The preseason (between teams Americanos) officially started last night, and the Raptors beat the Wiz.
Not one, but two, games are on today, btw. Suns/Sixers at 3 (ESPN2) and Heat-Pistons at 8:30 (NBATV).
The Cavaliers open against Boston tonight, and Terry Pluto says Cleveland is poised to become a Cavs-centric city.
Mark Cuban has been writing some words about how we should quit helping Europe so much – TrueHoop links it up and such and such.
It makes us wonder…what would happen if some rich Euroleague team offered a major American star like $40M a year? Would they go? Remember, most of those teams pay all your living expenses, too. House, car, etc.
If you haven’t been following the saga of Yao’s big toe, he’s now out for at least ten days, and Jeff Van Gundy is blaming Reebok.
Amare Stoudemire stops pouting long enough to claim he’s 110%.
Andrew Bogut’s leg said “OW!” and now he’s sitting for the next 6-8 weeks.
Isiah Thomas has great admiration for Joe Torre and is being hilariously careful and deliberate with every word that comes out of his mouth.
Sign of things to come: Sheed misses bus, Pistons leave without him, Sheed gives terse “no comment”.
Hee-hee.
We’re pretty upset at the moment.
This is one of our absolute favorite periods of the year: the NBA preseason.
You’ve media day pics begging to be manipulated (the Spurs, 76ers and PHX have already gone at it), predictions, previews, games, and of course, mass delusion from fans.
We’re caught up in heavy Who Shot Mamba? biz for almost the whole month, so we’re not as on top of things as we’d like to be. That said, we’re gonna try to be as blog-productive as possible, even at the expense of sleep.
Let’s get a quick rundown of the last couple days to at least get things back to current.
Phil Jackson is going to have a little hip surgery, but should be back by Halloween, which doubles as the first day of the season.
Donning Craig Sager’s Suit – another new blog. It has potential – we’ll see if they can keep it up after starting with a vid of Craig doing shots. (via Deadspin)
Led by CelticsBlog, this new blog will carry a steady stream of team previews by a wide array of NBA bloggers, including us. We’ll be covering the – wait for it – Cavaliers.
Forum Blue and Gold takes a look at the Pacific Division.
Lots of talk around the net about Stein’s Power Rankings, which put the Cavs at #7, behind both Chicago and Detroit…
Okay, we’ll talk about that later. Plenty of time for that.
The Spurs are doing camp in el France, where they’ll wear those special America racing stripes in exhibitions against teams de l’europa.
Larry Brown’s Knicks contract hearing with David Stern went down, although the results are unknown as of yet.
If the an article titled “Chris Mihm and more” doesn’t make you click, nothing will.
Cavaliers open camp with their media day on Monday, and Tom Reed says the ciy’s sports fans need some LeBron badly at the moment.
Don Nelson says he won’t make Baron Davis think too much when he plays. That’s just what he needs!
The Magic are getting a new arena, although it’ll be too late for this season’s Dwight Howard Fictional Title Team.
Gilbert Arenas has left his agent, and his new one is not us.
(The EXPLOSIONS return, as there should be regular news and crap from here on…might be sporadic for the next few weeks, but here you go.)
Apologies go out to all for this feature being missing all summer – it means we didn’t always send you to stuff like this 80s Lakers anti-drug music vid.
Well, we give up. Four phone calls and six emails later, there’s still no response from the RajaBell.com people. We give – we’ll sit and wait patiently with everyone else for the launch.
Kobe headed down to New Orleans to make fun of Raja Bell (we hope) and run some hoops clinics.
The blogosphere gets incestuous by having TrueHoop preview the Blazers for Slam Online. (And yeah, we’ll be getting dirty on the Cavs in a couple weeks over there.)
Odds on Vince Carter still being in NJ next season? Not good, if you ask us after reading about him not wanting to talk extension.
Eddie Jordan wants the Wizards in the East Finals this season, and all without playing defense.
We aren’t too fond of the hipster writing style, but this ESPN write-up on a day with Kobe has some good stuff.
We know it’s that time of year (optimistic time!), but Dwight Howard’s prediction of the Magic winning the title…? Um. That’s all we can say, is “um”.
