Tonight two of our favorite teams to watch come together to do battle - Cleveland at New York.
So many storylines…
For CLE: Will the Cavs continue to play down (or up, but not in this case) to their opponents’ level? Will LeBron finally have a decent game at Madison Square Garden? Will Sasha Pavlovic ascend further up the tower of our favorite current Cavaliers?
For NYK: Will the Knicks continue to stink it up? Will…can…how…nah, that’s pretty much it, huh?
The Knicks are bad again - Isiah’s 2-7 start is exactly the same as Larry Brown’s last season. If they don’t turn it around soon, it’s only a matter of time before Mr. Thomas is out.
In his new Daily News blog, Knicks Knation, Frank Isola has a badly lit photo and pretty much states that the team has already stopped listening to Zeke and don’t have his sense of fight, so things don’t really look all that up.
We tend to agree - the only way the Knicks were gonna do anything was by becoming a scrappy, hard-working, never give up team. They’re not there.
The reason? We would blame it on Stephon Marbury, but he is what he is. This is on Isiah, and we’re rooting for him, remember. Besides not being a great x-and-o guy, he simply has bad motivational techniques.
Not bad so much, but he uses them badly. Take the incident this weekend where he tries to fight Bruce Bowen of the Spurs and then screams at Gregg Popovich. Okay - that’ll work. The problem comes when Isiah then goes out of his way later to calmly explain that he was doing that as a motivational technique.
You can’t do that - people hate being manipulated like that. We had a boss that did that once - we felt like every time she spoke to us it’d been filtered through some book called something like “How To Get the Best From the Best and Do Your Best: The Ten Levels of Building an Effective Team Atmosphere (4th Edition - Now With Interactive DVD-ROM!)”.
You know - stuff like “Say “good job’ at a Level 6 Enthusiam, then pat employee on the arm twice. Smile for 2.3 seconds, then walk away while giving a Level 3 Enthusiasm thumbs-up.”
How do we know this is totally Isiah? As pointed out by a (drunk) reader over the weekend, Zeke is wearing a puzzle piece lapel pin this year.
Is it a symbol for some company? Representative of a dead relative or friend?
No, it’s the Crucial Puzzle Piece Pin, and is described as follows.
Recognize the important and outstanding qualities within your organization with the Crucial Puzzle Piece lapel pin. Presenting these to your organization will promote a collective sense of pride in that one employee does make a difference. Great for employee motivation.
Perfect - perfect, perfect, perfect.
Is this a pale imitation of Pat Riley’s “15 strong” cards? Does everyone on the team have these? Did they throw them away, and then Isiah dug up his copy of “How to Coach (Volume 7 - Now With Interactive DVD-ROM!)” to figure out his next move?
Will anyone tell Isiah he needs to come up with better motivational stuff than the same junk anyone can look up on the internet in 8 seconds and then use on 16-year-old retail store employees?
Will the Cavs go down by 17 early by letting Jamaal Crawford run wild on Eric Snow? Oops, that was our angry subconscious talking. We feel it.
(Thanks to Naseef for the drunk email.)
{ 15 comments }
FYI if you have cable and a fancy TV that game is on InHD, as well as NBA TV,
The Knicks would be much better if Channing Frye would get his act together. Seriously, what’s up with that kid? Check his stat line:
PPG 3.4 | RPG 4.1 | BPG 0.7
And to think, he was supposed to be the Knicks best player this year…
There’s your problem right there…
I still think they’ll make the playoffs, but Channing Frye needs to wake up, and they need to start playing more of the Hustle guys like Nate Robinson, Malik Rose, Balkman (Gasp), and David Lee. Whenever those guys have played they play with a ton of energy. And it’s infectious energy in that it even got Starbury to play hard a couple of weeks ago. Anyhow, you get what I’m talking about, right?
Good point, Jones. Frye’s midrange shooting opened up the court for the guards last year. He needs to trim his quasi-mustache and get back to draining his J’s.
Good point, Jones. Frye’s midrange shooting opened up the court for the guards last year. He needs to trim his quasi-mustache and get back to draining his J’s.
oops
Yeah play the kids. I always thought it was funny how Zeke would say they were rebuilding last year, yet they were playing Marbury, Francis, and Jalen Rose.
frye ? he was terrible last night missing easy baskets and giving silly fouls causing him to foul out .
frye must stick to writing bogus true story !
Spot on stuff on that idiot Isiah. One of the few times I agree with you.
As much as you’ve made fun of TP and his crepes, I can’t believe he would agree with you on something.
Anyhow, I think Channing Frye must have read this tonight because he played pretty well today. At least better than he had been playing.
And the refs favor Bron, Bron the way that they favor D-Wade. It’s actually very unfair. At least Jordan would actually have to draw contact to go the line. If you come within an inch of LeBron or Wade, they’re calling the foul.
less analysis please and more discussion of French cuisine
OLE!
Who is this Damon Jones fellow?
Youre still clueless when it comes to the NBA tho, especially when it comes to teams who have won 3 rings the past 7 years. Cavs? 0. Mavs? 0. I mean cmon…
All the Spurs, the most loved and respected NBA champions since the SuperSonics
Not that I don’t find the idea of Isiah using a lapel pin to “motivate the troops” hillarious (I imagine him hanging out a new one, to himself, everynight “I really was the crucial piece guys”), but the Puzzle-Piece pin is the “red-ribbon” analog for Autism. He does some work for Autism charities and this is a way to show his support I guess.
Can we pretend that’s not true for the sake of comedy?
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