For all those who said a U-Haul truck couldn’t make a daredevil style jump over Arco Arena, well lookee lookee.
SacTown Royalty runs down all the new coaching assistants for the Kings.
The combo of making up trades and hyping foreign prospects makes this predraft time the best 6 days of Chad Ford’s year.
If you’re looking for something to do, you newer people could go read our old Peja Stojakovic fan-fiction. Might be a good reference, y’know, sometime for something. Possibly. (Make sure to start at the bottom at Part 1.)
Sorry we’re all short today on the EXPLOSIONS, but we just can’t get all that into reading about draft workouts. We get excited only when there are moves being made with actual NBA players, or when people are shaking David Stern’s hand.
It hath been done.
Larry Brown is fired; Isiah Thomas is head coach of the New York Knicks, opening the door for a drama-filled 06-07, and the most interesting draft night crowd in NBA history.
Will the building explode as the Bulls use the Knicks selection? “Fire Zeke” chants? Big signs that say “Wow, the Knicks are quite interesting in a circusy way!” Owner James Dolan and the man of the hour weigh in.
“Larry has had a long and storied career. We hired him last summer with the expectation that he would be with the Knicks for a long time. Sometimes decisions work and sometimes they don’t,” Dolan said.
“No one in our organization is happy with last season and we all accept responsibility for our performance. … Today begins the 2006-07 season for the Knicks, and I strongly believe we are on the right track to take major steps in our rebuilding process to achieve our goal of being one of the premier teams in the NBA,” Thomas said.
Don’t forget this important fact – Isiah’s a horrible GM, but lost in all this is he’s also a horrible coach! Seriously, look at him already. He thinks the season starts today! It doesn’t start until November!
The best part about this, at least for the summer, should be Larry’s strange and/or bitter statements, and there’s no way they’re not imminent. The man loves drama too much, plus there aren’t any other jobs out there for him.
Enjoy this, everyone. The Knicks have just solidified another entire season of glee for everyone except their fans.
(Zeke officially gets his own category today – we need to go bacak and rearchive the old stuff.)
UPDATE: ESPN.com says that David Stern is arbitrating the buyout due to a clause in the contract. We don’t even know why that’s funny, but it is.
When he’s not fighting supervillians for DC Comics or following that hot Rasho Nesterovic trade, LeBron James is probably busy following American Idol runner-up Katherine McPhee’s bulemia announcement.
Once those things are out of the way, LeBron sets out to build some new townhomes on the East side of Cleveland, while simultaneously discussing the contract extension he can sign July 1st.
James is convinced he’ll be in Cleveland for a long time. “I’m very happy here with our team and I’m very excited about our future,” he said. “I’m confident we’ll get something done. I’ve got confidence in the organization and what we’ve done together.”
Following Miami’s 95-92 series-clinching win in Game 6 on Tuesday, James spoke to his jubilant friend in Dallas. “He was out of his mind, and he doesn’t touch alcohol,” James said. “I’m excited for him. I’m very happy for him. He’s one of my best friends in the whole world. Hopefully, I’ll get there one day and he can be excited for me.”
T-minus nine days to euphoric relief, friends.
On to Dwyane Wade. Does that quote mean Wade was drinking or was he just so happy it seemed like he was drinking? Anyone know for sure?
Either way, the “Wade is better than LeBron” articles are rolling off the presses. Here’s one from the hometown Akron Beacon Journal, no less.
You can probably guess where we stand on this one. Switch their teams (and coaches) up, LeBron’s the one “out of his mind” in Dallas. It’s not like LBJ got swept in the first round or something. Not to take anything away from Wade, but we still think you put a gun to these writers’ heads, they’re all taking LeBron.
When we say that, it’s not a symbolic thing – we mean like, if you put an actual gun to their heads and were all, “Say LeBron is better or I’ll shoot you in your head in such fashion that you’ll die.”
(All kinds of LeBron comic/cartoon goodness over at Powerade, especially for those of you under 13! And us!)
What can we say about the Mavs?
They’re fine. They’re excellent. They’ll probably be back in the Finals next year.
Who knows if they’ll make big changes? Hopefully not, because they don’t need to.
Now their fans? We’re not sure what becomes of them. This is only a small sampling, but those who aren’t complaining simply “want to die”, according to our comments section from last night.
“If we believe that the last great conspiracy theory in Dallas was JFK’s death, the second greatest conspiracy theory was that David Stern wanted the Miami Heat to win the championship,” said Mavericks fan George Graffy, 41.
“I paid $1,200 for these tickets, and we did not win,” said Ashleigh Adams.
“We got the coach. We got the team. We wanted it all this year, though,” said Korby Keene. “The Heat aren’t that good. The refs gave them the game.”
Look, we sympathize with you people, especially Ashleigh, who’s so crushed she can only state simple facts in brief sentences.
