NBA enters the panic zone
Mark Bradley - Staff
Friday, April 13, 2001
The NBA differs from big-league baseball in that the
NBA is willing to admit it has a problem. Baseball,
as we know, will dither for decades over the most
obvious point. But baseball's inherent reluctance to
change can carry the occasional benefit. It can keep
the sport from doing what the NBA has done, which
is lose its mind.
Pro basketball has become almost unwatchable.
Nobody runs the floor. Nobody cuts to the basket.
Everybody stands around. The formerly free-flowing
game has devolved into a series of one-on-one (or
two-on-two) skirmishes. TV ratings are down, and
that scares this cable-ready league to death. So a
blue-ribbon panel decided that jazzing up offense
could best be done by allowing zone defense.
All together now: Whaaaaaat?
Zone defense is the sworn enemy of movement.
Zone defense promotes even more standing around.
The way offenses seek to attack a zone is by
shooting over it. And this, remember, is the NBA,
where the 3-point line is more testing than the
collegiate arc and where nobody can shoot anyway.
This is a solution?
Get ready for games both in and from the 50s.
Meaning the early 1950s, that Paleozoic Era before
the NBA adopted the shot clock, and also the 50s as a team's point total after
48 minutes of work. Get ready for bad shooting and wholesale standing and a
product of such surpassing aesthetics as to rival the XFL. Get ready for this
perceived solution to become a failed one-year experiment that leaves
blue-ribbon execs asking, "What in the name of Zelmo Beaty were we
thinking?"
Then get ready for even more corrections and overcorrections, because the
NBA is desperate. This is a TV-driven league. Ticket prices are so high that
only corporations can afford them, and one look at the splash of empty seats
for games involving even the bigger teams shows that two tickets at courtside
aren't the lure they once were. So the NBA studies its nose-diving Nielsens
and tries to give non-viewers reason to tune back in, and all it can think to do
is serve up a tasty zone.
The NBA got big by pushing its names at the expense of the game. It was all
Magic and Michael and Larry and Sir Charles, which was OK until those guys
got old and quit playing. They left behind a league designed for star turns
without the stars to take them. It's one thing for Michael Jordan to go
one-on-five, quite another for Ron Mercer. The "isolation" plays that Jordan
made work to spectacular effect now stand as just another reason to grab the
clicker and see what's on A&E. So now the panicky NBA is treating the
symptom.
The league hasn't gone bad because of the lack of zones. It has gone bad
because there are too many bad games between bad teams and bad players.
What the NBA should do is trim the number of franchises to 24 and slice its
regular season to 60 games and try to start the playoffs before everybody is
too pooped to run another step. What the NBA should do is stop making
millionaires of teenagers and let them learn their trade in a minor league that
Isiah Thomas hasn't managed to bankrupt. What the NBA should do is
address the core quality of its product, not the cosmetics. |
