Complaining about NBA Christmas Day games is a decades-long holiday tradition for players, coaches and the media.
“It’s just not right,” the Knicks’ Chris Dudley said of Christmas Day games in 1999 (Albany Times Union, 12/25/99). The Spurs’ David Robinson said almost the exact same thing seven years earlier: “I don’t think it’s right. … We play every day at every time and I don’t think there is a reason to play on Christmas” (The Financial Post, 12/24/92).
“We hate it,” then-Laker Robert Horry said in 2002 (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12/25/02). “I don’t think anybody should play on Christmas,” said the Pacers’ Sam Perkins in 2000 (San Diego Union-Tribune, 12/25/00). Orlando’s Jeff Turner thought it was “unfair” in 1993 (St. Petersburg Times, 12/25/93). Kevin McHale, Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer were fined in the 1980s and 1990s for missing team flights on Christmas Eve so they could spend the time with their families. (Associated Press, 12/24/92).
NBA players and coaches have been complaining about working on Christmas for at least 20 years, and the media has been reporting on it as if its a new and/or relevant phenomenon for that same period of time. The latest complaints by the Lakers’ Phil Jackson have reignited one of the most repetitive, stale stories in sports.
“Now, I see they have like six games on Christmas,” Jackson said earlier this week, “It’s like Christian holidays don’t mean anything to [the NBA] anymore. You just go out and play and entertain [on] TV. It’s really weird” (nydailynews.com, 12/22/10).
In addition to dropping religion in there for no good reason — the NBA plays a full slate of games every single night of Hanukkah and has for decades — Jackson’s statement gives the indication that things were somehow different in previous years.
The NBA has played Christmas Day games almost every single year of the league’s existence. They played three games in 1947, five games in 1948, seven in 1949. Over the course of Jackson’s playing career (1967-80), the NBA played between two and seven Christmas Day games each year. In fact, Jackson’s team (the Knicks from 1967-78 and the Nets from 1978-80) played on Christmas in eleven of the twelve seasons he was in the league.
In other words, ‘anymore’ seems like a strange word to use. They were playing Christmas Day games when Jackson was a toddler.
Jackson’s comments touched off a flurry of articles that could have been written twenty years ago, and merely updated by clicking ‘find and replace’. Jackson’s gripes are essentially the same as Stan Van Gundy‘s last year, Rudy Tomjanovich‘s in 1995, Rick Adelman‘s in 1990. And yet his complaints, like those in previous years, are treated as news, debated not just in the sports world, but even on CNN.
If there are any silver linings to the talk of an NBA work stoppage, at least these repetitive stories might be put on ice next year. Then again, the media could just dust off one of those 1998 articles about how happy players were to finally spend time at home for Christmas. “The one advantage [of the lockout] is, if there’s any, is that you get to be home for the holidays,” Chris Webber said in ’98 (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/25/98). Replace ‘Chris Webber’ with ‘Chris Bosh‘, and you may very well have a quote for a December 2011 column.
