Phil jackson on the current state of the NBA. I agree the most with the flow of the game being ruined
In person, Jackson’s voice is low and growly — a result of two elbows he took to the throat in his playing days. In conversation he comes off as both surprisingly shy and sometimes almost recklessly candid. He has based his entire career on the notion of basketball as a spiritual enterprise, and as such he considers the N.B.A. to be something like the Catholic Church: a powerful but flawed institution charged with administering that spirituality to the masses. Jackson is a born reformer, and when I asked him how the league might be changed to bring it more in line with the purity of the game, he — predictably — had lots to say.
The court should be lengthened and widened, he said, to accommodate the athleticism of today’s players. Timeouts and commercial breaks need to be cut back to restore the sport’s natural flow. Refereeing is a mess: they should stand closer to the action the way they did in the old days, so they can see the fouls better. They also need to find a way to control illegal contact: defensive players holding, offensive players pushing off (“LeBron James,” Jackson said, “has the best ‘off’ arm in the game”). James Naismith, Jackson said, invented basketball as “anti-football,” a sport in which brute violence would be replaced by free-moving fluidity, but excessive contact has destroyed that fluidity. Also, today’s players are allowed to cheat when they dribble: they routinely put their hand under the ball, which gives them far too much control. As a result, the game has become much more dependent on dribbling, less on motion and passing and teamwork. Over all, Jackson thinks the N.B.A. should aspire to be more like soccer, which has managed to remain a global juggernaut without corrupting the sanctity of its game. (“Although their jerseys are a mess,” he admits.)
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