Bruce Arthur, National Post

Published: Saturday, June 16, 2007

CLEVELAND -Your honour, we submit this petition as fans of the game of basketball, and the National Basketball Association. We take no joy in it, which, as you will see from our case, is a trend.

But we ask you today to strike the 2006-07 NBA season from the record, as it was among the most disastrous in the 61-year history of the Association. It was a debacle, beginning to end. The San Antonio Spurs will be allowed to keep their championship, and certain isolated highlights will be kept for posterity. But the rest, we ask you to consign to obscurity. The game deserves no less. Here is our case.

The NBA, like any 61-year-old, has had good years and bad years. This was like the year you default on your mortgage and break your hip.

It actually began a week after the conclusion of the 2006 Finals, when the NBA announced that it was changing the only significant piece of equipment the league uses. The new composite ball, pictured, was heralded by NBA vice-president Stu Jackson as “a better product.” (If there is a more reliably wrong person in sports than Stu, they have yet to be discovered.)

Except nobody at the NBA asked the players. The ball’s test-drive consisted of ex-players and current TV analysts Reggie Miller, Steve Kerr and Mark Jackson fooling around with the ball for 90 minutes in an empty Madison Square Garden. As players, Miller and Kerr barely ever dribbled.

Shockingly, current players hammered the ball for not bouncing properly and for causing tiny cuts in their fingers. Shaquille O’Neal summed it up by telling Time magazine that “Playing with the new ball is like going to a gentlemen’s club, seeing an exotic dancer and then going home and playing with a plastic blow-up doll.”

They did change it back in mid-season. But that was the NBA in a nutshell this season.

Speaking of strippers ? The starting gun, as it were, was fired by Indiana Stephen Jackson, in the parking lot of a strip club during training camp. The actual season began with the Miami Heat opening a disgraceful season as undefending champions by getting nipped by 42 at home to Chicago on the night they raised the banner and received their championship rings.

Shaq would eventually undergo knee surgery, coach Pat Riley would take a couple months off to have surgeries of his own — he aggravated his knee and hip problems by kicking a door in frustration — and the Heat would be quietly swept in the first round, again at the hands of Chicago.

The league’s other short-lived change was a crackdown on player complaints. After a spate of early technicals and a ridiculous threat from the players’ union to sue over the move, the standards relaxed by the second month of the season, until respected ref Joey Crawford tossed San Antonio’s Tim Duncan from a game late in the season for laughing on the bench. Crawford was suspended for the rest of the season, and may never return. The bitching and whining, meanwhile, never really left.

The season itself was marred by injuries to stars and rising players such as Yao Ming, Michael Redd, Paul Pierce, Dwyane Wade, Shaq, Ray Allen, RashardLewis, Joe Johnson, Gilbert Arenas, Caron Butler, Kenyon Martin, Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom, Shawn Livingston, Andrea Bargnani Tony Allen, Jermaine O’Neal, Emeka Okafor, Nene, Richard Jefferson, Jason Richardson, and most of the Milwaukee Bucks and New Orleans Hornets. That is a partial list.

Then there was the effort. The league’s future flagship superstar, LeBron James, essentially coasted on his vast talent for the first four months of the season and only turned it on after the All-Star break. That weekend was a debacle in itself, as Las Vegas was overrun by criminals — at least in the minds of some — creating a controversy over race and the NBA and hip-hop culture. Oh, and the game itself resembled a 48-minute hangover.

Even the one so-called brawl was subpar, as one of the league’s other bright lights, Carmelo Anthony, was suspended for 15 games for a silly slap at the Knicks’ Mardy Collins at Madison Square Garden, after which he backpedalled 70 feet to avoid repercussions.

As the season wore down, the tanking epidemic began, as teams tried to position themselves for a shot at draft prizes Greg Oden and Kevin Durant. Teams such as Boston, Milwaukee and Memphis basically pulled the chute on the season, culminating when Boston left its starters on the bench while blowing an 18-point lead, at home, to the Charlotte Bobcats, who finished with 33 wins. Afterwards, Boston coach Doc Rivers said “I was not throwing the game or anything like that.” Doc got a contract extension, at US$5-million per year, last week. And Boston didn’t win the lottery.  Sure, Toronto had a dream season, but the league’s best team, the 67-win Dallas Mavericks, flamed out in the first round to the thrilling Golden State Warriors. The rookie class was dishwater weak. The MVP award went to Dallas’s Dirk Nowitzki, who shot .383 in his team’s upset loss to Golden State, and who gravely accepted the award a week after his humiliating exit from the post-season.

The playoffs, so scintillating last season, were the final flaming tire on the whole stinking pile. As they began, an academic study claimed subtle but measurable racial bias in NBA refereeing, which the league had to vigorously dispute. Then came the suspensions.

What could have been an all-time second-round series, between the two best teams left standing was instead decided, essentially, by a dirty foul from the Spurs’ Robert Horry on Phoenix’s Steve Nash. The ensuing altercation never even came close to being a fight, and Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw never came close to trouble. But the league went by the letter of the law, suspending them for Game 5 of the second-round series with San Antonio. With that, the league ruined the series, and put an asterisk on the playoffs.

Appropriately, The Finals between Cleveland and San Antonio ended with an unwatchable defensive struggle, including the second-lowest scoring Finals game of the shot-clock era, and the lowest TV ratings since they started measuring them. Sure, there was LeBron’s iconic 48-point game in the conference finals, and there was the lightning in a bottle that was Golden State. And that was it.

Maybe we should have known it was not the NBA’s year when one of the league’s few true titans, Red Auerbach, died before the season began at the age of 89. The half-serious theory said he wanted to avoid the introduction of the Boston Celtics dance team, which was a move he never allowed during his 57-year association with the team.

Or maybe old Red, the smartest guy in the room right to the end, was just getting out while the getting was good.

So there you have it, your honour — a blight on basketball, a roundball wreck. How could it be worth remembering? With your help, your honour, we will all forget together, and we will never speak of this again.

barthur@nationalpost.com

© National Post 2007