When is a brick not a brick?
Or a turnover, or a sure rebound, for that matter? The answer is clearly found after substituting in a 2006-2007 NBA basketball, something you most likely haven't had a chance to play HORSE with in your driveway.
Rejecting the conventional basketball design we are so used to, where every line, whether curvy or straight, neatly intersects at two narrow points, this ball has curves that find the center, and then curiously enough, turn back around from where they came. The classic NBA logo at the center remains lonely and unmolested, and you, the fan, are left to realize something seems askew. So what planet plays ball with this thing again?
(Since you've undoubtedly read a version of this column on five other different websites already, I will spare you the endless player quotes/testimony on it. I know that you know that Kobe likes it and LeBron thinks they should all be thrown to the stingrays. I will also not go into the stat-by-stat comparison of this month to last year because that angle has already been used ad nauseam.
So why am I writing another groan-inducing new NBA basketball column, you ask? Simply because none of us here at Sports Central have yet weighed in on such a central issue. To ignore this development on the website altogether would be somewhat naïve. Therefore, I offer my own fresh perspective on our new funny-bouncing friend.)
So why would David Stern do such a thing? The most likely reason is clear to see during any game. The new sphere bounces the same against hardwood, but not the same against metal, or glass. For a commissioner who tinkers more than Tony La Russa with the pitcher's spot due up, another impulse to (not so) subtly increase scoring was unavoidable.
You might notice this strategy is not all that different from the time Commish Stern turned his giant pencil upside down and erased the league's three-point lines (and if you can remember that far back, you will recall that's exactly how it looked on NBA courts at the time) and redrew them a foot and a half closer because he thought it might be cool. (Actually, it was kind of cool for a little while. Chris Webber thought he could hit threes, Charles Barkley thought he could hit threes. The Magic and Rockets even had a happy little three-point orgy together and set an NBA Finals record with all the treys they hit in Game 1 of 1995. Anyway, I digress...)
Luckily, that experiment only lasted a few years before he got bored with it and set things back. I can only hope the new ball experiment will share the same fate. Stern has already given us best-of-seven first round playoff series, zone defenses, and now playoff re-seedings over the past four years. None of these seem to occur for any apparent reason. These quirks and tweaks to the game many of us once found familiar do not appear to be stopping anytime soon. David wants to see futureball. And he wants it now.
You see, this is how it works. The world according to David. This, right now, is the rough adjustment period. Players will make sloppy turnovers and miss easy rebounds because suddenly the angles are all different and the grip isn't right. Eventually, rebounders will relocate their angles, point guards will pass, forwards will catch a little different than they used to, and rookies will come into the league only knowing this ball and everything will be okay again.
What will remain is that the ball, if you haven't noticed yet, is a lot more forgiving. Those hard, true, astroturf-like bounces off the rim and backboard are now a thing of the past. Now when a ball hits the backboard, that soft kissing noise you hear is a lot more likely to lull the ball through that maze of lace below it. Same thing when it hits the rim, especially the back rim. When you eliminate the hard bounce, anything and everything that is not an air ball has a chance of going in. That means more scoring, and more scoring is always good for business.
Don't believe me? Check out Rip Hamilton's desperation, end-of-the-half three against the Celtics last week. I promise that is not the last time you will see a shot like that go in. If you're familiar with the highlight, and if you're enough of an NBA diehard to be reading this, you should be, you should remember having the distinct sense that something was very wrong with just the notion that a shot like that could result in points.
If you haven't seen it, the shot appeared to defy all modern hoops physics — a long, forced-up three-pointer from straight away, and slightly further out than usual. Hamilton had not shot the ball softly, and yet when it got to the back of the rim, specifically that bridge area between the cylinder and the backboard, instead of being violently propelled upwards and outwards, it simply died as if it had been gunned down by a sniper in the stands, took a feeble bounce that couldn't have been more than three inches high, and fell into the net. And with that, we enter into a new era where the NBA will see more lucky and strange bounces go through the net than college basketball and the WNBA (both of which have always employed slightly smaller balls, and thus friendlier rolls, than the NBA) combined.
If I'm an NBA coach, I'm telling my slumping shooter one thing: aim for the back rim. If it hits the back rim, it'll probably take that awkward bounce and go in. If you miss long, and it hits backboard, it may go in off glass, and if you miss short, you might just swish it.
Can you imagine the first time someone wins a big playoff game on one of those weak back-rim drop shots? Keep in mind, this could actually be a defining moment between two franchises, decided on one of those weird bounces that never should have happened. You will hear accounts of fans of the victorious team saying things like "I saw it heading towards the basket and went 'nooooo,' but then I remembered, hey, wait a minute, that's an '06 ball, this might still go in." Some of the less intelligent fans may chalk it up to divine intervention, destiny, or any of the other playoff clichés for a team pulling out a heart-stopping win, but the smarter fans will know that fortunes will have changed because the ball has changed.
Or how about the fact that this ball lets any and all moisture sit on its surface, making it slicker than the older model. Does this mean that during timeouts before game-deciding possessions with three seconds left, the home team or home fans will try to accidentally pass by and spill a water bottle on the ball before the visiting team inbounds it? You can't score what you can't catch.
And what of the statistical records kept? Does Stern know or care what he is doing to scoring averages of player, team, and league? Historians in future years may have to divide such averages into before '06 and after '06. Let's say Kobe or King James or maybe even Greg Oden is looking to hang it up 10 or 15 or 20 years from now, and his career scoring average is at 30.3, just a shade higher than record holder Michael Jordan, at 30.1 (and Wilt the Stilt, only hundredths lower), can we say definitively that he is now the new greatest scorer of all time? Nope, the critics will say. He spent the last half of his career using that newfangled leathery ball, and that probably lent him a few tenths a year or more. Controversy would reign.
There is already a fair amount of chaos in the league within this strange first month of the season, where Dallas and Phoenix, who battled for the Western Conference crown last year, now battle for the cellar, Miami and Detroit struggle similarly in the east, and the Atlanta Hawks soar high like never before. We've been trying to explain this topsy-turvy phenomenon all month, including other columns on this site.
Has anyone considered it might just be that Sternforsaken ball?
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