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    #51
    Ice hockey - can't see the puck, plus I have an irrational, unjustified and completely unwarranted dislike of all things Canadian. I don't know why but everything about Canada grinds my gears.

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      #52
      I don't get the "you have to be tall to play basketball well" mindset. I'm 4' 20" and at the age of 17 I was a county level player. All about positioning, choosing a pass and being able to shoot consistently.

      I could dunk, too, but I think those days are gone.

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        #53
        The best player around currently is Steph Curry, who is possibly somewhere close to the Greatest of All Time. He is tall but not freakishly so, at 1m90 (6'3"). That is a size of many normal people. He has also revolutionised the game by making it much more about three point shots (the 3-ball) than working inside. I was on a Basketball forum a few days ago and someone was asking when the last time the no.1 draft pick was a Center, as the game has changed and teams are no longer built around that player as they were even in the very recent past. It turned out to be more recent than the questioner realised, in 2015 but it confirms the perception of altered value of players and a change in style of play is at least is out there.
        Anyone who doesn't think three-point shooting is both skillful and properly difficult to execute making a successful shot noteworthy hasn't watched much of it - at NBA level this means looping a ball of ~9.5 inches diameter through a ring less than double that size (18 inches), that is ~23+ feet away, 10 feet up in the air and orientated 90 degrees in the wrong direction (i.e. a horizontal target that players have to get the ball to drop through rather than a vertical ring that would just need to be hit).

        The shooting leader by percentage in the NBA current is hitting 65.2% of his shots, btw. And that is the very best. The best team, the Golden State Warriors, have made 50.4% of their shots. The worst, the Chicago Bulls, have hit 43.6%. Scoring runs where one team will get double figures worth of unanswered points are really not uncommon.

        I do understand the perception that they 'score every time', even if that perception somewhat false. It's the mirror image of the incorrect perception by non-fans that Football (soccer) games 'always end up 0-0'. And to be honest, one wouldn't expect a high degree of appreciation of Basketball on a Forum where we have all gathered explicitly as Football fans, seeing as they are polar opposites in that way.

        Personally I consider both flawed in their scoring. It's too easy in Basketball and too difficult in Football. It means that baskets are not events unless they are done at the business end or achieved with extra style, whereas Football it is too important and random, so that a patently inferior team can fluke results by a number of fortunate bounces rather than by unexpectedly playing at a higher standard than their norm. Getting the scoring balance right to reward skill but not sate the audience is probably one of the trickiest things someone writing the rules of a Sport faces.


        So, in summary, I wouldn't expect one set of extremists to 'get' a very different set.

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          #54
          Originally posted by WOM View Post
          Oh, you may well be factually correct. But perceptually, that's exactly what happens. Down one end, score. Down the other, score. Back again, score. Return, score. Then someone fouls someone and an advantage is gained that upsets the rhythm and someone wins. Dull. Dull. Dull.
          Football from a Basketball fans perspective:-

          "Down one end, turnover. Down the other, turnover. Back again, turnover. Return, ooh someone actually had a shot this time! He missed... Then someone fouls someone and everyone shouts at each other and the officials for 60 seconds before returning to the same pattern until the Umpire puts everyone out of their misery by ending the game. Dull. Dull. Dull."

          Edit - Or indeed from a British non-Sports fans perspective, thinking about it. I'm sure you've heard variants on this theme from friends and colleagues who don't 'get' Football (there are millions of them in the UK alone), along with "Why don't they just kick it in the goal?!?". I know I have...
          Last edited by Janik; 07-04-2018, 20:48.

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            #55
            Originally posted by Cesar Rodriguez View Post
            Ice hockey - can't see the puck, plus I have an irrational, unjustified and completely unwarranted dislike of all things Canadian. I don't know why but everything about Canada grinds my gears.
            What's that all aboot, eh?

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              #56
              Originally posted by Cesar Rodriguez View Post
              Ice hockey - can't see the puck, plus I have an irrational, unjustified and completely unwarranted dislike of all things Canadian. I don't know why but everything about Canada grinds my gears.
              Hopefully not quite to the extent that the Greeks annoy Mrs Carberry...

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                #57
                Originally posted by WOM View Post
                What's that all aboot, eh?
                He did say it was irrational. So explaining it might be difficult.

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                  #58
                  Not going to try to convince or proselytize, but basketball is all about the 10 point swing. Indeed, basketball during the regular season has the tendency to be incredibly tedious and useless. But when it really matters, and every shot really matters (playoffs or championship time,) it's another level.

                  However, a 10 to 20 point run, when you hit 2-3 three pointers and an alley-oop comes off a turnover...it's a "rinse out" as they called it in jungle drum and bass lingo. Absolute ecstasy.