Dirk gets a big fat Dallas extension through 2011.
The Sixers complete their huge offseason by adding two guys we’ve never heard of.
Finally, for you NFL fans, Jamie at AOL wants to know what you think of FanHouse, now that it’s mighty and powerful.
Honestly, we love the concept and the power. We dislike the 80+ voices and ultra-high volume of posts. It’s too much content to keep up with. But then, we’re not a huge NFL fan, so maybe the NBA version will be different for us.
That said, Terrell Owens tried to commit suicide last night? How messed up is this dude??? Guess it’s back to all-T.O., all-the time.
Not much went on today other than Chris Paul’s North Carolina Bowl-a-Thon, which brought out all the Team USA alpha dogs. They all became fast friends, looks like. (See D-Wade bowl here.)
Set your Tivos – LeBron is going Letterman this coming Friday.
Now, about these babies. Not having kids ourself, we can’t say what affect letting your young children be admitted murderers will have on them later in life. However, we can say that those kids are wearing some sharp looking feature film apparel.
(Keep sending those pics in – we want to see you in your Mamba stuff!)
Look, we know we didn’t invent Photoshop, and we didn’t invent comic books, and we didn’t invent movies, and we didn’t invent parody. (We did, as you can see from our myspace profile, invent tables, however.)
But c’mon ESPN – have you no shame?
Common courtesy says you offer us the job first, and after we turn you down, then you turn to someone else to get all hacky with our style. Even uncommon courtesy says you send a pastry basket or a nice wicker porch set.
No worries here, however. We’re staying ahead of the curve, although look for Who Fired A Gun At the Pro Athlete’s Reptilian Subconscious Come To Life? in March – only on ESPiN’s Page 2.
Moving on…
The Bobcats sign up an Argentinian with glorious, flowing hair, raising their “female headband wearing players” quota by one.
Bonzi Wells fires his agent, continues his transformation into Latrell Sprewell.
Finally…the stunning, long-awaited return of Jones on the NBA.
Sekou Smith ponders which of the current players will one day be Hall of Famers.
JJ Redick pleades guilty to the DWI-ish offense, gets one year’s probation.
Toni Kukoc is retiring, and sounds completely content with the decision. (For real, he does.)
Fresh off that confusing lawsuit, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar dumps a bunch of garbage on his neighbor’s lawn.
The Celtics may have gotten a great deal on a Kendrick Perkins extension. Did the Perkolators comment? Nope, too busy getting smart in the YAYcomments. (That’s your cue, Matt.)
(Beware a smidge of NCAA Football with your NBA today – apologies to the Tar Heel.)
Man, sometimes there’s a storyline you just wish you had caught onto first.
For example, we could’ve run with this one all season, but it’s all Globetrotter’s – Yao, T-Mac, and the shark-fin soup.
Here’s the headline that’s simply golden – under the heading of “Breaking News” no less – Basketball star berated for shark fin dinner.
Slam Magazine is now on myspace, and wants to be your friend.
Just a reminder – YAYsports! is on myspace, also.
Kobe and Freddy Adu do some improv trash talk, and Kobe gives some to Steve Nash on the side.
‘Nique is blogging his RV trip to the Hall of Fame and admits to being a little nervous.
(Ceremony is tonight – you can watch on NBATV at 6:30 EST.)
TrueHoop has compiled a nice list of NBA things that should be online but aren’t.
Pittsburgh people are hilarious. BTW, the Mighty MJD is now working for 18 different blogs by our count.
From now through tomorrow night, two words are ringing in our head – OHIO STATE. We’re so pumped we can’t even Photoshop correctly.
Finally, lots of people back home ask about our filmmaking aspirations, because truth be told, we’d make a fantastic grocery bagger or small business owner. The answer is simple – in this business, it’s possible you may get the opportunity to act like this:
We won’t apologize for this – mumbling nonsense in a French accent while holding a giddy French-Canadian girl on our lap is something we aspire to. Actually, we could do without the girl or the accent even. Just pay us to mumble nonsense in front of a camera and we’re pretty happy. (via Defamer)
Well, it’s late in the day and the end of summer (more or less), so we thought today would be a fine day to do the last ever nose job endorsement.
