The officials are just symptomatic of the larger problem of the NBA game generally: team play — which is really where the beauty of the game emerges — has for years been sublimated to talent. Michael Jordan in effect ruined the NBA, so that now all that fans root for is that somehow their team can draft or somehow nab the league’s next great talent. Defense is an afterthought in the NBA, and the pick-and-roll is about as team-oriented as you get on offense. The college game — though its players are inferior — is far superior from the standpoint of the game itself.

But the NBA's biggest problem is that it is based on a hoax: It pretends that its games are real competitions honestly officiated, but NBA officials openly control the pace and flow of games and often their outcomes. It also pretends that it's part of the communities in which teams play, but it's willing to rip teams out of those communities if they aren't willing to spend taxpayer dollars lining the pockets of owners. All of that is deeply corrupt.

I thought the NBA's denial to Van Susteren was interesting: It simply insisted that there was no criminal wrongdoing in its operations.

Which is probably true. But there's nothing criminal about the WWF or other wrestling operations, either. That doesn't alter the fact that they're essentially scams, though.

And the NBA these days resembles nothing so much as a hyped-up wrestling scam that still likes to clothe itself in the mantle of being an objectively officiated sport. It's not. And anyone who's watched the game much in the past 20 years can tell you that.

It's tragic, really: Basketball players are the greatest pure all-around athletes in the world, IMHO. And the best of them play in the NBA -- which has become a dysfunctional carnival scam, predicated on raking in as much dough as possible, while the game itself is just a sideshow, a platform for promoting media stars.

Full disclosure: I was a lifetime Sonics fan. And still bitter about it.