BrianCarter/basketball

Is it just me, or is there very little NBA worth watching this year?

Don't get me wrong- I'm following the Boston Three Party's every move, and it's clearly a party of more than just three...

But here's my detailed analysis of why the NBA sucks right now and what exactly sucks about it.

NUMBER ONE, my biggest beef with the NBA and network TV: they choose the games too far ahead of time to know which ones will be worth watching (or they're choosing the less interesting games for other commercial reasons). My estimate is that less than half of the nationally televised games are the most interesting ones. Case in point: the most statistically significant game since the shot clock era started, the one between Detroit and Boston on Jan 5, 2008 (read an article about it), was only available to us super-devoted league pass subscribers.

But hats off to the NBA for making league pass available online- killer!

One team worth watching is the L.A. Lakers because of the ascendancy of Bynum- this is a good team now, so watching them compete against the better teams with Kobe ready for the 4th quarter is still fun.

In the regular season, it's hard to care about the TEAMS THAT WILL WIN LOTS OF GAMES BUT WHO CARES IF THEY LOSE IN THE FIRST ROUND OF THE PLAYOFFS:

* Dallas Mavericks- Dirk, Steve should have had 3 MVP's and you and everyone else knows it.
* San Antonio Spurs- These guys are great, but there are still about three teams I'd rather see champions- Boston, Phoenix, and L.A.
* Phoenix Suns- I love you guys but how many heartbreaking post-seasons can I take?
* Maybe the Utah Jazz, but they're not as good as last year, and Denver seems to have peaked as well.
* Maybe you could put Detroit and Boston in this category, but Boston's fun to watch. Detroit can take any game and make it a grind-out bore-fest. Not that that's not good basketball- Spurs vs Pistons is great basketball but not entertaining. LA pr Phoenix vs Boston- now that's fun AND great!

Teams that are ok to watch for stellar play from young stars: Portland, Seattle, New Orleans, Orlando. But still kinda blah when you take their whole teams and the fact that most of these teams lose a lot.

Houston also seems to have peaked because T-Mac and Yao are not the right star combo, and can't both stay healthy anyway.

Golden State plays fun basketball, but I admit I haven't gotten around to watching them- I guess I still feel like it would be a let down compared to their mind-blowing playoff run last year.

TEAMS THAT SUCK SO WHY WATCH THEM:

* Atlanta Hawks
* New York Knicks
* Memphis Grizzlies
* Milwaukee
* Minnesota
* Philadelphia
* Indiana
* In fact there's too many to mention here and I have to go look at the list of teams to remember some of them, they suck so much, they're just fading into obscurity
* And I probably would have put Charlotte on here if they hadn't just dealt Boston their 4th loss of the season tonight. Dang it!