That said, the refs didn’t make your Mavs shoot 800 jumpshots to every drive to the hoop. The refs didn’t make Dirk forget how far he’d come and how he got there, ie playing more inside, less out. That’s all there is to it – Wade was too good, you guys weren’t good enough.
Were you the technically better team on paper? Probably, but even Toine and Zo clearly wanted it more than you last night. That’s all anyone will remember, so start living that way ASAP – it’ll be healthier than playing endless rounds of “But If Stack Hadn’t Been” all summer.
Now, we’re sorry this was up kinda late, but we’re working hard on our little project and putting in countless hours on the Stairmaster while doing interviews on national television.
And what was up with Josh Howard dropping his shorts? Who puts an ACE bandage around their waist anyway?
As long as we’re talking Mavs, we love how Stu Scott played up Marquis Daniels’s Biblical tattoos last night and left out his ones about murdering people, among these others, which total 27!
The tattoos range from an extremely detailed map of Florida that covers his entire back, a disturbing caricature of a man blowing his head with a shotgun on his lower right arm, and Chinese characters on his other arm which was apparently intended to represent his initials, but when translated into English, it actually reads “healthy woman roof”.
We get the “healthy woman roof” one, although we’d get that kind of nonsense on purpose, just to see people’s reactions.
(Best tattoo we never got in college – a maze on our shoulder, which to this day we insist would’ve made the greatest chick-picker-upper ever. At least when we were 20 – now it would likely just bring odd looks.)
There are certain things you get when you’re NBA Champions – for example, Wheaties has already thrown Shaq and Wade on the box.
Another thing you get, and the thing that interests us most on this day, is people speculating on whether you can do it again next year.
While we’re happy to see them win, the Heat isn’t our team, so we have no need to sit back and be euphoric. Let’s look at next season!
Zo could retire, GP could retire, we see J-Will being totally satisfied, Shaq will be a year older. What of Pat Riley? He makes it sound like he could go any which way. He’s freed like Stephon Marbury.
”I said it, and I mean it,” Riley said after the Heat took the Finals series 4-2. “I’d give up the six [previous championships] for this one. It’s not disrespectful to any of them that I won, but after 18 years, you keep chasing it, you get tired. So that gives me an absolute sense of freedom.”
Certainly anything is possible, but we’ll say it’s going to be tough to find anyone picking the Heat to repeat next year.
Free agency, trades, the draft (lol) – these things will bring small ripples of change throughout the league, and the Heat are somewhat in a position of “they are what they are” – lots and lots of salary. Can’t see them adding a full MLE dude, and there’s no amnesty this year for the Michael Finleyesque stuff that went around last season.
We’ll hit the Mavs next…and the euphoria part isn’t entirely true – we do want to take a moment to watch Toine’s floor shimmy again. His face is screaming Classic Finals Moment.
(Thanks to The Beautiful Lie, which doesn’t exist yet, but posted this clip in our comments section.)
We don’t want to brag, but we called Heat in 6 back before Game 1.
Unlikely as it seemed two games in, we were right again, making us an exact 3/3 since the conference finals, both in picking the winner and the number of games.
What is there to say? Please – leave us a bit of praise below. We’ll so need it in this offseason of “Dwyane is better than LeBron” articles.
Chris Sheridan has a nice roundup of what was in that bowl, and Pat Riley’s motivational techniques, which involve wheelbarrow stories.
Farlane says the Larry O’Brien has cooties now that Toine has smothered it.
How much do these guys make for winning it all?
Fox’s Charley Rosen picks it all apart in typical negative fashion.
Forum Blue and Gold has no problems whatsoever with Shaq winning the title.
Need4Sheed celebrates with Jason Williams’s championship rap album.
Dallas writer knocks on Mark Cuban.
If you happen to know what the hell a “Maradona Hand of God goal” is, the Wade Blogs recreated it on a Nintendo game.
Orlando just can’t quite let go of Shaquille.
The Sixers make no secret of their desire to move up in the draft.
Finally, why do they do the trophy presentation on the floor when it’s on the road? It seems kind of disrespectful, and we have fond memories of Bob Costas gettiing champagne poured all over him.
What was the better odd celebration play – Toine’s floor shimmy or Zo’s floor spazmatronic shake? Full thoughts in the morning – we just thought we should put something sexy up.
Whatever your opinion of ESPN’s Bill Simmons, his NBA columns are must-reads, if for no other reason than he knows and loves the game in a very pure way.
It’s the kind of love we hope to achieve with a human female one day, but never will because we’re morally ignorant in the ways of the relationship.
Regardless, the Simmons piece of the day urges you to root for Dallas to win this series, based on the idea that a Heat (read: Wade) victory means the revolution is over. The “new NBA” of team play, as he refers to it, will die before it fully lived.
In between Jordan and Wade, we had to watch all the wannabes pretending to be as good as them. And they weren’t. Not even close.
