Why It's Hard to Follow Basketball from Afar

This video conveys my general feeling of trying to glean NBA coverage without actually attending games or watching them on TV. True, this video is for LA fans, by what a slight bit of research would probably reveal is the local Lakers TV channel. But it speaks to a larger point. This game was largely covered in the national media as a case of Kobe having a broken finger. Which isn't to say that Kobe's finger, his sickness, or playing two games in a row didn't have anything to do with the loss. But it seems to me that the sports media's obsession with stories they already know leaves them unable to cover stories they don't know. What we end up seeing, presuming we don't have the local Utah Jazz station, is very much like the video that opened this post. It's a reel of Lakers highlights, and yet, if we ever glance at the score, we'd notice that the Lakers are behind and staying there.

This isn't to single out the Lakers, who are generally singled out as the NBA team (but that misses the point). I think the larger problem is staying on top of stories as they develop. It's waiting for things to be solidified in stone so you don't end up making the wrong calls. Predicting a team is going to the moon, when its only going to Minnesota. It seems to me (though, granted, my view is askance and taken from afar; meaning I don't follow the NBA nearly as much as I should to be pontificating on its followers' weaknesses, but that's my life) that coverage of the league always lags about a year behind where it should. Therefore, the Orlando Magic are one of this year's big stories. Not to say that that's wrong, but I suspect that other teams are creeping up, ready to strike when everyone in the media least expects it. Pretty soon it'll be mid spring and journalists will start making a retroactive case that 09/10 was their year, ensuring that we'll be inundated with mass amounts of coverage of them as next year's team to watch, while yet another team (one hopes the Jazz) prepares for its moment.

Then again, its very hard to predict these things. Is Atlanta the future of the league, or was November just a hot month? I don't know. (And its hard to know when I only hear about the Hawks in relation to the Celtics, which is partly the fault of coverage and partly the fault of my own biases: my strong emotional connection to Garnet over, say, Josh Smith. But that emotional bias, which limits my ability to take in Hawks or Smith stories as important to me, is itself due to a lack of past coverage, a lack of any narrative to connect new data to.) What I do know, however, is the way coverage is means that really awesome stuff often doesn't make it onto the public consciousness to every one's detriment. And although that video might not capture the whole truth of the league either, it does show that our current vision may be heavily distorted. Plus, it provides solid evidence for my beliefs about Farmer.