                  Hit a dunk, hit another dunk, and that's a a goal.

                  It's all about goals, you just need to figure out when/where they are.

                  Any sporting event, any sporting contest in history...Cavs vs Warriors or Heat vs Mavs or Heat vs Spurs was right up there.

                  The problem is they have too many games on too many nights, to get corporate money for their corporate boxes. A simple home and away for every team in the league would work out great. If a great World Cup has 2-3 memorable matches, or an FA Cup has 2-3 incredible ties, there will certainly be 7 great NBA or NCAA playoff games in a tournament that are brilliant.

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                    #59
                    Originally posted by Janik View Post
                    The best player around currently is Steph Curry, who is possibly somewhere close to the Greatest of All Time.
                    Not quite. Though amazingly talented (and I am a Warriors fan and have loved the last few years), Lebron, and in retired circles, MJ, Kobe, Magic, and a few others surpass him as GOAT.

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                      #60
                      Table tennis - playing area is too small and the ball is too fast to see. Ditto squash. Both are fun to play and maybe watching squash in person works OK, but table tennis, nah.

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                        #61
                        Because football and cricket were my childhood, they formed my subsequent view of all team sports (with balls, or pucks pretending to be balls).

                        And the key thing that I can never lose is that these sports should have the options of closing, defending and even drawing. That with X minutes to go, the Captain-Coach-Hero says "Men of Sparta/Alamo/Rorke's Drift, what we have, we HOLD". It's ingrained, it's an integral part of the attraction. It can make the non-scoring action (bowling maiden after maiden) the stuff of great drama.

                        So every time I watch basketball or ice hockey (usually at the Olympics) I find myself exhorting the team leading 5-0 or 100-70 to stop trying to score, and gather around the net/goal to withstand the siege. But they ignore me and try to score more instead, even though they really don't need any more points/goals. This is the real gulf in "getting" sports for me: they obviously do know what they're doing, and I don't, but they're depriving me of an essential part of what I'm programmed to expect.

                        Nothing to do with the merits of the games themselves (skill levels, etc). Like Sunday school, the sporting stories of childhood moulded me, and they cannot be un-told.

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                          #62
                          Yeah it's basketball for me too. I can appreciate the amazing acts of athleticism but the contest just seems really dull until the end (and then those last two minutes get dragged out to 20 actual minutes, thereby sucking all the life out of them.)

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                            #63
                            There are things I don't get about ice-hockey, mainly the play-off system and the fact that that they have an annual world championship at the exact time the NHL is reaching its climax. But I love going to live games. I go to Zilina games in the Slovak league 4-5 times a season, and to the odd international, and it's fantastic. Literally every game provides either excitement and/or at least one moment of outrageous skill. I've also been to see a couple of games involving a colleague's son, who plays for Zilina's Under-13 team. They look a very skillful, well-organised side, and the slower pace, and lower emphasis on hard physical contact has helped me grasp some of the rules and tactical patterns a bit better. I'd like to go to a live NHL game sometime, though I understand they play on smaller rinks than in Europe. That, plus the greater emphasis on physique (and fighting) must make it quite a spectacle, and the moments of skill that bit more special.

                            I've seen women's basketball in Slovakia and enjoyed it - Good Angels, the president's charitable foundation, funded Kosice (the best team) until recently. I remember a Bill Bryson piece in Notes from a Big Country about attending college-level basketball in the US. From the way he described the experience, I could imagine enjoying that as well. But I find televised top-level games both tedious and ridiculous.

                            The sports I don't think I'll ever get are (variously) skiing biathlons and darts. I appreciate the endurance levels and precision displayed in the former, but find watching them extraordinarily dull. As for darts, a friend is paying upwards of 50 quid to attend last 16 matches at some event in Blackpool later in the month. He probaby won't see anything except on video screens. Why?

                            And I nearly forgot motor-sports. No time for those either.

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                              #64
                              Basketball for me too. And US football. How both these sports are now eclipsing baseball is beyond me, because the latter is awesome.

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                                #65
                                Originally posted by Janik View Post
                                Football from a Basketball fans perspective:-

                                "Down one end, turnover. Down the other, turnover. Back again, turnover. Return, ooh someone actually had a shot this time! He missed... Then someone fouls someone and everyone shouts at each other and the officials for 60 seconds before returning to the same pattern until the Umpire puts everyone out of their misery by ending the game. Dull. Dull. Dull."

                                Edit - Or indeed from a British non-Sports fans perspective, thinking about it. I'm sure you've heard variants on this theme from friends and colleagues who don't 'get' Football (there are millions of them in the UK alone), along with "Why don't they just kick it in the goal?!?". I know I have...
                                This is, of course, the classic US take on football.

