Photo Credit: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

Photo Credit: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

Crosswalk

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It seems like every year come springtime all anyone is talking about is that the Stanley Cup Playoffs are the best in sports, filled with their “drama” and “intensity.” Maybe that is just a defense mechanism for hockey people who still want to believe that hockey can, for a couple of months, be more popular than basketball (similar to ESPN’s Buster Olney writing Twitter diatribes on how baseball is not boring), but the NBA Playoffs are significantly better. Does anyone outside of Chicago or Tampa Bay care who wins this year’s Stanley Cup Finals? Are you going to tune in to watch Patrick Kane and Steven Stamkos skate up and down the ice and maybe score a goal or make one nice pass in two and a half hours? I say you won’t, and Greg Wyshynski from Yahoo! can back me up. But will you watch LeBron James try to overmatch Draymond Green, Steph Curry and Kyrie Irving go head to head, and Klay Thompson and J.R. Smith rain threes? Hell yeah, you will.

I had a friend tell me last year that the NHL playoffs are great because the results are so unpredictable, this after the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs clinched their respective conferences to set up a rematch of one of the greatest series in sports history from the year before. But that is what makes the NBA Playoffs so much fun. You get some of the best to ever play going head-to-head year after year. Think about the rivalries that have developed just in recent years. There has been LeBron vs. the Celtics,  in which the Celtics beat the top seeded Cavs in 2010 and force James’s exit from Cleveland. Then LeBron, with Miami, beats the Celtics and their Big 4 of Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, and Kevin Garnett the next two years, including an epic 2012 conference final in which LeBron wins Game 6 in Boston and Game 7 en route to his first NBA Championship. The rivalry festered even more, as that series was the last in Boston for Garnett, Pierce, and Ray Allen, who fled to join James in Miami and helped him win back-to-back titles with this season-saving shot in Game 6 of the Finals. Which led to another rivalry. I mean, how does this 2014 opening montage not give you the biggest goosebumps ever? It gets personal in the NBA. You don’t get that with hockey.

Second, the NBA Playoffs allow the fan to watch superstars come to life and age before our eyes. Think about the awesome first round series in 2010 between the upstart Oklahoma City Thunder, featuring a third year Kevin Durant and second year Russell Westbrook taking the reigning NBA Champions and 1-seed Los Angeles Lakers to 6 games. Think about Allen Iverson singlehandedly willing the 76ers to the NBA Finals in 2001 and winning an overtime Game 1 in LA, scoring 48 points against Shaq and Kobe. Think about last year, when Kawhi Leonard outplayed the best basketball player on the planet to enact revenge on the Heat and win Finals MVP. Think about Evan Turner’s up and under in Game 2 in Boston in 2012…well, actually don’t think about that one. But you get the point! Hockey doesn’t allow for as much as that.

Finally, the NBA Playoffs are better because of the game itself. In hockey, you could turn off the game for a half hour and really not miss anything. There is no progression of scoring, i.e. being in the red zone or having bases loaded. Just because you missed an off-target point slapshot from a third line defenseman you have never heard of – and won’t hear from again – doesn’t mean you missed anything. But in basketball, things are happening all the time. Miss a quarter, and you may have just missed half of the SportsCenter Top 10. You can walk away from a hockey game and think, man, I came to see Claude Giroux and the Flyers got shutout. In basketball, you know the stars will come out to play.

So hockey fans you can take your no name goalie from Finland who suddenly gets hot, and his team is in the Cup Finals despite having the sixth best record in the west. You can take your sudden death overtimes. I’ll take LeBron James going back to Cleveland and bringing them to the Finals. I’ll take Steph Curry knocking down jumpers from miles behind the arc. I’ll take the greats going mano y mano any day. That is what I call drama

[pvc_paratheme ]