Tonight college basketball kicks off it's season, and I, for one, will not be watching. I do watch March Madness, in particular the beginning, because I love seeing the little guys knock off the big guys. But other than that I don't really watch basketball because to me basketball is boring, and, here is where I get controversial, an inferior sport.
I say that because the first parts of the game simply don't matter. If you miss the first pitch of a baseball game, you could miss the batter hitting a homerun which could be the only scoring in the entire game. The same is also true of football and soccer, and perhaps, although I have no idea, even in cricket. Every moment of every game is important because you don't know what's going to happen, when the scoring will begin or end. That is not true in basketball.
Really the only part of the game of basketball that really matters is the last 5 minutes, because if you turn the game on with 5 minutes to go either the game is a blowout, and it doesn't matter and you can turn it back off without wasting any time watching it. Or, it will be a close game and therefore you haven't missed anything because you're going to see the most important part.
In addition, the last 5 minutes could still take an hour to play, so the game could still be long. If you don't believe me, here is something from a story by Phil Mushnik that proves my point: "Last Friday, we noted the final 42 seconds of the
Knicks-Pistons game ran an insufferable 20 minutes, 12 seconds. The last 1:41
of Monday’s Hawks-Knicks game ran 20:17. On Wednesday, the last 18.7 seconds of
the Magic-Knicks game went 8:06 — and included two commercial breaks."
42 seconds took 20 minutes to play?! Here is my solution to make basketball interesting. Make it last only 5 minutes. It would take just as long and would be just as interesting. Now I know that is never going to happen, but here is an idea that should happen. In the last two minutes of the game (or even the last 5 minutes if you would like), when there is a foul committed, the other team should not only get two shots, regardless of the number of fouls, they should also get possession of the ball. That would not only solve the problem of the last 42 seconds taking 20 minutes, but it would also solve the problem of teams fouling in order to try and win, which I can't also stand.
Good luck to the teams this year, although I won't be watching.
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