I try to avoid sounding like a cranky old white guy – “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” – but I attended a professional basketball game today and yikes, what the heck was that?

For people who haven’t been to an NBA game in the past few years, I will simply say that such games are three hours of non-stop “entertainment,” and none of that includes the actual game.

If there even is a game, because, really, it’s hard to tell between the spotlights, the multiple dance teams, the acrobats, the t-shirt cannons, the singers, the lottery tickets parachuting down to the crowd, the quiz show exchanges, the ear-splitting music, the jets of fire shooting out of the scoreboard, the jumbo video screens, the dance contests, and the rest of the “show.” After three hours of hyper-stimulation, I will probably need 48 hours in a sensory deprivation tank to return to equilibrium.

Now the local team is having an historically bad season – and around here, that bar is set pretty high – so perhaps management wants to partially atone for the inferior product they are selling at premium prices. But the reality is that this kind of visual and auditory assault occurred when the team was actually good, and it, or something resembling it, occurs every night in just about every other NBA arena.

It’s as if NBA owners don’t trust their own product to hold people’s attention through the one-or-two-minute time-outs that occur regularly during the games. Which is a little sad, because professional basketball players are possibly the most athletic of all professional athletes.  Or, more likely, they don’t trust their customers to endure occasional breaks in the action without suffering some kind of adverse reaction.

Is it warm in here, or is it just me?

December 23, 2018