Right now, both the NBA Finals and the Euro 2012 soccer tournament are being contested, and this made me think of the two sports as they relate to one another. When you consider them, they're really opposites of sorts, as far as game play is concerned. When the person who created basketball first thought-up the idea for the sport, he must have intended it as the opposite of soccer.
How's that? Well, basketball is played with the hands, dribbling and passing and shooting the ball with one's hands; whereas soccer is played with the feet (and the head, etc., too, I suppose; but this is simply an extension of the "not using your hands" idea, I think.), dribbling and passing and shooting the ball (mostly) with one's feet. Also, whereas soccer is a (sometimes excruciatingly) low-scoring game, with many, many missed shots at the goal, and much time spent dribbling and passing the ball around; basketball is a very (occasionally absurdly) high-scoring game, with lots and lots of shooting, most of which results in scoring of points (2 for most shots, 3 for a long shot, and 1 for a free-throw). So basketball, even with all its copious scoring, has most of the shots scored count for multiple points each; whereas soccer, with practically no scoring whatsoever, has each goal count for only one point. (You'd think a goal would count for 10 points, just to make it seem like a bigger deal, wouldn't you? Oh, well. But the truth is, when there is so little scoring in an-hour-and-a-half, even one point seems like a really big deal! In fact, I have heard proponents of soccer claim that scoring in basketball means nothing compared to scoring in soccer, because in basketball, everyone is constantly scoring, so it's nothing special; but in soccer, it's relative infrequency leads to far greater meaning and excitement when {and if} it occurs. {<That "and if" part was my own editorializing.})
Additionally, extremely tall people tend to be very successful in basketball, whereas in soccer, shorter people are often amongst the greatest players in the world (i.e.: Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta, Wesley Sneijder, Diego Maradonna, etc.). Also, basketball is played indoors on a wooden floor, and soccer is played outside on a natural, outdoor surface of grass. Plus, the basketball court, despite the enormous size of many of the sport's participants, is very small for a playing area, whereas despite the more-occasional diminutive nature of its players, the soccer field is very large. So in many ways, soccer and basketball appear to possess veritable contradictory attributes.
So there you have it: basketball and soccer are very much opposite sports, at least in terms of game play. Don't you think so? I have to wonder if the inventor of basketball did this deliberately out of frustration about the low-scoring aspect of soccer games, and its quite possibly infuriatingly resultant tedium. And if designed to produce many, many opportunities for the enjoyment of point-scoring by a viewing audience, basketball is indeed a great success, as it most certainly delivers that part well enough!
