As if I ever needed any more reason to harp on the fact that the NBA today is utter crap, along came this game the other night where the Memphis Grizzlies lost to the Charlotte Hornets – by 61 points. I had to stop and do the math in my head when I saw the final 140-79 score to verify that it really was a 61-point blowout, and yep sure enough, the Hornets blew out the Grizzlies by 61 points.
It’s no surprise to me the frequency in which I see 30-point blowouts with regularity in today’s NBA scores, but to see it somehow doubled up, now that takes a tragic amount of effort in futility to attain. Seriously, I was an NBA fan in an era where 20 points was considered a blowout, and they really didn’t happen that often. The most lopsided wins I’d ever seen in my life in the NBA up until the turn of the century was this extreme abomination clunker of a game where the Knicks beat the Jordan-led Bulls by 32 points during the 96 season in which the Bulls still won 70 games, and this stinker of a game by the Jazz in the NBA Finals, where they got blown out by 42 points by the Jordan-led Bulls.
But those were just two games in nearly a decade of watching basketball in which I saw such gargantuan blowouts. The Grizzlies somehow managed to lose by a bigger margin (61) than the total score the Jazz put up in that 1998 game (54). 61 points was typically the average score of any team that lost to the defense-heavy, hard hitting Pat Riley-coached New York Knicks teams of the 90s.
To put it in perspective, the only time that I, and probably most people my age, have ever seen a 60+ blowout was in 1992, when the United States Dream Team featuring Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and other superstars blow out a star-struck squad from Angola by 68 points. The 2018 Charlotte Hornets might be owned by Michael Jordan, but there sure as shit aren’t players remotely close to his level of greatness, that still managed to blow out the Grizz by 61.
The bottom line is that losing by 61 points isn’t even describable as “embarrassing,” it’s something completely else and new. There is no way in hell that a Patrick Ewing or Charles Barkley team of yesterday would have lost by 60 points much less 40, and someone would probably end up dead or at least seriously injured if it were ever to be a threat of happening.
Today’s NBA is just about every pejorative in the book to deride an entire league. Soft, shameless, players with no pride and integrity, more concerned over Twitter and going viral and making SportsCenter highlight reels than actually winning. And then managed by stooges who have all bought into the strategy of tanking and deliberately losing games in order to improve their draft positions, so they can hope to get lightning in a bottle and get real good real quick, as opposed to strategizing and developing their own players into winners.
As much as players and fans used to bitch and moan about David Stern being a shitty commissioner of the NBA, I like to believe the NBA was better with him at the helm rather than a doormat like Adam Silver who acquiesces to all the players’ narcissistic and selfish demands, and with the inmates running the asylum, we’re subject to shitty professional basketball with zero heart and all greed.
It’s no wonder why college hoops are so very preferred, and frankly I’d imagine watching basketball from South America, Europe or the Philippines would yield more passionate quality over the NBA. And I would bet money that a team from any one of those leagues wouldn’t lose by 61 points to any NBA team of today, ever.
