What to watch when the Playoffs aren't on

Something unspeakable has been going on in between these rounds of the NBA playoffs.  Namely: they aren’t happening.  There is no playoff basketball on TV. 

Now, if you’re like me, this is extremely disconcerting. When playoff basketball goes off the TV—not just in my apartment, mind you, but in others, in the car (because it’s not on the radio), in sports bars, brewpubs, and other places all across America and the world—when playoff basketball disappears from the planet like this, I suddenly don’t know what to do with myself.  I’m roaming around like a zombie.  People mistake my face for Tony Snell’s.

As soon as I caught myself Googling basketball clips on YouTube, I pulled myself together and realized I had a problem.  These playoffs have just been too good.  I’m hooked, and now I’m suffering.

There is, of course, plenty to do to occupy myself until the Finals begin.  There is plenty of time now to rewatch the last series between the Spurs and the Heat.  But that will take only so long.  Reading all the material in the papers and on websites, can only do so much.  Meanwhile, I’m suffering.  I need a fix, so I’m not withdrawal.

And, furthermore, though it’s almost excruciating to consider right now, eventually there will be… the off-season.  If I don’t develop a healthy relationship with this drug, I don’t know if I’ll make it to July, when the summer league starts.  Blazer fans in particular may have gotten the worst end of this deal.  We had the most exciting series in the most exciting first round of playoff basketball in recent memory, while people with teams that didn’t make the playoffs have had time to disinvest themselves, to decathect. 

So I got proactive.  How, you ask?  I’ve decided to watch another sport on these days without playoffs.  The live experience of some other game involving a ball may help me through this, I think, and eventually transition myself into a state where watching something other than playoff basketball is ok.

But which one?

Throughout this last month, during these interim basketballless periods, there have been several choices to make on the TV.  And in these days before the Finals—and in the days in between the Finals, don’t forget those—there is a profusion of sports-entertainment product to consume.  So I grabbed the remote, sat down with a beer and some chips, and did the research for you all.  You can thank me later.

These are my rankings for the best NBA substitutes to watch when the NBA isn’t on, from lowest to highest.  I ranked not the sports themselves, but the experience of watching the sports on TV as a whole.

I did this scientifically, of course, breaking them down into three essential categories.  First, funsomeness: how much fun is it to watch the games.  How much I find myself off my seat yelling obscenities when something goes wrong.  How much I find myself ripping my shirt off if something glorious happens.  Second, rootability: how much can I get behind any one side in any one game as a fan.  How much I can play out my fantasies for how the game will go and develop, and how much I can get disappointed when these dreams are crushed.  Third, soothingbalmitude: how much watching the sport in question actually compensates for the loss of playoff basketball.  How much it consoles, relieves, and acts as a restorative force to get me ready again for its reappearance like a phoenix (Suns).

Each is rated out of 10, where a 0 equals a THAT’S TURRIBLE and a 10 equals an INDUBITABLY.

HORSE RACING

Now, I have nothing against racing horses—racing in all forms is excellent—but there is a strange atmosphere that hangs over the whole sport.  Something offputting.  The mere name of a race that was on after the first round of the playoffs was over perfectly captures this.  The Preakness was on.

The Preakness…That doesn’t sound like a sporting competition I want to watch.  It’s like how The Hague doesn’t sound like a city I want to visit.  I can sure as hell believe the International Criminal Court is there, though: there’s something too big and too vague intimated by making such an article an integral part of the name, even something sinister.  Moral of the story: you can’t have “The” be an integral part of your name.  In sports, it makes it seem less like a contest than an event, and less like an event than a show. 

And fundamentally, that’s what The Preakness was.  Things of consequence barely happen, and when they do are over too quickly.  There’s a lot of buildup and then a little bit of running animal legs and things, and then we’re done.  I know this severely underrates what is going on, the complexity, the beauty of the spectacle.  But fundamentally the clincher is—it’s still just too much of a spectacle.

Being there, being at the track in person, would be a blast.  Things that approached this—the sound of the horses in the gate, the thundering hooves as they rumble down the track, the chatter of the jockeys that you can hear—were neat.  But there is absolutely no way that all can translate into a viewing experience.  Sitting at home, watching on the TV, you can’t take part in it.  All you watch is a quick race that you know is just going on so that a bunch of rich people can bet and smoke and drink and debauch and be greedy and toss around money, women, men, salacious glances, never directed at the race itself, because they are not really being interested in what they're watching except for the outcomes and an occasion to generally act reptilian. 

