If the NBA’s marketing team wanted to craft an honest and effective promotional campaign for this season (leaving aside the unlikelihood of an outbreak of honesty ever afflicting a marketer), they’d run something like this: A title card tells us that it’s November 23rd 2011, and we see besuited players and owners as they glare at each other silently across a grey conference table; journalists yawn in hotel corridors, listlessly updating Twitter with ‘Meeting into fifth hour, no progress’; a basketball fan watches the last ten minutes of Teen Wolf on an infinite loop – lonely, bitter tears rolling down his face; and all the while Khloé Kardashian laughs and laughs and laughs. Finally, the screen goes black and the tagline comes up: ‘NBA 2011-12 – It’s Better Than Nothing’.
The lockout has given us exactly the season we feared it would give us – a rerun of 1999’s post-lockout season. Cramming as many games as possible into the available weeks means no time for practise – which means disjointed, sloppy teams playing ugly, unfocused basketball. It also means no time for players to rest and recover, making them much more susceptible to injury. Unsurprisingly, every team in the league is carrying at least one long-term injury on their roster, and for most of those teams it’s their best player as – logic and consequence being the harsh mistresses they are – the best players play the most minutes. Equally unsurprisingly, taking the best players out of the league makes that league markedly worse.
Under these hothouse conditions for creating dismal spectacle, the NBA finds itself in the situation where at least ten of its thirty teams are objectively terrible. It is a mathematical inevitability that 66% of the games played this season will be, at best, dull walkovers as the good teams sail through a mismatch; and at worst ambulant insults to the concepts of sporting endeavour, entertainment and human dignity. If the Washington Wizards and Sacramento Kings turned up to play in your back garden, you’d politely ask them to leave, before politely calling the guy at the pub who ‘takes care of things’ and politely asking him to have every one of the players politely assassinated.
Not that it’s all bad. The quiet competence of Chicago and Oklahoma City, as well as the infectious fun of the clairvoyant point guard/gravity-exempt forward pairings in LA and Minnesota have supplied enough sporting nourishment to keep fans away from furry Michael J Fox-based nostalgia. But by far the most entertaining spectacle in today’s NBA is watching the New York Knicks desperately scrabbling around for any trace of a coherent basketball strategy. With a roster that can boast of two All Star calibre attackers (Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony) and the defensive lynchpin from last year’s champion Dallas Mavericks (Tyson Chandler), New York has, in theory, the foundations for an elite team. In practice, the remainder of their squad is filled out with anaemic ballast ranging from the unrefined (Iman Shumpert), to the uncoordinated (Toney Douglas) and the undead (Mike Bibby). Frustratingly (or hilariously, depending on your reasons for watching), this motley crew tend to start games fairly well, moving the ball crisply and sharing offensive and defensive responsibilities equally, forming a cohesive unit that is more than the sum of its parts. This usually last until around midway through the second quarter, whereupon the entire team gets bored or distracted by the bright lights or the cheerleaders or the popcorn or the tasty tasty braaaaiiinnnsss lining the arena, and forgets these fundamentals in favour of passing the ball to Anthony and watching him try to score over five defenders on every possession.
This unbreakable pattern has seen the Knicks lurch from disaster to false-hope-engendering-win-over-a-poor-team to further disaster over the course of the season, with coach Mike D’Antoni unable to get his players to change their ways. Presumably he’s tried showing them tapes of games, pointing to the scores at the end of the first and second quarters, and screaming wordless gales of unyielding horror at them until they make the connection between performance and outcome, but as yet it has been to little effect. Sadly, the only glimmer of hope on the horizon for the Knicks is the return from injury of point guard Baron Davis, and the forlorn notion that he can knit the team more efficiently. As Davis’ CV prominently features worrying phrases such as ‘unfulfilled potential’, ‘questionable attitude’, ‘injury-prone’, ‘Cleveland Cavaliers’ and ‘fat mess’ – the jury remains firmly out on his potential to revive this ailing franchise.
And yet I can’t get enough of watching this season’s Knicks – the disjointed play, the furious crowd, the coach’s grimace, the uncomprehending thousand-yard stare on Jared Jeffries’ face. Perhaps it is because their very being embodies the lockout-afflicted season: they stand for star power over prudent team building, short-term panic over any semblance of forward thinking. They shill a substandard product at record prices to an openly hostile audience. They are venal, frustrating, incompetent and – very occasionally – spectacularly entertaining. And there’s still a chance that they could fall into a frenzied panic at the trade deadline and swap their entire bench for Steve Nash and some magic beans.
The Knicks are by far and away the team of the season.
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