How to Fix Basketball

Anyone who compares basketball to chess is an idiot , but especially if they're talking about the last few minutes -- on the clock -- of a close game, when everything slows down and becomes excruciatingly boring, completely unlike chess. 

We can all agree that it's getting worse: the first 46 of the game clock's 48 minutes might be over in an hour and a half, but those last 2 minutes could take another half hour. 

And if we don't stand up and cry, "Enough!" it could soon be an hour, or longer.

And unlike those prima-dona egocentric head coaches who think they're like chess players, and are making this last part of the game longer and longer -- unlike them, most of us actually have stuff to do after the game. Other than those coaches and a few particularly silly fans, nobody finds these long, slow exchanges of time outs and fouls left to give, and wasting as much time as possible at every turn, exciting! Time outs are allowed to go on for much longer than they're supposed to. and when was the last time you saw a so-called "thirty second timeout' which was over in 30 seconds? 

But it's not just that: every time the clock stops, late in a close game, these bonehead coaches who have never cared about anything or anyone other than themselves, abuse the opportunity and stretch it into a non-timeout timeout: when there's a possession change. Between free throws. During a substitution. Any and every time they can, they abuse the situation to inflict a little bit more of their time-wasting supposed wisdom on their long-suffering players and fans and the officials. 

I say, during the last part of any basketball game -- maybe the last 2 minutes on the clock, maybe the last 5 minutes -- there should be no more time-outs. and no more non-timeout timeouts. Let the game clock roll after a basket is scored, just like early in the game. Also, don't stop the clock during substitutions. If a player takes too long to get on or off of the court during a substution, that's a technical.

And, the final brilliant nail in the coffin of this "game of chess" which is boring us all to death: every foul is a 2-shot technical foul, and the fouled team gets or retains possession of the ball. The only time the clock would stop would be for a foul. The coaches could still have their short non-timeout timeouts during these technical fouls, but not too long: put a 5-second limit on each shot. Exceed that limit and you forfeit all remaining free throws and the other team gets 2.

If a coach is ejected from the game, give him 5 seconds to get his precious prima-donna ass off of the court. Not 5 seconds to start moving off the court, but 5 seconds to get out of our sight, or it's an additional 2-shot technical. 10 seconds and we can still see or hear him? 2 2-shot technicals, 3 fouls for a 15-second delay, etc, etc. One more technical for coaching after being ejected. One delicious aspect of this rule would be that some of them still wouldn't be able to stop themselves from staying on the court and ranting and screaming like the spoiled little tittybabies they are.

An extra 2 shots for flagrant fouls. Etc, etc.

Why, the players would actually have to decide close games by actually playing basketball, with a strong incentive to play it clean and foul-free. 

You know what's already exciting because there already are no timeouts? CHESS!!

Amateur and Professional Sports

Chess has existed for well over 1000 years. Tennis has been around for at least 600 years, golf for at least 500. In western Europe, all three of these sports were originally exclusive pastimes of the aristocracy. Playing golf has continued to be primarily the preserve of what Veblen called the leisure class, a status symbol affordable only by a small portion of the population. Tennis, by comparison, has become somewhat less exclusive, and chess is now a mass phenomenon.

 

All three of these sports, as well as other Medieval aristocratic pastimes such as tournaments (jousting) and horse racing, are individual sports. The most popular team sports of the present day did not become popular until the 19th century: baseball, rugby, what Americans call football, what the rest of the world calls football and Americans call soccer, basketball, handball and so forth.

These team sports grew simultaneously in two categories: amateur sports for the upper class, as sports had been, and, something new, professional sports which were much more open to the entire society, and which, indeed, were often looked down upon by the aristocrats and the rich middle class wishing to join the upper classes. And large-scale amateur sports persist to this day in the US in the form of school sports, including college sports.

And perhaps it is better to call them "amateur" sports, in quotation marks, because, right from the start, university football and baseball and basketball teams cheated, and included players who were not really university students. 

Back in the mid-19th century in the US, attendance at universities was still mostly confined to relatively wealthy white men. It was a status symbol of the upper classes, as sports traditionally had been. However, as team sports grew explosively in popularity, and they began to generate huge amounts of revenue from ticket sales, and as college sports began to gain fans who had never been to college, the code of exclusivity was regularly broken, and the pool of players expanded far beyond the upper classes, in order to find the very best players. 

And from the mid-19th century until today, most people have known that the claim that most of a college's athletes are actually students, is untrue. 

In the rest of the world, many sports -- above all soccer, by far the most popular sport in the world -- developed in an entirely different way, with none of this pretense of amateurism. The revenues are openly shared with the athletes, not just in the "major leagues" as is the case in the US, but in all leagues. 

Baseball still has its minor leagues, although these have been mostly replaced by college baseball. Each major league team owns or is closely and exclusively associated with teams in several minor leagues, which form a pool of young talent for the major leagues to pick from. 

Most of the soccer teams outside of the US are independent entities. Typically, a country will have many soccer leagues, and a team can move up to a higher, more prosperous league by leading the league below it, while the team which did worst in the higher league moves to the lower league.

It's a much more sensible way of doing things. The American system is much more like a battle royal, with millions of children competing for a few thousand positions in which their financial compensation may begin to reflect the revenue they generate for others. There are only a very few, very impoverished and unsuccessful independent minor leagues in American football and basketball. Quite a few American athletes have figured out that they will be better treated in other countries, where basketball and baseball leagues and leagues in still other sports are modeled upon the soccer model.

