Growing up, I remember a different world of sports then the one I see in front of me now. A time when athletes weren’t advertising anything possible, a time when timeouts were just timeouts and not “Cingular” timeouts and a time when the playoffs weren’t as long as the regular season.

The NBA playoffs start on Saturday and by calculations should be done sometime in September. The finals are set to start June 9 and the playoffs could end as late as June 23. Last season the playoffs started April 17 and got done June 9. Something about a two-month playoff makes me lose some interest in the whole thing,.

One cause of the lengthening of the playoffs, is extending the first round of the playoffs to seven games. There’s no reason for this, and the fact that only one of the eight opening round series went past five games pretty much proves that it’s useless.

Last season the league was taking off too many days between games. I would see times when there would be two or three days between games in a series and the teams wouldn’t even be traveling. And of course the NBA is doing it again this year. In the finals, there are two days in between the first and second game of the series.

Imagine only having to go work every other day. Or how about having a chef making you lunch and then when dinner rolls around he says wait ’til tomorrow ’cause he’s done for the day. These people are getting paid outrageous amounts of money to play a game, and they have to take time off between the biggest events of their careers.

Another reason for the never-ending playoffs is that eight teams from each conference make the playoffs. That’s way too many; this isn’t hockey here. It’s kind of ridiculous that half of the league makes the playoffs. Why even have a regular season, from now on let’s just have playoffs. If you get eliminated in the first round, tough luck, wait for next season.

Dan Renick is a junior journalism major. He can be contacted at [email protected], but it’ll be a week before he checks it because he did right after finishing his article.