Farewell to the Association

Dear NBA,
This has been a long time coming, and no doubt will not come as a complete surprise, but I am handing in my resignation as a fan. I am one of perhaps several Milwaukee Bucks fans, and it does pain me to turn my back on a team I have been loyal to my whole life, but I can hardly continue my allegiance to a team when the entire league is in this state. I confess that I have not always been the best fan, I have not always lived in NBA towns where I could take in a game, and I have never kept up with the carousel of jersies you have tried to inspire me to buy. I never drank the Michael Jordan kool-aid, er gatorade, and I do not have a lineage of excellent teams to pull from. My two clearest memories of the NBA are watching the Bucks beat the Bullets when I was ten, and watching Allen Iverson flop his way to victory over my Bucks in 2001. I live in San Antonio now, a city who loves their team, and have been to four games in a year and a half. I do not get excited by dancing, loud bad music, and all the things that are used to try to make me forget I am at a basketball game. I have three children, none of whom have been to a game, because even with the cheap tickets, my family would have to pay more to go to one Spurs game then we pay for a month of water and electricity.
To be fair though, my dying of love of the NBA is not all my fault, I really have tried. It is not that I dislike basketball, its simply that NBA basketball doesn't count anymore. Its like watching a high school dance where the pre-determined prettiest kids have the most fun, while the rest of us get harrassed by self-important, delusion filled chaperones who think the dance is about them. The NBA is not even the best place to teach my kids how basketaball ought to be played. How is that a league can have the unquestioned, best athletes on the planet and still be such a drudgery to watch? The answer is that basketball players don't care. 90% of every regular season games are about going through the motions. Playoff teams lose 2-3 games a series becuase they simply do not have "the focus" that night. If your teams are able to play half-heartedly, lazy, unfocused basketball, then certainly that is the sort of fan I ought be.
In some respects it is tough to blame the players for a lack of effort, especially when that effort is so rarely rewarded, and is often punished. The way your games are officiated disgust me on a regular basis. If I am ever thinking to myself, "My day has gone well, and I really have not gotten angry at incompetence yet..." I can easily rectify the situation by simply turning on an NBA game. I am certain that officials have been a problem with the NBA for as long as the NBA has existed, as they often are in other sports, but the officiating has become so over the top absurd its hard to take it seriously. But you do take it seriously right? They change the outcome of every game they referee, and to say they do not is to question why you have them in the first place. Referees exist to effect the game, if not, then get rid of them. You place referees in a game to control the flow, make sure the game is played with integrity and the players are safe. Which of those three have your officials been any good at in the last 15 years? There is no other sport that has its integrity challenged as often as the NBA. You are sketchier than soccer and boxing! How does this not bother you? I am also very tired of hearing that this is part of the nature of the game, because this is simply fundamentally untrue of the rest of basketball. While every level of basketball is filled with bad officiating, the NBA is the only one whose motives are consistently called into question, by the people who play and coach the game. Everyone knows that teams like Duke get a ton of calls during any given game, but no one believes (even remotely) that the NCAA is fixed, or is trying to produce certain outcomes.
When its all said and done, I am resigning as fan for the same reason I stopped watching wrestling when I was 12- I already knew the outcome, I could tell the wrestlers did not control their own fate, and the spectacle wasn't better than the sport itself. I would say that I would miss you, but I am just not sure that's true, it would be like me missing a cavity I had eating away at me. No doubt you will go on with life and not miss me at all, we will both see other people, and soon I will forget why I ever liked you in the first place. For now, good luck with the rest of your playoffs, not that you need it (wink). For my part, I think I will enjoy the time away.