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Was it just me, or did everyone at the end of last season who was still watching the NBA find themselves rooting for the Pistons? Now I don’t, nor have I ever, supported the Pistons, (I did once hate the 88-90 squad, but more on that later) but I found myself wanting the Lakers to lose. Intensely. In fact that Lakers team from 2000-2004 were so easy to dislike because, well, they were so damn good. This made them bad, not a bad team, just bad guys. Ironically, this was the exact opposite of the lovable early 80’s Lakers, with the ever-smiling Magic Johnson rolling down the lane, whipping no-look dishes for easy buckets, or with the graceful Abdul-Jabbar cranking up another feathery soft sky-hook. They were good guys, classy, poised, gracious, competitors.

Not this mob. The 2000's dynasty was the bad LA. A Lakers team that was begging to be hated not only because they were so good, a dynasty even, but they were calculating, cold and didn’t care about who they beat in the process. This was despite seemingly almost combusting with two feuding superstars that were always a string breadth away from threatening to implode the team completely.

Seemingly indestructible, nobody could beat the recent Lakers in the crunch. To a sports fan supporting any other team, this was not fun.

Not being able to win against a team can be maddening; it forces you to hate them. If you get a win here and there, you can usually be placated, but being consistently beaten in heart-breaking ways is the sports equivalent of living under a communist regime. Knicks fans will know what I am talking about (especially regarding the 89-93 Bulls teams) same for the Cavs anytime they played a team containing Michael Jordan.

Having said that, as a Celtics fan, I should be hating everyone in the league right now.

So as I sat there back in June smiling smugly and feeling the warped satisfaction of this ‘bad’ LA team on the receiving end of a beating at the hands of a righteous Detroit team, tt occurred to me that currently, the NBA really lacks something that it has provided fans with an abundance of over the years: The classic battle of Good vs Evil.

I’m talking about schoolyard bully bad. I’m talking about bold, in your face, "I'm gonna beat your butt and nobody can stop me" bad. This is the sports version of a giant multi-national supermarket chain squashing a 4th generation mom & pop vegetable store type bad. Nasty bad.

Same extreme goes for the heroes. I wanna see the good guys on wheaties boxes, a household name in every country, powering across the sky with a red cape and wearing their underpants on the outside. In a Superman sort of way.

This whole emotion-based sports phenomenon goes right to the heart of any red-blooded male. Starting with our fathers, fathers who watched the Cowboys fight the Apaches. Scenes of cowboys staggering about with axes in their backs and arrows through various bodily parts, gripped them emotionally and deep down inside, they longed for the baddies to be vanquished. Unfairly, the apaches were the 'bad guys', but that’s another story. That generation went out on the playground and everyone wanted to be the cowboy and win one for the good guys.

With the advent of pro-wrestling, the good vs evil saga was taken to a whole new level. As the lycra-clad, muscle-bound heroes launched themselves and each other from turnbuckles through tables and beat each other senseless with trashcans and whatever other solid object that could be propelled by a 250-pound man, we chanted in unison for the eventual sweat and blood dripping hero standing mid ring whilst lofting the golden belt. (The miracle in this was that we actually were rooting for men in lycra.) Once again, children in the playground emulated the good guys, hopefully not causing too many permanent injuries in the process.

Not since the early 90’s has the NBA had a team of bad guys.

In my limited lifetime, I have observed some mean dudes commit some equally mean acts: Kermit Washington’s brutal punch on Rudy Tomjanovich; Charles Barkley poleaxing anyone in sight, including bar patrons, the late 80’s Pistons including Mahorn, Rodman and Laimbeer toturing the entire league before taking a particular affinity for the Chicago Bulls; the early 90s Knicks taking their turn to deal out some punishment on the Bulls, Vernon Maxwell beating fans in the stands; Charles Barkley again (take your pick of the incident), Anthony Mason (perhaps the last of the true thugs in the league), Pat Riley (Riley gets a place on the list for his ability to incite his teams to violence.) and Marv Albert (apologies Marv, I retract that, he was not nasty, just a baaaaad man!)

Sadly, with perhaps the exception of the immensely potentialled Ron Artest, no-one to date has shown any particular nasty streak.

The NBA’s desire to roll the turnstiles has been the driving force behind the sanitation of the current game. Sure there is the odd eventful scuffle from time to time, but most of these are quickly swept under the carpet and in the process, incurring fines that eclipse the GDP of most smallish nations. The effect? No Good Guys vs Bad Guys. No Batman vs Joker, Luke vs Vader, He-Man vs Skeletor, Michael Dudikoff as American ninja vs uhh......(who exactly was he fighting against anyway?)

The point is good vs evil is a key attraction for all fans to the NBA game. Anyone who was not a Pistons fan in the late 80’s had to be fascinated with the struggle of a young Bulls team against the nastier, uglier, meaner Detroit “bad boys’. After the Bulls struggled and finally defeated the brutish Pistons, they were challenged by the menacing and physical, Riley-led, Knicks teams, boasting bruisers such as Charles Oakley and Xavier McDaniel. This was more than basketball. This was theatre of the highest order. The Knicks home games could easily have moved over to broadway and played to packed houses gasping with horror and shrieking with delight at the momentum swings and last second heroics.

The past finals in 2004 parlayed into somewhat of a good vs evil, but more from the way each team represented themselves with their gameplay. Unlike their earlier incarnation, the current Detroit squad represent heroism. They represent the last bastion of basketball. They ‘ play the right way’ as Larry Brown repeated over and over to the media. No-one is the star. Some players score, some rebound. They all pass and they all play defense. Even Rasheed Wallace has become a ‘good guy’ such is the effect of the unifying force in the Auburn Hills Halls Of Justice.

L.A. represented the evil selfish gunners. Of not, the two selfish superstars (well, at least one seemed fairly selfish) dragging the team down between their own evil, greedy desire for personal glory.

The storyline of the 2004 Finals series may not necessarily have fallen classically into the hero-villan storyline, but it shows how deperate one can get for a little theater in sport. Sure there have been many exciting moments in NBA playoff and finals history since the slightly-old days, but no-one can deny that the battles will be more enhanced by the momumental struggle of good vs evil.

Lets hope that for every Jordan loving kid out there flying and gliding above the clouds, there is a evil professor constructing a frankenstein like player modelled on Bill Laimbeer ready to smack him back to earth. The NBA will be all the better for it.