Another Fast Break winding down

Veteran readers of this blog (of which I can still count on one hand) know that I'm an old-timer when it comes to following professional basketball. Who can ever forget the excitement that came with every April, when the Lakers would faceoff against Sampson and Hakeem of Houston or Jack Sikma and Kiki Wandeweghe of Seattle, and the Celts would face off against Detroit and Philly. The final culmination of this would result in a titanic struggle between the Lakers and Celtics in a sweaty parquet-lined dungeon known as Boston Garden for TRUE hoops bragging rights. In those days, calling the winner of the NBA Finals 'World Champion' may have have been based on myth, but no one could ever doubt its veracity. I look fondly to the days when CBS still had the NBA broadcast rights, and ESPN was still showing Pac-10 basketball games at midnight eastern, and the closest to a box seat at a Laker game was sitting on top of the stairwheels in the colonnade at the Fabulous Forum. However, for several years now, the NBA playoffs have been long, tortuous and dreary conclusion of the Sports Year, which for me begins each September with the start of college football, building up around the holidays when the college hoops and college bowl games take place, and depending on how my Bruins are doing, crescendoing around March, when NCAA bids are announced. Now, the NBA playoffs are an interesting on certain levels, most of which have very little to do with which team advances to the next round. Instead of watching the league, I merely follow it, as a novice investor would 'follow' the stock market. There's a business aspect to the game that I find quite entertaining, and each season, I match wits with a hapless opponent in what is the closest analogy to stock-picking contests. ESPN.com has provided the venue the last 2 seasons via its very easy-to-understand (and free) Fast Break game. I must confess that my record on Fast Break hasn't been what I would have preferred, and it hasn't helped this week that my starting center is out for the season. Which is ironic, because much has been made about the recent hiring by the Houston Rockets of a stats guru with little basketball knowledge (no, they didn't hire Mitch Kupchak), who is expected to take over general manager duties for 2007-2008. I admit that merely following the game has resulted in some very questionable decisions in my roster selections, but the increasingly business-stats-focused aspect of the game is an interesting turn of events, because evaluating talent has become increasingly complicated with the global nature of basketball. Even a guy like Jerry West can't figure out from 100 minutes of tape of a promising player in the European leagues would translates into a mid-or-late first rounder. The increasing reliance on statistical data to faciliate decision making, be it in player acquisition, or determining your starting lineup night after night reflects what's happening in the business world, which has really turned heavily into data mining to guide decisionmaking. So, when I lament the passing of those days when shorts really were shorts, and trade rumors only took place hours before the actual moves, not months, I'm not lamenting the increasingly commercial nature of the sport. That's to be expected. But leading a team to a division or league title shouldn't be based on outcome of the analysis of B-school number jockeys, especially because NBA playoff series generally are 'best-of-seven.'