Nike has launched what might be the most revolutionary marketing device they’re ever had – a blog. What can you find on the Nike Blog?
It’s nothing like you’d expect, actually. One would assume it’s really just an ad for their shoes and apparel, but it’s so much more than that. Check out this post about Kobe Bryant.
Enclosed in glass cases around the venue, were the Air Zoom Huarache 2K4, the Air Zoom Huarache 2K5 and the Zoom Kobe I — all in Kobe’s colors.
Then there’s a bunch of pictures of Kobe’s shoes, plus a link on where to buy them. Other posts have such insightful and creative content as “LeBron’s Shoes”.
We get that they’re trying to get hep with the kids and stuff, but do they seriously not have anyone in the entire Nike headquarters who can figure out what a blog actually is? Since they obviously don’t, why not hire someone who will subtley weave the marketing in under the guise of an actual “inside Nike HQ” type blog? We’d read that.
Hell, they could pay us in shoes and shorts and we’d give them awesome stuff like this day in and day out.
Just went up to Phil’s office and hit on his secretary some more. She was all like, “he’s not in.” Not one to take no for an answer, I started screaming “Yo, Uncle Phil! Uncle Phil! Don’t send me back to Philly! Hey, Kool-Aid!”
He didn’t come out again, but I’m going to get that bastard out of his office one of these days. Yeah, we get free (and extremely comfortable) LeBron Zoom IIIs, but without daily interaction with Phil Knight, I’m wondering what the point is to working here.
Look, I Photoshopped hot dogs on these new Nikes! Fuck, I’m retarded! Swoosh!
Simple, Nike. Blogging is easy.
Photoshop, swearing, jokes about food. That’s it. That’s all you need.
It’s a slow day in the NBA, which is convenient, since we’ve signed up at MySpace and have now discovered a new way to waste unbelievable amounts of time.
Let’s just run down some of the things that have happened since our Ben Gordon post yesterday.
1) The Red Sock emailed to say, “hey, we should get those and use them to promote the site.” He was right, so we did. We expect they’ll get some when they get around to it, which will mean 2 more friends. (We’re currently at 12!)
(Just to be clear, we’re not selective at all – we’ll be friends with everyone. That’s pretty much how it works with us in the real world, so we’re not friend-whoring. We’re sure there’s some fancy myspace term for that, so if anyone knows it, let us know.)
2) We became friends with a fake Shaq and left him this comment: “Moustaches!”
3) Sarunus Jasikevicius became our friend and we left this message: “Go Pasers!”
4) The Beard, who used to write YAYsports! NFL but has moved on to better places, emailed to say he tried to IM with Ben Gordon. Here’s what happened:
wayyyback78: Ben Gordon….WORD!!!!
*** “bg4307″ signed off at Mon Feb 27 15:56:24 2006.
God, we miss that guy. We’ll be on AOL IM all day trying to reach Ben Gordon – we’re “yaysports” if you’re bored.
5) The infamous Tammy Nyp is not on myspace yet, but this guy is asking.
Seriously, nothing is going on except Larry Brown whining about how the Knicks make him want to die, which is pretty old news, anyway.
The guy who owns the Knicks goes on a road-trip with the team once every year, and the time for that trip is apparently now. Whether he’s doing that because it’s so much fun to watch the Knicks or because he needs to get away from Isiah before he kills him is unknown.
If it’s the second one, he’s screwed, because Isiah has decided to tag along this year. Apparently the surprise has give Mr. Dolan a case of the crazies.
“It’s not just about making the playoffs,” Dolan said. “It’s about being a great team during that 82 games and putting a great product on the floor and that should ultimately end up, we would hope, in making the playoffs.”
“I just think [Isiah]’s done a very good job,” Dolan added then. “Particularly in this offseason it’s been, I think we’re ahead of schedule in where we want it to be in terms of bringing on talent and youth and making the team more exciting.”
Looking over that list of goals, Isiah has accomplished none of those things, so we’re not sure where he’s coming from.
We suppose you could take that first sentence fragment about “not just about making the playoffs” and twist that around into something Isiah has done right, but that would have to be worded as “it’s about not making the playoffs”.
We’ve bashed Isiah quite enough on this blog over the months we’ve been here, so let’s take this in a different direction. We’re going to say the best, most positive thing about the Knicks we can.
Here it comes.
