NBA: Back from the Dead?

by Hal Borkow

The National Basketball Association came shockingly close to doing the unthinkable — canceling its 1998-1999 season. Ironically, the most financially successful and commercialized professional sports league of the 90s teased its fans by flirting with this very unmarketable possibility.

Billy Hunter, Union head, did his very best to bully the players, yet in the end, they didn’t buy his rhetoric. The borderline NBA players as well as many of the non-superstars would have lost too great an amount of their income, had the season been cancelled. In the aftermath of this fiasco the media may focus on Michael Jordan’s retirement, but the fans ought to be thanking the Scott Burrells of the NBA for breaking with the Players Union and allowing the season to commence. So let’s put professional basketball up there with death and taxes. Sports fans can count on its survival, if not its surging popularity.

Numerous questions surround this NBA season. First and foremost, how will Michael Jordan’s retirement affect the NBA? Conventional wisdom suggests that it will unquestionably hurt professional basketball. But the league, the media and the fans knew that this day would come. This decision may actually benefit the league. For example, the Eastern Conference is now an open field, with numerous teams having a shot to make it to the Finals. Thankfully, we will finally have a playoff that is not anticlimactic in this conference; an interesting battle for supremacy will develop with Indiana, Miami, New York, Atlanta, and Charlotte in the mix. I can’t imagine I’m the only basketball fan that got sick of a seemingly predetermined Eastern Conference Champion. Sure, the TV ratings will decrease if it’s an Indiana-Charlotte conference final, but I expect true basketball fans will appreciate the greater parity in the league this year, something it has lacked for too long.

Truthfully, there existed borderline fans who would watch four NBA games a year; all ending with Michael Jordan swishing the game-winning basket in the final game of each of his respective playoff contests. The NBA may assume that these fans generate any high ratings it achieved in the past; still, the NBA underestimates the creative potential of the sport it promotes. As long as the game continues to develop with infusions of new and talented athletes, the sport will move on, and the league will, too.

Yet many claim that no heir to Jordan’s talent exists; that he exemplifies the pinnacle of human basketball existence. Which current players will carry the torch and lead the NBA into a new era? Naturally, Michael Jordan’s basketball career cannot nor should be recreated by Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Grant Hill, or any other young player the media obnoxiously labels as the Second Coming. However, the sheer quantity of pure talent that exists in the league today is simply awesome. When Wilt Chamberlain suggests that if he were in his prime today, he could dominate to a greater capacity than when he actually played, recognize that he is full of hot air. In Chamberlain’s day, only one center could neutralize him: Bill Russell. Today, there would be several: Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo; perhaps even Dennis Rodman, the most versatile defensive player in the history of the sport, could hassle Chamberlain in the pain. Indeed, today’s players are redefining their assumed positions.

Guards like Iverson, Bryant, Stephon Marbury, and Anfernee Hardaway have the uncanny ability to set up their teammates like a classic point-guard, and the ability to score like an off-guard. Sleek, athletic forwards are reshaping their positions, too — demonstrating skills that transcend the traditional roles and expectations that defined their positions. Even a seven-footer such as Kevin Garnett now possesses the versatility of a forward and the springs of a guard. Basketball is a sport where individuality reigns. There may never be another Jordan. But let’s allow the athletes in the coming years to place their individual mark on the game before we start overdramatizing Jordan’s loss to the league.

Possibly the question most concerning NBA is this: will fans come back to the NBA, despite the shortened season and no all-star game? Perhaps the NBA will rejuvenate, but only slowly. The strike affects some franchises more than others. For example, if the Bulls dismantle, the best basketball team in the city of Chicago this year may well be DePaul. However, once March Madness ends and the NBA playoffs begin, my hunch is that the basketball fans interested in the playoffs of yester-year will be interested in this year, too. Remember that basketball is not the only sport that has had a postseason after a strike-shortened regular season— baseball did it in ’81, and football held its Super Bowl in ’83 despite a regular season of only nine games. These sports have rebounded, and basketball can, too. MR

This article was published in the 20 January 1999 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 17, Number 6).
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