Tonight the National Basketball League starts their season and every team is in first place as the night begins. The new season arrives with promise for all of the thirty teams in the league. Parity is not part of the NBA mantra however, as there is huge disparity between the haves and the have not’s. There are literally only a few teams with a chance to win the league championship. The NBA is one of the premiere leagues in sports rivaled by the NFL and MLB. The league can be seen on TNT, ESPN, and ABC. With great television exposure the stars of the league are well marketed and the league is extremely profitable.
The overall talent in the NBA has never been better with an influx of foreign players. The NBA is now a world league like MLB is now. Each team now has foreign scouts to judge talent all over the globe. Since 1999, a foreign player has been picked within the first fifteen picks of the NBA draft every year.
With the salary cap the NBA has, it is almost impossible to make a bad team better in one season. An exception to this was the 2007-2008 Boston Celtics who went from last to first with two blockbuster trades. Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett were both traded to the Celtics in separate deals before the season started. While this is not the norm it can happen.
Year after year, the lowlife’s in the league fail to become competitive because of the way the league is structured. If you are mediocre one year, you will continue to be mediocre until you either make that rare trade or you win the NBA draft lottery. Teams like the Los Angeles Clippers, Milwaukee Bucks and the Golden State Warriors have continued to lose year after year because they can’t find that one superstar to put them into title contention.
The NBA is a superstar driven league and if you do not have a superstar you will not go very far. Stars like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and Lebron James do not just dominate a game they are the game. They make their teams instant title contenders year after year. It is the supporting cast that determines whether you go far into the playoffs or not.
The players today are definitely not like the players of old. In every sport the athletes are getting bigger and stronger, but in the NBA the players have not just become bigger, faster, and stronger, but their pure basketball skills have diminished as well. Basketball fundamentals have slowly become a thing of the past. While I still cheer loudly for the amazing slam dunks that I see in the game today, I still like to cheer the behind the back pass or the bank shot. I have not seen a good bank shooter since Jerry Schiting in the mid 80’s.
I still enjoy the NBA immensely and I hope that the game will go back to its roots of passing, shooting and defense. Games that go 10 minutes without a basket is becoming the norm in the NBA. Final scores of 75 to 70 have become a regular occurrence in basketball and the games have become a bit of a bore. Let’s hope as the new season arrives teams will go back to fundamental basketball. NBA fans will cheer no matter what for their teams and their favorite players regardless of the basketball being played, but there is still nothing wrong with playing it the right way.
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