Read the opposing arguments from Loyal Homer.
This is a very exciting time for the NBA!
Everyone has been talking about this upcoming season of free agency for a long time, now, and rightfully so. It will likely set the course of the NBA for the next three to five years.
The whole world is waiting to find out where LeBron James will sign on to play basketball. Once that question has officially been answered, the rest of the dominos will fall quickly, and many team rosters will be completely overhauled. Some teams have literally spent years preparing for the possibility of wooing LeBron, or one of the many other elite free agents who will be available, and when the dust settles, the face of the NBA could look entirely different than it does today.
But has the talk of free agency overshadowed the NBA Finals? Absolutely not, and the reason for this is simple – the drama of speculating about what may happen pales in comparison to the drama of what is taking place TODAY on the NBA court, a fact supported both by the media and the fans.
No one is talking TODAY about Lebron James.
From a media perspective, every sports outlet in the nation is focusing on one thing – which team will win game six of the NBA Finals? Don’t believe me? Check it out… here are the links to the NBA pages for ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and NBA.com. Every single cover story is about the same thing – game six.
As far as the fans are concerned, TV ratings for the NBA Finals have all INCREASED this year. Game one of the series actually featured a 20 percent INCREASE in viewership over the numbers from last season’s game one, sparking a trend that has continued throughout the entire series. In fact, game five of this series actually has posted the highest TV ratings of any single NBA Finals game in more than half a decade (and that INCLUDES the 2007 NBA Finals between these same two teams).
Interest in the NBA Finals has not been higher than it is right now for a very long time.
If anything, all of the free agency talk has actually enhanced, rather than overshadowed, the Finals by generating ongoing interest in the NBA overall.
To begin with, this NBA Finals feature the latest installment of the undeniable best rivalry in the NBA, as the league’s two most storied franchises are once again battling it out on a championship stage in yet another very competitive Finals series.
This season features the 12th time these two teams have faced each other in the NBA Finals, and marks the tenth time the series has gone to at least six games. And although the Celtics hold a staggering lead in the head-to-head department, there is no denying this rivalry continues to be the most intense and exciting as there has ever been in all of basketball, and that the 2010 matchup is worthy of addition to this already storied legacy.
On one hand, you have the Los Angeles Lakers, led by the top player in the game today, Kobe Bryant. The Lakers, who are defending champions, have played as one of the top teams in the league all season long. They are coached by Phil Jackson, who is arguably the best coach in NBA history (with the only possible exception being the Celtics’ own former head coach, Red Auerbach), who could claim his 11th NBA championship (I wonder if they make championship toe-rings), should the Lakers prove successful.
On the other are the Boston Celtics reached the Finals, seemingly against the odds, by playing as the best team of the 2010 postseason. No team had a more difficult road to the Finals since the team first had to get past the Cleveland Cavaliers and then Orlando Magic (the two teams BELIEVED to be the best in the Eastern Conference), all just for the CHANCE to face the Lakers.
There is just no way that rumors about where guys like LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh might play could compare with drama like that. And while stories about these players may surface and capture a headline or two, those headlines are very quickly trumped by the stories about something much more relevant to the game of basketball TODAY – The NBA Finals.
While people may be excited about the intrigue and suspense surrounding the upcoming period of free agency, the drama and intrigue of awarding a championship will ALWAYS supersede it. The question that is most burning on the minds of NBA fans today is, “Who will be the champions?” Only AFTER that question is answered will people FULLY focus on the question, “Where will LeBron play?”
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