The NBA draft is losing its appeal, I think in large part because once you get past the top few picks, nobody knows who these guys are. The relentless marketing machine of NCAA basketball has narrowed the spotlight to a very few players, which means that the vast majority are unknown to rooters outside their teams' conferences. Throw in the mandatory Obscure European Player Picks(TM) that spangle the first round - guys we won't be seeing in the league for years while they hone their games in Spain or Croatia or France - and the interest, apart from macabre "how far will he fall" stuff, fades after the big names are gone early.
Or to put it another way, I have no idea who Marreese Speights is. My wife attends NC State, and J.J. Hickson barely registered on my radar. The first I heard of Kosta Kofous was watching OSU dismantle their opponent in the NIT semifinals. And Sergei Ibaka? Nicolas Batum? These are not names that people eagerly speculate about. They don't quicken the pulse of the casual fan, or even the semi-serious one. And so it's a question of where do the big stars go, followed by "how far will this guy I actually heard of" fall. Making it worse is the disconnect between the college and pro games, the near certainty that guys who excelled on the college level are no-hopers in the pros (Paging J.J. Redick, J.J. Redick pick up the white courtesy phone) and there's no reason to watch. The guys who are going somewhere are guys you never heard of; the guys you heard of are mostly staying home. And after the fifth or sixth pick the star power is gone.
4 comments:
I enjoyed reading your posts. I agree with your analysis of why the NBA draft is such a lackluster event. I think it goes a bit deeper, however. The NBA, while chock full of great athletes, can barely be classified as a basketball league anymore. The way the games are officiated, the lack of offensive continuity, the poor jump shooting, lack of solid fundamntals, etc. have all turned the NBA into some sort of pseudo basketball league. This is why, I believe, the U.S. has performed so poorly in international play of late. When true basketbal rules are enforced, our guys have a hard time. All these factors have conspired to turn off basketball purists.
The curmudgeon in me blames A)the neverending attempt to market a succession of "next Jordan/Bird/Magic" types and B)the isolation offenses that came out of the attempted minting of superstars. It narrowed the spotlight on a few players, left most of the guys with less to do on the floor (and thus fewer chances to catch the fans' imagination), and encouraged players to try to be those semisuperstars at the expense of fundamental basketball.
This is purely anecdotal evidence, but I loved the late 70s/early 80s Sixers precisely because you had guys whose games had unique personalities - Bobby Jones playing suffocating defense, Andrew Toney launching from outside, Mo Cheeks dishing, Caldwell Jones being the ultimate "solid" guy in the middle and alternating with Chocolate Thunder... The later incarnations of the team, whether they were the "keep the ball away from Shawn Bradley" Sixers or the faceless bunch surrounding Hersey Hawkins, or the stand-back-and-let-Iverson-bomb-away Sixers, just didn't show me players whose games had personalities. The one exception was the McKie/Snow supporting cast that Larry Brown put around Iverson, but even that got torn apart and replaced with...well, I can't even remember half the guys who replaced them.
This is completely off-topic, but I just read GAMES Magazine's review of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, which according to them is "helped by a strong, twisty plot." That's you, right? If so, congrats!
Thank you :)
Honestly, on that one I was in an editorial/advisory role - the credit goes to the writers on the team. My level of involvement varies from game to game. Sometimes I'm just reading and commenting, sometimes I'm involved soup to nuts.
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