Basketball vs. Hockey: A Tribute (of sorts)
(It’s a shame that I even have to point this out, but I know somewhere there is somebody who will read this and say “Hey! This is just a rip-off of the George Carlin routine about the differences between baseball and football!” Relax, fuckface. We in the writing profession don’t call it “ripping off;” we refer to it as a “tribute.” Mostly because we are intellectually dishonest.)
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I’d like to talk a little about Basketball and Hockey. These sports differ in a lot of little ways. For instance, while they are both played in the fall, basketball is played on a court made of wood while hockey is played on a rink of ice. Points are scored by getting the object of everyone’s attention, be it ball or puck, to go into a net. In basketball, it comes out the other end and play continues. In hockey, the game stops to give everyone the opportunity to reflect on what a shitty goalie they have.
Basketball is played by black people. Hockey is played by Canadians. Black Canadians, all ten of them, spend their lives conflicted. Hockey has a lot of fights, which is odd given what pussies Canadians are. One day, they will realize that they can use the sticks they carry around as weapons and murders will become commonplace in hockey.
Speaking of murdering people, you’d assume that there would be a lot of murders involved in a sport played by black people but surprisingly there aren’t. Occasionally one of the players will attack someone in the stands, but other than that, violence is limited to a little pushing and shoving. Experiments conducted by Nike and Reebok involving inner city kids wearing basketball uniforms in order to reduce assaults have to date proved unsuccessful.
At the professional level, basketball has four quarters. At the college ranks and below, the game is divided into two halves. Hockey on the other hand is the only sport that is divided into three periods. Nobody knows why. At first I assumed that it was because of the metric system but when I did some research, I found out that our quarters could be converted to centiquarters and our halves into millihalves with very little difficulty. Turns out that Canadians just like to make everything difficult for everyone.
Like you, if I had to guess, I would have guessed that if a game ended all tied up, the black sport would be the one decided by a shootout but what do you know… it’s hockey. Go figure.
Basketball can carry on about the home team’s “sixth man” all they want, but I’ve yet to see a basketball court littered with dead and dying octopi. Perhaps it’s because when a basketball player commits a foul, their opponent is given the opportunity to shoot foul shots but in hockey they send the offender to a special glass box where he is forced to sit in front of everyone and think about what he has done. The cameras catching every second of his delicious metaphysical squirming (I saw HDMS open for Counting Crows back in 2003). If there could be one thing that I’d like to see transferred from hockey to basketball, it would be the penalty box. Except maybe make it a penalty cage with thick iron bars. Like the kind you see in backyard wrestling videos.
And to balance things out, hockey could change the rules and make their goalies wear only short shorts and a headband. Maybe wristbands… but only if they match the headband.
It’s at this juncture that a wit like George Carlin would come up with some pithy observations about dribbling and checking but I can’t seem to fight the urge to point out that female hockey fans rarely have a full set of teeth. It’s completely clouding the pithy part of my brain. I’d like to be pithy, believe me, but I’m so worried that I will somehow forget to point out that females who enjoy hockey are a rough bunch, that I can’t concentrate. If you're a female hockey fan and you're offended by this, at least take a moment to admit that your first thought was that you wanted to pull my shirt over my head and smash my face into a pulp.
See? See why I'm distracted?
It’s really a shame because I had some hilarious stuff about how the only reason that hockey players can’t dunk is because they are wearing heavy skates, their net sits on the ground so there is no reason for it and, most importantly, they are white. Canadian white at that. Canadian white is like 25% whiter than American white. For the last couple of hundred years, white Americans have been banging all sorts of other races while Canadians have been stuck banging each other and the occasional moose.
Am I the only one who misses afros in basketball? I understand doing away with the red, white, and blue ball, but isn’t there a way to force the NBA players to wear afros? It somehow makes the players less terrifying when you see them out and about in the real world and they are all seven and half feet tall.
And if hockey wants to call the area between the blue lines the “neutral zone,” then the least they could do is incorporate a few Kobayashi Maru scenario references. If basketball players are willing to don afros then the least hockey players can do is have the away teams dress like Klingons.
The one thing that both sports have in common is that the players are there to score.
With white women.
Clearly George Carlin knew a lot more about baseball and football than I do about basketball and hockey.
And humor.