In short: too rich, too odd, too distant.  At its best, it merely approaches the excitement generated by a Nets regular-season game.  And there’s none of the bizarre, terrifying Nets-Knight to haunt my dreams, either.

Funsomeness: 2

Rootability: 4

Soothingbalmitude: 1

Total: 7

NASCAR

Like horse racing except it has a poorer audience and the horses occasionally crash and explode.  So, slightly better.  But you’re still not brought any closer to the action, even especially on short tracks.  The only way to see it is up close.  And preferably drunk as you can be.

Funsomeness: 3

Rootability: 5

Soothingbalmitude: 1

Total: 9

WOMEN'S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

If we’re looking for something to help cope with the lack of playoffs, we’re also not looking for things that replace them.  We’re not looking for what is most like watching playoffs basketball.  Mimesis be damned: darts, for all I know, could be the best thing to watch (unfortunately, no darts was on, so they are eliminated from contention in my rankings here… though frankly I wasn’t quite ready to stoop to watching darts).

This is why watching the WNBA fails to really compensate for my loss.  You’d think that because the WNBA is basketball, it would fill the void we’re looking to fill.  But it isn’t NBA playoffs basketball, and, watching it, you suspect other completely different sports might fill the void better.

Now, “it isn’t NBA playoffs basketball,” is a loaded phrase, historically fraught.  And I mean it in a specific and I hope respectful sense.  The WNBA is too often doomed by association and comparison to the NBA.  You judge a dissatisfying thing harsher when it threatens to resemble the thing you like.  And in a way the WNBA has been dogged by this throughout its entire existence: at its best, it approaches something it merely resembles; at its worst, it seems to be unable to achieve any resemblance whatsoever. 

Different solutions have been proposed to deal with this: but if you compare it to NBA basketball, all you see are differences; if you begin to think of the WNBA as a different sport than NBA basketball, you’re effectively saying women can’t do what men do.

I know this is not a complete solution, but basically I see the WNBA as a version of NBA basketball that has different rules.  The rules are not ones really involving the size of the court, the ball, what constitutes a foul, and whatnot.  They have to do with the height of the player, their weight, their physical capabilities.  The WNBA is basketball which just like the NBA (or any game for that matter) is played within a certain set of limitations.

They aren’t, in principle, even more restrictive limitations than those of the NBA, though they have to do with the body of the player—certain physical rules are present, in this way of thinking about it, in the NBA too, and in many ways they are more strict.  In a way it is like the 6’5-and-under leagues you sometimes find.  The basketball is just as good—and often better—but its play takes different forms.  Ultimately it is like racing with different sized engines, or (the analogy perhaps most apt) different weight classes in boxing.

Now, with all that considered, where the WNBA games fail to satisfy my NBA playoff cravings, where they present themselves as particularly inferior, are in the fact that what I am looking for is indeed the specific awesomeness of PLAYOFF basketball.  Watching the Seattle Storm get beat the Phoenix Mercury, I felt like I would be having the same problems watching reruns from earlier in the NBA season as a way to fill the void here.  Things don’t hinge on every play, and the fun of it here is not in the action, but simply in the precision of the athleticism.

Watching Brittney Griner do things that are not only physically amazing, but also simply so precise—the way she uses her body, her ability to spot the exact angle at which to swat at a ball for a block, are exact motions, remarkable to watch.  You don’t find that in college women’s hoops, though in certain ways you find there a somewhat playoff-like crazy intensity that could, were the playoffs on, perhaps do some consolation work for me.

Unfortunately, though, the WNBA doesn’t quite do everything it needs to do here to bring this out in the manner of its broadcasting: we need more slow-mo replays to appreciate what these women accomplish as athletes, and we need more amazed, rather than simply excited, announcers.  It’s here that the whole experience seems most lacking.  There’s not enough people in the stands, there’s not enough glitz and general craziness.  I need the possibility of something like the aura that surrounded Lance Stephenson in those last two games.  With a little more entertainment and show—more of Griner’s tattoos around the league—it could well be a sporting experience I’d watch on these off days, when I’m longing for sweat and hardwood and Birdman and things like that.

Funsomeness: 3

Rootability: 4

Soothingbalmitude: 4

Total: 11

FORMULA 1 RACING

Like horse racing, only the people are even richer, and the horses are made of strange space-age polymers.

