| |
Inverse law of hoops:
Posted: Wednesday March 31, 1999 01:15 PM
With apologies to Rodney Dangerfield : I went to an NBA game the other night and a lecture broke out. Nobody can score anymore. Nobody can shoot -- not even from the free-throw line. Nobody can run. Teams have been regularly setting negative records for low-scoring quarters, halves, games. And maybe even more important, it isn't simply that the shots go clang ; all of pro basketball is cacophony now. I'm sorry, but it just isn't so pretty anymore. What has happened has been evolving, so the problem isn't just a phase we're going through. It's institutional -- involving the whole basketball culture. What happens in any NBA game today is the end product of what was set in motion years ago. The best schoolboy players participate in basketball all year round. Most of them play the bulk of their games on summer teams, under pseudo coaches who are more interested in catering to their baby stars than in teaching them anything. When players should be learning fundamentals and teamwork, they're isolating themselves, playing one-on-one, going for personal points. Even the most successful coaches in college will rant and rave that players not only arrive on campus nowadays without basic basketball intelligence, but that because they've been spoiled all along, it's almost impossible to intercept the process, to get them to go back and start to learn. And, of course, what makes it so difficult to tell young players anything substantive is that they are indeed so physically wondrous. They can do such grand things on the basketball court; they just can't play the basketball game . In some sort of reaction to this, NBA coaches have grown more and more controlling. Every coach has a brain trust of very serious assistants, all of whom carry serious clipboards. The players' roles are sharply defined. All the positions are numbered -- slots. "We need a new two and a four off the bench," a coach will say. The players are ordered not to take chances. The point guard -- the number one -- walks the ball up. Everything is a set play, most of which consists of taking up 20 dreary seconds on the 24-second clock to try and isolate a shooter on the weak side to hurl up a three. Completely missing is the fast break, which was always the most gorgeous action in the sport -- perhaps in any sport. It's important to state, too, that a proper fast break was not helter-skelter. Teams like the Celtics with Russell and Cousy , the Bullets with Unseld and Monroe , ran the break as controlled as any Princeton back door. But, except perhaps occasionally with the Phoenix Suns, it exists only by accident today. Why, the fast break is in such disrepute we dare not utter its name. We must say: "the transition game." That sounds so much more thoughtful and coach-y. Transition. Particularly as we look back from our millennial perch, there is a tendency to celebrate modern-day athletes as more advanced than their predecessors. No doubt they are stronger and faster. But progress can be deceptive. It's like all those new and improved smart weapons we have that always hit the target but never seem to win any wars. Taller and stronger tennis players use fabulous rackets to smash the ball harder than ever and bore us more tediously than ever. Likewise, what this NBA season is telling us is that we don't miss Michael Jordan . We miss a game played by teams , that was once the most rapidly coordinated beauty we were ever lucky enough to see. Just because players are better doesn't mean the game is. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
| |||||||||||||||||
Copyright © 1999 CNN/SI. A Time Warner Company. Terms under which this service is provided to you.
| |||||||||||||||||