And so, ironically, in the US, which supposedly was founded upon a rejection of things like aristocracy -- although that's a pretense about as transparent as that in which college athletes are supposed to be students -- amateur sports has become a very cruel exploitation of young poor people. 

Perhaps even more ironically, one of the few other parts of the world who indulged in a lie about amateur sports was -- the former Soviet bloc. Were they doing this in order to compete with their great rival and enemy, the US? I don't know.

You're Not Always As Young As You Feel

"Okay, we're getting ready for the 4th quarter of this barn-burner between the Boston Celtics and the Phoenix Suns, and we've had a lot of good guesses to our trivia question: Who is the oldest player in the history of the NBA? but no correct guesses. And I'm really not surprised, because this was a tough one."

"Well, you know, age is just a number anyway."

"No, age is more than just a number."

"You're as young as you feel."

"Again -- untrue. Sometimes some people feel young who are in fact very old. The same way that sometimes some people feel pretty who are not."

"Oh, come on!"

"I'm just being real here."

"Well, if we're being really real here, I've got to call you on that one, because beauty is irreductably subjective."

"Well played, Sir, you are absolutely correct. But age is irreducably objective."

"I grudgiungly concede the point."

"Anyway, people guessed Robert Parrish, Kevin Willis and Dikembe Mutombo, and those are all very good guesses. Those guys are all in the top 5."

"I guessed Nat Hickey."

"Yes, and so did a few of our callers. Hickey was the head coach of the Providence Steamrollers in 1947-48, in the very early days of the NBA, and he put himself in in 2 games, and he was nearly 46 years old at the time, and, until, let's see, until about 10 years ago he was the oldest player in the history of the league."

"So somebody broke Hickey's record in 2007 --"

"2006."

"2006. I'm trying to think of guys who'd been in the league for a long time in 2006. You already siad it wasn't Willis or Mutombo."

"This is a tricky one.'

"Stockton?"

"No."

"Malone?"

"No."

"Grant Hill?"

"No. Okay, I'm going to end your suffering soon. One reason why this is so difficult is because most of the oldest players in the NBA, or the oldest players in most major league sports, have been All-Stars, superstars. This is a solid player, no doubt, or they wouldn't keep hiring him. He's solid, but he hasn't started very many games. As a matter of fact, over the course of his career, he hasn't even appeared in as many regular-season games as he's sat on the bench. Not injured reserve, but active and sitting out the games on the bench."

"You mean?"

"And he's played in this game, tonight."

"You mean Steven Bollinger?"

"That's correct. Steven Bollinger is the all-time oldest player in the history of the NBA."

"I didn't realize he was that old. I mean, yeah, he's got a few grey hairs, he's obviously not a kid -- wait a minute. Wait just a minute. You said Hickey had the record until 10 years ago?"

"I did say that."

"Has Bollinger held the record for 10 years?"

"Yes he has."

"That means he's -- holy shit!"

"Careful, we're on the air!"

"I apologize, ladies and gentlemen. You're trying to tell me that Steven Bollinger, journeyman reserve point guard for the Phoenix Suns, is 56 years old?!"

"Yes. Except, someone who's been in the league as long as he has, I think you refer to him as 'veteran' instead of 'journeyman.'"

"I stand corrected. 56! Wow, no wonder his knees and elbows and wrists are all taped up so often."

"I was talking to him before the game and he said he wished there were some way they could also wrap a hip. Says it might be a trick hip that finally ends his career."

"Did he say that he hurts all over most of the time?"

"As a matter of fact, he did. Not in a whiny way. He wasn't complaining, we were just talking about what it's like to be 56 and trying to keep up with all of these -- kids, from Bollinger's point of view. He actually called me 'Kid,' too. I didn't mind that, because -- well, because he's freakin' old!"

"So, he was drafted -- when, along around the mid-80's? Where did he play in college?"

"He didn't play college basketball, and he wasn't drafted. He declared for the 1979 draft out of high school. 10 rounds came and went and he wasn't drafted, but he managed to get himself a tryout with the LA Lakers, made the practice squad, and by the time the 1979 regular season started, he was on the roster. And he's been either on an NBA roster or an NBA injured reserve, not just every season, but every day of every NBA season since."

"Wait a minute -- he's not the oldest and also the youngest player in NBA history, is he?"

"4th-youngest. And he's also been very outspoken about how he thinks college athletics are a bad deal for athletes. He's called it a brilliant scam to keep from paying professional athletes. And if you look at other countries and how they tend to have a number of different professional leagues for each sport -- very much like how there used to be very many different minor leagues in baseball before college baseball eliminated a lot of them --"

"-- Except that in other countries, instead of minor leagues belonging to a major league franchise, all the teams are independent of one another..."

"-- And teams move up and down from one league to another based on their season records. Exactly."

"Right. So... Steven Bollinger. My goodness. He does not look 56 years old from the neck down. Good for him. 1979 to 2007... So he's in his 38th season in the NBA. I'm guessing his lead in the record category of longest career as a player in the NBA is rather substantial."

"He is nowhere near the lead in most games played, but in number of seasons played, he is 17 years ahead of Robert Parrish and Kevin Garnett."

"17 years and counting."

"Yes. You are correct. You are incorrect when you say that age is just a number and that you're as pretty as you feel, but when you're right, you're right."

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