And let’s be honest: the whole thing is really mainly an occasion for parties.  I don’t say this lightly, as a fan of F1.  The F1 in Monaco, the trials for which were on between the first and second rounds was a significant race, a significant test of endurance and skill that sustains itself for quite some time.  The thing takes longer than 15 minutes.  Rich people have to occasionally stop swilling their drinks for a second to gather themselves and concentrate on watching.

But they still are rich people sitting there mostly to swill drinks, gamble, and screw beautiful women.  When this whole experience can be made portable, let me know, I’ll put it at the top of my list.

One thing which elevates F1 racing beyond the other forms of racing: the on-board cameras on F1 cars are EXCELLENT.  With a big TV, going a lap with your eyeballs bolted on one of those things is an experience.  NASCAR cameras are always placed deep inside the cockpit, where you have to look past a jungle of equipment and gearboxes and things out a grimy windshield to see anything.  Or if they’re on the car’s front or rear everything’s vibrating so you get sick and throw up that pizza you’re eating.  You’d think they could find a better camera angle.

Horse racing, naturally, involves no cameras at all, which is why it loses out yet again.  Though if we could find a way to install a camera on a horse, The Preakness might jump up near the top of this list.  Horse-View-2000 can become a thing.  You heard it here first.   Don’t steal my idea.

Funsomeness: 5

Rootability: 4

Soothingbalmitude: 4

Total: 13

MAJOR LEAGUE/CHAMPIONS LEAGUE/PREMIER LEAGUE/LA LIGA FOOTBALL AKA SOCCER

Well, hailing from Portland you know I have to enjoy seeing the Timbers.  And I do, even though they are having a horrible year and Porterball seems extinct amidst a flurry of injuries, bizarre suspensions, and general suckiness.

Yesterday they played against the Vancouver Whitecaps.  Because Portland’s Rose Festival is going on, they decked themselves out in their sexy reduniforms, to make all the womenfolk swoon and show some pretty sweet civic pride in the process.

I watched the game in a Timbers bar, and this made things eminently fun to watch.  Yet I couldn’t escape the general boringness of the action itself.  MLS soccer is extremely slow-paced, plodding, offensively minded, and generally not like its more interesting European counterparts.  Arsenal playing Hull City was some real football: big loping passes, quick sprints—the whole field seemed bigger and the players smaller, so quick was everything moving about.

But even this quick movement isn’t quite what a basketball-hungry viewer wants: the motions of soccer are too intermittent, the flight of the ball too high, the movement off the ball never quite clearly off the ball, the movement with it never quite reaching levels of control you get in basketball.  Eliminating the hands was a bad idea—that’s the upshot you basically come away with, as a playoff-basketball-hungry viewer.

But what saves soccer generally and makes it fun to watch are the fans—which are actually quite telegenic and so escape much of the problems of the other sports low on this list.   Shots of the fans are some of the most fun to see in any sport, and if you turn the volume up, you feel like you’re there.  When Real Madrid played FC Barcelona, THAT was amazing to see.  The general insanity of the entire country at that moment was wonderful, and you felt it.  And Timbers games are this way too.  Everything becomes amplified and funner to watch, even at home, when you see and hear thousands of people yelling songs continually, only stopping to excoriate refs in spittle-laced blasts of profanities, or pump fists in celebration in an orgy of war-painted blind drunk hooligans.

So while the game isn’t the best thing in the world for a basketball fan, the crowd makes it and provides a satisfaction that is hard to get elsewhere.

Funsomeness: 4

Rootability: 9

Soothingbalmitude: 5

Total: 18

NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE

This should be rated higher.  Hockey has the right amount of fast paced, graceful movement.  It has continual action.  It’s like watching one fast break after another.

And it is in the playoffs, which makes matches extremely competitive—something someone who is in playoff-withdrawal desperately craves.  And this means there are fights.  Even more fun fights than the regular season.

But it is all—padded.  And laden with sticks and gloves and whatnot.  There’s something about basketball’s nakedness, the fact that you are simply there with your body, in nothing more than thin uniforms—well, unless you are Dwight Howard, and love to wear those foamy wraps and elbow protectors and things and look like a big red 7 foot human condom.  For the rest of NBA players, you’re out there, you’re moving just with your arms and legs and a ball, and you are the only thing that pushes the thing through the hoop, or stops it along the way.

