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NBA commissioner David Stern has been sticking his stubby little fingers into all kinds of administrative pies, whether it's messing up the basketball or dressing up the players or investigating the officials or even adding another year of school before collegians can turn pro.
Stern isn't lazy, but he isn't efficient, either. He needs to forget all that nonsense and focus his efforts on the league's primary problem: the 48th minute.
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| You want the foul, LeBron? OK, let's just start calling everything. Make the 48th minute even worse. (AP) |
In person, I'm sure it's great. All that passion and drama and anger and then, finally, the climax ... to be there live is fantastic. Like great group sex or something. So for the 20,000 of you lucky enough to attend any given playoff game, congratulations.
Those of us watching on television? Condolences.
The last minute of an NBA playoff game is a series of timeouts and whistles and bitching and moaning. It's officials calling fouls that didn't happen and ignoring fouls that did. It's Orlando coach Stan Van Gundy proving how smart he is by calling timeout to orchestrate every last dribble.
It's interminable. It is, as I said, unwatchable.
It takes forever. Watching an NBA playoff game -- and this gets more and more true as the postseason gets deeper -- is like watching two different sports. For 47 minutes it's a professional basketball game, in all its fast-moving, spontaneous glory. And then for the final minute it becomes a cross between chess and sumo wrestling. The coaches become Boris Spassky. The players become spastic. The officials become stupid.
Those of us watching this slop on TV? We become frustrated.
This is a problem that has been 100 years in the making. It has taken the perfect storm to get us here, but the storm has arrived, and here we are. Players are bigger, stronger, faster. The court has stayed the same size. A game designed more than 100 years ago for men standing 6 feet tall and playing with military precision far below the peach basket has matured and immatured all at the same time.
In the final minute of a playoff game here in 2008, offensive players don't want to rely on the vagaries of their poorly developed jump shot. They want to get to the rim, and they have the explosive ability to get there. What happens next is chaos.
LeBron James or Chauncey Billups barrels into the lane. Caron Butler or Maurice Evans is waiting. Whoever the matchup, that's at least 450 pounds of fast-twitch muscle trying to share the exact same space -- and they're not alone. Some long-armed defender like Tayshaun Prince or Hedo Turkoglu is clawing at the ball from the side. An enormous mountain like Brendan Haywood or Dwight Howard is looming, about to contest an already contested shot.
All of it happens in a matter of seconds, and none of it happens with civility. LeBron wants a foul. Caron wants a no-call. The coaches are yelling, the fans are screaming, all 10 players on the court are fuming and the officials are left to clean up the mess.
