Some truths are self-evident. Dogs are better than cats. Trains are better than planes. February, starring Ground Hog Day, is worse than April, the cruelest month, which pales beside December. And, yes, hockey is better than hoops.

I don't mean college basketball. Try finding a grander sports event than, say, Duke at Carolina. Instead, I mean the NBA -- National Basketball Association -- as in hype, boom box, trash talk, and self-promotion. The late Bart Giamatti, who hated it, was once asked by a college student about pro hoops. "Young lady," he said, deepening his basso profundo voice, "Don't ask me to talk about thumpety, thumpety, thumpety, swish."

Sportswriter Red Smith won immortality by saying, "Baseball is dull only to dull minds." Pro basketball appeals only to demented minds. Like Giamatti, Smith disdained the NBA's sameness. Run up the court and shoot. Run down the court -- been there, done that. Throw a pitch in baseball, and a hundred things can happen. Shoot a pro basketball, and two things happen. You make it. You miss it. Wake me when it's done.

Perhaps the NBA's most nauseous trait is its miming of mindless culture. Hockey is the grace and class of Maurice Richard, who died this year at 78. By contrast, one in every five NBAers has spent time in jail. Most are two-faced, in your face, and shouldn't be allowed to show their face. The NBA is garish, quickly consumed, and utterly forgettable, like Chinese food. Hockey comes from small towns from New York to Manitoba -- oral history enduring from one generation to the next.

Invariably, NBA apologists say, "But they're the greatest athletes in the world." So? They play the worst game in the world. Pro hoops' defense recalls how New York City proclaims itself the world's greatest city. "Proof"? Manhattan never closes. Wow: you can get pastrami in a restaurant at 3 a.m.

Sadly, pastrami can't save New York City from the coarse place it is. Likewise, great athletes can't obscure what pro basketball has become -- a so-called hip/grotesquely self-obsessed/overblown blowhard of a game where nasty is cool, profanity even cooler, and nice guys don't simply finish last -- they rarely play at all.

Recently, I trekked to Marine Midland Arena to see the Sabres play Richard's Les Canadiens. What a swirl of imagery. The sheen of ice. The vivid red and blue lines. The shift of players -- like warriors storming Normandy. The grace and elegance -- a mix of Andrew Wyeth and ballet. Compare hockey to the NBA, where MTV triumphs, it seems illegal to reflect, and the sound system is louder than a 747.

Pro basketball mirrors, as Bob Costas says in his 2000 best-selling book, a society which has "lost all sense of what kind of people deserve respect and even approbation." So watch hockey -- a great and lovely game. Then let's see if we can get three-quarters of the states to declare pro hoops unconstitutional. Let's make the USA an NBA-free zone.

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