The Knicks got blown out by San Antonio last night, which is the third massacre in a row since the Steve Francis trade. Their uniforms were clean.
This is Cavalier basketball. Fourth quarter, close game. Why do you guys only play at 75% effort? Just try hard all the time. Why are you making this so difficult on yourselves?
(Also, stop taking so may lazy-ass jumpers when you should be getting the ball inside or driving to the hole. SWEAR WORDS!!!!)
Okay, we’re on myspace now, so go sign up to be our friend – that way we can call each other “buddy” and/or “pal” when we see each other.
We were poking around for a few minutes last night on there. Do like people really think this is Michael Jordan?
For the record, we do think this is Martell Webster.
In other news about Martell Webster, we’ll be LiveBlogging Britney Spears on GMA over on Mary Hartz in a little while. (If you haven’t figured out that we write that site, you’ve either never been there or aren’t paying close attention like this gentleman.)
Gilbert Arenas gets his second Player of the Week in a row.
Mike Kahn discusses the end of the Colangelos in PHX and more in his 10 things he learned this week. We only learned one thing this week, and that’s the Cavs are pissing us off.
Amare Stoudamire is cleared for 5-on-5 practice. That’s good, because the Suns are just struggling badly, huh?
Celticsblog analyzes the case with Ryan Gomes. We’ll be honest, we don’t know who that is but have heard the name.
We found this new blog called Cavs World, which takes another look at the fans booing of LeBron over the weekend.
That freaking Deer eats Origamis. We’ve tried eating electronics before and it ain’t easy.
The Paxfather is messing around with the impending buyout of Tim Thomas.
Sources say Allen Iverson hasn’t been invited to the Shanghai Olympics.
Finally, we took a good look at Vince Young’s Wonderlic test and the results are both hilarious and full of hilarity.
KG had his 413th moment of frustration last night and lobbed a ball into the stands, accidentally hitting a fan.
The dude who the ball grazed wanted to be wheeled off on a stretcher. If this had been an away game, we can see this. Maybe. This happened in the Target Center, however.
Kevin Zenk of St. Paul, who was sitting behind the fan who was hit, said the ball didn’t appear to have much velocity on it. “It wasn’t real hard,” Zenk said Asked how he felt the fan reacted, Zenk said: “Overreacted. … You know, I kind of figured the Oscars were next week, but I don’t know if the nominations are all in. He played it up.”
“It was just a toss, man,” he said. “I’m an athlete, so it’s going to have something on it. But I just tossed it, man. I didn’t even really look at where I tossed it, I was so … damned mad.”
He should be – that dude calls himself a fan? Look, man-who-refuses-to-give-out-his-name, if you’re mad at your team, you do things like write fake movie script pages making them feel bad for not trying. You don’t go around pretending your All-World good guy player was trying to take your head off.
If this tool tries to sue Kevin Garnett or the Timberwolves, we’ll make it our mission for at least a post and a half to mericlessly make fun of him. Then, because of our ADD, we’ll probably quit and go work at Ralphs, so we can meet Ben Howland. Who the hell is Ben Howland?
According to the Chicago Sun Times, this Ben Gordon myspace profile is the real deal.
So far, Ben has 1979 friends, and they all look like nice people. One of these friends is Indiana’s Sarunas Jasikevicius, who leaves this message.
2/26/2006 10:03 PM
Hows it going Ben I had a great time with you guys at the rookie challenge and take care in Chicago and tell Darius I said whats up.
Sarunas
Ben also lists his AOL instant message name as “bg4307″ and invites you to talk to him. Kirk Hinrich is listed as one of Ben’s friends, but not in the top 8.
One of Sarunas’s friends is Lakers guard Von Wafer, whose myspace page will blind you.
We’re going to end up doing this all day – Andreas Nocioni has one, too. He says he’d like to meet Chris Duhon. That shouldn’t be too tough. One of Andreas’s top friends is a fake Andreas Nocioni, who says:
About me:
My name is Andres Nocioni, I look like a werewolf and I play forward for the Chicago Bulls. Everybody says I play so hard always diving for loose balls and whatnot because I have so much hustle, but it’s really because I’m insane. I have extraordiarily red hair. I bite people from time to time. I even bit Coach Skiles once but he didn’t mind and said he liked my effort. I start at small forward even though Luol Deng is better than me. He knows this, and eveytime he tells me I bite him but then he chases me with his spear and threatens to slash me.
