Baffoe: Wake Up -- Of Course The NBA Is Fixed
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) If you watch the NBA playoffs (sometimes and without really paying any attention to the regular season), you know darn well that the fix is in. It's all a canard to lure you into watching games that you already have a cemented narrative for. We're all willing pawns in a game that laughs at us. Oh, that evil David Stern and his puppet mastery.
This was no more evident than in Tuesday night's Cleveland Cavaliers victory over the Chicago Bulls.
You listening to that man, NBA? Taj Gibson was ejected — he's at least one of the 10 or 12 most important players in the series. POOF! Gone. The Bulls had the Cavs right where they wanted them — Cleveland up by 10 in the fourth quarter — and the refs snatch it all away.
But it's to be expected when the love that dare not speak its name between referee Joey Crawford and LeBron James is in full bloom on national television. Oh, yes, this is a tabloid-worthy affair that the NBA's Orwellian media management suppresses, in case you weren't aware.
Some will say this conspiracy theory was disproved several times by rational people with actual easily researched numbers, but look at this site that does so (and even notes that James has fouled out of two playoff games reffed by Crawford as part of his mountain of career games fouled out — four). Notice anything suspicious? Yep, James in the top right corner staring you down like a chump for believing factual data.
Consider the way more obvious stuff that plays to your heart rather than your head (sports is about heart anyway, remember).
Cleveland sports draw eyes to TVs. You can't go through football season without big network Browns bias being shoved down your throat. Sorry we can't all have favorite teams that are a helicopter in telephone wires of bad drafting and substance abuse. And by the end of each summer, you can always name at least three guys on the Indians.
That town gets almost half the viewers as Chicago, and there's nothing that TV money loves more than mid-markets. Because the NBA is a hipster's league. Have you seen how guys like James Harden and Russell Westbrook dress? Even Jimmy Butler sometimes looks like he got lost on the way to playing the dulcimer on a Bon Iver album. This isn't the good ol' days when players represented a more inclusive, hip-hop style of dress that scared white adults.
Being hipster is then exactly why the NBA would allow the San Antonio Spurs to have as long of a run of success as they have. Real NBA fans today want teams that are bland as hell and win without style points in a city nobody has ever been to. The Spurs are like jazz, man — you have to appreciate the plays they're not making. Hell, the Cleveland's Matthew Dellavedova got the benefit of that altercation with Gibson as a silent nod to his barista illuminati. And you can'ttell me that attempt by Dellavedova at a leg lock on Gibson wasn't a shoutout to a certain brotherhood in the fix game.
So in favor of not-big markets, the games are rigged against the Bulls. Then coach Tom Thibodeau can be sooner kicked out of Chicago and go join that new band only the cool kids have heard of, the New Orleans Pelicans featuring Unibrow.
But make this series go seven games, of course, a la that 21-point Game 5 win the Houston Rockets were handed over the Los Angeles Clippers on Tuesday night after you went to bed. Wake up, people. Literally and not literally. It's all on the table in front of you if you just pay attention. Take Game 3 and the inbound right before Derrick Rose's convenient buzzer-beater.
That smartphone stopwatch is pressed at least 0.5 seconds before Mike Dunleavy touches the ball, and the ball leaves his hands with the phone clock is a shade past 6 seconds. So it took Dunleavy tenths of a second past 5, counted off in another human being's head in an intense situation, to inbound that game-winner. And yet people want to say there isn't an invisible hand manipulating the glove of this series? C'mon.
Then Game 4 rolls around, and we just so happen to have late-inning drama on our hands. James is conveniently banged up from — plot twist! — running into Rose. Cleveland has no timeouts, yet conveniently the refs give them a ghost one to draw up a play that James overrules. He then hits a corner fadeaway three-pointer that nine out of 10 times doesn't go in.
Most alarming about this is that Thibodeau is evidently in on the fix.
Be it because Big Brother is forcibly pulling his strings or he's tanking to spite the front office that he hates, I'll let you speculate.
Game 5 was then much of the same. The refs were making the Bulls shooting percentage hover in the 30s, Vaseline was on Joakim Noah's hands, etc. Rose is banged up in a return to narrative. James was totally allowed to play well in a crucial second half.
It's all part of a master plan to kill the Old NBA and press a new regime of basketball that you only watch starting in the spring.
It's almost as if the league wants you to forget Michael Jordan ever existed or is still involved in basketball. (He owns the Charlotte Hornets — look it up.)
Stay woke.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
