Cry Havoc
04-20-2007, 09:05 AM
http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/6702780?MSNHPHCP>1=9331
Buzz missing as playoffs near
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Peter Schrager / FOX Sports
Posted: 1 day ago
As the NBA regular season limps to an end and the start of the playoffs rapidly approaches, there seems to be something glaringly lacking from the transition.
The key players all seem to be there, with Kobe and his Lakers in a now suddenly familiar first-round underdog role, LeBron carrying the otherwise hapless Cavs, and Shaq and D-Wade finally healthy (sorta) and ready to defend their crown. The faces behind the bench -- Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, and Gregg Popovich specifically -- will all be in attendance too; sarcastically smiling, grimacing, and shouting at officials as they've done so eloquently for the past few decades.
Kobe Bryant's scoring binge livened up the regular season, but there weren't enough compelling stories. (Noah Graham / Getty Images)
But something's undoubtedly missing this year.
Oh, that's right -- there's no buzz. No juice.
In what will go down as one of the more forgettable NBA regular seasons in recent memories, there's been a rather noticeable lack of attention to the upcoming postseason by both the mainstream sports media and the casual fan over the past few weeks. The words NBA Playoffs and "palpable buzz" are like oil and water at the moment.
But why?
In truth, there were indeed some headline-worthy stories from this NBA season. Dirk Nowitzki, finally putting it all together in Dallas; Kobe and his ten 50-point explosions; even the Knicks had a few moments in the sun. The Golden State Warriors, 13 years removed from their last playoff berth, made a midseason trade and surged towards the eighth seed in the Western Conference. The Toronto Raptors, owners of the fifth-worst record in the NBA a year ago, became the most enjoyable team to watch in the NBA, led by an up-and-coming star big man and an international mosaic of supporting players.
And yet, with the NBA postseason now right around the corner, sports headlines seem to be centered around everything but the league's second season. The NFL Draft, postponed baseball games, and an old, irrelevant talk show host dominated back pages and dot.com home pages all last week.
Surely, it wasn't always this way. No, there was once a time when an eventual Jordan vs. the Knicks second-round matchup was hyped for weeks. You'd be watching Ross and Rachel or Jerry and Elaine and see ads for Stockton and Malone. First-round "NBA on NBC" weekend triple-headers, with Bob Costas manning the studio show and John Tesh handling the instrumentals were enough to get you through the work week. Even as recently as the early part of this decade, those Kings-Lakers battles were highly anticipated. The sports world gravitated to those series like bees on honey.
So why no excitement this year?
I reached out to some of the most respected basketball and sports media minds to find out. Nathaniel Friedman is one of the brains behind FreeDarko.com, an influential basketball blog that's gotten national acclaim over the past year. Friedman points to the Eastern Conference — a 15-team grouping with only six squads boasting records better than .500 in '06-'07 — as a reason for the widespread malaise, "When half of the bracket is perceived as irrelevant, it only empowers the 'this is a colossal waste of time' faction. You have to be a zombie to not be fiending for the West, but people see the East as cheapening the whole thing. Plus the East is missing so much of what can make it compelling: LeBron had an off year (for him), Wade is possibly gimpy, Arenas out, Iverson transplanted."
Sam Rubenstein, an online contributor for SlamOnline agrees, "There is no reason to watch a single playoff game from the Eastern Conference or acknowledge that there even is an Eastern Conference playoffs."
Certainly, from an East Coast standpoint, having no Philadelphia, Boston or New York represented in the playoffs for the second straight year doesn't help. As for the teams that did qualify with the top eight records in the conference, not all of them exactly played the beautiful game this season.
"Orlando's lost more than 40 games this year and they're heading into the playoffs," says Rob Ryder, basketball consultant for movies such as White Men Can't Jump and Blue Chips. "That's absurd. Too many teams making the playoffs. Too many games during the regular season. The players are tired, the fans are exhausted."
Others would point to the what coulda/shoulda been from the Eastern Conference this year.
Gilbert Arenas will miss the playoffs and the playoffs will miss him. (Jeffrey Bottari / Getty Images)
Over the course of the 2006-07 season, Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas had solidified himself as the NBA's next big thing. A marketing dream and a fan's hero, Arenas busted on to the scene with a multi-faceted attack on our collective senses. On the court, he was arguably the league's best player, a fiery leader with an unwavering calmness in the clutch. He scored 60 on Kobe, hit countless game-winners, and kept the Wizards ahead of the defending champion Heat in the Southeast division standings for the majority of the year.
