How Not to Run a Professional Sport
I don't know what day it will be when you read this, so I'll just ask this right now: Have the Sacramento Kings claimed that the NBA wants the L.A. Lakers to win their series yet?
If it hasn't happened, you know it will. It happens every year about this time, it's the new NBA tradition. The teams that lose the conference finals claim that the fix was in so that the NBA could get the two biggest markets or most popular teams possible so as to get the most ratings. It happened when the Knicks beat the Pacers in '99, when Portland mysteriously blew a big 4th quarter lead in Game 7 to the Lakers in 2000, and when the 76ers beat Milwaukee last season. Ray Allen and George Karl were the first to publicly accuse the NBA of such a fix, and they were fined so heavily, they've been pretty much muzzled since. Now, Sacramento loses Game 6 tonight to the Lakers because, among other things, Mike Bibby was called for a foul for getting run over by Kobe Bryant and almost getting his nose broken in the process. Regular season-- foul on Kobe, maybe even a flagrant. Game 6 with the Lakers trailing in the series-- Bibby's nose got in the way. Kings coach Rick Adelman has claimed there was something fishy about the officiating tonight, and for that he'll lose a sizable portion of his next paycheck.
In fact, when you think about it, it's easy to try to claim that the league had a hand in the events of the New Jersey/Boston series as well. Think about it; every time the Nets would jump out to a 20-point second-half league, somehow Boston always suddenly and "miraculously" came back to make it a close game. And we find out that because of that, the ratings are up big time for the playoffs! My fellow sports conspiracy theorists, I think I'm on to something here.
It didn't used to be this way, ya know. The NBA didn't have to tinker with the outcomes of playoff series to get ratings in the past. Oh, wait, I think they still did; that might explain how Charles Smith got hacked about a dozen times trying to make what would have been the winning put back in that Bulls-Knicks series in '93, and nothing was called. No Bulls in the finals means no Jordan means no ratings, after all. Now I know the Bulls fans will counter with the non-foul Scottie Pippen got called for on that Hubert Davis 3-pointer the next year, but here's my rebuttal: it was a makeup call, and Jordan was retired, so the NBA wanted the Knicks to win that year. Anyhoo, back to my point, we didn't worry about ratings before the last work stoppage. You remember that one, the owners' lockout that wiped out half the '98-'99 season and effectively killed most of the fan interest in the game (OK, Jordan re-retiring may have had a role, too, but I've got something here...) Just in case, you don't recall how that whole mess started, the players' union and the owners had pretty much reached a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement before the season, when suddenly, all the star players' agents got together, nixed the deal, and then broke up the union to form one where they would have more say.
So I hope you see where I'm going with this... a work stoppage, especially one that was as much of a sham as the NBA's last one, kills fan interest in the league to the point where the league has to fix playoff series to ensure bigger ratings (but the ratings are still well below the pre-lockout levels). Which brings me to baseball, where you apparently don't have to have a work stoppage to kill fan interest, you just have to talk about it. Attendance is down across the board at major league stadiums this year, and it's not just the weakened economy. It's the fact that we spent the last few months talking about contraction, lawsuits, and now steroids. It's the fact that the union may or may not have already set a strike date and baseball columnists everywhere are starting to resign fans to the fact that this season will end up just like '94: done early, no World Series, no sure sign of a following season. Now, of course, I said this back in October before the last World Series, but I didn't realize that it would be even worse than I thought it would be. Nobody then was thinking that the Expos and Twins would be contracted; hell, nobody was thinking that not only would the Twins and Expos survive an attempted contraction, not only would Minnesota be in first place, but Montreal would be at .500 and just 2 1/2 games out on June 1.
Not only that, but we damn sure didn't believe that even with the Twins and Expos in the race at this point, they would STILL be targets #1 and #2 for contraction. You see, it's simple to Osama Bin Selig, if you haven't held up the taxpayers for a new stadium lately, you don't belong in the league. See, Major League Baseball and its teams are hemorrhaging money, piling up debt, I mean look at the figures... oh, I see, you're claiming we're making record profits and you have numbers from Forbes magazine that basically say we're just blowing smoke and staging a PR campaign... this interview's over...
