The NBA Playoffs
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This weekend saw the beginning of the NBA's second season, aka the NBA Playoffs. Of all the professional sports, I think the NBA and the MLB (by far) have the best playoffs on television. I'll save the MLB adulation for September and October, but I'd like to mention a few reasons why the NBA playoffs reign above all others.
-Playoffs Basketball is a game of streaks. Whereas in the regular season, it's pretty common to see one team take a lead in the third quarter and keep it throughout the rest of the game, the NBA playoffs will have these wild scoring fluctuations between the teams playing each other. Just look at what happened in the Dallas/Memphis game, where Dallas had their 15 point lead dwindle to a 2 point lead in a matter of minutes, only to have it bounce back up to a comfortable lead a few minutes later. The NBA Playoffs seem to produce a lot of lead changes.
-You get to know an opposing team for anywhere from one to two weeks. I think it's kind of fun getting to know other teams and seeing how they change their game plans from night to night. That's kind of the beauty of basketball. If you're a home run hitting baseball team, you can't suddenly switch in October and become a small ball type of team. If you're a run and shoot football team, you can't suddenly become a traditional type team in the playoffs. But in the NBA, you have more of a chance to go from being a run and gun team to a taller, more traditional post up team. That's why you'll see a team like Dallas play San Antonio one way, and the Phoenix Suns a completely different way.
-The NBA Playoffs give individual people the chance to become legends. The NFL playoffs *rarely* shift off of one person's performance. But in the NBA, you can have a player like LeBron James completely put their team on their shoulders and take them pretty far into the playoffs. What really sets the NBA apart from other sports is it's ability to build personal rivalries. There just really isn't a comparison in Baseball or Football to Magic vs. Bird, Jordan vs. Drexler, Hakeem vs. Ewing, Rasheed vs. Duncan, etc.
-Almost ALL of the games are close. It's pretty common for an NBA playoff game to come down to the last minute. The general rule for basketball is that if you're up by six with about a minute left, it's still anybody's ball game. With three point shooting being what it is, one or two aptly dropped three pointers can completely reverse a team's fortune. By having most games come down to the last minute or so, that's about like having NFL playoff games come down to the last minute (almost NEVER happens), or having a MLB playoffs game come down to the last few innings.
That's all I got for now...oh well...kinda meaningless post. Was fun to write though.
-Playoffs Basketball is a game of streaks. Whereas in the regular season, it's pretty common to see one team take a lead in the third quarter and keep it throughout the rest of the game, the NBA playoffs will have these wild scoring fluctuations between the teams playing each other. Just look at what happened in the Dallas/Memphis game, where Dallas had their 15 point lead dwindle to a 2 point lead in a matter of minutes, only to have it bounce back up to a comfortable lead a few minutes later. The NBA Playoffs seem to produce a lot of lead changes.
-You get to know an opposing team for anywhere from one to two weeks. I think it's kind of fun getting to know other teams and seeing how they change their game plans from night to night. That's kind of the beauty of basketball. If you're a home run hitting baseball team, you can't suddenly switch in October and become a small ball type of team. If you're a run and shoot football team, you can't suddenly become a traditional type team in the playoffs. But in the NBA, you have more of a chance to go from being a run and gun team to a taller, more traditional post up team. That's why you'll see a team like Dallas play San Antonio one way, and the Phoenix Suns a completely different way.
-The NBA Playoffs give individual people the chance to become legends. The NFL playoffs *rarely* shift off of one person's performance. But in the NBA, you can have a player like LeBron James completely put their team on their shoulders and take them pretty far into the playoffs. What really sets the NBA apart from other sports is it's ability to build personal rivalries. There just really isn't a comparison in Baseball or Football to Magic vs. Bird, Jordan vs. Drexler, Hakeem vs. Ewing, Rasheed vs. Duncan, etc.
-Almost ALL of the games are close. It's pretty common for an NBA playoff game to come down to the last minute. The general rule for basketball is that if you're up by six with about a minute left, it's still anybody's ball game. With three point shooting being what it is, one or two aptly dropped three pointers can completely reverse a team's fortune. By having most games come down to the last minute or so, that's about like having NFL playoff games come down to the last minute (almost NEVER happens), or having a MLB playoffs game come down to the last few innings.
That's all I got for now...oh well...kinda meaningless post. Was fun to write though.
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