Off the court, he was our devious friend; our gateway to the life of a 20-something superstar. On NBA.com, Arenas kept a daily blog read by millions filled with everything from pre-game strategy to his pre-Thanksgiving failure in getting a PS3. He showed up on YouTube, betting teammate DeShawn Stevenson that he (Arenas) could make more college 3-pointers with one hand than Stevenson could make NBA 3-pointers with two. Naturally, he won, dancing, laughing and doing snow angels throughout. Later on in the season, he'd get in line with the mascots and jump off one of those trampolines and dunk a basketball ... during a timeout in the All Star Game. It was the only worthwhile highlight from the weekend. He called out coaches who spurned him over the summer during Team USA competition, screamed "Habachi!" when he made big shots and had glowing pieces written about him by everyone from Mike Wise of the Washington Post to Chuck Klosterman in The New York Times' sports supplement.
This was Gilbert's year. It was supposed to be his postseason to take the world by storm. After it was all said and done, everyone would know Agent Zero.
And then the unthinkable happened. In a freak play against Charlotte on April 4, Arenas banged his knee against Gerald Wallace's. He was diagnosed with a lateral meniscus tear in his left knee and sidelined for the rest of the season.
You could practically hear the air deflate from the NBA's balloon.
Dan Steinberg, editor of the Washington Post's D.C. Sports Bog, explains, "Based on my reading, I think (Gilbert) was the breakout personality in the league this year, certainly in the East, and it's clearly a league that relies on personality. I know a lot of out-of-towners who were anxious to see what he was going to do in the playoffs, and what he was going to say. At a minimum, he's one of the five most compelling personalities in the league, and at least one compelling series has been completely neutered as a result of his injury."
Since Steinberg can't heal Gilbert, he offers this cure to the NBA: cut the length of the series, especially those first-rounders that often aren't competitive.
"I'd say the problem is the same it's been for years: a regular season that's more bloated than an American Idol results show, and first-round playoff series that last longer than some marriages," he said. "It's just hard to get pumped after all that basketball, and with all that basketball still to go. At a minimum, they should go back to best-of-5 in the first round, which will never happen. Or better yet, best-of-3. That would indisputably add some life to the first round."
SlamOnline's Rubenstein adds to the idea: "Fewer days off between games so each series takes less than a month to play.
"Bring back the best-of-5 first round series, or even make the first round best-of-3, second round best-of-5, conference finals and finals best-of-7, Rubenstein said. "Fewer teams in the playoffs, so less than 50 percent of the league makes it there and the regular season means something."
Dwyane Wade and the Heat limped through the regular season, but they'll try to defend their title. (Issac Baldizon / Getty Images)
Some hoops nuts call for even more drastic measures.
"How about some radical changes?," asks Ryder. "Here are some radical changes. Eliminate the intentional foul. Basketball is the only game where a trailing team can get back in by committing an offense. No more back-to-back timeouts. Drastically reduce number of timeouts. Put the onus on the players to spontaneously react to events. The NBA is overcoaching itself into oblivion. Make one foul shot worth two points. Fouled shooting a three? -- one foul shot worth three."
Will Leitch, the gatekeeper of the wildly popular Deadspin.com isn't sure about going that far. And he offers reason for optimism when talking about the overall lack of buzz this year: "I think it's all there; once the playoffs get going, we'll forget we ever were worried. There are so many great storylines this year, plus so many yet to come. Sure, we're missing a couple of stars — Gilbert being gone just kills me, and the Eastern Conference isn't that exciting. Though if the Cavs get hot and LeBron turns it on, look out. But the Mavs-Suns storyline, alone, will be gorgeous."
Lang Whitaker, the executive editor of Slam, holds a similar glass half full approach, insisting, "I'm sure a lot of people are going to tune in once the playoffs start. Don't forget how good some of those series were last year (Phoenix vs. both the Lakers and the Clippers, Cleveland and Washington, San Antonio vs. Sacramento, and of course Dallas vs. Miami) even though nobody was really expecting such great play. Once all the games matter again, the 'juice' level will rise."
