At what point am I supposed to start caring about the NBA lockout?

I ask this question in all seriousness. When are we supposed to care? Baseball runs into Football, which overlaps with Hockey, which runs into baseball, anyone have any problems with that? The NBA, at one point was just an added bonus in between the other, superior sports that we all know and love.
The NFL recently ended a lockout in time to start their regular season without having missed much, maybe a few OTA’s but who cares. For me, the NFL lockout was turning into a bit of a concern. I look forward to Fantasy Football and the whole Sunday football/food/good company tradition. So what would I have done without that for a year? Obviously I would have survived, but I probably would have enjoyed myself a little less.

If Football had stayed locked out, we would still have had baseball until October and then gone right into Hockey once it ended. This still would have been a tremendous transition but having a couple of months of Browns/Pats football and Bruins Hockey is quite a treat. Pile this on top of the fun of playing in multiple fantasy football leagues and all the fun that brings to your life, especially late in the season.

Then out here in Boston we have the Stanley Cup winning Bruins coming back which to me is by far the second most entertaining sport to watch behind football.

So, do you see my point? Where in all of this am I supposed to give a shit about the NBA not playing basketball?

Does anyone care, outside of people who work directly for the NBA in some capacity? Who needs professional basketball?

The NBA is by far the worst in my opinion in the below categories which I have made up and are loosely based on factual information.

• Competitive Balance: Only 9 NBA Franchises have won NBA championships in the last 31 years. (This is completely true). This makes the NBA very unappealing to the other 23 cities, who have either never seen a championship or have not seen one since before Drew Barrymore was feeding Reese’s Piece’s to ET.

• Media/Marketing Biases: For whatever reason, the television and marketing moguls seem to be attracted to NBA Basketball players to a point where they will sell their own farms for the sake of making people like them. More so then any of the other, better sports. Personally, I think this started with Jordan and Nike and eventually worked its way through every shoe company/sports media outlet etc. Everyone wants the next Jordan, and I’m not talking about on the court. I am talking about his next pair of shoes. Mind you he has been retired for a decade but you can’t get to Footlocker fast enough, every year, when his shoes come out. So the gravy train gets rolling, and inevitably the shoe companies want to find the next guy, enter Lebron James, or Dwayne Wade or Carmelo Anthony. Are any of these shitheads Michael Jordan? Absolutely not, not even close! But it is in the shoe companies best interest to make people think they are, so they open their wallets and pay EVERYONE in the media to talk nice about them, and pamper them, until eventually ESPN is writing blogs calling Lebron James BETTER then Michael Jordan, (mission accomplished Nike). Why this is so obvious in the NBA and not MLB or the NFL is beyond me.

• Excessive Celebration: Unfortunately I have to hand this award to the National Basketball Association as well. Now hold on when I say this, it may come as a shock to many avid NBA fans, but basketball is not that fucking hard. Basketball is not that hard for me, and I’m white and short and fat. I can’t even imagine how NOT HARD it is when you are 6’10 and an athlete and have a 4 ft vertical. At that point, you are looking down at the basket when you jump. Yet, nearly every time one of these jackaloons makes a layup, they high five and hit themselves in the chest with their fists and yell shit into the crowd as though they have actually accomplished something remotely difficult. It would be like me going out and getting the mail and after I brought it upstairs, began yelling about how awesome I was for doing it, while hitting myself in the face with my own penis. This entire situation is helped along by play by play announcers such as Marv Albert’s who still believe a reverse layup is a difficult thing to do and can’t keep their hands out of each other’s pants whenever someone makes a super difficult three point jump shot, even though any one armed blind guy could probably make one out five of them.

• Overall terrible player behavior: I don’t understand how NBA players are constantly getting themselves into trouble. First off, how dumb do you have to be, to be an NBA basketball player and commit a crime? At one point, I think the entire Portland Trailblazers starting lineup was in prison. Like anyone would have a hard time picking you out of a lineup. I think most people are going to remember getting robbed by a 7’4, 185 pound freak of a human being. How do you ever expect to get away with anything? That’s like getting robbed by Mothra. The NBA also has an extraordinarily loose drug policy. By far the loosest in all of professional sports. This is probably for good reason as I don’t think there would be much of an NBA left once people started asking for piss tests.

• The dumbest pay system in the history of organized sport: You know how much money Greg Oden has made through his first four NBA Seasons? 20 million dollars! You know how many games he has played in those four seasons? 82! I have played in more beer league softball games over the last four years then Greg Oden has NBA basketball games. This wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if the NBA worked their player contracts the way that everyone else in the world does. You see, in the NFL or NHL and even MLB, you have to play to make most of your money as your contract is based on incentives. In the NBA, you just have to be not dead.

• The most painful live sports experience: Anyone been to an NBA game recently? It’s like having a seizure for three hours. It is very difficult to tell where and when the actual basketball game is going on amid the dancing strippers and midgets on stilts, indoor pyrotechnics, shit falling from the ceiling on parachutes, people firing tee-shirts and other random crap at you with slingshots, the never-ending, organ music and 1990’s hip hop sound effects. All other sports have these fringe entertainment factors at work however the sport itself takes precedence over the sideshows. In the NBA, I’m not so sure.

• The Goddamn NBA starting lineups: In other sports, the starting lineups are either a blurb in your program or a basically nonexistent exercise for the public announcer. But in the fucking NBA, it has to be some sort of a spectacle. And this spectacle repeats itself every single game. Why? Everyone knows who starts for their team, why do we have to go through this self indulged, professional wrestler style, entrance prior to playing basketball? If anything, this entrance looks even sillier once they start playing basketball after it ends. It would be like having Sean Michael’s WWF entrance, but then Sean Michael’s started playing badminton once the entrance ends.

• The only sport where college is better than the pro’s: NCAA football is great but any team would get waxed by any NFL team. NCAA Baseball is barely even a sport. But then there is the relationship between NCAA Basketball and the NBA. I think Duke or Carolina could give the Minnesota Timberwolves a run for their money. I think college players still play basketball better than their professional counterparts which is something you can’t say about any other sport. I know for a fact that they play better defense in college, you certainly can’t say that about any other sport. So basically the NBA is the only sport where you actually have to get worse at the sport before going pro.

So when do I start missing this shit? Why would I? To me the NBA trying to compete with the NFL and MLB and NHL is like the animated TV series, American Dad. It would probably be okay on its own but unfortunately, it is on after Family Guy, The Cleveland Show and The Simpsons, so good luck with that. The NBA Players Association, in my opinion, has made a huge mistake with this current lockout. They already had a league where they could basically do whatever in the hell they wanted, virtually no salary caps and they didn’t even have to play basketball in order to make money. Why would they ever upset that status quo? They were taking a free limo ride down easy street. Now they have opened this huge can of worms. You can’t improve upon a perfect situation NBA players, perfection can only go backwards and make things worse.