JD, welcome to the forum. Glad you've found us. There's a lot of useful information exchanged here. Having said that, I'm going to take exception with a couple things in your post.
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Originally Posted by jd6stop
I just watched a good game of basketball last night on ESPN classics. NBA finals game 4, Lakers over Celtics.
It was good because of the lack of physical play
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Did you see the clothesline foul against the Laker player (I forget who it was, but I don't think it was Magic) on the fast break in that game? Did you see Kareem elbow Bird in the face after the whistle? Did you see Cooper get hammered on a drive straight down the middle of the lane with no call? That series, and the NBA in general, had LOTS of physical play. Did you see Parish literally beat down Laimbeer at the Garden during the Eastern Conference Finals? There was no call from the officials. There was no suspension from the league. There wasn't even a fine. Not only was the physical play there, it was an accepted part of the game.
I will grant you that the physical play became worse as coaches started using it as a tactic, rather than just playing the game. But that was actually pretty commonplace with Detroit's "Bad Boys".
I agree with you that in general, there was better shooting and passing ability in the glory days of Magic, Larry and Michael. The pace of the game was more fun to watch with Magic running Showtime. But to say that there wasn't any physical play, even back then, is "misremembering".
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Even the refs called fouls and travelling. The stuff we see today is our fault - refs - with no sense of the game letting everything get out of control. Where did we go wrong? 
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The state of the NBA game is "our fault"?
I can't remember the last time I reffed an NBA game.
Some of that stuff does filter down to games that I (we) do work. But part of it happens because that's just the style of play now. We keep calling fouls, but they keep playing physically. And part of it happens because the game is faster now (at the high school and college level). Some of the traveling calls happen so quickly that it's hard to know which was the pivot foot.
I'm not sure that "where did we go wrong" is the right question to ask. I think we are trying our best to do, at the high school and college level, what our rulemakers and supervisors are asking us to do. (Which, come to think of it, is exactly what the NBA refs are trying to do.)