What follows is part one of a two-part series.  Up first, the NBA.  Coming tomorrow, "College Hoops are Cool As Well." 

I love basketball. I wouldn’t be writing for this website if that weren’t the case. A three on two fast break piloted by Jason Kidd or Steve Nash is poetry in motion. The only game with a goal suspended in mid-air, it encourages players to take to the heavens and reach, as it were, for the sky. It is a beautiful game, I would argue the only American major sport that can claim as much.

There are two camps of basketball fans, though: ones who swear allegiance to the National Basketball Association (a steadily dwindling population) and those who go for the "purity" of the college game. I have been given untold amounts of grief the past four or five years for being in the former camp. I do love college basketball as well, and Go Marquette while we’re here, but for me the NBA is basketball in its truest, most athletic and awe-inspiring form.

Lots of people roll their eyes when I say this, demanding to know how I can continue to defend the Association in light of all the recent bad press, a league full of players who supposedly don’t know how to play. So, for my first article for hoopswriters.com, I figured I’d go ahead and make a list of reasons, off the top of my head, for why I feel the way I do.

You agree, congratulations. If you don’t, salutations. Feel free to say your piece. As for me, here goes:

- Carmleo Anthony’s jump shot

- The Phoenix Suns’ fast break

- The fact that players in the NBA actually have to be good shooters to make three pointers

- The combined potential of Kevin Durant and Jeff Green on the same team at this early stage of their careers

- Having gone to Duke means next to nothing in the NBA; you still have to hack it with the big boys, no matter how much of a man Coach K, sponsored by American Express, made you

- Watching a game and seeing those long-forgotten former collegiate stalwarts still hustling for a paycheck

- The Spurs’ professionalism on a game-to-game basis

- What Rudy Gay is capable of if he ever puts it all together

- Keeping up to date on the draft and then seeing who makes it and who doesn’t

- Because of the NBA, a 7’5" Chinese guy has entered and enriched all of our lives

- Golden State vs. Dallas, 2007 NBA Playoffs

- The way the twenty-four second clock pushes the pace and swings the momentum

- Hubie Brown and no Tim McCarver

- Dwyane Wade

- Allen Iverson getting out of Philly, given to a team with other good players and a legit shot at winning something

- ABA highlights and stories

- Big trades, both in-season and out, still happen every year

This is just a short list, by no means meant to be the complete summation of my feelings on the subject. I plan to write quite a few articles about college basketball as well, since I basically see the two versions of hoops as 1a and 1b. I anticipated some of your objections to the above list, however, so allow me a moment to deal with them:

- The NBA is a shadier game than college, full of hucksters and mediocre people: talk to Bob Huggins or John Calipari about this one, or better yet look at their recruiting practices and graduation rates

- Tim Donaghy proved that all refs have an agenda, and the game is rotten from the inside: some of those strike zones in the baseball playoffs this year best resembled modern art. Just watch what Herr Stern does if anyone else gets caught pulling a Donaghy

- No one knows how to play anymore: You can count on both hands, with fingers to spare, the number of great quarterbacks currently running NFL offenses. Bad teams with bad players don’t win games in any sport, and there’s a reason the Spurs have been so dominant for so long

- The playoffs are a boring slog: How many college football bowl games were there last year, and how long did the Gators and Buckeyes have to wait as a result to play in a championship game capping no playoffs whatsoever?

The National Basketball Association is certainly not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. No big-time American sport is. Anytime so many personalities and so much money and the ridiculous egos that result are all involved, mass craziness ensues. Several players are babies, entitlement is all over the place, and the lack of an established minor league system (though one is developing quite nicely and producing decent rotation guys as a result) to deal with rapid expansion plunged the league into a post-Jordan funk that they are just now starting to come out of.

But the game itself remains as beautiful as it ever was. Opening week proved as much, and with the Celtics’ maneuvers going a long way towards slowly but surely evening out the talent gap between the Eastern and Western conferences, we could be on the verge of one of the more entertaining seasons in memory. Just as soon as D-Wade gets healthy.

My point is, whatever is driving this ambivalence for the pro game, this overwhelming preference of college basketball over pro has little to do with the ACTUAL GAME itself. The NCAA tournament is the most amazing playoff system currently in place in American sport. But that’s a three-week period at the very end of the season.

Would you honestly rather watch twenty-year-olds of dubious academic distinction chuck eighteen-foot threes over zone defenses for the college that hypocritically lets them represent the university, or professionals run the break and defy gravity in a fast-paced atmosphere where the only thing that matters is whether or not you can play the game?

That said, here’s to a good season, everybody. Cheers.