The National Basketball Association (known as the NBA, of course) is one of the most gripping spectacles on TV and is well-worth the time it takes to get to know its players and teams. Its action is riveting, its players are memorable, and it almost never takes a break.
1. It’s exciting.
Basketball is exciting to watch. It is fast, it is flashy, and it is visceral. There are many more possessions in each game than in a game like football where drives can drag on for close to ten minutes without an exciting play or a score.
And, unlike sports like soccer, there is lots of scoring. Players dazzle fans every time they bring the ball up the court, and games routinely finish with both teams scoring more than a hundred points.
To add to the excitement, players love to show off. Monster dunks are always highlights, and watching a shorter guard “climb the imaginary ladder” and throw it down over a seven-foot-tall NBA center is like nothing else. No-look passes display crazy awareness, and intricate dribbling moves embarrass defenders who try to stop the man with the ball.
2. It’s accessible for everyone.
Basketball is one of the most accessible sports for the average person. Since every rec center has a court and a ball, anyone can play. Anyone can try to do what the pros do everyday on the court, and while dunking and throwing it down may be out of reach for some, everything else is possible: swish a basket from thirty feet out, drop a defender with a crossover, play lockdown defense to ice a game.
There is no barrier that prevents the everyman from doing what the pros do, whereas in the NFL, it takes a special kind of man to be an offensive lineman and a lot of protective equipment. Similar prerequisites exist for other sports. Hockey requires skates, pads and a hockey stick, and baseball takes bats, helmets, and pads as well.
3. It's year-long entertainment.
The NBA is literally year-long entertainment, and it is concentrated as well. Opening night is mid-October, and playoffs last until mid-June. That means nine months of basketball every year followed by wild offseasons with players moving to teams across the country, old legends retiring, new rookies ascending to the ranks of pros, and teams trying to better themselves through shrewd trades.
And the season is not nine months long just because the games are very spaced out either. Unlike the NFL where the season is only sixteen games long, the NBA season features eighty-two games for all thirty teams. That means there are 1230 games to watch per year with multiple games being played almost every night.
All these games are really building toward the end goal: playoff season. This is where the real action happens. Teams turn up the intensity to eleven as they compete in best-of-seven series. They shorten their rotations so their stars are playing more than forty minutes nightly in a forty-eight minute game, defenses lock in and make everyone work that much harder for a bucket, and tempers flair as the games get chippy.
4. It's personal.
As with all things, the NBA is at its most intriguing when its stories are told, and it has plenty to tell.
From teams like the Toronto Raptors trying to break into the Eastern Conference Finals this year before aging star Kyle Lowry regresses and their window of contention closes, to the rebuilding Brooklyn Nets whose amalgamation of young players like D’Angelo Russell and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson try to desperately reverse the effects of years of mismanagement in the front office, the NBA is chock-full of likeable teams and players.
Getting to know each team is almost like getting to know a cast of characters from a new TV show. Take the Cleveland Cavaliers for instance. The league’s only hope to prevent the Golden State Warriors from taking their third title in four years, the Cavs have retooled and reinvented themselves for a shot at their fourth finals appearance in as many years.
They traded disgruntled star Kyrie Irving to Boston in return for the injured Isaiah Thomas, one of the most polarizing players in the league. He has yet to play this year because of an injured hip, but last year when healthy he was the league’s leading scorer while standing a mere 5’9”, one of the shortest players in years. He’s been playing with a chip on his shoulder since he entered the league and that does not figure to change as he vies for a championship with Kevin Love and Lebron James.
Joining him is the youngest player ever to win MVP, one of the biggest what-ifs in NBA history, Derrick Rose. He has fought devastating injuries for his whole career as he struggles to regain his MVP form from 2011. He joined the Cavs this year for one last shot at winning.
Leading him and the rest of the cast is Lebron James, the boy from Akron, Ohio, who has had the weight of everyone’s expectations on him from the time he was in high school. He was called the Chosen One. People said he was going to be better than Michael Jordan, that he was going to be the best to ever play, that he would bring a championship to Cleveland, a city that had not seen one since 1964.
Refusing to cave in to the pressure, he has surpassed all these expectations and more, and now he faces his greatest challenge yet, defeating what many argue is the best team to ever play the game, the 2017 Golden State Warriors.
This is not even close to all there is to say about the Cavs, and every team has its own Isaiah Thomas, its own Derrick Rose.
From Portland’s Damian Lillard, the best rapper in the league, Indiana’s Lance “Born Ready” Stephenson to New York’s 7’3” “unicorn,” Kristaps Porzingis, there is a team and a player for everyone. Pick one or two and run with them; it’ll be a blast.
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