LeBron and Kobe are ruining the NBA

After skipping the entire regular season I started watching the NBA again now that the playoffs are on. I've found that I can probably take another month off from it. LeBron James and Kobe Bryant have sucked all the suspense out of the league.

LeBron's Cleveland Cavaliers swept a suddenly old and feeble Detroit squad, winning every game by at least 11 points. Kobe's LA Lakers lost one game (by two points) to the Utah Jazz, but were never really in trouble. Their four wins also all came by double digits. It's gotten to the point where LeBron and Kobe are almost impossible to guard and it gives the games a boring inevitability.

The Jazz have a 24-year-old kid named Ronnie Brewer who actually looked like he was doing a good job guarding Kobe. He's 6-foot-7, strong and quick, and he generally didn't give up anything easy. But it still seemed like Kobe was just toying with him:

"OK, I'll just dribble over this way for awhile, then cross over and dribble the other way for awhile, now pick it up and give you a couple head-fakes. Wait, you're still here? Alright, guess I'll just rise up over you and hit a 20-foot fadeaway jumper."

No fair, really. Brewer was in his shirt most of the series and Kobe still averaged more than 27 points a game. Something about Kobe rubs me the wrong way. Part of it has to do with that whole "I'll go ahead and commit adultery with some hotel employee I just met and then buy my wife's love back with a giant diamond" thing. Part of it's just that he seems insufferably smug. I'm not a huge fan of his, but I have to admit, the guy is really good.

But LeBron might be even better. He doesn't toy with defenders so much as overpower them. It hardly seems physically possible that a guy that big and strong (6-foot-8, about 265 pounds of mostly muscle) can also be that quick and agile. If you're defending him and he gets one step ahead of you in the lane you've got three choices: let him go, bear-hug him, or get dunked on. Hard. Detroit had no Ronnie Brewer to even make life a little difficult for LeBron. He averaged 32 points, 11 rebounds and 7.5 assists in the opening round of the playoffs, which are numbers that would make Jordan proud.

The individual dominance of Kobe and LeBron is special, but it's not the kind of basketball I like to watch. My favorite basketball team of all-time was the MidAmerica Nazarene University squad that won an NAIA championship in 2007. It was a group of guys who were very skilled, but not athletic enough to take over a game by themselves, so they had to play together, move the ball and trust each other. I vividly remember a play where one of the Pioneers saved the ball under his own basket and it turned into a fastbreak lay-up on the other end after all five players touched it with only one or two dribbles total. That's the kind of basketball that gets my blood flowing, the old "five pistons, firing as one," as they say in the movie Hoosiers.

After just one week of NBA playoffs I'm already tired of watching LeBron and Kobe dominate people one-on-one. There's a reason there aren't a lot of spectators rushing out to watch people play one-on-one: it's boring. Give me some good old-fashioned NAIA ball any day.

Of course, at this rate LeBron and the Cavs and Kobe and the Lakers are on a collision course to meet in the Finals. Now that could be fun, as long as they guard each other (which probably won't happen very often, because they need to conserve energy for the offensive end). My prediction? Cavaliers top the Lakers in seven games. It's LeBron's time, this year and for the foreseeable future. Which means more boring seasons ahead.