Merry NBA Christmas

You know the feeling.  You’re eight years old.  It’s Christmas Eve; the end of a long winter night of visiting family, eating and drinking.  You convince your parents to allow you to open one gift only.  Then, it’s off to bed for an anxious version of sleeping.  That’s how I feel today. 

Last night was a taste.  It was opening that one gift, a tease.  Our taste included the familiarity of the TNT produced NBA game.  Familiar faces and voices having familiar arguments getting transformed into nostalgia.  We got a taste of NBA League Pass.  League Pass provides the feeling that we’re in on some kind of secret.  That only a chosen few are witnessing what we are witnessing.  Only those who know the secret password are allowed into the League Pass Broadband club.  It’s a mirage of course.  Each game we peruse is being simultaneously watched by many thousands and sometimes millions of others, but it doesn’t feel that way to us.    

Tonight is my Christmas morning.  I get the same excited feeling that the eight-years-old version of myself did in anticipation of coming down those stairs and seeing all the Christmas joy.  The NBA season perennially launches in a targeted way that almost always misses the mark.  It tries to dictate the season’s narrative by only providing a select few teams to showcase the new versions of themselves. Last night half of it worked.  The Heat reminded us all that they are the defending two time champion and are the roadblock to any wanna be contenders.  The nightcap, went a bit differently than the NBA planned.  It was supposed to be an announcement that LA is no longer the Lakers city.  The message: the Clippers are here to stand over them and cast a shadow over the covered banners in the rafters.  Oops.

My favorite night, though, my Christmas morning, is always the Wednesday following opening night.  It’s the night the league has no control over the narrative.  It’s chaotic.  As the season goes along each League Pass subscriber develops their own personal system for harnessing in the explosion that is a full slate of NBA games.  That first Wednesday though.  There’s no harness for that.  We forget how methodical we must be in our strategy for absorption.  Undoubtedly, on that first Wednesday, we struggle to balance all the options available to us, like a twelve year old with ADHD in an arcade.

Optimism abounds throughout the league.  Crowds are raucous in the lowliest of cities.  That first Wednesday is an eruption of rookies, and new players and coaches, and new expectations.  We have so many questions at the beginning of the season, (hell The Starters take a crack at 101 every year), and that first Wednesday is our first clue into the answers to almost all of them. 

The anticipation is killing me.  In my mind’s eye, I’m currently lying in bed, in a dark room, staring at the ceiling with visions of Durant’s sweet jumper, Andre Drummond’s blocked shots, KG’s intensity, Rubio’s behind the back passes, among so much more.  Visions flashing before me like Johnny Depp’s character on an acid trip in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

Last night was a taste.  Tonight is NBA Christmas.

This commercial gets more and more dated every year, but it’s still my favorite to date and it always gets me ready for NBA Basketball.  Merry NBA Christmas everyone.