Back when I watched basketball

When I was a young, I loved basketball. We're talking Larry Bird, Danny Hale, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar era basketball here. The 80's to early 90's.

I remember my enjoyment of the sport drifting away about the same time Jordan began to fade. He was the best, of course, and had a good team to play around him. They played as a team, not as a group of individuals just supporting Jordan.

A few years after I lost interest the NBA seemed to fall on bad times. Players started to get a sense of entitlement, and a slew of arrests and other pretty rotten stuff was floating around (an era when our Trailblazers were rechristened the "Jailblazers"

It all culminated with the Kobe Bryant Colorado incident (no matter what really happened in that hotel room, we can know for sure that Bryant is a pretty terrible person), and at that point the league seemed say "Okay, out of the Pool."

A lot of the bad off court things started to dry up, but there was still the one man team problem, with Bryant again being the poster boy for the way he forced Shaquille O'Neal off the Lakers. To many teams are either dominated by these huge egos (Bryant & the Lakers), or the team it's self puts all it's eggs in one basket and doesn't give their top player enough (LeBron James & the Cavs).

Reenter the Celtics

They built a team of three top guns: while no one of them as good as Kobe Bryant, as a unit they were tough to beat. The remaining starters and the bench were no cut rate rejects, they trained and acquired their way to a top notch team. They had unity, they had ubuntu, and now that have a shiny trophy, rings, and have reawakened the interest in the game for at least one former fan.

let's see what next year brings.

Go Celtics (and, okay, I'll root for the 'Blazers as well)