With the sports world in a serious dead time the NBA playoffs are just about to start. I used to love to watch the NBA, and I am a big LA Lakers fan (dating back to the Showtime and Magic Johnson days). But starting a couple of years ago I reached a point where the NBA slowly became unwatchable. There were 3 factors: my trying hard to watch less sports on TV, the games changing into a kind of boring blob of interchangeable parts, and knowing that the Lakers are defending back to back.
I have been trying hard to de-emphasize TV sports for a while now. With differing success of course. It's easier to ignore basketball than football, just because I like to watch football at pretty much any level, while basketball can be hard to watch without a lot of factors being involved. And part of that is when my team is on, I can become pretty unbearable to be around, and that's not fair for my family, and not healthy for me. So the smart thing is to break that viewing habit, and try to focus on other things.
The more I watch the NBA lately the more it feels like all the teams are pretty much interchangeable. It is no longer a matter of the teams having distinct personalities that the players adopt. Instead it is the players that create the team's personality. And that gets pretty boring, especially when it feels like 8 guys standing around watching 2 go 1 on1. I know that isn't all that is happening, that there is a lot there that doesn't meet the eye. But to someone who has gradually become a casual fan of most teams that is what it looks like.
Last, I know that I am being a little spoiled, but I might not feel this way if the Lakers had not been in the last 3 Finals series, and won the last 2. On the other hand, I am not even sure I could bring myself to watch much of the Lakers playoff games any more, it's just not that much fun to watch.
My goal is to let the playoffs go and not watch any games, just follow the scores and stories on the web. Which should be relatively easy to do as there are not a lot of big gatherings in the near future where people will want the games on in the back ground. I'm going to try, I won't say it will be easy, and there's a possibility of:
"Just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in"
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