NBA: Let the Bashing of Potential Pacers-Spurs NBA Finals Begin
By Phil Watson
Apparently, at least one national columnist isn’t crazy about the idea of Paul George and the Indiana Pacers playing in the NBA Finals. Photo: Mark Runyon, Basketball Schedule
It was just a matter of time before it happened and Sam Amico of FOXSportsOhio.com reached for the low-hanging fruit.
Amico is allegedly a national NBA columnist for FOXSports.com and this is where I ran into his oh-so-insightful commentary, which in this case boiled down to: “ZOMG! Pacers-Spurs NBA Finals would so suck for the NBA … ROFLMAO.”
Would a matchup of the Indiana Pacers and San Antonio Spurs have broad national appeal? Probably not. But if you are not (a) an executive with the NBA, (b) an executive with Disney Corp., which owns ABC and ESPN, or (c) an executive of one of the companies paying for advertising time during the NBA Finals, why would you care what kind of television ratings such a series would draw?
It is this sort of fallacious logic among people who purport themselves to be journalists that drives me positively insane. Not a lot of people will watch it on TV, ergo it has failed or is irrelevant.
A lot of people watch “Duck Dynasty.” Does that mean it matters? Does that mean everyone in the country is going to grow a ZZ Top beard and go live in a duck blind?
The NBA isn’t the only sport that experiences this, of course. When a small-market team in Major League Baseball threatens to reach the World Series or a college football program outside of the Southeastern Conference makes some national noise, one of the first things idiot fans and idiot journalists do is to play the “oh, nobody wants to watch (insert name of matchup here)” card.
For the record, a Pacers-Spurs NBA Finals would likely be an intense battle between contrasting styles. For all the talk that San Antonio’s brand of basketball is slow and boring, here’s a newsflash: The Spurs ranked in the top 10 (sixth, actually) in pace this season, using 96.4 possessions per game. That’s right up there with teams who usually get adjectives such as “high-flying,” “run-and-gun” or “offensive juggernaut” attached to their name such as the Houston Rockets, Denver Nuggets, Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers, and it’s higher than other teams renowned for offense such as the Dallas Mavericks and Oklahoma City Thunder.
I mean, does this look like an old, slow team?
Of course, when your most recognizable player is nicknamed “The Big Fundamental” and your other two best players are from France and Argentina, mainstream audiences might get turned off.
But again, this begs the question: Who cares what mainstream audiences think? These are the same people who have helped spawn the “American Idol” phenomenon and the 36 copycat shows that followed. Are these really the people we should be listening to?
Indiana and San Antonio would not be a series that, on the surface, would be a bright shiny thing and, apparently in the eyes of Sam Amico and others like him, the public is so absolutely moronic that we are only interested in bright shiny things.
I guess I’m just not so wild about having my intelligence insulted so blindly.