15 March 2012

Why I Hate Basketball.

First of all the NBA.
Why would I want to watch a bunch of freaks of nature run jog around a basketball court for two hours when the winner of the game is decided in the last five minutes of play anyway? This is more true in the NBA because the teams are so good that the "winner" is the team who happened to score last when the clock ran out. "WAIT," you say, "that is true of most sports!" With that I would have to agree.

But the difference is that it is much harder in every other sport to make points. In other sports, you win because you did some really hard thing to score. Not so in basketball. I trust no sport that has scores in the hundreds when the time runs out. If you knew nothing about basketball and all you knew was that the final score was 103 to 101 at the end, you would assume that 1. it must not be very hard to score points and 2. both teams are evenly matched. These two facts... *yawn* sorry, I almost just fell asleep on my keyboard.

The games should be five minutes long. It would make my life less tedious and watching a game wouldn't be a total waste of my time. Also, in other sports, especially football,  you can be proud of your team's effort despite the outcome. In basketball I would be more mad at the clock and the nature of the game's flawed structure rather than my team if they lost. I would hate to play basketball, knowing that despite my best efforts, and despite staying within several points of the other teams score throughout the game, that oftentimes the result of the game would depend entirely on which team's center raised his arms above his head last. And he makes how much money?! How is the center's effort worth two points when a little guy shoots the ball from almost 25 feet away and gets only one more point for doing so? Points should be worth less if you are as tall as the hoop.

I wonder what sport he plays? 
Little known fact: 
Those would be full length jeans on any other person.

This brings me to College Basketball.
There isn't much to say except that the games are shorter. This is a great first step. The major reason I hate the NCAA is because of March madness. This single-elimination "tournament" embodies all the problems of the time limit flaw. Teams can be upset so easily and lose by only one point, such that any victory can't really be called anything of the sort. The winner of this tournament shouldn't get a trophy. They should all get four-leaf clovers for being so lucky so many times in a row.

This brings me to brackets. Bracket is the worst word in the English language. I hate all bros and their brackets. Because the tournament is completely based on luck, there is no point making predictions about who is going to win. I consistently hear the following statement after the tournament is over: "this chick in the office who knows nothing about basketball had the best bracket, bro!" That's because you have biases. And because you did a stupid thing.


All exaggerated cliches aside, you literally have a better chance of winning the lottery than filling out a perfect bracket. Like, a WAY better chance. The odds are ridiculous. "The point isn't to get it perfect, brah. The point is to get 'most of them right.'" Yeah, you know who else said something similar to that? The local trash fisher at the sewage treatment plant when talking about his short stint in grade school. If there is 0% chance of even getting most of the picks right, why try? Because of the nature of the system, picking winners is pointless. It would be like me trying to fish a lake with a gun from a mile away. And not only fishing, but predicting which fish I'm going to kill out of the 68 fish in the general vicinity.

30 MILLION people fill out a bracket each year. Stop it. I don't want to hear how your bracket is doing. I don't want to hear it because I already know. It sucks. You weren't even close.

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