YAYsports! NBA

UPDATE: Well, we’re pretty excited, because we can now offically retire the thought/speech-bubble portion of the site.

No longer will we use that device in any way, shape, or form.

You see, when we see a funny bit that’s used frequently by another person in a similar area of creative pursuits as us, we immediately put it on an unofficial list of “things we won’t adopt in our own work”.

It’s a thing called “creative integrity”, and you’ve seen it rile us up many times before (see: Lupica, StopMike & Roundie, Orange). We’re this close to unleashing our rant. THIS CLOSE.

But we won’t, because it’s not the right time.

When the time comes, we’ll be sure to reprint the block of text that sums it all up, wherein a now prominent NBA blogger sent us an email asking all about how to Photoshop, because he “wants to start a site exactly like yours. You’re okay with that, right?”

Imagine, if you will, our attempt to answer that question. Somehow, we managed to only get out something to the affect of, “sure”. Basically, this is because we couldn’t believe someone would actually write that.

It’s like Live-blogging the NBA Draft - WHY?

Why would you possibly want to do that? That’s totally Bill Simmons’s “thing”. He didn’t invent live-blogging, and he didn’t invent the NBA Draft, but he did pair the two and make it a signature piece, to the point that any NBA Draft live-blog is a knock-off. And why would you chose to do a knock-off, full-well knowing it’s a knock-off? (If you don’t understand what that last sentence really means, you shouldn’t be trying to do creative things.)

(Also, parody is different than a knock-off - good parody is a challenge unto itself and also perfectly acceptable.)

Look, we don’t mean to set ourself up as the moral authority of creating blog content, but the fact is, we’re usually right on this stuff, so we ARE the moral authority of creating blog content.

All that said, we may quit blogging until the movie is released. Why keep doing this? We’ll decide by Friday - we know we go back and forth on this all the time and we’re a baby about it, but really, it’s just gotten old. (We’re sure we’ll keep going - we’re just having a moment.)

Of course, between now and then, we’re sure someone will announce they’re shooting a movie called “Who Is the One Who Killed the Snake With a Gun?”, at which point we don’t really know what we’ll do.

***PRE-UPDATE SECTION***

Oh man - we finally did it. MCBias (We think? Was it Jordi?) told us once he was dying for us to go off on how we really feel about the sports blogosphere and blogs in general, and we did it. It was brutal, AND it called sites out by name, accompanied by our specific criticism and/or beef.

But THEN???

Then we found these two pics of Chris Bosh, which lightened our entire mood up. The thing about them is, they’re about ten times funnier in Photoshopped form if you see the originals. Thus we post them below, with our work to come in a bit.

Gah - we don’t know what to think - we didn’t quite get to those Bosh PSs.

We have no time for Photoshop, etc today, but we know you need to read our thoughts on this -

Believe it or not, this actually has me contemplating getting League Pass for the rest of the season.

It’s not Gasol-to-the-Lakers or anything, but look at the dynamics of how LeBron plays, and you have be a little curious.

Drive and dump to Ben…Ben can handle that, and we’re not entirely convinced (although we’re sure we wrote the opposite in the past) that Ben is completely washed up. Remember, he’ll be playing power forward for CLE, which paired with Z, makes them pretty big upfront.

Wally is perfect for LeBron - doesn’t have to handle the ball - just stand out there and shoot it.

Getting rid of Larry Hughes is great for chemistry, and as far as contracts, they’ve added nothing extraordinary in the long term.

We’ve always felt Delonte West was a good PG for a LeBron James, as well.

We’re down with this deal - it’s a risk, but a calculated one.

UPDATE: The infamous Farlane sent us this lil’ thing he made for us, inaccurately depicting what happened when we heard about the trade:

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write anything about this or not, but I thought it was appropriate to say something.

I was informed a few days ago that frequent commenter and sometime poster “Stillajew” (his real-life name was Aaron), one of the site’s most loyal readers and a true-blue Roundie Henchman, was killed in a car accident recently.

From my online interactions with him, I always thought he was sharp-witted, intelligent, and full of enthusiasm. I’ll miss his contributions to the site, and send my condolences to his family and friends.

Wherever you’ve found yourself in the afterlife, enjoy yourself peacefully, Aaron.

Guess what?

For the first time in probably 18 years, we didn’t watch the NBA All-Star Game.

Out ambivalence toward the league is becoming quite odd - by all accounts, this is the best regular season in recent memory, LeBron James is having his best season ever, there are huge trades happening left and right, and the NBA blogosphere seems to grow every day.

Even the Orange Roundie is putting on make-up and participating.

As the Greatest NBA Blogger of All-Time (a title we will cement in place sometime this year), one would think we’d be all up in that.

Many a late night we’ve sat up and thought this over, even calling our Mom to say things like, “Hey, y’know how when someone wrongs me, I refuse to ever have anything to do with them again? I think that might be like a problem or something.”

