Electric Josh

Wow. The satellite radio is playing me Robyn Hitchcock covering Bob Dylan. (It's even weirder than you think.) Thanks, mom!
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Yes! The Times Magazine spends several feet of text noticing what this space started to discover in college when Michael Jordan's reign was winding down, which is that pro basketball has been sucking for years (local copy here), doing nothing for anyone except taking up a couple of seconds per day on NPR and making SportCenter even slower than usual:

The N.B.A. doesn't have a thug problem; it has a basketball problem. Its players are the best athletes in all of pro sports—oversize, swift and agile—but weirdly they are also the first to have devolved to a point where they can no longer play their own game.

And:

Presented with players bent on executing highlight-reel dunks—but who otherwise do not pass well, shoot well or move effectively to open spots on the floor—many N.B.A. coaches have slowed the pace to a plodding, unwatchable crawl. And the more important the game, the more slowly it is played.

I find it sad, because the whole playoffs from the year Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan faced off in the finals were great. I can't even be bothered to notice whether the Celtics even exist these days, except to plan my commute so as not to get stuck in traffic (I guess there are still a few fans) going past the Fleet Center before games. So notify me in five or ten years when it becomes more like the NCAA tournament, the first few rounds of which are, aside from the usual seizure-inducing camera work, the best sports tournament out there save for the occasional Yankees-Red Sox ALCS. Or, if the NBA never becomes good again, maybe just silently kill the whole league and then, if someone can resuscitate the NHL's postseason (but not the always-pointless regular season), please replace it with the CBC's hockey broadcasts.
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