Maybe you don’t agree with what Larry Bird said, or maybe you just cringed when he said it because you didn’t know what kind of reaction it was going to bring. But I’ve come to appreciate people who say what they’re thinking, even if the thought that emerges isn’t as clear and resonant as a Waterford champagne flute.

Bird told Jim Gray of ESPN that the NBA needs more white guys. As he put it: "I think it's good for a fan base because as we all know the majority of the fans are white America. And if you just had a couple of white guys in there, you might get them [the fans, not the guys] a little excited. But it is a black man's game, and it will be forever. I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American."

You can see why people were cringing when the statement hit the Internet and the talk radio stations. Anytime you use the words “black” and “white” in the same sentence that makes any kind of comparison, you’re asking for trouble. For those whose memories are long enough, opining on the subject of ethnicity and athleticism ended the careers of Dodger executive Al Campanis and television tout Jimmy the Greek. Howard Cosell got in trouble for a remark that the wrong people saw as a racial slur.

None of the above were particularly bigoted. Campanis was notably unbiased about the melanin content of your epidermis. It didn’t matter. He was destroyed anyway.

So now we have Bird saying the NBA needs more white players – guys like him, for example, and John Havlicek – to appeal to the paying public, who are mostly white, too.

I’m not sure if he’s right on that. The NBA is doing just fine at the moment. Television ratings for the Finals are way up over last year, and it’s not because white America doesn’t want to miss when Luke Walton, scion of the famous white former player, Bill Walton, comes off the Lakers bench.

What the NBA needs is what it has this year – compelling characters who have created a compelling story. The Lakers are the Yankees of the NBA. They already had the two best players at their positions in the game. So they went out and added two future hall-of-famers to guarantee another championship.

Except that one of the great players is also shuttling to a distant courtroom to defend himself against sexual assault charges, and both of the future hall-of-famers are royal pains in the butt, the whole team whines and squabbles and makes you wish that someone would beat them like an Osama Bin Laden piñata at John Ashcroft’s birthday party.

And along come the Detroit Pistons, a team with no hall-of-famers that plays like teams should play. They’re the classic underdogs with their own share of characters, including former villain Rasheed Wallace and center Ben Wallace, an undrafted defensive star who has single-handedly restored the sale of wild Afro wigs in Detroit to levels not seen since the Seventies.

No basketball fan I’ve met cares what color anyone is on either team. They’re watching this series because it’s great theater. If you don’t have those compelling characters and plot lines, it won’t matter what color the players are. No one’s going to watch.

On the other hand, Bird had a point. When Yao Ming came into the NBA, a whole lot of people in China started paying attention to the NBA, and with more than a billion people, that’s a lot of potential game jersey sales. Similarly, when Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui came into Major League Baseball, Japanese networks started broadcasting Mariner and Yankee games. Dirk Nowitzki has done the same in Germany as Vlade Divac did in Serbia, and Drazen Petrovic did in Croatia.

Back in the Thirties and Forties, a lot of Italian-Americans took to baseball because of Joe DiMaggio. Nobody called them racist if they wished for more players of Italian heritage. Jews paid more attention when Hank Greenberg was at the plate or Sandy Koufax was on the mound.

Were they all racists? Hardly. They were only human.

Our brains are wired to identify with others who are like us. It’s why we have political parties and why people can be more attached to the colors worn by their college team than they are to their spouses. The great thing about America is that we include among people who are like us a vast array of people who aren’t like us at all in the old ways that still matter in much of the world. If you are a Red Sox fan, that defines you, no matter what your religious and ethnic origin. And by your standards, Yankee fans, even if they are your own siblings, suck.

Nearly everywhere else in the world, you are born into a tribal group – or ethnic group, if you prefer. In Africa, being black means nothing. It’s all about what tribe you are from. It’s the same in Europe, where for more than 1,000 years people were more than willing to hate people who looked very much like them but were from a different tribe.

In scientific fact, there is no such thing as race. There is only ethnicity, and Africa has more ethnic diversity than does Europe. It is only in America, where slavery robbed Africans of their ethnicity, that skin color has created an artificial tribal division. In America, unlike Africa, skin color means something.

But it doesn’t mean enough to make people not watch a game because there aren’t enough people like themselves. The tribal attachment to team is greater than the attachment to anything as vague as color. We might want to see a few more people like ourselves on the court, as Bird does, but we aren’t going to quit watching until they show up.

And we aren’t going to quit wanting to be like the great players. When I was a kid growing up near Cleveland, I wanted to be Jim Brown in football and Rocky Colavito in baseball. Twenty years ago, a lot of white kids wanted to be Magic Johnson and I’m betting a good number of black kids wanted to be Larry Bird. A few years later, kids of every imaginable ethnic stripe wanted to be Michael Jordan.

Sure, a few more white players would bring in marginal fans. But the real issue with the NBA isn’t color but class. Upper middle class people, no matter their ethnicity, want fewer tats and cornrows and bling-bling and more clean-cut, polite, respectful young men – like Tim Duncan.

That much of the NBA’s talent comes from city kids (that’s code for black) who grow up steeped in street culture and looking forward to the day when they can get their first tats and cut their first hip-hop record, its fans come from people who grew up in the suburbs (that’s code for white) who listen to the Grateful Dead and dream about trading up to a bigger SUV is proof that it’s a great product.

It doesn’t need more white guys. It needs more stories like the one in the Finals that’s captivated us now. It needs guys from all over to pull in people from everywhere. It needs a few transcendent talents who are also good people, and in Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James, it seems to be getting them.

Yeah, we all want another Bird. But we all want another Magic, too.

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