It’s been awhile since we published anything proper for NBA Tuesday, and it’s mostly because professional basketball bores us. We’ve always found the regular season to be pointless, dating back to the days when there were only 23 teams in the league—and 16 of them made the postseason. And, of course, we’ve often found the postseason to be a bit “rigged” (for lack of a better word), at least since the mid 1990s. Yawn.

The NBA itself also is trying every little gimmick to stay relevant in the eyes of the consumer public, from introducing a silly play-in format for the postseason—in effect, expanding the playoffs to 20 teams in a 30-team league—to trying out an in-season tournament like European soccer does. In trying to micromanage everything, the sport has just become a snooze fest, really. We have little interest in it, sort of like MLB now.

While we are on pause, brainstorming for our next miniseries idea(s), we only really have interest in our local franchise: the Golden State Warriors and their pursuit of a fifth NBA title in 10 seasons. A lot of that interest is driven by the presence of Chris Paul on the roster this season, too—one of our all-time, most-respected players who, for whatever reason, has never been chosen by the NBA to get to the mountaintop.

The larger issue is an 82-game regular season that takes almost six months to complete; no single game matters in the moment, really. And with two thirds of the teams getting a shot at the title come postseason, the individual match results mean even less. On a day-to-day basis, there is little urgency to care or follow along with your favorite team. Win or lose, there’s always tomorrow, next week, next month, etc. Ho hum.

Eventually, things get more tense, of course, but those moments don’t come until February, at the earliest. Yes, every game counts, but with long regular seasons, they just seem to count less. This may be one of the primary reasons that football remains, by far, the most popular sport in the United States: the shorter season means every game has an importance that can’t be matched by the other major sports in play.

But we digress: the long grind has begun in the NBA. We may or may not check in here on the Warriors’ progress every so often, but eventually, we will start a new miniseries on something of interest from the NBA’s past. That’s where we live, really, anyway as historians and journalists. It’s more fun to look back right now than it is to look outward or forward—especially when the present is so gosh-darn boring.