NBA - the sport that fell the most

            Pro basketball is the sport that fell the farthest. The age-old knock on the game was that you only had to watch the last five minutes, which was where all the excitement was concentrated. Of course, this was not true if you loved the skill and explosiveness of the athletes and the grace and nuance of the team game.

            Over the last 15 years or so, the sport stopped looking anything like the fast moving team game that reached its apogee in the 80s and early 90s, to the point where the action is almost as intervallic as the action in baseball, football, tennis, golf, or any other of the stop and start sports. Many observers have bemoaned the NBA game’s devolution to a one-on-one affair dominated by players with fabulous talent but undeveloped skills – totally true, and this is what it means to the viewer. Turn on an average N.B.A. game, and keep track of how often the ball goes from one end to the court to the other and then back again three times without a stoppage of play. Usually the stoppage will be caused by a foul, but even if someone trying to muscle through a solo move to the basket isn’t hacked, something will happen to stop the play – an out of bounds, a kick, a timeout, whatever.

I first noticed this when I could not figure out why I was bored out of my skull by the NBA game, once the most fluid of sports. The good thing is that I managed to reconnect it with binge drinking. Every time the ball goes from one end to the other and then back again three times without a whistle, I take a drink, and then another for each time after.

Alas, by the time the game ends I’m sober.