Basketball Musings

Much ballyhoo and ink has been wasted in the last two days as we await the possible coronation of the Detroit Pistons as kings of basketball. Some of this is understandable. No Eastern team has won the NBA championship since the last year of the Jordan Bulls in 1998. In fact, over the course of the last 6 years, the West has fielded the top 4 or 5 teams in basketball. It was freely acknowledged a few years ago that the Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and the Sacramento Kings was the real NBA finals.

Such is not the case now. The quality of play in the West has slipped and at least two teams in the East seem to be returning to the ideas which made basketball fun to watch back in the 80's and early 90's. Back when it was all about the team and not the individual. Both Detroit and Indiana built teams designed to work together. Detroit beat an Indiana team that is still maturing (with the exception of Reggie Miller) and are now functioning smoothly against an overhyped Laker team.

Many people in the media and on the street like to think that the Lakers are just imploding from the personalities and egos. I won't say that's not true, but I think we give too little credit to the Pistons. They are not the exciting Bad Boys of the late 80's, but they are efficient and its quite nice to not have any chest thumping until the goal has been achieved.

Goodness knows what's going to happen in the off season, but it'll be interesting to see if there is any break-up of the "greatest team ever built" or if they give it one more try next year.

On a side note, I think we can expect that the US will not win the gold medal in basketball, losing to either one of the Balkans, Spain, or perhaps Brazil. Then we can at least drop this stupid Dream Team logo to every basketball team. I'm sorry. There was only one dream team: the '92 Barcelona team. Everything after that has been but a pale shadow, gold medal or not.