Artistic Athletic Criticism and Cathexis

So the Pistons are back from the brink and are postured in a dominant position vs. the Pacers. Sports talk was way too positive on the Piston's strengths and Pacers weaknesses; the swing in scores from game to game have been remarkable, one game close, four games romps. Last night the Pistons romped the Pacers, but it was at home. You could say many things to the Pacers, but most prominent is "When Ben Wallace thrown down 19 points, you just might be in trouble."

Let's skip for the moment thinking about why anyone would care about the home team, or any other team, winning in any sport, professional or college. The Dodger is positively cathected on a variety of sports entities, mostly losers, and negatively cathected on entities like the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys.

Basketball, on TV, gives so much more of a personal vision of the players than anything but tennis, or gymnastics (or maybe boxing, which the Dodger doesn't watch.) Even the officials are personalized, not wearing hats. In regular season, you see the home team, night after night. In NBA playoff basketball, you see the same adversaries, night after night.

In basketball, the officials are almost like gymnastics judges, calling fouls and violations, except they present human gestures and, by convention, demonstrations of the call, instead of holding up numbers as in gymnastics, diving or ice skating. And, then you see the artists - the players - discussing with the critics whether the call was right. Basketball refs are much more of the show than umpires or football officials.

Basketball is a lot more of a statistical game than football, baseball and hockey - there are turning point plays, but there is not one or two encounters which build difficult to surmount leads. So the player to player interaction over long periods, seen in detail, becomes dominant.

Back to the game. If Ben Wallace could make foul shots, the Pistons would be awesome. He still isn't finishing near the basket all that well. He made up for Rip Hamilton, clearly off his game. Larry Brown finally let Carlos Arroyo play. Brown finally noticed that the Piston's problem is more scoring than defense, that neither Billups or Hunter were doing that great a job of keeping Iverson or Tinsley out of the lane, and actually Arroyo did ok with on-ball defense on Tinsley. The 4-5 rotation of R. Wallace, B. Wallace and McDyess seems to spread the fouls, and McDyess making mid range jumpers from the baseline or wing almost takes over the game for the second unit when he's making them.

The weakness remains the absence of a second unit 3.

If the Pistons get to Miami, we can have some optimism. It's hard to imagine Shaq showing on the high pick and roll, or maintaining contact so as to box out whatever 4-5 he's supposed to be guarding. So then it falls to Billups or Prince to defend Wayne Wade. Can be done.