Thursday, we embark on another couple of weeks of silliness, aka the NBA Finals. Think of it as the prelude to the parade.
The silliness is not the players, who are all marvelous athletes. Nor is it the competition format, which only follows the lead of most organized sports these days. That means seasons that are way too long, followed by playoffs even longer, leading to the exhaustion of everybody involved except for those benefiting the most -- television, team owners and Madison Avenue ad people.
No, the silliness is the game itself, as it has been allowed to evolve.
Once, we had passing and shooting. Now we have wrestling. The players are bigger, stronger and faster and the coaches talk more about power and muscle than finesse. It is now more rugby scrum than basketball.
The outcomes are a bigger deal because the money is huge. And the media herd right along, mooing at great length and great volume while perpetuating that importance.
All of which is fine, as long as we see things for what they really are, especially when it comes to the poor suckers known as referees. Such as:
* The game as it is played today is impossible to officiate.
* The people with whistles are not bad people, and they're not participants in some great conspiracy to have Team A beat Team B. They are just overmatched by the task at hand.
* Fans who see a call go against their team and immediately assume some official is the next Tim Donaghy -- and call talk shows and write letters to the editor -- need to get a life.
Officiating in the NBA is not a sweet science. It's not even a science. It is survival.
The court's too small, the players are too big and too fast, the rules are too funky, and the pressure to cater to superstars is too severe. There used to be two referees working games, now there are three. They could have 10 and it wouldn't matter.
They have a rule against standing in the lane for more than three seconds. That's a joke.
They have a rule against moving while setting a screen. That's a joke.
They have a rule against taking more than two steps off the dribble before shooting. That's a joke.
What our high school coaches taught us to avoid is now done every time down the court in the NBA and the TV broadcasters call them "great moves." Referees used to call that "walking."
NBA officials are now calling so many fouls and whistling so many game stoppages that if they called all this other stuff too, the games would last four hours.