What do I think? Yes, the players should be tested for steroids; the IOC does it, and what's worse, they catch people; baseball players should be held to the same scrutiny. Ken Caminiti admitting he juiced up during his MVP year should be to baseball what Ben Johnson getting caught in Seoul in 1988 was to the Olympics: a wake-up call. Yes, there should be a salary cap. Of course, a salary cap hasn't even been brought to the table by the owners lately, because they know that if they do, the players may just strike right then and there, and that's ridiculous. Unfortunately, the owners lost the moral high ground when Herr Selig insisted on trying to contract. Now, it's gotten more ridiculous; with the Commish about to achieve his goal of bilking Jesse Ventura and the good people of Minnesota to get a new stadium to replace the "aging" 20-year old Metrodome, he now claims that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays will then become Most Likely To Be Contracted. Does he have any idea how dumb an idea it is to put an expansion team in a city (especially after the last work stoppage) and then rip it right out four years later. He does have one thing in his favor; I don't think Tampa Bay even KNOWS they have a team yet based on the lack of fan support, so they may not even blink if the team disappears tomorrow. Who cares? Tell me how Gruden's gonna get the Bucs to the Super Bowl.
America invented basketball and adopted baseball as its national pastime, and you know what? We want to give up both of them, at least the professional ranks, anyway; we'll keep college basketball, even if some 60 or more high schoolers and college underclassmen just declared for the NBA draft (by the way, they DO know that there are only 58 picks, right?) We'll keep our football... American football, I mean (don't go thinking I suddenly want us to make soccer the national game, at least not until we move up to at least 31st in the World Cup). Why do you think that Arena Football teams are spreading like the plague? We want our football! We want to scrutinize our teams' offseason salary cap casualties and sit in sports bars and ponder who we'll take with our 7th-round draft choice. You know why? Because the NFL actually KNOWS WHAT IT'S DOING!!! The officiating is seldom likely to yield conspiracy theories (unless, of course, there is a "tuck" involved), and there is never an imminent threat of a work stoppage or contraction on the horizon. This is not just a lesson for Bud Selig and David Stern to take to heart, but the players unions of the NBA and MLB as well. We're sick of the games withing the games and the off-field bickering.
Now then, how do you think the Lakers will be handed Game 7? Rare traveling call as Webber drives for the winning hoop? Shaq is allowed to wrestle Vlade to the floor to clear the lane for Kobe? Where's Tom Clancy when you need him?
If it hasn't happened, you know it will. It happens every year about this time, it's the new NBA tradition. The teams that lose the conference finals claim that the fix was in so that the NBA could get the two biggest markets or most popular teams possible so as to get the most ratings. It happened when the Knicks beat the Pacers in '99, when Portland mysteriously blew a big 4th quarter lead in Game 7 to the Lakers in 2000, and when the 76ers beat Milwaukee last season. Ray Allen and George Karl were the first to publicly accuse the NBA of such a fix, and they were fined so heavily, they've been pretty much muzzled since. Now, Sacramento loses Game 6 tonight to the Lakers because, among other things, Mike Bibby was called for a foul for getting run over by Kobe Bryant and almost getting his nose broken in the process. Regular season-- foul on Kobe, maybe even a flagrant. Game 6 with the Lakers trailing in the series-- Bibby's nose got in the way. Kings coach Rick Adelman has claimed there was something fishy about the officiating tonight, and for that he'll lose a sizable portion of his next paycheck.
In fact, when you think about it, it's easy to try to claim that the league had a hand in the events of the New Jersey/Boston series as well. Think about it; every time the Nets would jump out to a 20-point second-half league, somehow Boston always suddenly and "miraculously" came back to make it a close game. And we find out that because of that, the ratings are up big time for the playoffs! My fellow sports conspiracy theorists, I think I'm on to something here.
It didn't used to be this way, ya know. The NBA didn't have to tinker with the outcomes of playoff series to get ratings in the past. Oh, wait, I think they still did; that might explain how Charles Smith got hacked about a dozen times trying to make what would have been the winning put back in that Bulls-Knicks series in '93, and nothing was called. No Bulls in the finals means no Jordan means no ratings, after all. Now I know the Bulls fans will counter with the non-foul Scottie Pippen got called for on that Hubert Davis 3-pointer the next year, but here's my rebuttal: it was a makeup call, and Jordan was retired, so the NBA wanted the Knicks to win that year. Anyhoo, back to my point, we didn't worry about ratings before the last work stoppage. You remember that one, the owners' lockout that wiped out half the '98-'99 season and effectively killed most of the fan interest in the game (OK, Jordan re-retiring may have had a role, too, but I've got something here...) Just in case, you don't recall how that whole mess started, the players' union and the owners had pretty much reached a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement before the season, when suddenly, all the star players' agents got together, nixed the deal, and then broke up the union to form one where they would have more say.
