On the Edge of Our NBA Seats

Evey year at this time, with just a handful of games left in the NBA season, some enterprising sports journalist writes a story that says, essentially, that various playoff races are building to their exciting conclusions.

The Bias of Sports Media
Many Americans believe that American journalism is guilty of a left-right partisan bias. Generally people who say this are revealing their own left-right partisan bias. But there is a significant bias in American news media: a bias for news.

It's why all kinds of irrelevancies bubble up as news, and often last for weeks. Witness this week's dust-up over the inevitable confirmation of a highly-qualified Supreme Court judge. American journalists have wrung weeks of stories out of this controversy, even though the result is a foregone conclusion.

Which brings us to the ineluctable stories about NBA playoff races. The writers of these pieces know that battles for seeding are nonsense, that way more teams are allowed into the tournament than have any hope of winning the title, and that the best team doesn't have to nab the top seed. But they want a story, so they put on the blinders and outline the races. (Also, their employers own the broadcast rights to these shenanigans.)

Who's the #1 Seed? Who Cares!
For example, there is uncertainty about whether Cleveland or Boston will take the top seed in the East. We all know it hardly matters, because both Cleveland and San Antonio have won recent NBA titles as the two seeds in their conference. The big advantage of finishing first is a home game 7 in a series two months from now.

Then there is the battle for three and four in the East between Toronto and Washington. Are you seeing the humor in this? If the seeds are 1. Boston 2. Cleveland 3. Toronto 4. Washington, the ostensible second round match-ups are the same as if the teams finished 1. Cleveland 2. Boston 3. Washington 4. Toronto. If your goal is to avoid Cleveland, it's not clear that you want to nail down the third seed.

Even more significant are the races for the last playoff slots. Where you sit isn't nearly as important as simply getting a seat at the table. Two games separate Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, Indiana and Milwaukee with four spots available. Sounds compelling, until you consider that these thoroughly mediocre teams are just cannon fodder. LeBron James could beat any one of them himself.

In the West, the intrigue is around whether Portland's losing record will edge Denver's losing record for the right to get slathered by Golden State in the first round. Or is it whether Utah or the Clippers will earn the fourth seed? The stakes are high, because if Utah wins that race, they play the Clippers in the first round. Whereas if L.A. jumps up a seed, they get the Jazz in round one. 

All of this is utter rubbish, of course. The regular season is just a preliminary bout. The first round of the playoffs is just warm-ups. They could skip the first two rounds of the playoffs altogether and eliminate the need to seed anyone. Let Golden State and San Antonio square off for the right to host the Cleveland-Boston winner, and we won't have the charade of .500 teams filling up the bracket.

Instead, we'll have another week of this dreck. And don't even get me started on hockey.

11 New Year's Wishes for Sports

The universe owes us one. We will have thrust upon us at the beginning of this year by a comatose American electorate a sociopathic, clinically narcissistic, utterly unqualified, willfully ignorant, despicable, lecherous, shallow, juvenile, jackass-in-chief.*

I hope that wasn't payback for the Cubs and Indians in a thrilling seven-game World Series. Assuming the former was the common people knowing what they want and getting it good and hard, and the latter just good luck, it's only fair that one of the following occur this year to improve the sports universe.

1. Put the N-Scam-A-A out of our misery -- its member institutions admit that they are, in

collusion with various television networks, in the for-profit sports entertainment business. They agree to treat revenue generating sports -- big time football and men's basketball -- as the business franchises they are, bidding for players with actual cash and offering everyone who wants one a scholarship to matriculate and graduate like regular students. They maintain the limits on practice time and provide time for all athletes to attend classes, but in every other way continue to treat them like the employees they are. This is the only formula that allows the member institutions to move forward without lying through their teeth every day about their athletic programs.

2. Slash the NHL and NBA playoffs in half -- so that the regular season actually matters. With only the eight best teams qualifying, most every game will count.

3. Enforce MLB's rules designed to move the game along and limit the number of pitching changes. Committee meetings are stultifying, even when they take place on the mound.

4. Have a foreign network provide the telecast of the next Olympics to the U.S. -- It's not all about us.

5. Limit the NCAA hoops tournament to a league's best teams -- No team that loses more games in its conference than it wins should be allowed in the tournament, period. We'd all much rather see a 25-4 squad that lost in the Southern Conference semi-finals make the tournament than a 16-12 powerhouse that finished 10th in the ACC. The latter did not have a successful season and the former did, and they should be likewise rewarded.

