Baseball season is long. It always has ups. It always has downs. And it is often impossible to figure out why, in a random midsummer series, things go the way they do. Hitters and pitchers regularly go on slumps and hot streaks. Players are sent down to and called up from the minor leagues. A trade from the American League to the National League will turn a scrub into a borderline all-star. That’s why the regular season is so long. Because after 162 games, everything pretty much evens out. Your whole roster is tested. Teams end up where they belong. It doesn’t matter that the ups and downs have no discernible connection to each other. The swings are an inevitable, unpredictable part of the ride.

Football season, on the other hand, is short and sweet. 16 games over 17 weeks, no ifs ands or buts (or butts…haha). In such a short season, every game becomes a comment on the season thus far. Last year, the Cardinals played 20 games including the playoffs and Super Bowl. The Lakers played more than that in the playoffs alone. There’s not a lot of time to figure teams out (or for teams to figure themselves out). Even aberrations aren’t aberrations, like the Eagles losing to the Raiders as 14.5-point favorites. If the Eagles make the playoffs, people will look at that loss as indicative of Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb’s tendency to once in a while completely forget to show up for a game. We learn something with every game because NFL teams are constantly being judged.

And then there’s basketball.

Basketball exists somewhere in the gulf between these two extremes. Teams have the ups and downs of a baseball season, but for some reason a basketball team’s swings all feel like gestures towards the team’s true identity. It’s as if different stretches of a team’s season are like tangents. They’re connected, made significant by their context. It’s kind of like a stream of consciousness. When your mind wanders, do you ever try to retrace your psychical steps and figure out how you got to what you suddenly found yourself thinking about? Well that’s sort of like the NBA season. When you look back on it, you can trace all of the trends you’ve seen in a team’s play back to what you learned in the very beginning of the season. You don’t really know what , however, until it’s all said and done.

So that’s how The Heller Boyz are going to cover this NBA season: Stream of Consciousness. There’s no reason to rank every team every week because how much really changes from game to game? There are so many interesting narratives over the course of the season that we feel the best way to get to it all is to write about whatever the basketball parts of our brains (I think its one of the frontal lobes) are naturally drawn to.

So fasten your seat-belts,

And pass me the rock.

WHAT TIME IS IT?!?!

GAME TIME—WHOO!!!

(How do you spell “whoo’?)