FanNation - The Republic of Sport

Tomorrow the Detroit Red Wings and Dallas Stars will begin the Western Conference Finals,but tonight the ponds are quiet. So I sit unable to remove my eyes from KOBE, the lakers, and the Utah Jazz. How is this an entertainment product? I am, as an avid and ravenous Hockey fan, both confused and jealous that this "NBA Basketball" passes, let alone thrives, as a valid sporting contest. But I sit,an addict to the real drama of live sport,unable to stomach the bile and putrid "reality" programing and meaningless election coverage the networks attempt to placate us with nightly. Forced to quell my hunger for sport with the NBA. 

The officiating alone seems at times arbitrary and often calls appear to favor star players over junior players regardless of the true events of the play in question(blocking/charge plays,body fouls/offensive fouls). I understand bad calls happen but I'm watching a lot of them, as well as some bad non calls tonight. When I played this game fifteen years ago, if you slid your pivot foot it was traveling, you couldn't take three steps, and if you jumped into someone taking your shot it was an offensive foul. Unlike many hockey critics, I understand the sport I'm railing against. I just don't understand how a game with so little consistency can be so successful.

               Hockey is fast, violent, and precise. Raw and beautiful at the same time. A triumvirate of twenty minute periods that produce bone crushing body checks, tape to tape passes, lightning strike one timers, and saves that make you fall off the edge of your seat. Snipers like Alexander Ovechkin firing frozen bullets from the blue line at one-hundred miles an hour. Puck masters like Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg amaze as they wind around and through the defensive alignment and plant the puck in the net. Crafty veterans such as Chris Chelios play on well into their forties, through the pain of age and injury, for love of the game and nothing more. It sure as hell isn't the money! Overpaid collage drop-outs make two to four times the money a hockey player does and in half the length of their NBA carer. Still that doesn't stop them from acting like self important pricks and lawless thugs. On the ice you back up your talk with action. When someone gets in your face you don't throw up your hands and cry and complain to the referee. In Hockey you stand up for yourself and the team. Remember the Team? If that means dropping the gloves and pounding some face, then so be it. You sit in the box, your team works it's penalty kill and the game goes on. Raw and beautiful. Not whiny and arrogant. 

I guess on this night of slim sports pickings I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds but come on. Maybe there's a replay of an old Players Championship on the golf Channel.