Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Lame NBA and mamed NHL

Well, it finally happened. The NBA is back for another boring, yet thankfully shortened season.

This month is a special month in the Association where players from all over the league complain about their current situation and demand to be traded. Any sort of allegiance that remains for any of the players in this league gets wiped out faster than Doc can say "Great Scott!".

A couple examples...

All around nice guy Chancey Billups was released by the Knicks last week. Upon his release he stated a warning that any team that picks him up off of waivers will have to deal with a hold out and a lot of complaining. He said that he was sick of being the nice guy and that he wanted to have a say in where he was going to play. A day later, he was picked up by the Clippers. He is expected to report to practice on Monday. I guess he was just blowing smoke.

Then you have Chris Paul. To no fault of his own he gets traded to the Lakers. Then, the league says that the deal is not good enough, so they veto the trade. Then, a week later, he gets traded to the Clippers. It's weird stuff having the commissioner of the league say what a fair trade should look like. Apparently, the league owns Paul's former tea...

Agh...

Can-not-talk-about-boring-NBA-any-longer.

I will say that a lot of players say that they feel "disrespected" by teams that either trade or release them. These players include Billups and former Laker Lamar Odom. The thing to remember when whiny millionaires complain about being disrespected is that, just maybe, the fans that pay to watch the games might feel a little disrespected by not being able to watch the games because of the rich players and rich owners arguing about who is being disrespected.

Because of the now present risk of sounding like I care about all of this, I will now stop talking about it.

On to a sport I care about. The NHL is a mess, but for completely different reasons. Their leading scorer is out with a concussion. Their best player is out (again) with a concussion. Every other night someone is getting concussed. This is a mess. Are there more concussions happening now or do there just seem to be more because we are looking out for them now?

I'm glad that they are taking this seriously, after such a horrible off season of players dying of a lot of crazy reasons, one of which is related to concussions. It also seems that there are still a lot of players that don't care at all about other players well being. There are a lot of dirty hits still happening in the league, even though the league is suspending the culprits left, right and center.

At the same time, there are still a bunch of loser hockey players playing the game as if it were a soccer match. Flopping, diving, whining, and biting should not be apart of the game. I dream of a day when players respect the game and their fellow players by playing the game hard, tough and clean.

If the illegalities keep going down this road, I think that we really need to be worried that someone is going to die out on the ice. I am serious about that.

1 comment:

Brett said...

by my count, at least 27 NHL players are out with concussion like symptoms. The list includes the best player in the game, the leading points getter and the leading goal scorer.