The forever season

 OK, Blobophiles, listen up. Today is pop-quiz day ("Aw, gee, Mr. Blob"), and so no hall passes will be issued, no one will pretend he's suddenly come down with bubonic plague, and no copying off your neighbor unless your neighbor is poor old lint-for-brains Merle back there.

Ready?

First question: Which is longer, the NBA season or ...

1. The Pleistocene Age

2. The Ming Dynasty

3. The Hundred Years War

4. "Titanic", the director's cut

Second question: If the Mavericks, as expected, select 18-year-old Cooper Flagg as the No. 1 pick in tonight's NBA draft, how old will Cooper Flagg be when the season ends next year?

1. 38

2. 45

3. Older than dirt

4. Older than the hills

Third (and last) question: If a baby is born on the first day of the NBA season, what will he/she be doing at the end of the season?

1. Attending first grade

2.  Graduating from high school

3. Doing his/her residency in thoracic medicine

4. Being honored for 40 years service at that Tire Barn out by the interstate

In other words ...

In other words, the NBA season is ridiculously, preposterously long. And all so a bunch of folks with more money than they know what to do with can make even more money than they know what to do with.

The Blob makes it a practice never to be in sync with radio blowhole Colin Cowherd, on the assumption it's one of the first signs of cognitive decline. But the other day Cowherd went on the air to say the NBA season is JUST TOO DAMN LONG, and, doggone it, I'm in full agreement.

I blame my age (70) and my habit of killing brain cells with an occasional cocktail or three for this lapse. Obviously I must be heading down the same unraveling mental trail our current President is blazing so well these days.

Anyway, yes, the NBA is JUST TOO DAMN LONG. It begins before Halloween, and, this year, ended on Sunday, the 22nd of June. The 22nd of June. You know what was nearly half over on that date? The baseball season.

The baseball season.

Partly this is because the NBA playoffs themselves last longer than a politician's stump speech. The Indiana Pacers, for instance, played their first game on April 19, beating the Milwaukee Bucks 117-98. They played their last game on Sunday.

That's more than two months.

That's 76 days after Florida snipped the nets in college buckets.

That's so long Milwaukee might not even be there anymore. Maybe it is, but I haven't checked lately.

In any event, this is beyond absurd. The back-in-my-day crowd likes to sneer at today's NBA players as pampered sissies compared to the he-men of yore, but what the codgers forget is how much shorter the NBA season was then. When I was growing up, Bill Russell 'n' them used to wrap up the title sometime in mid-April. Now the playoffs don't even begin until then.

So what to do?

Probably nothing. The folks with more money than they know what to do with aren't going to be disposed to make less, no matter what sort of Everest O' Cash they've summited. Saner people would either lop six-to-ten games off the regular season or make the first two rounds of the playoffs best-of-five instead of best-of-seven, but the saner people are not in charge. The money men are.

Me? I'd eliminate the play-in games and go best-of-five in the first two rounds. The play-in games give two extra teams per conference a shot at the playoffs, which means only 10 of the 30 teams are eliminated outright after an 82-game regular season. That's just wrong.

No, 16 teams in the playoffs are enough. If you want to be one of those 16, play harder during the regular season. You've got 82 chances to do so.

I know, I know. Losin' my marbles, right?