This year’s Lakers-Celtics NBA Finals matchup has Machochip Contributing Editor Alex Ferreyra wondering what ever happened to the tube socks and short shorts he donned as a child to emulate Lakers forward Michael Cooper for Halloween. [Ed. note: I’d pay money to see that picture!] But the maturity of adulthood has him wondering if this look back at a “better” NBA—when the Lakers and Celtics last played for the Championship in 1987—is just nostalgia or, like a deep-fried Twinkie, filled with something more.

Growing up in Los Angeles during the 1980s meant one thing—you followed basketball. The Showtime-era Lakers were the end all, be all of Angeleno sports teams, even if our Dodgers won two World Series and the Rams and Raiders combined for three Super Bowl appearances and one title. The Lakers represented everything that epitomized LA—flashy plays; cocaine binge-style speed up and down the court and movie-star audiences. And never did the team feel more “ours” than in the years when the Lakers and the Celtics met in the NBA Finals, 1984, ‘85 and ‘87 (they won in ‘85 and ‘87, as well as in 80/82 against Philly and ‘88 against Detroit). Perhaps it was because, when you boil it down, the Lakers and the Celtics were diametrical opponents for so much more than their play on the floor—it was east versus west; white versus black; trap defenses versus pizazz. So, logic concludes, I should be psyched that we’re refreshing the page on the most storied rivalry in basketball. Then, why am I all of a sudden getting a case of the get-off-my-lawns?

Because regardless of the recent infusion the game has gotten from new stars like LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul (who I feel is the true savior), the NBA’s product suffered from league mismanagement and shoddy play in the years since the teams last met for a Championship. Quite frankly, it lost fans like me and what I’m left with are the memories of the fast breaks of yore.

It’s amazing considering, at one time, this was the most cutting edge league in the world, leading the way in not only sports, but also in culture. (It was attached at the hip with rap during its concurrent rise in the 80s and early 90s), advertising (remember those Larry Johnson “Grandma” and Michael Jordan/Larry Bird “HORSE” commercials?) and merchandising (one word—Nike). But for a good chunk of the past 20 years, the NBA became a Guy Ritchie movie—heavy on style (commercials, fashion, etc) but low on substance (um, scoring), something it’s been trying to recover from with new rules and styles of play implemented over the past few years. Let’s take a look at what went wrong.

D-FENCE (CLAP, CLAP) SUH-UHKS (CLAP, CLAP)
We make fun of exhibitions like the NBA All-Star game because it’s 10 superstars playing a pick-up game with no defense and all offense. But that’s what we want in basketball more than in any other league because of the way the game was designed to flow (well, when they stopped using peach baskets). Sure, chicks dig the long ball in baseball, but why are no-hitters and perfect games always exalted? That’s one whole team’s worth of ineptitude. It’s because baseball is a game of minute defensive manipulations and strategy. In football, a defensive stop can be just as exciting as a touchdown. Why? Because the game is built on the idea of power clashing with power—the jarring guitar-and-drums tandem of death metal suits it perfectly, while basketball is a Cannonball Adderly or John Coltrane tune—long, winding and unpredictable, but hitting high notes all along the way.

The league lost me—and most of the public—during the 90s because those high notes became muted. Ironically, it was the early-90s Knicks, led by Pat Riley, the former head coach of my beloved Showtime Lakers, that began a devolution of NBA basketball in my eyes that still lingers today with things like repeatedly fouling a bad free throw shooter to put his team at a scoring disadvantage otherwise known as the Hack-A-Shaq.

This Knicks-ball, while beautiful to see—a brutish, defensive-minded strategy that can be summed up by watching then-Knicks forward Anthony Mason trying to continually decapitate the Bulls’ Scottie Pippen—marked itself as the apex of its style of play and alas, led to a league-full of sub-par knock-offs. So Michael Jordan’s Bulls gobbled up all the championships in the 90s because teams decided to play in that Riley/Knicks mold, ignoring the fact that the Knickerbockers couldn’t stop MJ to begin with. Yeah, that got boring real quick.

Is That A Score Or A Dead Man’s Blood Pressure?
According to NBA super-statistician Dave Hollinger who writes now for ESPN but penned this piece for Sports Illustrated, in the 20 years between 1985 and 2005, scoring in the league dropped 17 points. Was it because the league was drained of talent? Of course not. Sure, they didn’t have Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Dominique Wilkins, Alex English or Clyde Drexler (not to mention MJ later) on the hardwood, but they had plenty of scorers in Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal.

