I always find conversing with Buffaloians on sports message boards to be a strange experience because they always use hockey as the point of comparison. I have to defend my love of hockey to midwesterners because they find it about as relevant as many of you find soccer. I would like to make a case for basketball here. When you learn the details of the game, there is as much of a chess match as in football with double screens, planned plays, motion, double teams, defensive rotation, etc... But the ball keeps moving and downtown is at a minimum. As someone who grew up in Buffalo, I never gave basketball much thought. It seemed as foreign as soccer. But spending 8 years in Bloomington, Indiana made me appreciate the game a lot.