Opening Night!

This is fantastic! I love this game. Alright, I'm actually going to write something. The night that we have been waiting for since June has finally come. Dusty asked me an interesting question earlier tonight. If this country has such a short attention span how is fastest, highest scoring major sport not the most popular? I am going to ignore the answers because I don't want to start writing about racism and the fact that people just don't recognize a great product sometimes. Suffice to say I am just glad that the best major sport to watch is back into it's regular season. Here is a quick top five reasons:

1) The athleticism is far superior to baseball and football. Baseball can be played by people who are woefully out of shape. This isn't to say that it doesn't take skill to hit, pitch, throw, and play defense in baseball. Hitting is probably the hardest thing to do in sports in my opinion, at least before a diluted league expanded too fast and people started juicing. Football definitely has some of the best atheletes in the world, but there is a difference between power and the kind of agility it takes to play basketball at all five positions on the floor. Athleticism in the NBA is a must. Look at this way, tonight Bonzi Wells had a decent showing and last year in the rare event that he played he couldn't even get off the damn floor. He shed twenty five pounds in the off season and he suddenly looks like the guy that almost single-handedly demolished the Spurs a couple of years ago. Speaking of...

2) The Spurs are damn good. For the first time since the Spurs won last we have a champ that looks like they actually give a shit about repeating, and this team much more than their last championship team. Detroit and Miami were sure not to repeat, it wasn't going to happen. I think they should have insisted on wearing the rings they got in the Championship ceremony before the game, and flashing them at the camera every time they made a play that reminded you that if you thought these guys were not going to come back and be ready to kick some ass this year you were sadly mistaken. The Blazers were still surprisingly decent though...

3) LaMarcus Aldridge looked damn good. There are young teams in this league that you can tell will be good. The Blazers lost Greg Oden before the seasons started and they kept up with the best team in basketball for stretches. Aldridge in particular made Kevin Pritchard look pretty damn smart in trading Zach Randolph. These guys as Chuck said are going to be damn good soon, you better beat them now, while you can. Speaking of the Chuckster...

4) The commentating is far better. Not this is a reason to watch a sport, but Tim McCarver was like the guy in Pootytang who repeated everything during the world series, and there always at least one guy in the booth in footbal games that has had multiple concussions. The ECK is one of the best combinations in sports commentating in a long time, even when they allow Magic Johnson to interject sentence fragments about the Lakers into the conversation intermittently. Charles alone makes it worth watching the halftime shows. Tonight he called out Skip Bayless and Jay Mariotti by name in the Rockets-Lakers halftime show. Priceless. They don't know much about basketball and Charles was nice enough to point that out on national television. There really are too many sports journalist who are "personalities" now. "Personalities" should be the list of people that you have been on a date with that you would willing set yourself on fire before you went out on another date with them. They were a "personality" or a void of "personality" because they were loud dipshits that thought they knew something about everything. Dusty and I would never write a column about hockey we don't know anything about it. Maybe curling because nobody knows anything about it. Basketball does have a couple. Stephen A. Smith yelling about everything is not good commentary, for fuck sakes the man claimed there were five title contenders in the East. OK, have a beer and calm down. Alright I got it. Finish the beer. The point is for the most part pro basketball commentating is better than other major sports.

5) Fifth and maybe the most important. There are fewer teams in this league that have nothing to offer. There are compelling players on almost every team. Though I dog the East constantly, there are few genuinely compelling teams in the East. Even though the top five in the West would be favored to beat who ever comes out of the East there are many players in the East that are amazing. The best player in the League that isn't demanding to leave his team and making empty threats. In case you wanted to know his name starts with L and ends with Ebron. Even a team like the Atlanta Hawks has at least four players that can be truly exciting. A mess like the Knicks has some great players. There are not many exceptions, Sacramento is the one that jumps to mind. Parity is there, and some of the great teams are not paying the luxury tax.


The Captain is checking out.

P.S.- If you couldn't get excited about the last 1:36 of the Rockets and Lakers game you couldn't fog a mirror.