Last weekend during the NBA's All-Star festivities, players, executives and others rebuilt houses in New Orleans.
Disgraceful. No wonder that league is the epitome of all that's wrong in sports.
To be fair, the perceptions that preceded the NBA's trip to New Orleans were fueled - not created, but certainly accelerated - by last year's All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas, when drugged- and boozed-up hordes of NBA players grabbed tourists off the street and robbed them at gunpoint, then ate their babies. Or something like that.
However accurate the hysterical descriptions of that weekend are, the Vegas trip reinforced the average fan's opinion that compared with its competition, the NBA is garbage. That notion is reflected clearly by two polls released in the past two weeks.
The annual Harris Interactive poll, asking which sport is the responder's favorite, pretty much nailed it. The NFL is No. 1 by the third-widest margin since the first poll in 1985.
The NBA is tied for sixth, at 4 percent (the NFL is at 30 percent), with men's college basketball and men's golf - behind the NHL and way behind auto racing. Ten years ago, it was a comfortable third, challenging baseball for second.
In the current edition of ESPN The Magazine, the NBA scored far worse than football, baseball and hockey on questions about whether the players play hard every game, love their fans, respect their coaches, value image over the game itself and are "wholesome."
Now, this would be a good time to delve into why America feels this way about not just the NBA, but also the sports it prefers to it. But this will be a busy week, and I won't have time to read all the hate mail, threats and questions about my lineage.
Still, it is a great time to examine what has gone on in the other sports America feels much better about since the debacle in Las Vegas 53 weeks ago. The following is in order of preference in the Harris poll.
NFL: "Spygate." Michael Vick. Chris Henry and Tank Johnson. Pacman Jones (the athlete actually involved in shooting up a strip club at NBA All-Star Weekend). Gene Upshaw vs. the retired players, threatening to kill each other. Bill Belichick walking off the field before his team's Super Bowl loss was complete.
Baseball: Barry Bonds, indicted on perjury and obstruction-of-justice counts. The Mitchell Report, not just for all the players implicated, but for Bud Selig, Donald Fehr, a handful of owners and several other team officials implicated as well. Roger Clemens and the circus he created, and the way he used his wife as a human shield.