With hockey, there’s a huge amount of mediation of athletic force.  You’re not watching the athlete put the puck in the goal, you’re watching his stick.  And while this should actually make it more awesome, for those hooked on playoff basketball it doesn’t.  It feels more false.  During the regular season, perhaps, when basketball players concentrate more on saving their body, the relationship is turned around: playing with pads is actually a pretty good way to describe what happens during that period of time, and so hockey has a sort of honesty to it that is satisfying and makes the playoff clashes between the skating players much more interesting to watch.  But there’s no comparison between a hockey player getting hit to the boards and LeBron getting grabbed and smacked going to the basket.

Nevertheless, hockey is fun as hell.  The fans are drunk, attack the players when they get hit onto the glass, and it remains the only sport amazing enough to blare a klaxon normally reserved for ICBM strikes accompanied with red flashing lights stolen from nuclear submarines when something good happens to their team.  All this translates well intoa viewing experience too, because, unlike soccer, the rink is small enough that all the insanity gets piped pretty clearly through the TV.

And yet while hockey seems to deserve a much, much higher rating, it has to be put here.  This year so much action has gone on, so many game 7s, that it’s actually painful for me to do this.  But science requires I have to grit my teeth, because there are two even better sports to watch.

Funsomeness: 9

Rootability: 7

Soothingbalmitude: 5

Total: 21

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

Loss is a curious thing: you wouldn’t think the absence of an object could actually be a rich emotional experience.  The thing you don’t have is gone.  You’d think that, if there’s anything you feel, it’s not what the loss itself makes you feel.  Rather, you think it’s the residual attachment you have to the object now gone that hurts in so many ways.

But the opposite is the case: lack has many dimensions to it, ones not even caused directly by your attachment to the object that is missing.   I miss a thing, but it’s not that thing which makes me feel cruddy.  All sorts of other things, some involved with basketball, some not, are what are actually making me feel cruddy.  It’s the void itself and what surrounds it: everything that the thing it has its own texture, its own character, elements I discover more and more as I go along.

In a way, all this means is that we are childish and spoiled and we tend to replace a loss with a longing for the missing thing very quickly.  Too quickly, sometimes: we don’t let the loss itself be felt, and all we have is the longing for something, the desire, the want, and we don’t understand what just happened to us.

But this also means the compensation for the loss that might be most satisfying can come from something that doesn’t necessarily look anything like what disappeared, or produce anything like the same sorts of pleasures.  In short, we don’t have to get what we like, to adjust ourselves to the loss of the thing we liked.  Each loss is an opportunity for the discovery of something new that can fill the void.

These are the deeper reasons why watching baseball is one of the most satisfying basketball substitutes.

It doesn’t resemble basketball at all.  The rhythms are slower, the game takes more time.  This annoys you for about 5 minutes, and the game begins to seem like the most boring thing ever in your life ever, and you sort of want to kill yourself, and you hand reaches for the controller to turn it to NBA TV to see if another rerun of Inside Stuff is on and you can learn more about Patty Mills’ country dancing… but then something changes.

You take a break from your attachment to fast-paced action, and the exasperated, extenuated announcing, always half-unsure about everything that is happening on the court.  Everything is clear in this strange sport you’re all of a sudden now looking at a little more closely.  Everything is almost over-calculated and decided.  Whether things come off is much more a matter of definitive action-taking than anything in the jazzy-free-flowing world of basketball.  While the latter takes more intuition, more sense of timing, baseball is rational, reasonable.  Everything is a probability much more precise than any shot-selection.  Every pitch involves more psychology, more biography, than Jordan used to take down one of his opponents.

And you watch this unfold, in its regular pace, with its rather staid and stocky gestures, its unnatural movements—is there anything more unnatural than a throw of a baseball?  And you begin to realize the depth involved in each movement, the level of thoughtfulness.

And by now you’ve joined the flow of the game, and you’re hooked.  Baseball is so satisfying because it doesn’t represent anything like the pleasures of a playoff basketball game at all.

The more superficial reason for all this—I’ll shed the existential analysis here—is that it all translates well into a TV experience extremely well.  It doesn’t make for the most entertaining viewing—but it is less different than being at the game than pretty much any other viewing experience you could think of.

Furthermore what you see is just what you want.  It’s early summer, you want some sport that is a little bit more outdoor-friendly, after being shut in for the whole winter and partly the spring.  It’s high time to get out.  And as the camera sweeps over the huge stadium, overlooking a city skyline, or a vista over which the sun is setting, you get this experience to the full.  And there is the crowd: a crowd that is bigger, and in for the long haul, no matter really what happens.  Ballparks aren’t so much entertainment venues as places, sites that you visit.  You don’t find the seats empty in the 1^st quarter and at the end of the 4^th like you do in American Airlines Arena.  People are there, they are sitting down, relaxing, as if at a public park.  This change in scenery makes for a change in mood, which is strangely refreshing.