Then she’s like, “You’re not still on those energy drinks, are you? It’s 3am.”

“No, no, no. I’m off those.”

“What was that sound just now? It sounded like a can opening.”

“Oh, you’re flexing some major juice cards now, aren’t you?!”

Then we hang up and go back to contemplating how flat-out AWFUL that Knight Rider update was on NBC lasternight. HORRIBLE.

* The car has no personality and isn’t even gay.
* That lead actress was really, really bad.
* Anything that wasn’t the car driving around looked like you could’ve shot it guerilla-style in your backyard. (Particularly the scene where the thugs threaten Mike in his garage.)
* Oh, and the wrap-up to that story point was great - “Mike, I deposited that money in your account. Those thugs won’t bother you anymore.”
* They couldn’t even bother to answer the one question everyone wants to know - is that the same KITT brain in the car or not? If not, where is the old KITT?

Oh, well - it’s one more thing we don’t have to watch if it becomes a series.

BTW, you know what would be funny? If LeBron just got really selfish and decided he wants the All-Star MVP every year. Like he wins it 10 years in a row, and just laughs about it every time.

Larry Hughes didn’t make the All-Star team, and nobody has ever argued that he would.

But after scoring 40 points last night in an improbable win over the Orlando Magic, one must assume that Larry Hughes finally took our advice and started working out. Getting sturdy. Being a strong person who doesn’t get injured.

In celebration of that, we’re going to type as many NBA players names as we can think of right off the top of our heads without stopping. As soon as we hit more than a 5-second lag, we’re done. This should be interesting - we don’t know why.

Oops we accidentally pushed the publish button, when we meant to type that we were gonna go blow our nose before beginning this exercise.

Come back in 20 minutes and we should be done.

Okay, here we go; excuse typos - they’re part of the exercise:

Larry Hughes Dwight howard LeBron James Donyell Marchall Chauncey Billups Ben Wallace Steve Nash Shaq Kobe Bryant Carmelo Anthony Rasheed Wallace Antoine Walker Udonis Haslem Shareef Abdur-Raheem Shawn Marion Eric Snow Stephon AMrbury Kevin Garnett Tim Duncan Dirk NOwitzki Eddy Curry Zach Randolph Tracy McGrady Vince CArter Jason Kidd Adrian Pasdar Brandon Roy Greg ODen Stephen Jackson BAron Davis Lamar Odom Elton Brand Corey Magette Derek Fisher Luke Walton Z Ilgauskas Anderson Varejao Shasa Pavlovic Jameer Nelson Josh Smith Dwyane Wade

That’s it - Wade for some reason froze our brain. Obviously we know plenty more, but Dwyane Wade absolutely made us stop for about eight seconds, thus ending the exercise.

What have we learned? Well, even in a cruel world where up is down and left is sometimes right, SKREE! SKREE! SKREE!

While Shawn Marion makes his Heat debut on national TV against the Lakers, we’ll be concentrating on something else.

This may surprise you, but we’re calling NYC this afternoon to have an over-the-phone lunch with Stephon Marbury.

You see, he’s had like all these surgeries on his ankle (or maybe just one surgery), is out for the year, and now he needs what we in the industry call “a friend”.

We intend to be that friend - on the menu is MacDonalds hamburgers - we’ll both be eating the exact same thing so that we can have conversations about the food, just like in a real, in-person meal situation.

We imagine it’ll go something like this:

“Hey Stephon Marbury, how is your McDonalds hamburger?”

“It is good. How is your McDonalds hamburger?”

“It is good, too.”

“I am going to eat six french fries now. You should too, and then we’ll ask each other how they were.”

“Okay.”

…

…

“How were your McDonalds french fries, Stephon Marbury?”

“I am not done yet.”

“Will you tell me when you are done?”

“Yes.”

…
…

“Now I am finished.”

“I am glad. Now we can discuss our McDonalds french fries.”

“Yes. I am looking forward to this part of the conversation.”

“How were your McDonalds french fries, Stephon Marbury?”

“They were good. I am curious if yours were good, as well.”

“Yes, they were. Now I am going to take a drink of the Diet Coke that came with my McDonalds hamburger and french fry value meal.”

“How long of a sip will you take.”

“I will sip with the straw for 2 seconds, at a medium strength.”

“I would like to sip at a strength of 7/10, which is more towards a medium high strength.”

“You are a shrewd negotiator, Stephon Marbury.”

“Ha ha ha! That is funny.”

“Yes, I have made a joke, and the joke has been a success.”

“What you did was take a business phrase and inserted it into a casual conversation about having a meal.”

“The odd pairing of words out of context results in humor.”

“I laughed.”

“I am glad, Stephon Marbury. Are you ready to sip the Diet Coke, as we proposed earlier?”

“Yes.”

“Before we do that, may I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“Is your refrigerator running?”

“Yes”

“Well, you better catch it.”

