No defense, too many thugs, not enough attention to fundamentals - these are the charges brought against the NBA and reasons many claim that the college game is a superior brand of ball.
That case, however, should be thrown out since there is almost no evidence to back it up.
After seeing a superb game between the Golden State Warriors and Denver Nuggets last night, the question of why the NBA needs to be defended at all comes to mind. For some reason, however, it does.
The pro game is played at a much a higher level than college basketball and comparisons are just plain ludicrous.
Are college players really that much more fundamentally sound? They have received less coaching and are worse at the little things like boxing out, rotating and setting screens.
They only reason this myth perpetuates is college teams run simpler more static offenses. The meticulous probing nature of the swing offense seems complicated, but it pales in comparison to the intricacies of a NBA motion offense.
The triangle offense, a strategy employed almost exclusively in the NBA, is based on an extended sequence of reads, reactions and off-ball movements that is so well choreographed and diverse that it is often difficult for the average fan to recognize.
So instead of respecting this complexity of NBA offenses, fans merely note the repetition in college attacks and assume that it means their fundamentals are better.
If fundamentals were so important, the experts who complain so viscerally would flock to the WNBA. Clearly they haven't.
Honestly, how can college players be better fundamentally when a team can sit in a 2-3 zone defense all game and the offense cannot make them pay for it?
College players may bump offensive players a little more on defense but their lack of speed is their undoing.
Watch a college game and see how uncongested the court is. This happens because players are slower and can cover less ground.
Compare that to an NBA team where most players can move across the court in only a few strides. With that kind of quickness on the floor, the cracks that would exist in a college defense simply are not there.
NBA defenses react faster, rotate better and are just plain superior at shutting down opposing offenses. They force offenses to adjust and probe in more ways than just moving the ball around until a defender loses track of their man.
All of this pushes the game to a higher level since offenses must negotiate their way through a group of very large, very fast individuals. Defenses in turn must find ways to stop some of the best scorers on the planet from putting the ball through the hoop.
Now we got to the question of the thugs"" in the NBA, a characterization that is just plain unfair.
College teams have plenty of issues: from players getting drinking tickets to fighting to events as heinous as the tragic murder of Baylor's Patrick Dennehy at the hands of a former teammate in 2003. And the worst part was that Baylor head coach Dave Bliss, the man entrusted with guiding high school students into the real world, lied to investigators about Dennehy to cover up his own wrongdoings.
Yet after all this, it's the NBA that has the thugs.
The biggest problem for the NBA is that we want the league to be more than it is. We want ballet with a scoreboard. We want a beautiful free-flowing game, but also pine for fundamental, grind-it-out defense.
In comparison, the slower, simpler college game appeals to us because it meets our expectations and because March Madness is just that cool (note: the first two days of the NCAA tournament are better for fans than anything the NBA has to offer, there is no questioning that).
So stop attacking the NBA for its perceived flaws. It is the highest level of basketball in the world, and that's a fundamental truth.
Think Ben should pay more respect to the subtleties of the swing offense? Enlighten him at breiner@wisc.edu.