And that’s the key to the experience: it’s like a dip in the pool.  It gets you feeling good, so you can sit back and have more fun in the sun.  So too are you ready for basketball right when it gets back.  And if it never got back, well, you’ve discovered something new in baseball, something that can strangely satisfy a whole host of things that surrounded our love of basketball.  And this is probably what makes it the best sport to watch after playoffs are finally over and gone.

Funsomeness: 6

Rootability: 6

Soothingbalmitude: 10

Total: 22

BOXING

Let me list the reasons why boxing wins this contest, hands down.

• It involves people fighting other people after months of each participant bragging that he will hit the other person more.  Competitiveness can’t be more present in a sport.

• It involves concrete outcomes.  As much as the scoring is said to be a detriment to people watching, it’s clear what is happening at each moment, and it’s pretty clear what happens at the end of each fight: someone gets beat more than another guy.  Or if it is close, that’s clear too.  Boxing may not have the most decisive or decided outcomes, but it certainly has ones you can see and feel and witness.  This is because,

• It involves a level of physicality, athleticism, and endurance that shames every other sport besides basketball and maybe even includes the latter.  This is because, like basketball,

• The people are not wearing anything.  There’s only the gloves.  You see everything.

• It’s therefore one of the most telegenic of sports, maybe even beating basketball in this respect.  The only thing you could ask for more is more slow-motion replay, to witness just how much goes on in every single second, how much fakery, how quick reactions work, foot movement, everything.  But it’s quite frankly okay that this doesn’t happen.  Why? Because,

• The action never stops.  Even between rounds.  Each time the bell sounds, it’s like a pitstop takes place in which all sorts of implements of torture are used to stitch up a poor guy’s face and keep it from bleeding.  It’s like watching the Clippers play the Spurs, two teams that push the ball as quick as possible across the half court line.  Only if they only got defensive rebounds and only occasionally scored.  Everything is moving, all the time.

• The crowd is amazing, always bloodthirsty, and often indignant, which is the best mood a crowd can be in.

• The announcers are amazing.  They invite people who went rounds with each opponent into the announcing booth.  Which isn’t a booth but a ringside seat, feet away from all the action, just like in the NBA (there are few sports where the announcers can be involved and hit or hurt by the action, and all these sports are AMAZING).  This leads to authoritative, direct, personal commentary, of the kind that only Chris Webber or Charles Barkley really pretty much uses.  It also involves the most amazing phraseology in sports besides basketball.  Watching a heavyweight match between the first and second rounds, this sentence was uttered: “He’s lookin fresh like a glass of iced tea.”  How can you not love that.

• Occasionally, they’ll interview the coaches and trainers as the round is going on.  In an interview with Buddy McGirt he has to stop talking to yell “KEEP THAT RIGHT HAND UP!!!”  It was like watching Joakim Noah’s father during that Bulls game earlier in the year.

• Like basketball, physical characteristics translate into movement and character direct, with surprising immediacy.  Saying someone has a “chin” is very much like saying they have a good “left hand” in basketball.  The body becomes more than just a body: it becomes representative of a style and a way of playing, a “game” unto itself.  This is the type of thing that makes basketball approach dance or other forms of art.  Only there is slugging and hitting and blood.

• And this gets at the deepest and most fundamentally satisfying, fun element of boxing, that is incredibly like basketball.  The participants are individuals, characters, well before they are athletes.  Or as athletes, they are humans.  This has always been the appeal of basketball over other sports, and it comes home especially in playoff time as we look back and look at the journeys each player has made to get so far.  And boxing gives it to you in an almost more concentrated form.

If that doesn’t get you watching boxing in these off-days, I don’t know what will.  The only downsides are the relative lack of frequency in matches—the thing that makes them such a big deal also leads to a kind of randomness in scheduling—and the non-existence of teamwork.  Nevertheless, it’s about as close as you can come to basketball, I think, in terms of a satisfying TV experience.

Funsomeness: 9

Rootability: 9

Soothingbalmitude: 9

Total: 27

So there you have it.  Nothing, of course, replaces playoffs basketball, but one of these replacements will do a pretty serviceable job, now and even eventually in the off season.