And Now It Is Time To Forget The NBA’s Regular Season

Finally, after 25 weeks, 1,230 games, 59-some-odd-thousand minutes and 280,000-ish points scored, the NBA's Preseason In Hell is over. Whatever awaits in the NBA playoffs, the world can at least approach it with the comforting knowledge that it won't have to look at or think about the Utah Jazz again until October. Or, for that matter, any of the NBA's other Tankin' Ten, who managed to elevate the art of insulting our collective intelligence to an almost unprecedented degree over the NBA's grueling 82-game prelude to the good stuff. For example, five of those tankers managed to rank among the 17 worst teams for defensive care in league history, and not because they couldn't master the arcana of the high pick and roll. Washington lost 25 of its last 26 games by an average margin of 16 points per game, an astonishing counter-achievement in its own right but also only part of the most aggressively unsatisfying anti-season in modern basketball history. The fact that every team that could tank did so with such unnerving gusto, the high accumulation of injuries both real and contrived, the administrative ruination of postseason awards, the Clippers laughing at the salary cap and getting away with it, and the general sense of misery brought on by reading too much about the Los Angeles Lakers helped make it all a thoroughly dreadful slog. We make the same sense out of Doug Christie keeping his job in Sacramento that we do of Doc Rivers being fired in Milwaukee, which is none at all. The bottom of the league hijacked the top and has held a whoopie cushion to its ear from Christmas Day to now.