That said, Whitaker identifies an altogether different reason for the potential lack of buzz entering the league's second season, pointing to the emergence of stars Greg Oden and Kevin Durant on the college level as a potential spotlight stealer in the world of hoops. He explains, "Oden, Conley, Florida, Durant and others made college basketball exciting again, at a time when the NBA races were all being decided. The NBA was overshadowed. That Suns/Mavs double-OT game in March was probably the best NBA game of the year, but nobody remembers it because it was two nights before the NCAA Tournament started."
Did David Stern's ban on straight-from-high school superstars indirectly injure the league? For the short term, at least? It's certainly food for thought.
But as Whitaker and Leitch alluded to, this all could just be much ado about nothing. Sure, the NBA's gotten less sports media attention in the past two months than the Cleveland Browns quarterback situation, and yes — that ABC Pussycat Dolls intro with the woman wearing an outdated Kobe Bryant No. 8 jersey makes you long for a dose of Mr. Tesh — but, in the end, the NBA should be alright. Arenas or not, all it will take is one Kobe huge scoring outburst, a LeBron game-winner, or a big team on the ropes in the first round, and the headlines will gravitate back towards the hardwood. By the time the Western Conference finals kick off in a few weeks, with the myriad of potential intriguing matchups (Dallas-Phoenix, Phoenix-Houston, and Dallas-San Antonio are all strong possibilities right now), we may soon forget we were even discussing any lack of "buzz" at the end of April.
And maybe this is just an American thing. With Nowitzki (Germany), Yao Ming (China), Leandro Barbosa (Brazil) Tony Parker (France), and the Raptors (pretty much every country in the world) all looking to take the NBA crown, the rest of the world could very well be as excited now about the NBA playoffs as its ever been.
And if not? If the NBA playoffs begin and the mainstream sports media still just doesn't seem to really care? And the TV ratings are an all-time low? And we're not all staying up late hours into the night to see what Nash and Marion are doing out in Phoenix?
Well, Oden, Durant, and all those Florida guys will all more than likely be wearing NBA jerseys next year.
We'll just consider this NBA season the one the world forgot.
Buzz missing as playoffs near
Story Tools:
Print Email Blog This Subscribe
Peter Schrager / FOX Sports
Posted: 1 day ago
As the NBA regular season limps to an end and the start of the playoffs rapidly approaches, there seems to be something glaringly lacking from the transition.
The key players all seem to be there, with Kobe and his Lakers in a now suddenly familiar first-round underdog role, LeBron carrying the otherwise hapless Cavs, and Shaq and D-Wade finally healthy (sorta) and ready to defend their crown. The faces behind the bench -- Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, and Gregg Popovich specifically -- will all be in attendance too; sarcastically smiling, grimacing, and shouting at officials as they've done so eloquently for the past few decades.
Kobe Bryant's scoring binge livened up the regular season, but there weren't enough compelling stories. (Noah Graham / Getty Images)
But something's undoubtedly missing this year.
Oh, that's right -- there's no buzz. No juice.
In what will go down as one of the more forgettable NBA regular seasons in recent memories, there's been a rather noticeable lack of attention to the upcoming postseason by both the mainstream sports media and the casual fan over the past few weeks. The words NBA Playoffs and "palpable buzz" are like oil and water at the moment.
But why?
In truth, there were indeed some headline-worthy stories from this NBA season. Dirk Nowitzki, finally putting it all together in Dallas; Kobe and his ten 50-point explosions; even the Knicks had a few moments in the sun. The Golden State Warriors, 13 years removed from their last playoff berth, made a midseason trade and surged towards the eighth seed in the Western Conference. The Toronto Raptors, owners of the fifth-worst record in the NBA a year ago, became the most enjoyable team to watch in the NBA, led by an up-and-coming star big man and an international mosaic of supporting players.
And yet, with the NBA postseason now right around the corner, sports headlines seem to be centered around everything but the league's second season. The NFL Draft, postponed baseball games, and an old, irrelevant talk show host dominated back pages and dot.com home pages all last week.