Thankfully, things should be ramping up on the NBA and the Who Shot Mamba? front soon.
(Admission: part of the Mamba delay is our intention to ride the wave of the preseason for exposure purposes. Why debut during the lowest traffic month of the year, both for the net and the NBA? That said, August was our second biggest month ever, so who knows.)
Gilbert Arenas makes JE Skeets sad by being kinda sour over the Team USA thing. (Here’s the full Arenas article. We’ll have more thoughts on this tomorrow.)
The Ohio LeBlog is back, and ready for Ohio State. He’s also watching LeBron look…odd.
SacTown Royalty alerts you to Blog Day 2006. We’re not participating, because it sounds hard.
Celticsblog says this is Kendrick Perkins year, despite…well, not despite anything. We’re open to it.
Just a little while ago, Dirk stepped out of bounds with .9 seconds left, allowing France to win some 5th runner-up thing in the World Championships.
Dan Shanoff’s Daily Quickie is done at ESPN’s Page 2 – if you’re a fan, you can catch him in the blogsphere for the time being.
Basketbawful takes the $15 Starbury shoes for a ride. We considered doing this, but the only place to get them is Ebay for like $45.
Remember Luke Walton’s day on the Young and the Restless? Here it is. (via Deadspin)
That was the most pointless scene ever – seriously. We could see sticking that in your show if you’ve snagged Michael Jordan or Kobe or something, but you waste a minute and a half of your precious airtime for Luke to do that?
See, Luke’s been there before, and he knows that good old Beverly Hills rhinoplasty can really throw your game off.
We’ve got a serious problem here, in that we used the whole “get your rhino plastered” schtick yesterday, leaving us with nothing. Could we insert another animal? Maybe another plasterish material, like a paper mache type deal?
Or…we could give up and link you to this super-creepy picture of John Travolta kissing some dude goodbye.
When we exposed our weakness for linking to anything people ask us to the other day, we were email assualted with link requests. Some worthy, some unworthy.
A sampling follows, mainly because there’s nothing else to write about and we’re sworn to do this.
The lads at Simple Minded Entertainment have previewed a bunch of college football using music comparisons or something. Honestly, it’s so confusing and there are so many charts, we’re just going to reprint the email they sent.
Hey Brian,
I’m the hamster from MySpace. On the regular internet I’m a duck go figure. Anyways Monsieur Cavalier, you placed the following on your site:
“Finally, as we’re sworn by our gods of Mount Olympus to do, we continue to link to whatever readers ask us to without question or (much) hesitation.”
So I will take your challenge and ask you to link the most recent update on the Simple Minded Entertainment website on your next update.
It’s an article previewing the upcoming Conference USA football season by comparing the music scenes of the university’s towns. This was all supposed to be part of the music zine – but that failed badly. I know it’s about
football, but technically it’s about sports. If necessary I can add plastic surgeon comments throughout. Just wait until that college basketball season starts. I’m going to use the same article and just replace football with basketball. It will work perfectly.
Remember that girl I was hitting on. The one that was going out with the guy from that crappy band. Well, she’s not talking to me anymore and she blocked my MySpace as her friend. I sort of made a comment about her boobs on her blog when she put up a picture of herself in a tight shirt. I guess girls don’t like that sort of thing.
So in light of that, please humiliate me by linking my rant on your blog. Thank you. The hamster and duck nation appreciates it.
Truth of the matter is, hamster and duck people, everyone reading this right now would be in a lot less pain if you’d just sent an email with a pisture of the girl’s boobs and left it at that. Alas, you’ve been linked, and hopefully humiliated in some non-permanent fashion.
Since that took so much space, this dude Hacksaw just gets a non-descript link, since he hasn’t updated his blog since April, yet apparently still yearns for traffic.
Now that we’re really short on space, Amare and Boris, the famous Suns Brothers (new on The CW this fall!), went to the opening of one of those Pink Taco joints in the PHX.
Oh, and just so we’re all clear, Raja Bell’s site still isn’t launched, which means it’s possible Who Shot Mamba? could still beat it into existence.
If not, we may head back east for some sweet, sweet New Jersey Hair Restoration. If you’re gonna get your hair restored, you may as well do it in Jersey, right?