No, the points dipped because these Knick-clone defenses stopped fun teams like the 80s-era Nuggets and Mavericks from running like they did back in the days when they’d routinely score 120 points a game. It got so bad that the league banned hand checking, allowing the defender to use his hands to defend, to open up the game. But as this defensive mindset built up, teams like Detroit and San Antonio began using half-court sets that dragged down the game even more. That’s why more people watched “2 Girls, 1 Cup ” than the Spurs-Pistons finals two years ago.

Hey Kid, Wanna See A Foul?
You want to see how it went down back in the day? This clothesline on Kurt Rambis by Kevin McHale (who, coincidentally, is the Minnesota GM who traded Garnett to the Celtics) pretty much sums up how the two teams felt about each other.

Now, we’re left with light taps sending players flying, and announcers not calling it out.

Now, I’m not going to blame the influx of foreign players coming into the league for this rash of flopping—Lord knows we have enough American players doing it, and it pre-dates this era—but it’s gotten to the point that there’s now going to be a flopping fine implemented next season. And when you look back at players like Derek Harper of the Mavericks, Michael Cooper of the Lakers and Vinnie Johnson and Bill Laimbeer of the Pistons, you see a different type of defensive presence. Sure, today’s athletes are better conditioned and more athletic, but there are very few players dunkers currently fear going up on. Back then, there were six on every team.

And don’t even get me started on the disappearance of the traveling call.

STADIUMS versus stadiums
I was watching a replay of the ‘87 Finals and I was amazed at how quaint The Forum and the Boston Garden looked. I remember going to games in LA and thinking how cavernous it was. Of course, I was 10 and anything outside of a two-car garage looked that way. But those old-school stadiums, once they got rocking, could change a game. Sure, you have arenas like Utah’s EnergySolutions Arena where almost 20,000 screaming Mormons still have that effect, but it’s rarer than it was back then. The older arenas didn’t have sloping stadium seating so the architecture could accommodate multiple luxury boxes. No, these places had plenty of real fans sitting on top of each other and it gave the NBA more of a college ball feel, not the antiseptic atmosphere currently created by the suits wearing brand new jerseys over their work button-downs.

And Detroit: Please stop with the raging fireballs during the pre-game intros. You already have one on your team, be content with that.

Mo’ Free Agency, Mo’ Problems
I just can’t get properly hyped up for a series that pits a Lakers team that only has three players remaining from three years ago (Kobe, Luke Walton and Derek Fisher), and a Celtics team whose “Big Three” consists of two superstars, (Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen), who were playing elsewhere last year. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ll be cheering for my team, but it’s not the same as those teams who had players we knew were “ours.” The Lakers had Magic and Big Game James, but we also had Michael Coope and Kurt Rambis, all of who never wore anything but Laker Blue (Purple) and Gold.

Even after the salary cap was introduced in 84/85, there weren’t as many major shifts as we have today. Now there are too many teams creating a diluted talent pool situation that begs for trades to be made to create true contenders. And as much as it pains me to say this, most teams back then were built like the recent Spurs team was assembled—through the draft, one star at a time, with complimentary players added along the way—and the NBA was the better for it. Ugh, get me to a shower.

TMI, man. TMI.
This is going to be blasphemous for me to say, but the internet and 24-hour media has been ruining sports for a long time. Do I want to know that my favorite player’s poor shooting night was caused by being at the club until 4 AM? No, I don’t. But it’s how our information is now disseminated. We can never go back to the days of the newspaper and sports magazines as the only sources for our sense of whether we like an athlete or not. As much as I love sites like ours, I think the pinnacle of sports information gathering is reading the sports section, a magazine and an hour of Sportscenter looping for three hours in the morning. Does that make me a Luddite? I don’t think so. But then again, I’m the guy who wishes the NBA would go back to the era of players’ balls almost coming out of their short shorts, so who am I to say anything?

As much as I enjoyed the first game of the series, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re missing something. Maybe it’s the fact that just as I’m really getting into the game, the interwoven ad for Hancock proclaiming the Heroes of the Game takes me right out of it. Sure ABC has to recoup the money it blew on the rights to televise the Finals, but it says a lot of how we’ve moved into a different era of NBA basketball when Will Smith has to tell me who the great players are instead of players like Magic and Bird, Worthy and McHale just having to show me quietly on the court.