Surely, it wasn't always this way. No, there was once a time when an eventual Jordan vs. the Knicks second-round matchup was hyped for weeks. You'd be watching Ross and Rachel or Jerry and Elaine and see ads for Stockton and Malone. First-round "NBA on NBC" weekend triple-headers, with Bob Costas manning the studio show and John Tesh handling the instrumentals were enough to get you through the work week. Even as recently as the early part of this decade, those Kings-Lakers battles were highly anticipated. The sports world gravitated to those series like bees on honey.
So why no excitement this year?
I reached out to some of the most respected basketball and sports media minds to find out. Nathaniel Friedman is one of the brains behind FreeDarko.com, an influential basketball blog that's gotten national acclaim over the past year. Friedman points to the Eastern Conference — a 15-team grouping with only six squads boasting records better than .500 in '06-'07 — as a reason for the widespread malaise, "When half of the bracket is perceived as irrelevant, it only empowers the 'this is a colossal waste of time' faction. You have to be a zombie to not be fiending for the West, but people see the East as cheapening the whole thing. Plus the East is missing so much of what can make it compelling: LeBron had an off year (for him), Wade is possibly gimpy, Arenas out, Iverson transplanted."
Sam Rubenstein, an online contributor for SlamOnline agrees, "There is no reason to watch a single playoff game from the Eastern Conference or acknowledge that there even is an Eastern Conference playoffs."
Certainly, from an East Coast standpoint, having no Philadelphia, Boston or New York represented in the playoffs for the second straight year doesn't help. As for the teams that did qualify with the top eight records in the conference, not all of them exactly played the beautiful game this season.
"Orlando's lost more than 40 games this year and they're heading into the playoffs," says Rob Ryder, basketball consultant for movies such as White Men Can't Jump and Blue Chips. "That's absurd. Too many teams making the playoffs. Too many games during the regular season. The players are tired, the fans are exhausted."
Others would point to the what coulda/shoulda been from the Eastern Conference this year.
Gilbert Arenas will miss the playoffs and the playoffs will miss him. (Jeffrey Bottari / Getty Images)
Over the course of the 2006-07 season, Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas had solidified himself as the NBA's next big thing. A marketing dream and a fan's hero, Arenas busted on to the scene with a multi-faceted attack on our collective senses. On the court, he was arguably the league's best player, a fiery leader with an unwavering calmness in the clutch. He scored 60 on Kobe, hit countless game-winners, and kept the Wizards ahead of the defending champion Heat in the Southeast division standings for the majority of the year.
Off the court, he was our devious friend; our gateway to the life of a 20-something superstar. On NBA.com, Arenas kept a daily blog read by millions filled with everything from pre-game strategy to his pre-Thanksgiving failure in getting a PS3. He showed up on YouTube, betting teammate DeShawn Stevenson that he (Arenas) could make more college 3-pointers with one hand than Stevenson could make NBA 3-pointers with two. Naturally, he won, dancing, laughing and doing snow angels throughout. Later on in the season, he'd get in line with the mascots and jump off one of those trampolines and dunk a basketball ... during a timeout in the All Star Game. It was the only worthwhile highlight from the weekend. He called out coaches who spurned him over the summer during Team USA competition, screamed "Habachi!" when he made big shots and had glowing pieces written about him by everyone from Mike Wise of the Washington Post to Chuck Klosterman in The New York Times' sports supplement.
This was Gilbert's year. It was supposed to be his postseason to take the world by storm. After it was all said and done, everyone would know Agent Zero.
And then the unthinkable happened. In a freak play against Charlotte on April 4, Arenas banged his knee against Gerald Wallace's. He was diagnosed with a lateral meniscus tear in his left knee and sidelined for the rest of the season.
You could practically hear the air deflate from the NBA's balloon.
Dan Steinberg, editor of the Washington Post's D.C. Sports Bog, explains, "Based on my reading, I think (Gilbert) was the breakout personality in the league this year, certainly in the East, and it's clearly a league that relies on personality. I know a lot of out-of-towners who were anxious to see what he was going to do in the playoffs, and what he was going to say. At a minimum, he's one of the five most compelling personalities in the league, and at least one compelling series has been completely neutered as a result of his injury."
Since Steinberg can't heal Gilbert, he offers this cure to the NBA: cut the length of the series, especially those first-rounders that often aren't competitive.
