Christmas has been invading Thanksgiving more and more lately.
That’s true of a lot of holidays: Go into a grocery store on Labor Day weekend and you’ll find Halloween candy. Find yourself needing a jacket just after the New Year and you’ll probably see lots of heart-shaped jewelry on your way to the clothing department.
It’s like the marketers have forgotten the lesson they learned when they were little: Wait your turn.
The NBA, however, is going to the back of the line.
David Stern and co. realized they shouldn’t be in such a rush to start. So they locked out their players and decided to wait until college football and the NFL season wound down.
In Oregon, that’s perfect.
With a full month of the Blazers’ season wiped out already, what have you really missed so far this year? Griping about Greg Oden’s health? Debating whether Brandon Roy’s play has been worthy of not using the amnesty clause on him? Contrasting Gerald Wallace and Nic Batum to see who will be the small forward of the future?
We can do all of these things in January, right after the Rose Bowl. Right now it’s more fun to figure out why Chip Kelly is all of the sudden producing on-field advertisements. Or whether De’Anthony Thomas got pulled from the UCLA game because of an injury or his fumble. Or if LaMichael James is going to play on Saturdays or Sundays in 2012.
The NBA is fun to watch. But let’s be honest, it doesn’t really get exciting until March or April so why not let us soak up the Ducks even longer? Who’s going to pay that much attention to a Saturday Trail Blazer game in the middle of November?
With the lockout, we don’t need to spread our attention so thinly. We need to absorb as many stats, highlight plays and quotable players (Rest – or Smoke – In Peace, Cliff Harris) from one team before we move onto the next.
A shortened NBA season won’t hurt anything.
Start on Christmas and finish in early June. That’s still more than five months of the world’s finest basketball – more than enough time for you to catch Blazer Fever and have it remedied, hopefully not before late May.
That gives baseball a Memorial Day start – just in time to buy your fireworks!
We can knock a bunch of games off the baseball schedule. Even the most die-hard fans are going to have a hard time taking in 162 regular season games. Why not pare it down to 100? That gives each team four four-game series within the division, one four-game series with every other team in the league, and to make Bud Selig happy, one four-game interleague series.
By avoiding the fifth wild card team in each league, you could still potentially finish the World Series by Halloween.
Just be sure to avoid Sunday night World Series games.
The NFL is like Christmas: We wait all year for it and nobody seems to mind when it forces its way to the front of the line.
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