We have to be honest, we’ve though about hair restoration – not so much because we need it, but because we want to be prepared when we do. It’s not that we’re completely vain – it’s just 99.99%, and Dr. Pistone is the one who will could possibly (if it were necessary, which it’s NOT) do the job, despite his DET-ish name.
Because we haven’t in awhile…
Dirk. Germany. NBA Live 07. Trifecta.
LeBron James is the number one franchise player in all of sports – Kobe Bryant is number six. We don’t know any of the other people.
The Wade Blogs puts together the top ten sports figure entourages of all-time.
Celticsblog solves that boredom problem by looking at pretty pictures of Sebastian Telfair.
Globetrotter celebrates Yao and breaks down the World Championships.
Team USA is flying commercial, against all odds, and Brian Windhorst sounds ready to come home.
Rik Smits loves dirtbikes, and we love Rik Smits. Therefore, we love dirtbikes, too.
This is like a week old, but Blazers rookie Lamarcus Aldridge is having shoulder surgery.
Hey Jones – why’d you stop posting?
Speaking of “jones” we often wonder things like who was so early on this internet thing that they snagged jones.com.
Finally, as we’re sworn by our gods of Mount Olympus to do, we continue to link to whatever readers ask us to without question or (much) hesitation. For you Neil Crespi fans, here’s your official Neil Crespi MySpace.
Neil describes himself as a “not so average guy” and also as “strong-willed and organized”. Somebody please go be Neil’s friend. Dude has one friend, and it’s Tom.
Neil’s also got a blog, and it’s quite ambitious, so go check out the official Neil Crespi Blog – it’ll have you captivated for literally seconds. Neil, we have some advice for you in terms of blogging, as we’ve managed to make a decent corner for ourself here on the internet – you need to actually post something now.
Anyway, if you’d like us to humiliate you right here on the site, remember – we’ll link to anything. All you have to do is ask.
It’s been awhile since we’ve had an edition of EXPLOSIONS, and since we’ve got the time today, we’re gonna go ahead and point out some things, such as this instant class Renaldo Photoshop from Need4Sheed.
ESPN’s Chris Sheridan has officially picked against Team USA in the World Championships, because foreign teams literally smell bad. He typed this.
Speaking of ESPN, only a few more days of Dan Shanoff’s Daily Quickie. Get while it exists, cause after August 31, it won’t.
TrueHoop, which has been jabbing at Sheridan recently, goes ahead and picks the US to win it all. We tend to totally agree.
The Mighty MJD sums up the world of Stephon Marbury’s $15 shoes. Nice intent, Steph…and that’s all we can really say nice about them.
Sam Amico says the Rockets are ready to get it on in 06-07. We agree – they’ll be one of the best video game squads out there.
Le Tony Parker has a la boo-boo on le tip of la finger, et he could miss some of les World Championships.
The Wizznutzz have video of Lonny Baxter’s arrest for firing shots near the White House, along with Nutzzian commentary.
Speaking of commentary, our good friend Dr. Andrew Frankel, a Los Angeles cosmetic surgeon, has plenty to say about his favorite subject (and ours), nose jobs. Here’s an excerpt from his personal nose job philosophy, something we’re quickly developing, as well.
Revision rhinoplasty is my favorite operation to perform. I enjoy the challenge of diagnosing the cause of a particular deformity or problem and then operating to analyze and correct it. All aspects of my training are involved with these cases and no two of them are exactly alike. Once in surgery the process is similar to solving a puzzle.
As we’ve stated previously, we’ve never had a nose job, but if we were to get one, surely we’d be going to someone who can look us straight in the eye and say, “sir, your nasal deformity is puzzling to me, and to be honest, that’s a puzzle I’m going to enjoy solving.”
Dr. Frankel has also appeared in many of your favorite nose job journals, such as Allure and Self magazine, which means one thing – he’s appeared in Allure and Self magazine.
(What can we really say at this point? Nose jobs nose jobs nose jobs nose jobs nose jobs Andrew Frankel nose jobs going to the bank now (for reasons unrelated to the last three posts) nose jobs nose jobs nose jobs.)
