Pro sports took the leap from substance to style the day Joe Namath made his first Brut commercial. Most leagues at least maintain the illusion that the games are bigger than the show. For the NBA, the show is everything.

Name another league where an 18-year-old child who never played a college minute is accorded the fanfare LeBron James has received. Find another league where the individual is more celebrated. Is there another league where an owner could suggest the news surrounding a megastar's sexual assault trial would be good publicity?

The younger the better, the harder the better. Look at my body art, my dunks, my tough-guy poses from the pages of a magazine. Look at me.

OK. I'm looking at Tayshaun Prince, in ESPN the Magazine. He's featured in a story labeled The New Order. Really? As a rookie last year, Prince averaged 10 minutes and three points a game. He went crazy in the playoffs: Twenty-five minutes, nine points.

Tayshaun Prince is hard. Know what I'm sayin'? He looks at you from the page with his head tilted to the side, his mouth pouty-tough, his eyes lasering straight through you. Tayshaun has ... attitude.

Spare me the attitude. Nothing against Prince; chances are, the magazine people told him to look that way, because the magazine wants to appeal to younger readers and the magazine thinks younger readers want attitude. Most of these guys, Prince included, might have come from Attitude, two houses, five cars and a shoe deal ago. But they are not there now. Good luck to the magazine, anyway.

Some of us are sick of the attitude. If you are of a certain age, the ego-flexing as sport turns you off to the National Basketball Association. It turns you off so much, you don't watch the games. Even as the raw ability leaps and bounds like never before. Even as gravity shows it has no relevance. Even as the NBA is the finest mix of sport and artistic self-expression ever devised. You don't watch.

It's ironic that the most essential team game is dominated by divas and Me-Men. How silly was it last week, when fires left thousands homeless and several dead, that Shaq and Kobe could engage in an ego-feud, even as they could see the smoke and ash from the tinted windows of their fine automobiles?

If attitude must rule, OK. Fine. Can anybody make a shot?

Your average NBA player has names for his dunks. Here's one for his jump shot: MIA.

On Tuesday night, the Denver Nuggets scored 60 points. They scored seven in one quarter. That is good if you are 8 years old and playing on Saturday morning. Denver's newest sensation, the man currently second on the league's Hype-O-Meter, Carmelo Anthony, played 19 minutes, took 13 shots and missed 12. Probably, he looked fabulous doing it.

The Toronto Raptors average 76 points a game. Five NBA teams average fewer than 80, 11 shoot 40 percent or less from the field. On any given night, Allen Iverson needs 30 shots to score 30 points. Iverson had been the NBA's state-of-the-art star. He has been supplanted by Anthony and James. And by Bryant, accused of sexual assault.

That doesn't matter to the NBA. It has LeBron, blowing bubbles on the cover of the magazine. The league knows what sells. It ain't the quality of the product.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com