“HA HA HA!”

“HA HA HA!”

“That was another joke.”

“I know.”

“I have lost track of who is who in this conversation.”

“I have, too.”

“Uh, oh!”

“This could be troublesome to the continuation of the conversation.”

“It is called a loss of identity.”

“Earlier, one of us was repeatedly referring to the other as Stephon Marbury so as to differentiate who was speaking.”

“I do not remember which of us was doing that.”

“Keeping track of it became difficult with all of the jokes flying around.”

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Your refrigerator is running!”

“HA HA HA!”

“HA HA HA!”

“EL OH EL!”

“I am enjoying this lunch.”

“I am, as well.”

“Would you like to try taking another bite of the hamburgers?”

“We have forgotten to take the sip of Diet Coke.”

“Things are getting crazy.”

“We don’t play by the rules!”

“And we have running refrigerators!”

“HA HA HA!”

“TEE-HEE!”

“That is how girls laugh.”

“I know - that is the joke.”

“I didn’t know we were still telling jokes.”

“HA HA HA!”

Continue reading ‘Stephon Marbury needs a friend’

Pau and Kobe are working great together, the Shaq trade is official, we forgot to change our credit card info on the server account after that gambling hi-jack incident, and then neglected to change it for like a week as we received emails saying, “We’re gonna shut you down, kid. We’ll do it.”

Sorry about that.

There is a redesign coming, and we hoped to actually disappear for like two weeks and come back online with it, but then we were all like, “Man, we kinda miss having the site there.”

So we paid the bill, and here we are.

Jordi said this about us on his site during the Blog Confusion:

Few bloggers are more unpredictable than The Cavalier of YaySports!. A self-proclaimed disinterested Cleveland Cavaliers fan, the eccentric genius has in the past year run his site much like Osama Bin Laden - dropping an occasional rambling message while his acolytes (myself included) keep hope alive.

God, we love being an enigma.

Can one be an enigma while at the same time admitting that you’re trying to be enigmatic? Does the proclamation overwhelm the actions?

We have no idea, and that in and of itself is pretty enigmatic, which means we even look at ourself and think, “Jesus, man. How the hell are you wired up there?”

Everyone hates this deal, but we think we’ve got it figured out, and it’s all about two words: ANGRY SHAQ.

If the Suns figure it’s now or never time, ie they need to win it this year, then Angry Shaq might be the best way to do it, plus they don’t really need him on the fast break.

On the other side of the equation, they probably want him to rebound a lot and shoot a ton of outlet passes - Shaq hates rebounding. (Although Angry Shaq might do it just to spite Pat Riley & MIA.)

Whatever - if this happens, it’s clearly the year of the out-of-nowhere-big-name-trade, which means anybody could be moving on a moment’s notice.

This means Tracy McGrady should keep his bags packed and his “It’s a business and we all know you can be moved at any time” speech ready.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about taffy.

In 1422, in a small village in Western South America, a man invented taffy.

“It’s sticky and will make you immortal!” he screamed.

His neighbor quickly came over to see what the commotion was about. “This taffy! It will make you immortal, and it is sticky!”

“Have you had any yet?”

“No, but my immortality is imminent - observe!”

As he raised the taffy to his lips, the neighbor bludgeoned him with a bludgeon, killing him. He then ate the taffy himself, and lived forever.

NOTE: Like you didn’t know, it’s Shaq for Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks. We don’t know what this does for the Heat, but we picture Marion as someone who would love living on South Beach.

There’s pretty much nothing you could say to us that would convince us Roger Clemens didn’t take steroids.

He’s generally regarded as both a supreme competitor and a morally bankrupt type, which is about all it would take to get you to take roids and then lie about it.

Add in his trainer’s claims, Roger’s bizarre and over-zealous self-defense, and the smug looks on him and his lawyer above, and we’re ready to convict him.

This doesn’t mean he won’t lie today - in fact, we’re fully convinced that he’s fully convinced himself that he didn’t actually take anything.

Regardless, it’s Super Tuesday, which means we need to do what any good citizen does - refuse to vote. Until the USA decides to stop letting people have election sites in their living rooms and let’s us vote from our computer, we’re not doing anything.

It’s 2008, and we don’t vote in living rooms.

Besides, we’ve never voted before, and we’re not starting now - the prospect of walking in there all confused an not knowing what to do is too intimidating. At 18, it would’ve been one thing to be all like, “Hey, I’ve never done this before - I am confused and naive.”

Now we’d just look like some jerk who’s never voted before, because we don’t want to come into your living room and poke a needle through a punch card.

There’s all that, plus we don’t know the difference between a Nit Rooney and a Franklin Harkleberry.

What are those two are doing, anyway - either the black guy or the chick are gonna be the next president. We imagine they’re just getting as famous as they can so they can write a book or something.

Back to Roger Clemens - he’s fat, and have we got some HOT BASKETBALL NEWS for you!