Worse Than the Rockies: The NBA!

Hello, and welcome to "Worse Than the Rockies." Today, we're going to stay away from movie reviews, and answer a sports question: why watching the NBA is worse than watching a Rockies game, or any other pro sport for that matter.

Why pick on the entire sport of basketball, you ask? I answer: pay attention, man! I'm not picking on basketball; basketball in and of itself is fine, and it's a great stage for some tremendous athletes to show their stuff. I'm picking on the NBA, which is easily the worst, least interesting, and just plain dumbest of the major professional sports leagues... and yes, that even includes NASCAR.

Something happened last night to make my passive disinterest in the NBA boil over to this active disinterest: the Nuggets beat the Mavericks on a last-second 3-pointer. Exciting! Nuggets up three games to none! So, what's the issue? Well, after the game -- as after nearly every NBA game -- the losing team griped about the officiating. But last night, the Mavericks complained that a foul wasn't called in the final seconds... on the Mavericks. They wanted a foul called against them, they didn't get it, and they blame this non-call for the Nuggets' victory... and the league agreed with them!!!

Think about this for a sec: the Mavs were in a position where doing something against the rules would benefit them, they tried to do that thing intentionally, and then they were upset that they were not penalized. It's stupid to complain that a foul wasn't called against you, but it's even stupider when you realize that the rules of the game actually encourage this strategy! Combine these dumb rules with the fact that the NBA has -- far and away -- the worst officiating of any pro sport, and you're watching a sport with dumb rules poorly enforced. Strikes one and two.

We can look past these flaws, however, if the games were exciting and fun to watch. Unfortunately, they are usually anything but. There's speed, skill, and amazing athleticism, but the NBA still manages to package these in a meaningless and boring game. It's a league where the highlights are incredible, but the games suck.

Most basketball games end in scores in the 100s. By examining the rules a bit, I see that your standard basket is worth two points, which means that each team scores about 50 times a game, and often more. Some people would call that exciting, right? Well, not me. You can't show me a 120-112 score and tell me that all that scoring makes it exciting, because I know just how cheap every basket is. You jog down the court, pass the ball around a bit, and then throw it at the rim before the clock runs out. It might go in, or maybe not... but you get the ball back in 24 seconds anyway, so no big deal.

High-scoring NBA games are like when you try to trick a kid just learning to count by telling him you'll give him 100 pennies, and he thinks it's a ton of money because hey, it's a hundred! Then you hand him a dollar and he's like, WTF, dude? He just learned the lesson that NBA fans haven't: a big number isn't impressive if the little numbers are meaningless.

If you watch an NBA game, there will always be a point in the game where a team goes on a 18-0 run and is up by 20-something points. Coming back from this deficit should be truly exciting: if you've been scored on by your opponent nine straight times, you are getting schooled. In football, you'd be down 40+ points, or down 7-8 runs in baseball, or three laps back in a car race. Coming back at this point almost never happens, so it'd be exciting, right? You'd think so, but not in the NBA. In the NBA, this happens in every single game! And as such, it becomes the opposite of exciting, it becomes expected. We're calling that "boring."

And finally, is there anything more boring than the last 60 seconds of an NBA game? Foul, free throw, time out, repeat. It's like one game for 47 minutes, and then it becomes a completely different game til the end... the tempo, the strategy, and the scoring are nothing like what we saw the rest of the game, and that's the sign of a bad sport.

I know I was just complaining that the first 47 minutes are full of speed and dunks and athleticism but they somehow still manage to be boring, so you might think that a complete change from that for the final minute would be a good thing... but it isn't. The final minute of a game manages to take the few things that basketball does have going for it and throw them out. It's like watching a chess match when each guy has a king and a pawn left. Yawn. For 47 minutes, it's fast but boring, then it becomes slow and boring.

One more thing: free throws. I like the concept: you do something against the rules, the other team gets a chance for free points. Beautiful. The problem is this: these are supposed to be the best basketball players in the world, and a free throw is basketball at its most basic form: stand there, shoot the ball. They should have been doing exactly that since about age seven. This year, only five NBA players hit 90% or more of their free throws. The best free-throw shooting team in the league hit just over 82% of their free throws, and the average team is somewhere around 75%. This is ridiculous! I can't take a league seriously when the best athletes in the world can't successfully complete the easiest, most fundamental part of the game more than 3/4 of the time.

So here's what you need to do, NBA, to avoid being Worse Than the Rockies: step one: get rid of any benefit for fouling the other team... give the other team free throws AND the ball back. For every free throw you miss, give that point to the other team. Get rid of the little lighted arrow that decides whose turn it is to have the ball. Fire all your refs and replace them with monkeys with whistles. Make the last 2:00 of the game a running clock with no time-outs, and make goaltending legal. Until those changes happen, NBA, you're Worse Than the Rockies. 2/4 Dingers.