In Which I Try to Write Intelligently About Basketball

Today the top two teams in English soccer, Manchester United and Manchester City played an important game.  It's always amusing to me how the fans and journalists of European soccer leagues dance around the fact that they only have a handful of real teams that contend for the trophies, and the rest might as well be in the minors.

It seems like that's what's become of the NBA.  It's hard to get excited about the playoffs: even in the best of years, the first round seems like a formality, but now with Derek Rose out, it seems like entire Eastern Conference is a formality for Miami.

Like a lot of people, I have no affection at all for the Miami Heat and their trio of superstars (well, two and a half - sorry Mr. Bosh.)  It's not so much LeBron James's leaving Cleveland or their over-the-top boasting; it's the playground mentality of it.

And I mean that quite literally.  In my elementary school playground, whatever sport we played at recess, the three most athletic kids would always play on the same team, thus ensuring easy wins.  Of course, there's not much challenge in that, and I'm sure that with maturity, they would come to see that such victories are hollow, and that true joy in sports comes from a more even competition.  I assume they would grow to learn that - we never had recess in high school, so I don't know.

So that's what I hate about James, Wade, and Bosh: they have the same mentality as pre-tweens on a playground.  So my hope was that they would fail to win a championship together in Miami in however-many years they have together before their egos push them apart.  But then this year, I saw a chance at another possibility when Jeremy Lin became a surprise star.  The script as I would have written it would have Lin lead the Knicks on a long, valiant playoff run, then when the Heat win the Championship, hardly anyone talks about it because they're still amazed by Lin's accomplishment.

But with Lin injured, and the Knicks getting crushed by the Heat in the first round, it appears we won't even get that poetic justice. But one last point about Jeremy Lin.  With all the talk about the feel-good nature of the story, and the concern over the racial angle, I think we missed the big story, and one of the biggest challenges stemming from the Rise of China: more and more famous people with short names that are easy to make into puns.

For instance, the Vice President, and likely next President of China, is named Xi Jinping (with "Xi" pronounced, "she.")  Think of all the "That's what Xi said" jokes we'll be subjected to in the coming years.  We don't realise how lucky we were with Yao Ming.