The athletes are too big. How big? Between 1963 and 1983, the average NBA player grew an inch, from 6’6” to 6’7”, but his weight held steady at 211 pounds. Since then, along with yet another half-inch of height, he has packed on fourteen pounds of muscle. The change shows. It’s become startling to see footage of those spindly fellows from 1983, with their slender shoulders, their vulnerable thighs poking out of their too-short shorts. Time-warped into our world, and denied supplemental nutrition, a few might be able to make it in the modern NBA; but fewer could survive the shirts-off inspection of a reality dating show.
This bulking-up process has transformed the game. In fact, it threatens to render the game obsolete. The artistry of basketball stems from the interdependence of its parts; the players must think and move as one, not just for violent bursts, as in football, but for longer, unscriptable lengths of time. A formal system is in place—the rules, plus the team’s offensive or defensive scheme—but within the parameters of that system each player has the freedom to act according to what he sees, and to what he intuits about what he cannot see. If he knows his teammates well, and anticipates their movements correctly, the result is harmonious and often beautiful.
In the modern NBA, however, with a metric ton of humanity on the floor, there no longer remains room for five players to move. The isolation play, the two-man game, occasionally the triangle: formally speaking, these are the best the NBA can offer. Forget the fact that the basket is too low, no longer commensurate with our capacity for jumping; there’s not even space on the court to accommodate all the bodies. For precisely this reason, many serious fans have turned their attention to the college or even the high school game. Meanwhile the NBA is coming to resemble bloated Hollywood, trotting out its stars more as icons of human potential than in celebration of their actual performance. We like to think of our professional sports leagues as permanent institutions—hence all the talk about athletes and teams making “history”—but a sport with no sense of proportion, already outgrown by its own best players, is probably in decline.1
Baseball faces a similar dilemma in the Creatine Period. (Only football, of the major American sports, seems immune so far. The field has proved wide enough to accommodate the advent, not to mention the ass, of the 400-pound noseguard, and the 500-pounder will probably fit as well.) The average baseball all-star has squatted, curled, and juiced his way from 199 to 211 pounds in the past ten years, and the effects on the game have been profound. Home runs are being hit at unprecedented rates, not just by Barry Bonds, but by the little guys as well. No position in sports has changed more in twenty years than second base, former refuge of the puny intellectual (Marty Barrett), now usurped by sluggers like Jeff Kent.
The numbers for the NHL are even worse: since 1973, the average player has added 2 inches and 20 pounds. The rinks remain the same size, however, producing the spectacle of tiny Euro-forwards squirreling around giant defensemen, hoping the puck squirts out from between their oak-like legs. The forwards are then faced with the unregulated pads of giant goaltenders. The result is a scoring drought that resembles scientific models of the post-global-warmed future. ↩
