Mike Celizic

The NBA season is heading into its stretch run, and we ought to be getting excited about the playoffs to come in April. But if there’s any buzz, I have yet to hear it.

Maybe that’s because I’m not in Phoenix or Dallas, where the Suns are on pace to win 62 games and the Mavs 68 and Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki are battling for the regular-season MVP.

But I don’t think so. The Suns and Mavs are great teams with an exciting style of play and genuine superstars. But their success isn’t being matched elsewhere, and the league’s TV ratings continue to decline; the all-star game in Las Vegas, besides turning into a law-enforcement nightmare, had the lowest ratings ever for that pointless exercise.

In the East, nobody other than the Pistons seem interested in trying to play the game at a high level. (The Heat would, but they didn’t have Shaq the first half of the year and now they don’t have Dwyane Wade, a brutal double-whammy for the defending champs.) The Bulls have promise, but it will be a long time before that city gets as excited about basketball the way it was when Jordan ruled.

The Cavaliers are one of several teams with a version of the next Jordan, but as great a talent as LeBron James is, one gets the suspicion he doesn’t give it his all in every game. You might be able to live with that if the Cavs were on their way to the NBA Finals, but they’re not.

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And then there are the Knicks, who for so many years were the perfect foil for Jordan’s Bulls. The only person left in New York who still seems to care about that pathetic team is Stephen A. Smith, who spends two hours every day on the radio vainly trying to convince his audience that they ought to care.

There might have been some buzz if some of the teams that claim they care had done something at the trade deadline, but there wasn’t a single big deal that went down. And if the G.M.s don’t care, why should the fans?

And even in the West, the Suns and Mavs can’t play every night. As it is, the seedings out there are pretty much set. Dallas will be one, Phoenix two and does it really matter who’s next? Depending on who shows up from the East, the Finals could be a show you have to watch, but until then, it’s hard to find something to make you want to pay attention.

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We were supposed to be in a new Golden Age by now. That’s what we heard when Kobe started to mature and won those three titles with Shaq, and was followed by LeBron and Carmelo and D-Wade. These were the new Jordans, Magics and Birds and were lavished with endorsement deals and plugged by the NBA until fans expected them and their teams to dominate the game for a decade to come.

They have dominated the scoring stats, but not much else. It doesn’t mean they won’t, but what made the old guard great was the championships they played for and won, not the endorsement deals they signed.

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