Here’s what happens if Miami wins the title: New Jersey will say to themselves, “Hey, maybe this could happen to us with Vince Carter”; Washington will say the same about Arenas; Boston with Pierce; G-State with Richardson; the Lakers with Kobe; New Team X with Iverson. And so on and so on.
Basically, the team with LeBron or Wade will win the next 10-12 titles, and it will come down to which guy made more 20-footers with two guys on him and which guy got the most cheap calls from the most spineless referees. That’s not basketball, it’s a star system.
Despite the italicized portion of the excerpt being pretty goddamn okay with us, we realize it’s probably not the best thing for the league. Of course, the NBA was reborn when everyone knew it was either Magic or Bird every year – that worked out, didn’t it?
Anyway, we don’t agree, which is basically what we just said, but will repeat here a different way, ala BJ Armstrong. The NBA won’t go that way again, and the reason is the next breed of NBA star appears to be legit.
LeBron and Wade are a little different animal than Stackhouse and Walker, two of the late 90s “next great ones”, who coincidentally are now role players in these Finals.
Kobe – legit. Duncan – legit. KG – legit. Melo – legit. Gilbert – legit. Bosh – legit. Dirk – legit. Brand – legit. Greg Oden looks like he’ll be legit. (Please don’t be angered if we’ve excluded your favorite player. If we did, it’s only because he’s not legit.)
Plus, the league is now set up up to allow the false idols of the past to assume their roles as MLE role players on semi-loaded teams. Much as we loathe his game, how nice would Starbury look scoring 13 per for the Cavaliers at $5.5M a season?
What all this means is the NBA’ll be fine when the Heat take it in tonight’s Game 6. You can’t really “copy” Wade/Shaq, and every GM around knows that thing was built for this year, and this year alone, even though they’ll all be back next season. It’s a little blip in the new NBA – not the end of it.
And that’s fine, friends. Everything is fine, as long as you stop with the “why are you hitting Cuban so hard” emails. We’re not – those are love taps. How could you read this site and not know we love that dude? (And yes, we totally want Dallas to win tonight.)
While perusing the daily musings of the nation’s NBA writers this morning, two things struck us.
One, there aren’t that many writers writing, since it’s really baseball season, and the NBA is just about done.
Two, David Whitley of the Orlando Sentinel is taking a moment to bust on Shaq. This Southern CA person is, too. This on the day the man is on the verge of his fourth title.
It’d be easy to say this is just the bitter ramblings of a man left behind by Shaq’s abrupt exodus to Los Angeles in the summer of 199something, but by reading the column eight times, something else is revealed altogether.
Therefore, read the column the required eight times, watch the video here, and then join us below.
Please excuse the rap portions – that’s not what we’re getting at. Also, please excuse the poor video quality. Additionally, we make no excuses for our often poor spelling and worse sentence structure.
In fact, just a quick aside on that topic. We’d go so far as to say we misuse commas up to three, maybe four times per day. We’re completely aware we’re doing it, and the fact is we’d correct it if we knew how. That’s kinda the point of why someone does something wrong – they don’t know how to do it right.
Can you even use hyphens in sentences like we just did? We have no idea, yet we do it all the time. And you keep reading, so what’s that say about you, other than you’re probably one of those people who’ll have sex with those Angelina Jolie robots in summer 2011. (You can’t start a sentence with “and”, can you?)
The point is, we went to see Shaq his first year in the NBA with our dad, and poppa couldn’t stand him. We argued he had put up like 25/12 and looked cool doing it, but his stance was “Yeah, but he’s not even trying. Imagine if he did.”
Or imagine if Orlando Shaq had remained in that type of shape throughout his career. Thoughts? About us, please – not Shaq.
Dirk’s $5,000 fine may not be all he’s looking at when it comes to repurcussions from that ball he kicked into the stands after Game 5.
Michael Alan, a 63-year old Miami fan, says the ball hit him in the side of the head, and he’s been suffering from headaches ever since. He’s considering calling a lawyer if someone doesn’t give him money apologize.
Alan — who said he suffers from heart disease and emphysema — said he was rising from his seat when “out of nowhere, a ball hit me. It’s like a mule hit me. It knocked me down into my chair. I got a headache right away and my head was vibrating.”
His wife, Rosie, said, “It was hilarious how ridiculously hard it was kicked. My husband has a lot of health conditions. He doesn’t need this.”
Alan and his wife said they did not know Nowitzki had kicked the ball until they returned home from the game and turned on the television. ‘I told my wife, `That’s the ball that hit me!’ ” he said.
Not that we don’t sympathize, but how can the man be sure those headaches aren’t from that mule kicking him in the side of the head? He clearly knows exactly what that feels like.
Besides that, his own wife admits to the situation being “hilarious”, which it is. Somebody find tape of this. (See if you can get the opposite angle on the Josh Howard time-out, too.)
If all that isn’t enough, the best is how after seeing the news he finally realized the ball had come from the court. Just how many basketballs are shooting around the upper deck of Miami’s arena?
