There is a very real danger that the next year’s playoffs, the cash cow of any basketball season, will experience a dip in both ratings and revenue if there is no solution found to the overwhelming talent of Phil Jackson, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant’s combined might. Each Finals game is easily worth about $20 million to the carrying network and the league itself. But, with LA’s three-peat, how will the league kept interest high?
Historically, basketball leagues in general resort to punishing success by changing rules to force parity. Instead of making the other teams get better, they have tried to clip the wings of the outstanding players and teams.
On November 22, 1950, the Fort Wayne Pistons held on to the basketball and kept it away from George Mikan’s Minneapolis Lakers. Mikan, at 6-10, was the NBA’s first dominant big man, and voted in an Associated Press poll as the greatest basketball player in the first half of the century in January of 1950. Despite his scoring fifteen points and all his team’s field goals, the Pistons won, 19-18, snapping the Lakers’ 29-game winning streak. In 1952, the NBA widened the foul lane from six to twelve feet in an attempt to minimize Mikan’s dominance near the basket. Thus, the "keyhole" could technically no longer be called one. It didn’t work, and Minneapolis won the title that year and the two years after.
Gangling, 7-2 Lew Alcindor was practically unstoppable around the basket. With the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the middle, UCLA racked up 33 straight wins. However, the NCAA saw Alcindor’s ascension as a threat to its credibility and prestige, and outlawed the dunk partially to make Alcindor less effective. Even after Alcindor had graduated, the dunk was still banned.
In the early 1980’s, the PBA also had its own way of establishing parity. One of them was to ensure that the league’s top centers would not be on the same teams, among them Mon Fernandez, Abet Guidaben and Yoyoy Villamin. At the time, the depth of talent at the center slot was considered wanting, so teams were not allowed to have more than one of these marquee players on its roster. Today, that is definitely unnecessary with the proliferation of athletic, well-trained, talented big men.
The Detroit Pistons of the late 1980’s also had their own way to limiting outstanding scorers, most notably Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls. In what became widely known as "The Jordan Rules", Chuck Daly and the Pistons devised ways of attacking and physically assaulting Jordan and his teammates every time they would penetrate. Needless to say, it worked for a while, as the Pistons closed out the decade with two championships.
When the Houston Rockets defeated the New York Knicks for the NBA title in 1994, they did it with defense. It was the first time that neither team ever reached 100 points in any game of a finals, and it alarmed the NBA, which promptly moved in the three-point line and changed some of its rules on defense to allow for higher scoring. Scoring did go up, and the Rockets won again.
How will the NBA deal with a phenomenon like the Lakers? Unlike the Bulls, who won three championships twice, the strength of the Lakers is in the unassailable strength of Shaq. O’Neal set a new record for points in a four-game playoff series with 145, and was named Finals MVP for the third year in a row. He also places his name for the second time among Elgin Baylor, Rick Barry, Jordan, and Hakeem Olajuwon, having scored 30 points or more in every game of a championship. He once made 18 free throws in a finals game, placing him second behind Bob Pettit.
How do you solve a problem like Shaq, then?
It has been proposed that the three-second area be widened, making it harder to defend penetrations. That may get O’Neal into foul trouble more often when he comes over to help, but it will also help his teammates score more.
One way would be to ensure that the talent level in both conferences is balanced. It is widely accepted that the Eastern Conference has become the weaker of the two, simply because of the lack of big men. (Maybe big men don’t like cold weather.) If ratings go down dramatically next season, the NBA may want to scout for more quality centers to keep the West from thoroughly taking control. One other option would be to implement rules like the MBA’s Blitz Three, which gives four points for a basket scored within four seconds of a turnover, steal, interception, made basket or any play uninterrupted by a referee’s whistle.
Beyond that, there seems to be only one way to stop Shaq and company.
Buy a gun.
On this week’s episode of The Basketball Show, learn ball control in an amazing display from Ronnie Magsanoc of the Purefoods TJ Hotdogs, and get to know Cebuano shooting star Stephen Padilla of the Cebuana Lhuillier Gems. The Basketball Show is on RPN 9 every Saturday at 12 noon.
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