It’s baaaaackkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

Cheese.

The deal is tentative, but putting that aside, the NBA will be back come Christmas! The seemingly never-ending lockout is over, and basketball has returned!! Assuming everything goes smoothly (let’s hope), basketball will finally be back. It’s about damn time. It seemed as though the lockout would never end and I think most of us accepted the fact that there would be no season. This agreement reminds myself, and I hope many others, just how much basketball was missed. I cannot wait for it to return, and I hope we’re all grateful for the NBA now. Many thanks on Thanksgiving! Now let’s play some basketball.

The option play

Enough of this nonsense. I’m sick of reading and writing about the lockout. We could have just skipped to the part where they said there’d be no season. And enough about Penn State. Okay, so maybe those news pieces are reality, but for once, I’d rather look at the bright side of the sports world. Guess what? College basketball has begun. Thank you. During the next few weeks we will be privileged enough to see good college basketball teams beat up on bad ones, ranked teams face off against other ranked teams in tournaments, and maybe a few upsets. And though college ball isn’t the NBA, it’s what we have right now. And I’ll gladly take it. 

In other non-sports related news, I suggest you use your time away from the NBA to watch a movie, catch up on TV shows, or read a good book or magazine. Will full-fledged NBA games be featured? Highly unlikely. But there are other forms of entertainment besides the National Basketball Association. And they are here. Remember a few years back when the Screen Writers Guild went on strike? That was a shame and it cut our television seasons in half. But they came to a decision. Maybe the NBA can learn from that. Then again, I wouldn’t count on it. Sayonara to the 2011-2012 NBA season as we know it. No, it’s not the end of the world. But it’s damn close. Just kidding.

Come back

Bring it back, J-Kidd.

I think it just hit me. There are no NBA games tonight, the night that the season was set to begin. Would I have had time to watch tonight? Probably not, but the thought that, okay, there really are no games has come upon me. And it stinks. There goes an expression, that you don’t miss something until it’s gone. Well, there you go. I miss the NBA. Although I can no longer name 90 percent of the league’s players like I could back in the seventh grade, basketball is still, by far my favorite sport to watch. Sure, I’ve been enjoying the NFL lately and baseball had a nice postseason, but neither is basketball. And nothing can replace basketball, more specifically the NBA. Not college basketball (although it does come close), not streetball, and no other pro sports league. The NBA is the NBA. Irreplaceable. Where amazing happens. Except, unfortunately, for this season. It’s where nothing happens. And I’m going to miss it. The NBA Finals in June was the best Finals in recent memory. For now, it’s the latest memory of the NBA we can hold on to. I’m not going to talk about the 7-letter L-word here, or any negotiations or other random stuff that goes with it in this post. This is all about the NBA. I want my Eastern Conference semis, triple-overtime, take a 3-2 series lead only to lose the final two games league back. Bonus points if you know what game I’m talking about.