A caller last hour summed up my feelings on Felger's basketball talk perfectly.
The gist of his point was that what makes basketball discussion on "Felger and Mazz" so unbearable isn't that Felger doesn't root for the Celtics. It's perfectly fine for a sports talk radio host to have preconceived biases about teams, players, etc. Felger is an entertainer, not a journalist. Nobody is asking him to be unbiased when discussing the Celtics or anything else.
What makes basketball talk with Felger so intolerable is the fact that Felger has become a caricature of himself on the topic, and isn't interested in having a stimulating conversation about the sport. Everything comes back to one of these three points:
*The league is rotten and the referees are on the take, so these playoff outcomes are less than genuine (this is actually Felger's most coherent basketball talking point).
*Every player is faking an injury to draw attention to himself. There is no such thing as a legitimate basketball injury.
*Playoff hockey is more intense and unpredictable than playoff basketball. It is impossible to like both sports equally.
Last night on "Sports Sunday" Felger had Brian Scalabrine on with Cedric Maxwell to breakdown the Celtics/76ers series. Instead of attempting to draw insight from Scal, who just finished playing the 76ers a couple of days ago, Felger continually blabbered on about how every player in recent Celtics history has faked a playoff injury, and how predictable the NBA is. It was embarrassing, frankly, and I would be shocked if Scal agreed to come back to be a panel member on one of Felger's shows.
To reiterate, I don't care that Felger doesn't like the Celtics. I also don't care that he doesn't particularly like the NBA. In fact, I've found many of his "anti-NBA rants" to be amusing in the past. But the basketball team in town is on the verge of making a championship run, and Felger won't even pretend to be interested in having substantial discussions about these games. It might be a little different than what WEEI did with the Bruins several years ago, but it's of the same spirit (belittling the sport and the fans of the sport).
I loathe the pairing of Ordway and Holley, so I'm not going to switch to EEI over this next month. But I'm not sure how much longer I can stick with "Felger and Mazz." "The Sports Hub" has to do something here. You can't have the face of your radio station openly mock the Celtics for the next 4-6 weeks. It's bad for business.