NBA Basketball the best???

E-rants for the Masses
Is the best basketball in the world played in the NBA? Not anymore. The league is diseased and anyone can see it by checking out any random game on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Watch the players lug up and down the court, see the surly benchwarmers glaring at their teammates, feel the lack of teamwork on the court, and it is obvious most of these guys are thinking about all the dough they got at home and are bored silly by the game. If the players in the NBA are bored in the game, how the hell can the fans not be bored?

I challenge anyone to compare the style and attitude of the players in the NCAA tournament to that of the NBA players and tell me they do not see the sad, lost, loose play of the pros. Somehow the pros in the NBA have lost their edge. Ever since the Dream Team, with Magic, Michael, Bird, etc. in '92, the league has been steadily sliding. Very few teams have good player chemistry and very few teams play with a consistent team strategy. It is very hard to get high quality basketball when most of the players play selfishly.

The coaches cannot tell these guys what to do. They have more power than the coaches. The modern era has ushered in the superstar, the individual who plays solely for himself and the crowd. Almost every player in the league was touted at one point as a potential superstar, and since the reality is that there can only be a few real leaders, most of the guys are unhappy. It is easy to sense the jealously on most NBA teams.

The shocking truth is that from 1992 to 2004 the rest of the world caught up to the NBA and then surpassed it in basketball quality. In 1992, the original Dream Team won all 8 games at the Olympics in Barcelona by an average of 44 points. At the 2004 games in Greece, the American Olympic team, stocked by the best pros, such as Allen Iverson, Dwayne Wade and LeBron James, lost 3 games and barely won a bronze medal. Virtually every game was tough, even against countries not known as basketball meccas, such as Greece and Spain. The small island nation of Puerto Rico crushed our 2004 Dream Team by the score of 92-73.

The facts and observation scream it out:
the NBA is not the best basketball anymore.

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