6. Begin every televised NFL game with a warning to fans: Though the officiating will not be perfect, it doesn't matter. Luck is 30% of the game. Don't sweat every call; don't worry about three inches that can't be discerned without super slow motion, stop action and three camera angles. Enjoy today's action by freakish athletes who are maiming and killing themselves for your entertainment.

7. Sometimes, tell replay to shut the @#$%&! up -- Baseball players who dive safely into a base but bounce over it while still being tagged shall be deemed safe. That's not what replay was for.

8. Eliminate crappy bowl games -- Division 1A college football post-season contests played in

Detroit, Birmingham or Charlotte, or featuring contestants with losing records in their conference, may not be called "bowls." Instead, each of these contests shall be called the "NIT," as in, the "Pinstripe NIT" and the "Armed Forces NIT" to distinguish it from a real bowl game. There shall be 12 bowl games, -- the Rose, Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, Cotton, Peach, Outback, Citrus, Sun, Alamo, Music City and Liberty -- pitting only ranked teams or league champions.

9. Remove the remaining dolts from baseball coverage -- Require everyone requesting a press credential to a Major League Baseball game to pass a test demonstrating that they understand why the old measurements no longer pass muster.

10. Screw the plane. Get into the end zone for a touchdown.

11. Admit it already: sports gambling is legal. They scroll stats under football games for fantasy league players and list point spreads in newspapers. Every office and bar advertises an NCAA tourney bracket. Forty-nine states participate in lottery operations. Your bookie is just a click away. So let's ditch the self-righteous hypocrisy and end the remaining prohibitions. Good idea? You bet.

* This blog remains non-partisan. This is not an endorsement of the other major party's nominee, who, though qualified and generally adult, was also a miserable candidate. Contrary to what the news media told you during its 25/8/366 coverage of the election, there were actually more than two candidates for president, one of them an actual Republican, all of whom more qualified, mature and dignified than the ultimate victor.

Ray Charles Could See Why the NBA Playoffs Are So Dull

Following a six-month marathon, the NBA selects the very best 16 teams to compete in the post-season for a title. The competitiveness of these contests is demonstrated by the scores:

104-78
108-70
123-91
106-74
115-95
89-72
94-68
115-103

The average margin of victory in the first batch of face-offs -- 21 points.

Many hoops analysts are pulling their hair out over the snoozefest that is the first round. They are torturing themselves to explain this mysterious phenomenon. The answer is right under Jimmy Durante's nose.

Even Stevie Wonder can see why the games are such stultifying blowouts. Too many teams are allowed into the playoffs. The mediocre enter the postseason alongside the magnificent; indeed, they match up against them. Golden State is the greatest regular season team in NBA history. They are playing a dysfunctional Houston outfit that needed a late streak to reach .500. It's a mismatch.

Likewise San Antonio, with the game's seventh best record all time, pairing up with downtrodden Memphis, ravaged by injuries and limping down the stretch. It's a Major League team playing a Double-A team. It's not fair. It's not fun to watch. It doesn't tell us anything.

Helen Keller could have told you: the first round of NBA playoffs is rubbish. Eliminate half the qualifiers and all the mismatches. That would improve the playoffs and give the regular season some meaning.

Johnny Manziel could figure that out.

The NBA and NHL Playoffs Are sdrawkcaB This Year

It's been well-established in this space that pro hockey and basketball regular seasons pack all the relevance of Iranian elections and for opposite reasons.

In the NBA, there are usually only a couple of elite teams with any hope of winning the title, and the final contenders often seem pre-ordained. The first round often pairs a title contender with a lottery pick contender and offers less intrigue than a Dr. Seuss book. In the NHL, the results are so random that the regular season has as much bearing on the tournament as the zodiac.

This year though. This year, the NBA playoffs were something of a con flip. The reigning champs and -- in some eyes -- tournament favorites earned just a sixth seed and got bounced from the playoffs in the first round. Neither conference's top seed was necessarily the favorite entering the second season. And several popular contenders suffered injuries debilitating to their playoff prospects.

It's made the NBA playoffs much more interesting, much more like the baseball playoffs, where only good teams earn a bid and then the championship is up for grabs. As a special bonus, none of the four finalists has won the crown in at least two decades, and two of the four haven't ever held the trophy.

Meantime, the chase for Lord Stanley's parabolic hardware features a highly-unusual development -- semi-finals that include the top seed in each conference. If Anaheim and New York face off for the Cup, they will represent an NBA-style finals. The difference, much to the NHL's benefit, is that such a result carried 12-1 odds against entering the playoffs.

