How Jordan Crawford can fix the NBA playoffs

The NBA Playoffs are bad and broken and need to be fixed. All year long, you hear fans on sports radio and on Twitter and at my local Kroger say that they’re dreading the end of the regular season because then basketball stops mattering. We all know the adage that defense wins championships, but there’s no defense at all in the All-Star game, and that game has all the best players in the NBA, so defense is bad.

To make matters worse, the most memorable play of last year’s Finals was a chasedown block. That’s a defensive play. As such, booooooo. Trying to remember the 2016 NBA Finals is like trying to remember the plot of Joe Dirt. You can, but you don’t want to. Once that knowledge is there, it’s never going to go away.

This could have been averted. Had Draymond just let LeBron dunk on him, we could have had a little offensive exclamation point to put at the end of the sentence. Or an exclamation ham in the middle of the sandwich depending on how you want to look at it. But no, Draymond had to ruin a good thing. No wonder he’s a leading candidate for Defensive Player of the Year and therefore terrible.

The proper way to play defense is to look like you are but actually not.

Jordan Crawford is here to blow some stuff up in your mind but in a good way. I’ve watched him play in Grand Rapids a couple times this year, and I now feel confident saying he can save us. I have a proposal. No more defense. No more playoffs. What we need is basketball in its purest form, and that’s whatever form it takes when Jordan Crawford is playing it.

Unfortunately, there’s only one Jordan Crawford, so he needs teammates around him, right? Well maybe not. There’s a little known type of basketball playing called “one-on-one.” This is when two basketball players go against each other to see who can score the points better. The person with the most points gets the victory, or the win ham depending on how you want to look at it. Cut out the dross, eliminate the impurities, and just have more Crawford.

But still, technology has not yet advanced to the point where Jordan Crawford can play himself. Holograms are nifty, but they’re also lame and can’t play physical basketball as they’re a projection of light and now corporeal yet. Crawford is not to be blamed for this.

Unfortunately, we’re stuck. Two players but one Jordan. Our Crawford quotient can only get as high as fifty percent. What oh what is one to do?

At one point during mass this weekend, my sister’s fiance leaned over to me and whispered “Me and that little kid have the same pants.” This made me think of Austin Rivers.

It’s hard to think of a better person in the NBA to inherit the pants mantle. Inheritance is often a matter of family, and who in the NBA has more experience with nepotism than Rivers? Maybe Bryan Colangelo, but let’s not think about him. He’s another Joe Dirt.

Not only that, but Crawford and Rivers share the same “I am better than everyone, including myself” attitude. They attack and attack. They sometimes fail, but that only makes them want to attack more. They’re like mosquitoes but good. No defense. Just ball.

Just picture it. Seven, nine, maybe 13 games of Jordan Crawford going one-on-one with Austin Rivers to decide the NBA championship. Who the championship would end up going to would take some work to figure out, but let’s not sweat the details. Compare that to the other potential things we could see.

• Golden State -Jump shooting teams can’t win in the playoffs
• Cleveland – LeBron can’t win a championship without Wade
• San Antonio – Tim Duncan is boring
• Houston – Olajuwon can’t win a championship without Sampson
• Toronto – In Canada
• Boston – Isaiah Thomas is short

Do you really want to see any of those storylines play out? Exactly.

Next: Over and Back: A look at Linsanity, five years later

So this is what we need. Jordan Crawford versus Jordan Crawford Junior in a battle for personal and professional supremacy to decide everything. We start it in June, and we don’t stop until somebody passes out. With all the blood rushing from my head to another part of my body, that might be me.