BattleBall on Facebook: Explosive graphics, but where's the game?

"Boy, that sure is a nice tech demo," I thought to myself as I watched lithe street ballers destroy backboards with shattering force in BattleBall's preliminary matches. Standing as one of the few basketball games on Facebook, BattleBall was developed by Schell Games and backed by Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. While the game makes impressive use of the Unity 3D graphics engine, BattleBall sadly does nothing to explore the power of three dimensions. In fact, this game could have easily been presented in Flash-based 2D and absolutely nothing would have been different. Well, the explosions would be less prominent.