Enough already. Looks like the entire NBA and a horde of fake NBAers are on myspace. Kirk Hinrich is friends with two fake Kirk’s.
Our favorite profile we found this morning is this one for “sandwich”, though. He lists his occupation as “mothafuckin’ lunch” and has friends named Roast Beef, Smoked Turkey Breast, and Hank, who’s a hot dog. We’ve never really understood what myspace was all about until finding this last one. Now we totally get it. We’re signing up immediately.
We don’t want to accuse Stephen A. Smith of literally phoning in his columns – that’s just crazy talk.
However, yesterday he wrote the most rambling piece of garbage we’ve read since we reread our own posts from Friday. He says (we think) that the only reason Maurice Cheeks was hired to coach the Sixers was because he’s black, but now he needs to watch his step because he’s black. Or something.
Here’s the dirty little secret talked about amongst African Americans in the sports world: While the numbers are proliferating, methodically erasing the need to make an issue out of the paucity of black coaches in the game, it hasn’t changed the unwritten standard attached to their job description.
Most coaches are hired to win basketball games. Black coaches are hired to do so while keeping players under control. If this were not true, you still wouldn’t see many black coaches in this game.
Huh? What’s he saying exactly? Are white coaches hired because they let everyone run wild or something? Can black coaches lose as long as their players are under control? AI is “under control” and having his best season ever – why is Mo in trouble?
Maybe it actually comes back to winning and losing? Hasn’t Maurice Cheeks shown in both Philly and Portland it’s not something he can really do? Is it possible he’s just not a good coach? Where does race work into this at all? We can’t imagine SAS is just trying to be controversial – that’s not something he would do.
Perhaps we can gain some insight by looking at the first line of the column:
Maurice Cheeks is a black man.
Yes. Brilliance through the economic use of words. Now the last line:
That, in itself, is a problem he needs to fix. Now!
He writes just like he talks! We’ve been told we do that, as well, but we talk like a sane person generally. Now!
Click to read buddiesYes, it’s the Detroit Pistons.
Yes, you’re on the road.
You can’t really go in there expecting to come out with a win.
However, you could at least think you might have some sort or maybe even a sliver of a chance for like a couple minutes. The Cavs went into the Palace yesterday and acted like (again) they simply didn’t care, didn’t feel like being there, didn’t wanna bother responding to Z getting elbowed in the head by Sheed, who even said he did it on purpose. the Plain Dealer’s Bud Shaw says the tonight’s follow-up in Cleveland will show what this team is all about.
Watch how they play tonight to measure their commitment. There’s no day off to watch film, to dissect how the Pistons guards turned every corner on just about every screen. Playing the screen doesn’t require a Ph.D. anyway.
There is only time to answer with something resembling determination not to get pushed around again. The time frame limits the response to willpower.
We hate getting all on this team – it’s starting to look like they’re seriously a bunch of headcases, and having the 4th greatest blog in the entire universe pile on can’t help.
But seriously, that was so bad we incorporated it into our NBA movie we’ve been writing. Click the page to see an excerpt from what’s going to be the most incredible blockbuster ever.
We’ll be pausing the Cavs-Wiz game to LiveBlog the first ten minutes or so of the Knicks-Nets game aka “Steve Francis’s Coming Out Party.” Here’s a little game preview.
The new Knickerbocker doesn’t understand why everyone is all upset about him and Marbury playing together.
“I swear, until just now, until I got to New York, I never heard my game compared to Stephon Marbury’s,” he said.
“You just go out on the floor, learn about each other, let the vibe flow,” added Francis. “At least at first. You allow the chemistry evolve with time. I’ve played with Cuttino Mobley, another great guard, in Houston and we were ranked as the top back court for years. It wasn’t about him shooting the ball or me shooting the ball. It wasn’t a problem.”
C’mon Franchise, let it go already – you’re supposed to be healing. And read a newspaper or the internet now and then. Here we go…
12:00 The Knicks are in their retros tonight, and they’re starting Steve right there next to Marbury. Quentin Richardson gets the 3 spot, which mean Jalen Rose becomes the first disgruntled Knick in this new era.
More after the jump!
[click to continue…]
It’s our dad’s birthday, so if you happen to know him, please drop him a line and tell him happy 33rd. Happy birthday, father! Maybe the Cavs will try for you tonight.