"I'd say the problem is the same it's been for years: a regular season that's more bloated than an American Idol results show, and first-round playoff series that last longer than some marriages," he said. "It's just hard to get pumped after all that basketball, and with all that basketball still to go. At a minimum, they should go back to best-of-5 in the first round, which will never happen. Or better yet, best-of-3. That would indisputably add some life to the first round."
SlamOnline's Rubenstein adds to the idea: "Fewer days off between games so each series takes less than a month to play.
"Bring back the best-of-5 first round series, or even make the first round best-of-3, second round best-of-5, conference finals and finals best-of-7, Rubenstein said. "Fewer teams in the playoffs, so less than 50 percent of the league makes it there and the regular season means something."
Dwyane Wade and the Heat limped through the regular season, but they'll try to defend their title. (Issac Baldizon / Getty Images)
Some hoops nuts call for even more drastic measures.
"How about some radical changes?," asks Ryder. "Here are some radical changes. Eliminate the intentional foul. Basketball is the only game where a trailing team can get back in by committing an offense. No more back-to-back timeouts. Drastically reduce number of timeouts. Put the onus on the players to spontaneously react to events. The NBA is overcoaching itself into oblivion. Make one foul shot worth two points. Fouled shooting a three? -- one foul shot worth three."
Will Leitch, the gatekeeper of the wildly popular Deadspin.com isn't sure about going that far. And he offers reason for optimism when talking about the overall lack of buzz this year: "I think it's all there; once the playoffs get going, we'll forget we ever were worried. There are so many great storylines this year, plus so many yet to come. Sure, we're missing a couple of stars — Gilbert being gone just kills me, and the Eastern Conference isn't that exciting. Though if the Cavs get hot and LeBron turns it on, look out. But the Mavs-Suns storyline, alone, will be gorgeous."
Lang Whitaker, the executive editor of Slam, holds a similar glass half full approach, insisting, "I'm sure a lot of people are going to tune in once the playoffs start. Don't forget how good some of those series were last year (Phoenix vs. both the Lakers and the Clippers, Cleveland and Washington, San Antonio vs. Sacramento, and of course Dallas vs. Miami) even though nobody was really expecting such great play. Once all the games matter again, the 'juice' level will rise."
That said, Whitaker identifies an altogether different reason for the potential lack of buzz entering the league's second season, pointing to the emergence of stars Greg Oden and Kevin Durant on the college level as a potential spotlight stealer in the world of hoops. He explains, "Oden, Conley, Florida, Durant and others made college basketball exciting again, at a time when the NBA races were all being decided. The NBA was overshadowed. That Suns/Mavs double-OT game in March was probably the best NBA game of the year, but nobody remembers it because it was two nights before the NCAA Tournament started."
Did David Stern's ban on straight-from-high school superstars indirectly injure the league? For the short term, at least? It's certainly food for thought.
But as Whitaker and Leitch alluded to, this all could just be much ado about nothing. Sure, the NBA's gotten less sports media attention in the past two months than the Cleveland Browns quarterback situation, and yes — that ABC Pussycat Dolls intro with the woman wearing an outdated Kobe Bryant No. 8 jersey makes you long for a dose of Mr. Tesh — but, in the end, the NBA should be alright. Arenas or not, all it will take is one Kobe huge scoring outburst, a LeBron game-winner, or a big team on the ropes in the first round, and the headlines will gravitate back towards the hardwood. By the time the Western Conference finals kick off in a few weeks, with the myriad of potential intriguing matchups (Dallas-Phoenix, Phoenix-Houston, and Dallas-San Antonio are all strong possibilities right now), we may soon forget we were even discussing any lack of "buzz" at the end of April.
And maybe this is just an American thing. With Nowitzki (Germany), Yao Ming (China), Leandro Barbosa (Brazil) Tony Parker (France), and the Raptors (pretty much every country in the world) all looking to take the NBA crown, the rest of the world could very well be as excited now about the NBA playoffs as its ever been.
And if not? If the NBA playoffs begin and the mainstream sports media still just doesn't seem to really care? And the TV ratings are an all-time low? And we're not all staying up late hours into the night to see what Nash and Marion are doing out in Phoenix?
Well, Oden, Durant, and all those Florida guys will all more than likely be wearing NBA jerseys next year.
We'll just consider this NBA season the one the world forgot.