The National Basketball Association, to quote those old-time radio announcers, is ON THE AIR!
And with that news comes the news that it isn't really time yet for the NBA. Too much undone, too much done badly, since the end of last season.
Oh, it is a positive blessing in Los Angeles, where the Lakers vie with Southern California football for control of the city. And in Cleveland, where LeBron dwarfs all other enterprises anyway, let alone two like the Indians and Browns. And Portland, too, because it has never had any other girlfriend.
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| Shocking development: Stephen Jackson wants out of Oakland. (Getty Images) |
Allen Iverson playing out the string in Memphis? Bleargh. Stephen Jackson wanting out of Golden State (can you blame him?) 40 minutes after signing a three-year extension (too soon, too soon)? Feh. Replacement refs? Oog. The New Brooklyn Nets? Damn. Yao Ming's corn-chip bone structure? Ouch. Plus, whatever Delonte West is doing today.
It has just been a tedious offseason all around for the league and most of its beneficiaries, and now it's as if they all have to rush the production on stage because the hall has been rented. Because, well, it has.
None of this precludes the season from actually being a good one, maybe even a great one. There are few things that beat a really well-built surprise, and besides, James and Kobe Bryant and Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade and a dozen other delightful players are ready to bring you their very best and shiniest A-games.
Just not yet.
Maybe we go through this every year because the NBA starts right at the height of America-Hates-The-BCS season, or the time when the NFL starts laying out coaches who are going to be fired, or the World Series, which this year gives us the ratings-winning Yankees and the defending champion Phillies as opposed to, say, the Astros or Rockies or White Sox.
It just seems like this season opening has less to invigorate us than usual, because the offseason was such a relentless downer.
Take Iverson, for example. There is nothing wrong with wanting to play until you drop; we rather admire the sentiment, especially from someone who gave so many chunks of his body to the game in his prime. But this is really a low-level version of Babe Ruth to the Boston Braves, and those scenarios never end well. The Grizzlies are going nowhere, and Iverson is marching blithely along that path, just because he isn't ready to go yet and nobody he wants to play for will have him.
Or Jackson. Look, it's the Warriors. Never mind.
And the officials? That's a month of posturing we can never get back. Complain about them all you want, but the truth is that the replacements would have been worse, and the ones who replaced them worse still. There is not an unlimited supply of good officials on the market just waiting to be discovered, and to think that it couldn't be worse than these guys is simply stupid. The NBA is hard enough to work even without the league's ongoing attempts to emasculate them, and this pathetic dance just to fire a warning shot at the players union before the next round of collective bargaining was clearly beneath David Stern. Except, of course, that it wasn't, because he has done it before and will do it again.
The draft, which offered up Blake Griffin to the Clippers, didn't really invigorate anyone. There are no exciting new coaches to challenge the existing order, the bad teams are still bad and their number is growing, the best teams are still not seriously challenged.
Oh, and crowds will be down as they have been in major league baseball, the NFL and the NHL because the slow-motion erosion of discretionary income, as the result of this apparently jobless economic recovery, necessarily reduces the number of seats on seats.
The NBA will, in time, of course overcome this dreadful lead-in because the landscape will clear. The BCS will play itself out, the World Series will be over in five games, six tops, the NFL will ask too much of the New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings and Denver Broncos, and the Stanley Cup playoffs don't begin until mid-April. Plus, the Olympics will eat up the dog days of February, when even NBA fans don't care about the NBA. It's the circle of life.
Only it was a hot, dry and dissatisfying summer, worse than usual, and that makes the start of the season a little harder to gird for. I mean, for every Lakers fan, there's a Grizzlies fan, and a T-Wolves fan, and a Knicks fan, and a Nets fan, and a Warriors fan, and a Clippers fan, and a Kings fan. It's creeping lousiness from coast to coast, and those are not good numbers, no matter how much Kobe and LeBron can do on the other end.
But hey, the National Basketball Association is ON THE AIR! Man, Charles Barkley better get off to a good start, or we're all screwed.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
