The infamous and legendary Indiana and Texas Tech coach Bob Knight once said: "If the NBA were on channel 5, and a bunch of frogs making love was on channel 4, I'd watch the frogs even if they were coming in fuzzy."
Putting it lightly, the NBA is in disrepair these days. From the Pacers' Ron Artest using his two longest fingers to salute the fans to former Spartan and Portland Trail Blazer Zach Randolph liberating "large amounts of blood" from teammate Ruben Patterson's face with his fist, it's safe to say the "Association" has seen its better days.
Defense? A thing of the past. Teamwork? Not so much. And coaching? It's hard to tell if Milwaukee Bucks coach George Karl is leading his team on the sidelines or waiting for a bus.
The NBA's heyday has past, its facade as the best basketball in the world is crumbling like the Sphinx.
Where have all the Kurt Rambises gone? Where are the Dennis Johnsons, the James Worthys, hell, even the Bill Laimbeers?
Basketball in the NBA used to be about effort and hustle, not being amateur enough to toss a bogus shot at the wrong basket in order to pad your stats to a triple-double.
(If Dennis Johnson was what's right with the NBA, Ricky Davis is all that's wrong with it.)
So if the NBA is the end-all be-all of roundball existence, it would be reasonable to expect that a pro game is the epitome of finely-tuned basketball. There should be so much determination and tenacity poured onto the pro court that it's oozing out of the cracks of the parquet floor and forming in puddles under the players' bench.
The greatest mystery in basketball, then, is why the pro court is bone dry and college players are slipping and sliding all over the place on it.
The riddle isn't as difficult to unravel if you think about it.
For one, college basketball players are playing scared. Scared in a good way, not scared in a Luke Recker way. Every game matters in college basketball. In the NBA, there are 82 pick-up games to warm up for the playoffs. That's when everyone starts caring about the pros.
Why should fans support a half-assed effort from November through April?
They shouldn't.
Reason two, the postseason. There is no greater event in sports than the NCAA Tournament. Heroes are made in a matter of seconds and players cry unabashedly on the floor after they lose. The emotion runs like Busch Light at a house party.
And this is all in the first round.
For more than a month there are actual, meaningful basketball games to be played and watched. "One and you're done" as MSU men's basketball head coach Tom Izzo likes to say, reflecting the adage that has both made him a national champion and forced him to watch his campus disrespected by idiot revelers.
Reason three, the emotion. We remember Jim Valvano running around the court, looking for a player to hug after North Carolina State upset Houston in the 1983 NCAA championship game. We remember the photo of Mateen Cleaves and Morris Peterson shaking hands at halfcourt minutes away from winning the 2000 crown, sharing a look of "we did it" that only a player or coach can truly understand. We remember the grimace on Chris Webber's face, laden with equal parts self-loathing and utter despair, as he called a phantom timeout to lose the 1993 championship game for Michigan.
They are images frozen in time that will live forever as moments of unequivocal triumph or failure. They'll be re-enacted on driveways and rec league elementary school gyms. They represent sportsmanship at its very best and its very worst - and even at its very worst, it's still pretty good.
Simply put, March Madness is electricity and the NBA playoffs are Ben Franklin with a key on a kite string hoping to tap into it.
College basketball stirs this up in people like nothing else can. To the NBA's dismay, it's looking like the market on basketball enthusiasm has been cornered.
Patrick Walters, a State News men's basketball reporter, can be reached at walter88@msu.edu.