In other words, the results this year were somewhat less arbitrary, and whoever squares off for the championship will have been a reasonably worthy representative. Perhaps someone will take notice and reduce the number...

Nah.

So What Was the Regular Season For?

Some brief dead-horse beating . . . 

The complaint here about professional basketball and hockey in North America has always been that they play 80 games each for no apparent reason, allow mediocrity into the badly-devalued playoffs, drag through weeks of post-season revenue generation (the "post" season -- practically an admission in itself that the "season" is irrelevant) before finally getting, anti-climatically, to the point.

The conference finals are now starting in the NBA and NHL and they provide a stark case in point. 

In the NBA, all the silliness has been dispatched after voluminous faux drama and over-wrought analysis and the result is exactly what you could have predicted on the first day of the season. The finals comprise not only the top two seeds in each conference but also the best teams entering the season, lo those many months ago. Indeed, they are the very same teams that squared off in last year's conference finals.

Maybe even more to the point, the favorites in each series -- the teams that met in last year's championship series -- are the two most notable for their disdain of the regular season. San Antonio's coach has been fined for resting his stars during meaningless January contests. Miami, clearly the most talented outfit, coasted though the long gauntlet with the singular goal of getting its number two star healthy come crunch time.

Put another way, a season that has slogged through six months is now finally beginning in earnest in month seven.

Hockey has the same issue -- except in reverse. After eliminating only a handful of awful teams following a full season of play, the NHL playoffs have given us two five seeds, a four seed and a six seed in the conference finals. How a team performs in the regular season is utterly, completely, inexcusably meaningless as long as it makes the cut, a bar so low as to be laughable.

Once in the tournament, winning in hockey seems to be more about a hot goaltender, a healthy team and some fortunate bounces of the puck than anything else.

Put another way, a winter sport has slogged through six months to determine absolutely nothing. The winner of the Cup will not be able to claim it is the best hockey club, or the second best or anything except the survivor of a tournament that will finally conclude in the opposite hemisphere's winter.

There are great story lines, and should be inspiring competition, in these four series. I'll be watching. 

For the first time since last May.

We Haven't Learned A Thing

If there's one lesson we should all have learned from the Super Bowl it is that we don't learn any lessons in sports.

Consider this: the world of football analysts, which bubbles over like soup in an uncovered blender, spent 24 hours-a-day for two full weeks analyzing a single contest. They scrutinized each player and coach down to the mitochondria in his left elbow hair follicles. They tracked the weather with the ferocity of a meteorologist in the path of a hurricane. They investigated the emotional state of the competitors like Karl Jung on amphetamines. They compared and contrasted as profoundly as a comparative literature dissertation. They considered every possible variable in this upcoming game, discussed them interminably, examined months of tape and then boldly predicted absolutely nothing like the ultimate outcome.

Seriously, I am not aware of a single "expert" who suggested before the Super Bowl that Denver didn't belong on the field with Seattle. (Perhaps there was one or two, but they were they outlyingest outliers, and probably reside in the Pacific Northwest.) Although many picked Seattle to win, they were still wrong, because none of them proposed a blowout unworthy of your viewing time.

Football analysts aren't stupid, lazy or naive. They are simply guilty of reckless disregard of an obvious truth -- that anything can happen in one game that makes analysis of past games utterly irrelevant. And the consuming public of this analysis -- i.e., sports fans -- join them in that negligence. We all conspire to ignore a fact proven repeatedly, that tiny advantages, even if piled up high, even if all accruing to one contestant and not the other, even if beyond debate, convey only tiny advantage, which can be completely overwhelmed in the heat of battle.

Think about baseball playoffs. We see the same kinds of analysis built on houses of sand and fog -- one team has home field advantage (a 55% edge in one game if and only if the teams are tied after six); one team's top two starters are superior (over the course of the season, though perhaps not over the next two starts); one team has more experience (which has been demonstrated repeatedly not to matter one iota of a scintilla of a bit); or any other matter of considerations that reasonable people could agree amount to an amoeba on a whale's back.

We go through this annually with clock-like regularity, as if stuck in an endless loop we can't escape. No one ever reminds the ESPN host that he's ignoring history and wasting his breath.

If the games were predictable they would be . . . the early rounds of the NBA playoffs. A big yawnfest. Thankfully, they're full of surprises.

When asked, in the weeks leading up, who would win the Super Bowl, the only correct answer was, "the team that scores more points." Any other answer was, well, pointless.