Both Teams Played Hard?

NBA players don't always play hard. When you watch a game on TV, you often hear the announcers praise one player for playing hard. Or they note that the team is really giving a great effort on a particular night. They often offer excuses as to why the players sometimes don't give a full or consistent effort. "They are on the second night of a back to back." "The team plane arrived at 2 am last night." "After playing in the Olympics last summer they are tired."

Are you kidding me? These are excuses?

Let's compare the difficult NBA life to the average working fan.

In a regular year a person with a full time job, with two weeks vacation can expect to work around 250 days. Those days usually require 8 hours of work to be performed. That doesn't include the commute to and from work, or lunch time and a few breaks. Let's be realistic that most people don't work hard for every minute they are at work. Okay, lets say you are actually working only 4 hours a day. Some jobs it's more, some it's less. That would be 1000 hours of work a year. Outside of that work you might want to exercise, so you have to find time to go to the gym, or go out running, or even go to the local gym to shoot some hoops. You have to take care of your kids. You have to take out the garbage. You have to worry about the bills.

Perhaps you have a job that requires you to travel. Or you take a trip during your vacation time. You only have 2 weeks remember, so you will probably return to work right after your trip. Like most people you fly coach. You have to show up at the airport 1 or 2 hours before hand. You have to wait for you bags, you have to get to your car. All time consuming things.

According to Wikipedia, in the United States a 25 year old male with a High School Diploma makes somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 dollars a year.

If a person doesn't work hard enough, they can be fired. I am not saying everyone works hard, they don't. But let's compare.

Let's look at LeBron James from last year. He won the MVP. He played at a high level. But if you watched his games, sometimes he didn't seem to be giving it his all. Some games he seems to hang out by the three point line and be afraid to venture in for a crowd pleasing dunk. We won't even discuss the Boston debacle in the playoffs. There has to be reasons for this right?

If LeBron played every game of the season and played every minute he would play for 65.6 hours. He didn't play that much. He played only 76 games, and logged 2966 minutes or 49.4 hours. He sat out several games at the end of the season to rest up for the playoffs. That is something I will discuss later. Certainly the travel would have an effect. But NBA players travel on Chartered jets. They don't wait in line or pick up their bags. They are chauffeured to a luxury hotel on the road. For this work he was paid $15,779,912 dollars. There were also minutes for the pre-season, training camp and the playoffs. We are talking about playing hard in the regular season.

So is it too much to expect that a PROFESSIONAL would give maximum effort for 39 minutes 3 to 4 times a week for 6 months while getting paid roughly 375 times more than the average working man? Oh, by the way, the other 6 months is vacation time. They don't have to do anything. Maybe workout, which is something regular smucks try to work in while working all year.

Give me a break. Both Teams did not play hard, and they should be ashamed of themselves.