Now that this year’s installment of March Madness has wrapped, I’m going to go on record and state how I feel about the game of basketball.
By the time I got out of my hockey game Monday night, there was 8:38 left to play in the national championship game. Coming from downtown Nashville, I was about 25 minutes away from arriving at a sports bar near where I live to catch the end of the game. At first I wasn’t sure if I’d make it before the final buzzer, but then I remembered how the end of basketball games go.
When I got to the sports bar there was just under two minutes to play. Grabbing a beer with my teammates, we stood and watched as Ohio State prolonged their impending defeat for the next 15 minutes. Which brings me to my biggest complaint about basketball.
I understand that in most sports, when things come down to the wire and you’re behind, desperate times call for desperate measures. In football you have a few options: the hurry-up offense, the onside kick, and the Hail Mary. In hockey and soccer, you pull your goaltender for an extra attacker. But in basketball, desperation sinks to a new low with survival through infractions.
Here’s how you do it: Foul the hell out of your opponent to force a possibly missed free throw that may result in a change of possession and an ensuing opportunity to sink a three-pointer, narrowing the deficit to 12 points while the clock shows 19 seconds. Then, call one of your 14 remaining timeouts immediately for yet another stoppage in play and a much-needed commercial break. Repeat vicious cycle.
Now, I’m not saying that there’s a better way to keep hope alive in this situation. But the fact that this is the only practical strategy to compete at the end of basketball games exposes an inherent flaw in the sport, and makes games very frustrating to watch.
So what are the contributing factors to this end-of-game scenario? The back-and-forth nature of the sport and the frequent amount of scoring, for sure. Possession changes occur often in sports like soccer or hockey, but without nearly the amount of scoring that occurs in basketball, which brings me to basketball’s second major weakness.
One of the reasons that makes football or hockey more interesting to watch is that a goal or a touchdown isn’t scored on every other possession. Thus, the significance of most scores is not diminished. In basketball, too much of a good thing makes for a bad thing.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to knock the difficulty of basketball or the talent it takes to play the game, because basketball is one of the most athletic games out there. I just don’t enjoy watching it for the aforementioned reasons.
The one thing I will give college basketball is the beauty of March Madness. Name another sport that unites fanatics and apathetics alike and throws them into the same bracket-busting office pool. Or another sport that generates the kind of excitement you get when walking into a sports bar and seeing every male eye glued to an array of TVs that carry the multitude of games going on across the country. Or a sport that represents the very meaning of the term Cinderella and decides its champion using a classic playoff format.
I bet you can’t.
