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With every passing day, the NBA playoffs get worse and worse. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Charles Barkley owing money to anyone given the brain-crippling predictability of this last month.
Doyel saw the latest mockery in San Antonio on Thursday night, where the game was decided as soon as the Spurs put on their home whites. Like nearly all the other games in this round, and more than 75 percent in the playoffs as a whole, the home team won, and like more than 60 percent, it wasn't close. Right now, even a seven-point game which takes forever because of the tactical fouling looks like a barnburner.
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| Why bother to watch? Mike James might be on to something here. (AP) |
But it's all lost in a sea of predictability so spectacular that it has to be an aberration, a one-time thing. Yes, the home court has always meant an inordinate amount in the NBA playoffs, but not like this. And trust us, this is infinitely worse than you what you anti-Spurs snobs complained about the last two years. Way worse. The NBA -- Where Bloody Boring Happens. That much worse.
All of which you know. Now, what to do about it?
Nothing. These are the conditions that prevail in a league with no superior teams and a lot of good but largely inseparable ones. True, that doesn't explain the Celtics, but one false positive out of 17 (don't forget the Warriors) doesn't disprove the theory.
This may simply be a league in transition, whose new crop of best players don't quite know it yet but are filling in the gaps being left by their elders. While it is required that we speak daily of the incandescence of Kobe and LeBron, their games have been parsed to the molecular level, and when they are examined on a game-by-game basis, the wonder is worn away.
But if we can resist the temptation to concentrate on the two and miss the wonders of the rest, we can probably fake our way through the rest of the postseason, hoping desperately for better times.
You see, last year, we could use the Warriors as the shiny watch the magician holds while he's making a Hyundai disappear. They were so over-the-top weird that their saga sustained all the way through the conference finals, a round after they'd been obliterated.
Not so this time. Phoenix had been stripped and remade as the Cincinnati Royals. Denver's dysfunctions far outweighed its entertainment value. Washington was a dismal gabby blur. Atlanta was a feel-good story almost by default, even though it helped define the central theme of these playoffs -- the road team must suck.
And then we amused ourselves with the Tale of Mike Daytona, who became the smartest coach and the luckiest man in the world right up to the moment he shook Jimmy Dolan's hand.
Under normal circumstances, that would be a day's worth of fun. Three, at best. But we all forgot the downside of having so many teams who could win 50 games -- they're all the same, competitively speaking, good enough to crush the weak, but not good enough to establish any real dominance over each other.
Still, you'd like someone to win a road game just to show that it's possible. You'd like someone to break out, even if it means a road rout, just to break the monotony.
Frankly, you'd like the Spurs, because at least they won away from home. Maybe you didn't enjoy it because they don't play your game, but you knew they were the best team. These playoffs could come and go and we may still never know who the best team is.
Except, of course, by the color of the uniform. So thank God the Wizards went out early -- those Clair Bee outfits with the black shorts and gold tops just confuse a fella.
There is, of course, still time for some form to take shape. But as of this morning, these playoffs look a lot like Absolutely Fabulous -- really good stuff, but the same general plot over and over again.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
