What follows is a meandering look at the ‘09-10 NBA season. For more concise, team-by-team analysis, you should really check out our NBA Previews section, comprised of shockingly thorough previews from each of our network bloggers, and wonderfully organized by Jeff Clark of Celtics Blog. There’s a ton of good stuff over there, so really, check it out.
Previewing the 2009-10 NBA Season (With a Little Help From Tracy Morgan, Of Course)
The sports world and pop culture really aren’t that different. Neither is politics, for that matter. In each case, you typically hear a lot of clichés from all the relevant parties, and most of the characters you encounter have shades of stars that have come before them. Each world relies on the action—games, movies, elections—to keep our attention, because absent that, the characters involved really aren’t particularly interesting.
Which is part of what makes someone like Tracy Morgan so fantastic. In a world full of banal celebrities, he’s sort of the antithesis to the archetype. And awesome. He at once exacerbates the stereotypes of what a celebrity is, and destroys the clichés what they’re supposed to be. But rather than blather on about Tracy Morgan and his place in the pop culture universe, I’ll just say that no other celebrity, to me, encapsulates the NBA so perfectly.
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