Thursday, December 16, 2004

Amen, Bob Ryan

The Boston Globe's Bob Ryan is happy that the Celtics are running. While doing so, he perfectly explained what's wrong with today's game:

...Perhaps you've been enamored by all those 72-70 games the NBA has been infested with the past 10 years or so. Perhaps you like coaches standing up, calling every play, choking the athletes, stifling their creativity. Wow. You must have thought you'd died and gone to Hoop Heaven the past decade or decade and a half.

But the rest of us were too busy dozing to pay much attention. The NBA from the mid-'90s on was agonizing for us to watch.

It's not just a matter of fast breaks. It's a matter of simply caring about offense at all. There's been so much preaching over the years about defense, defense, defense that it was easy to forget that the object of this game is to put the ball in the basket, not prevent someone else from doing so. Sure, there has to be a proper balance between the two in order for the sport to be played properly, but there can be no denying that over the past several years most coaches have been much happier when the other team had the ball than when their own team did...


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