NBA Playoff or Does anyone care?

Soccer has solved it, but what do they know?
The ratings for this year's "dream" matchup are a disaster everywhere but LA and Boston, continuing a trend toward a ratings black hole for the NBA championships. Why low? The games are fucking boring, they are like wrestling matches or tugs of war, the "hard" fouls make exciting one on one plays rare. This means that the greatest athletes in the world aren't seen performing at or near their best abilities.

The main reasons for the low ratings are the now dated "Best of Seven" series of games, series that match teams nobody has heard of or care about. People in Philly don't care about Chicago, LA, Phoenix or any place other than Philadelphia. Ditto for every city; all we care about is the home team and won't watch a bunch of Seven Game series between teams we regard as collections of assholes. We want a one game sudden death. So what to do? Both the NBA and Major League Baseball have terrible ratings for their 7 Game "showcase" events at the end of the season because they are between teams that we don't care about.

The answer to this conundrum has been solved by World Cup Soccer. The NBA needs a double elimination tournament where single games actually matter. Single game deciders like in football and World Cup Soccer work because the preliminary games to decide the final playoff teams are also single games between teams we've at least heard of. Interest builds each day of the week. Basketball Purists will scream that the near brutal final games are necessary to see "who the real men are." The baseball purist will claim that pitching "staffs" have to mean something. My reply those views are 1. Want to show your manhood? Go to Iraq where the real men are; 2. If a new game is played every day pitching staffs will still matter. A tournament with no rest days between games WILL make pitching staffs important.

Now how to make the basketball games more exciting? The solution is radical and would take a lot of dedication to solve. The athletes are huge, probably bigger by nearly half when compared to the basketball players of the thirties when the game was invented. The current behemoths cannot fit fluidly on the court. So???? So some seats have to go in order to make the courts wider (and perhaps longer). The other possible solution is to cut the number of players on the floor per team to four (anybody notice how much better hockey is when they go four on four?) a cut that would also open up the game.

All leagues with seven game playoffs are losing their luster.

Then there is the basketball officiating, which ever since Jordan has been a joke where "stars" are manufactured by the use of special rules for them. Michael Jordan, for all his unquestioned skills, walked on every shot--meaning they should not have counted had the "traveling" rule been applied universally. Same is true for the bullying by the 330 pound Shaq who can move a mountain out of the way, and does so when he wants to. There must be a rigid interpretation and enforcement of rules.

So there.