The Bonfire of the Inanities

I love the novels of Tom Wolfe. They're unsparing in their insights of modern, nonsensical American life and filled with characters plucked off the streets of Real Life, U.S.A. 

But among the common threads in Wolfe's three novels -- The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man In Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons -- there is this: he weaves stories out of the minutest details of his characters' lives for 800 pages and then, realizing he is only halfway through the narrative, ties up the story in a neat bow over the last six pages, as if his editor is sitting in his office with a fat check, glancing conspicuously at her watch and drumming her fingers against the desk.

I thought of this while glancing through the sports section today. I noticed that, for some reason, they're still conducting an NBA season. I love basketball and the athleticism of NBA players is frankly beyond my conception, but it's very clear that all the necessary questions have been answered halfway through the season. At this point, they're really playing to decide which mediocre outfits with utterly no hope of making any noise in the playoffs slip into the post-season.

Take a look at the standings. There are three tiers of teams in the NBA: the elite, the mediocre and the godawful. The elite have been established -- Boston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio, Lakers, Dallas and Atlanta -- and they comprise the complete list of teams with even a one-in-a-thousand chance of winning the championship. The dreadful long ago eliminated themselves and the middle dozen or so either soon will, or will be allowed into the playoffs only as fodder for the teams that matter in a first round that could be eliminated without consequence.

If they ended the season now, the NBA could start its playoffs with all the right teams. It might turn out that some sub-.500 squad now seeded 10th could catch either fire or a string of home games against the Clevelands and the New Jerseys, and snag that last playoff spot. And that today's seventh seed could stage a lottery pick rally, but honestly, what difference would it make?  A home game or two before being eliminated by Lebron or Kobe won't change the overall flavor of such a franchise's season.

Instead, there is the faux drama of seeding, as if it matters whether Boston plays Miami in the third round, or Miami plays Boston. In the meantime, the NBA season drags on and on and on, and then they start eleven rounds of playoffs that take two months and don't end until baseball's picking its All-Star team. It's a ruinous formula and it augurs poorly for baseball's playoff expansion plans.

b