For the love of God, I just wanna watch Joe Johnson for once! Is that too much to ask?

While ESPN/ABCDisney was all up its own ass the last two days about its star-studded Sunday afternoon of NBA action, most of us--I think--were rather unimpressed.

ESPN hyped the doubleheader as--holy crap!--four of the biggest stars playing on the same network in one day. Wow. Nothing like that has ever happened. And if not for the grace of God (read: made-for-TV scheduling), we'd have never been so privileged. We'd have never gotten to see the four most overexposed stars in the league play on national TV. Uh-gain.

As far as I'm concerned, the redundancy of teams and matchups in marquee games is as crappy for the league as it is for the fan. I realize that superstars tend to boost the appeal of a professional sports league tremendously, but I don't think that fans need to hear the St. Dwyane routine every week to realize D-Wade is a good player. Nor should we be robbed of appearances by players of equal merit that don't play for the defending champ.

It's the same thing that's gone on forever with national broadcasts. The NBA's current star power unfortunately has brought us back to the '90s when it was "Sunday on NBC--Michael and Bulls take on Ewing and the Knicks, followed by Hakeem and the Rockets versus O'Neal and the Magic! And next week--O'Neal and the Magic face Michael and the Bulls followed by Hakeem and the Rockets versus Ewing and the Knicks! Here on NBC! [John Tesh music.]"

We get the same thing, of course, in other sports, be it the Red Sox-Yankees and Giants-Dodgers five times a year on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball or Duke versus whomever every Wednesday night.

If athletes--particularly NBA players--are so motivated by the limelight, as the common perception holds, wouldn't the league prosper from sharing this limelight among more stars? Today two of the league's most intriguing stars, Gilbert Arenas and Zach Randolph, were playing head-to-head in a game with an excellent side plot (Arenas's misguided bitterness about his Team USA snub). Granted, it was a horrible game in hindsight, but the TV exec with foresight would have seen that pot of gold (Wizard's jerseys) a mile away. But no dice. Just more Duncan, Kobe, and LeBron.

I don't just have a problem with the repetition. I also dislike the distortion of public perception it creates. Is Wade really that much better than Joe Johnson? Or Duncan compared to Pau Gasol? Were Michael and Magic really that much better than Bernard King and Alex English?

Remember--Phil Rizzuto is in the Hall of Fame, and Bert Blyleven is not. And that's really what this post is all about.