It definitely feels odd that we are approaching Christmas and just now talking about the NBA season, but I’m glad it’s back. More importantly, I’m glad that as I sit down to watch the Celtics first preseason game of the year, I know it’s actually worth watching.
Unlike the other major sports, the NBA preseason is actually entertaining and has a “regular season” vibe to them. To start, the best players on each team actually play. Maybe they don’t play 40 minutes, but they play 20 Minutes, and they play hard when they are on the court. When the starters aren’t on the court, you have the roles players / bench players truly competing, working to earn a spot on the roster. I’m not trying to say that in other sports, the non-starters don’t try hard during preseason, I know they bust their ass.
But here’s the problem, the NBA is the only sport where even during preseason games, I still know the majority of the players on the court. Maybe it’s because I follow college basketball so closely, but even in the waning moments of a preseason game, I still know most of the players because they were household names in college.
Think about MLB Spring Training, it seems like late in every game, the coaches put in players who don’t even have names on their jerseys, they simply have numbers in the 70s thru 90s. In fact, there were times last year when the game operations crew didn’t know who the players were, and you’d actually see “unknown” on the videoboard listed next to a high number in the batting order.
Take a look at this picture, it’s only the 6th inning, and there’s literally three players listed as “unknown” in this photo. Thank god for the nice weather and the alcohol at Spring Training games, otherwise I’m not sure I’d actually go.
Now think about NFL preseason games. For the first couple of weeks, the best players might play the first half, and then it’s mostly people I don’t know. Their rosters have around 90 people on it during that time and they try to get most of the players in the game. I barely know the players deep on the regular season roster, and those only have 55 players on it. Then you get to week 3 of preseason and all the stars “rest”, so you are basically watching college players (not even the best ones) take the field to earn a roster spot.
There are a lot of issues with the NBA game, and how the league is run, but the Preseason isn’t one of them. I’m sitting here watching the Celtics vs 76ers game, and honestly if I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was a regular season game. The players compete at a high level, and even the players deep on the bench have some name recognition. So I’m pumped the NBA preseason is back, and can’t wait for the regular season to start too. It’s going to be a great NBA Season.