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                                  #66
                                  I’m thinking through my reaction to Basketball again, and while I agree with Tee Rex about the lack of a rear guard defense, I think mostly you don’t have the drama of the possibility of a game defining single moment at any point. In football, obviously, at any point someone might score the only (or, at least winning) goal of the game. But even in american football or rugby or ice hockey, the game can be sufficiently low scoring that one “score” could make the difference. Which means you’re engaged and on edge the whole game. This is true of cricket and baseball too (wickets and runs being respectively rare). There is no single moment in basketball, so the game doesn’t have that potential for drama.

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                                    #67
                                    Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
                                    This is true of cricket and baseball too (wickets and runs being respectively rare).
                                    Unless you were on the wrong end of the Phillies / Marlins game last night. Yoy...

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                                      #68
                                      Well yeah. You can get drama free blow-outs in every sport. But you can’t have a game defining moment in basketball, I don’t think. At least, not until the drawn out last couple of minutes.

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                                        #69
                                        Buzzer beaters are game-defining by definition.

                                        You also get moments of athletic and artistic brilliance that are almost always fished with a score, which is often not the case with football (think of how often you’ve heard “if he scored there . . .”)

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                                          #70
                                          Buzzer beaters, by definition, can only happen at the end of a game. Whereas a defining goal, or touchdown, or try, or home run, or wicket (or dropped catch) could happen at any point in their respective sports.

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                                            #71
                                            Thus my second point.

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                                              #72
                                              Originally posted by Cesar Rodriguez View Post
                                              Ice hockey - can't see the puck, plus I have an irrational, unjustified and completely unwarranted dislike of all things Canadian. I don't know why but everything about Canada grinds my gears.
                                              Originally posted by WOM View Post
                                              What's that all aboot, eh?
                                              I guess he's not your friend, buddy.

                                              Comment


                                                #73
                                                Anyone who doesn't think three-point shooting is both skillful and properly difficult to execute making a successful shot noteworthy hasn't watched much of it - at NBA level this means looping a ball of ~9.5 inches diameter through a ring less than double that size (18 inches), that is ~23+ feet away, 10 feet up in the air and orientated 90 degrees in the wrong direction (i.e. a horizontal target that players have to get the ball to drop through rather than a vertical ring that would just need to be hit).

                                                See this is the thing that people seem to be missing out on. It's not just athleticism, it's also incredible mind bending skill, almost akin to witchcraft, combined with split second timing. I think people take an awful lot for granted when they think it just goes from end to end. Just because these people make it look simple, doesn't mean that it remotely is. On the other hand I don't see the problem that people have with the scoring system. Most Football Fans in Ireland also watch Hurling, and there were between 45 and 50 scores in the semi finals and finals of the All Ireland hurling series and another 20 wides, so there's a shot every minute. It's a sport where the equivalent of a corner is a free from 65 metres, which is considered an easy score, it's a game where People were doing things like this in 2001 (By the way, this is basically the manliest man thing that has ever happened in the history of Ireland. Just look at it. He's basically Cu Chullain.) and it's gotten so out of hand that by the 2013 all-ireland replay, Ger Canning is bemoaning the failure of one of the Clare players to score a shot from 100 metres, and drops it two metres short Btw it's worth watching the first 20 minutes at least of this, if not the whole lot. This is the most exciting hurling match I've ever seen. It's worth watching if only for the Cork Goalkeeper scoring two goals.

                                                I suppose the point really is that people who watch football in ireland, will happily watch a sport where a ball they can barely see flies from end to end and has a score every 70 seconds, without a bat of an eyelid, and then a lot of them also watch Rugby, which is about two lines trying to push each other up and down a pitch. And if these three sports form the three opposite corners of some sort of triangle, Gaelic football is slapbang in the middle combining elements of all three. It's just what you're used to I suppose. we're not really used to basketball, or more likely just come across it far too late and don't have any room left. I'm sure that there are plenty of kids and teenagers all over the place who have been watching NBA with all the enthusiasm of their american counterparts, or have got into it through video games.

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                                                  #74
                                                  Basketball seems to have been pretty big in Ireland (almost ice hockey in Scotland sized) in the late 80s/90s.

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                                                    #75
                                                    I think that it ultimately ran into the problems faced by 'professional' sports in Ireland. People were spending money on salaries that wasn't coming in through other means, which means that eventually the bubble pops. Something very similar happened to League of Ireland soccer during the boom. Unfortunately they pissed away all that money on paying the same players 3 times as much as before so nothing changed.

                                                    Fun Times.

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