So I hope you see where I'm going with this... a work stoppage, especially one that was as much of a sham as the NBA's last one, kills fan interest in the league to the point where the league has to fix playoff series to ensure bigger ratings (but the ratings are still well below the pre-lockout levels). Which brings me to baseball, where you apparently don't have to have a work stoppage to kill fan interest, you just have to talk about it. Attendance is down across the board at major league stadiums this year, and it's not just the weakened economy. It's the fact that we spent the last few months talking about contraction, lawsuits, and now steroids. It's the fact that the union may or may not have already set a strike date and baseball columnists everywhere are starting to resign fans to the fact that this season will end up just like '94: done early, no World Series, no sure sign of a following season. Now, of course, I said this back in October before the last World Series, but I didn't realize that it would be even worse than I thought it would be. Nobody then was thinking that the Expos and Twins would be contracted; hell, nobody was thinking that not only would the Twins and Expos survive an attempted contraction, not only would Minnesota be in first place, but Montreal would be at .500 and just 2 1/2 games out on June 1.
Not only that, but we damn sure didn't believe that even with the Twins and Expos in the race at this point, they would STILL be targets #1 and #2 for contraction. You see, it's simple to Osama Bin Selig, if you haven't held up the taxpayers for a new stadium lately, you don't belong in the league. See, Major League Baseball and its teams are hemorrhaging money, piling up debt, I mean look at the figures... oh, I see, you're claiming we're making record profits and you have numbers from Forbes magazine that basically say we're just blowing smoke and staging a PR campaign... this interview's over...
What do I think? Yes, the players should be tested for steroids; the IOC does it, and what's worse, they catch people; baseball players should be held to the same scrutiny. Ken Caminiti admitting he juiced up during his MVP year should be to baseball what Ben Johnson getting caught in Seoul in 1988 was to the Olympics: a wake-up call. Yes, there should be a salary cap. Of course, a salary cap hasn't even been brought to the table by the owners lately, because they know that if they do, the players may just strike right then and there, and that's ridiculous. Unfortunately, the owners lost the moral high ground when Herr Selig insisted on trying to contract. Now, it's gotten more ridiculous; with the Commish about to achieve his goal of bilking Jesse Ventura and the good people of Minnesota to get a new stadium to replace the "aging" 20-year old Metrodome, he now claims that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays will then become Most Likely To Be Contracted. Does he have any idea how dumb an idea it is to put an expansion team in a city (especially after the last work stoppage) and then rip it right out four years later. He does have one thing in his favor; I don't think Tampa Bay even KNOWS they have a team yet based on the lack of fan support, so they may not even blink if the team disappears tomorrow. Who cares? Tell me how Gruden's gonna get the Bucs to the Super Bowl.
America invented basketball and adopted baseball as its national pastime, and you know what? We want to give up both of them, at least the professional ranks, anyway; we'll keep college basketball, even if some 60 or more high schoolers and college underclassmen just declared for the NBA draft (by the way, they DO know that there are only 58 picks, right?) We'll keep our football... American football, I mean (don't go thinking I suddenly want us to make soccer the national game, at least not until we move up to at least 31st in the World Cup). Why do you think that Arena Football teams are spreading like the plague? We want our football! We want to scrutinize our teams' offseason salary cap casualties and sit in sports bars and ponder who we'll take with our 7th-round draft choice. You know why? Because the NFL actually KNOWS WHAT IT'S DOING!!! The officiating is seldom likely to yield conspiracy theories (unless, of course, there is a "tuck" involved), and there is never an imminent threat of a work stoppage or contraction on the horizon. This is not just a lesson for Bud Selig and David Stern to take to heart, but the players unions of the NBA and MLB as well. We're sick of the games withing the games and the off-field bickering.
Now then, how do you think the Lakers will be handed Game 7? Rare traveling call as Webber drives for the winning hoop? Shaq is allowed to wrestle Vlade to the floor to clear the lane for Kobe? Where's Tom Clancy when you need him?
posted by Dave | 4:19 PM
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