And then one day this fall, a series of unexpected events led me to season ticket-holder status with my local French Division A club, ASVEL (Lyon/Villeurbanne).

Around the same time, San Antonio Spurs guard and minority ASVEL owner Tony Parker announced that he would spend the duration of the NBA lockout (y'all already know how I felt about the lockout) playing for ASVEL, the success of which he intends to make the focus of his retirement. When New York Knickerbocker and fellow Frenchman Ronny Turiaf joined the team a few weeks later and the lockout seemed joyously sturdy, it looked like I might have a French Division A championship contender just a few subway stops away.

While the millionaires managed to get their zeroes straight, Parker and Turiaf returned to the big leagues and ASVEL adjusted its ambitions accordingly, my initiation to top-flight French basketball continues.  After a half-season of faithful attendance, some observations:

  • If Tony Parker wants to make ASVEL a factor in European hoops, he needs a new arena.
Not that there's really anything wrong with the Astroballe, an aging, 5700-seat arena shoehorned between a residential neighborhood and Lyon's eastern beltway. It's homey, loud and glows 1990s hues on game nights. And despite the string of Parker-induced sellouts that inspired impressive (and, it turns out, optimistic) season ticket sales, it's not like ASVEL is selling the joint out every night and is need of lebensraum or anything.

The problem is that, while European basketball is moving forward at lightning speed, the Astroballe is a voyage back in time to an era when all the best players and teams were American or Soviet, and all basketball was perceived as a derivative of the North American game; the place reeks of the minor leagues, the tiny sporting backwaters where the good players want to move on and everybody else is playing for the love the game. It's not a bad sporting atmosphere, but it's completely at odds with the club's ambitions.

In any case, Mr. Parker feels me: early plans for a new, 13,000-seat arena were published late last year, with a (very optimistic) target of 2015. The arena will remain in Villeurbanne, will help rehabilitate a dilapidated neighborhood and will be even closer to Lyon, which is the only way to do this right.

  • Sadly, the mascot needs to go.
I can't get enough of this guy. I don't know who was on the brainstorming committee back in '95 when the place was built, but if this was the best they could do they were smoking the wrong kind of cigarettes.

Never mind that the name "Astroking" doesn't look nearly as NC-17 to a francophone as it does to us—even when the floor announcer stresses the "s" so it comes out "ASSSS-STROKING!!!"—or that the basketball-for-a-head bit doesn't immediately conjure up Fat Albert imagery in the average French person's brain. The real problem is that Astroking doesn't, well, do anything. While not everybody can be the Suns Gorilla, a mascot does have certain responsibilities beyond simply showing up, taking pictures with fans and dancing poorly to terrible music. (As a side note, it would also probably be better if that music didn't consist solely of English-language rap songs with high F-bomb density played at ear-bleeding volume through a 1990s PA system. It's awful.)

And who gave this guy a high-octane, soccer-field-strength t-shirt gun? I'll be shocked if there isn't a death in the crowd by the end of the season!

  • The giant electronic ads in front of the team benches need to go, too.
I don't know if all French basketball arenas are like this—the games are almost never televised on network TV—but the advertising screens in front of the benches cause multiple and comedic pile-ups at least once per game. Isn't it obvious that if if you take a dozen giant men, put them in chairs behind a four foot tall barrier and then ask them to repeatedly climb over one another to enter and exit the game that there are going to be problems? The players never know whether to jump, stumble, body surf or simply straddle the thing like a hockey player, and the outcome is rarely something anyone wants to see from their basketball warrior heros.

  • Raise the (upper deck) season ticket prices already!
That might sound weird coming from a paying fan, but seriously: my season ticket was €99 and is good for fifteen season games plus three Eurocup pool match-ups...and then I exercised my option to attend three more Eurocup games for €15 more. That's 21 basketball games from a center-court, upper deck seat in a very small arena, all for €114. While lower-deck seats are more reasonably priced (€400-€700), the upper-deck seats are way too cheap! Several times this season the game has been advertised as sold out, but my section was only half full. Why? Because at €6 a pop, no one thinks twice about missing every other game! The guy who owns the seat next to mine told me as much: he figures that if he can make it to enough games to get the price down to €20/game, he's getting a good deal. Which is true...but it's also why I've seen him three times so far this season. These are great seats for real basketball fans: you can see everything, and yet the action is closer than many lower-deck seats in just about any NBA arena. I'd pay double and still feel like I was getting a bargain: through an admirable effort to be community friendly, ASVEL is inadvertently doing itself a major disservice.

But I ain't all criticism and mockery:

  • The pace of the game rocks my world.
I don't mean the pace of play—see below—but rather the pace of the event as a whole. I get to the arena, grab a €3 beer (the real stuff, not that N/A crap they have to sell at soccer stadiums so the hooligans don't get too rowdy) and get to my seat, all within ten minutes of stepping off the subway. Then the game starts: ten-minute quarters go by fast, especially when there are no TV time-outs (thus the giant, player-safety-menacing electronic billboards to generate ad revenue). Coaches bother the refs less and there is no instant replay, so there are less delays of an official nature as well. The whole affair can take well under two hours! You get your sport on and then continue your evening. Very nice.

  • The pace of play itself is remarkably well thought-out.
There are some great coaches in French basketball teaching some complicated stuff. Most French teams are longer on schemes than they are on talent, and the game reflects this. For example, the alarmingly young ASVEL's gimpy early-season half-court sets have given way to a much more refined flex offense, designed to create openings for a bevy of talented shooters and ingeniously disguise the team's lack of muscle and experience in the paint; on the other hand, some teams come in and try to out-muscle us and get to the line, while others are intent on preventing open three-point looks on defense and exploiting a soft lane on offense (to which ASVEL has yet to respond with a hard foul; if I were coach that is what would happen after surrendering three consecutive layups). It's a half-court chess match every night, and the whole affair has revived my dormant interest in basketball strategy and the question of how to beat teams with better/more experienced athletes, something that's generally only of peripheral interest in the talent- and ego-laden NBA.

  • The crowd is spectacular!
I heart ASVEL fans, who are living proof that you can be enthusiastic, loud, rowdy and rabid without putting on masks and starting the building on fire. After several years of attending top-flight European soccer matches I've grown used to being frisked like Eastwood on Alcatraz, ignoring major in-stadium fires/explosions and putting up with the ritual (and ritually obscene) insulting of officials, the other team, its supporters and even unpopular home-team players. But it really does get old: what a breath of fresh air, this game of basketball! The Astroballe is playoff-loud every night—even when half full—and yet I've never seen a hint of real conflict or violence. Bravo!

Oh, and did I mention the three-euro beers? What's not to like??