the bone conductor

and honestly, it drives me crazy that a black member of the media would even bring this kind of shit up. there’s still plenty of actual racially-motivated double-standards being perpetrated, both in the coverage of the league and the way it operates; using this kind of crap as an example just kills your credibility. here’s a constant perception that the league has an image problem - despite record sales, attendance, etc., - because of the overtly-obvious hip hop/thug image some of the players have that a few white guys in a few news rooms just can’t seem to get past.

it’s okay in the nfl, of course. in the nfl you can take drugs, cause a shooting riot in a vegas strip club, have half the team arrested in the course of a season (hello cincinatti), and that’s okay. no one worries about the sponsors abandoning the league: exactly the opposite in fact. hell, in hockey, guys fight every night, but that’s okay too, because those are white guys and we know they’re okay. but in the nba, an accidental elbow during a game (not even called a foul 5 years ago) is now an ejection and a suspension, and an off court altercation or run in with the law, guilty or not, convicted or not, will cost a player a 10th of the season and their salary, at the very least. because we can’t let those thugs get out of control and ruin the game (and scare the sponsors)!

anyway. first off, i agree that bird has done a terrible job overall as general manager, and if he wasn’t god of indiana basketball from his college days, and larry legend from the nba (aka the hick from salt lick, as he called himself) he’d probably already be out of a job (although with the job some other gms have done over the years you never know… elgin baylor, a brilliant player and all around class guy by all accounts, was just awful for the clippers for years, for instance, before the team finally kind of turned it around at least for a few years. to be fair, the clippers have one of the cheapest and worst owners in sports, but that’s another story. and don’t get me started on larry brown, who absolutely did one of the worst coaching jobs in sports history with his brief tenure with the knicks before thomas came on board. it turns out, constantly pouting while you attack your players to the press isn’t super effective, coaching-wise.

but even without all the extremely embarrassing and absurd off the court drama that thomas and the knicks have been involved in (and even here, the comparisons are pretty unbalanced; you could talk about the trail blazers from a few seasons ago (aka the jail blazers) and their insistence on doing things like getting busted every other week for having an ounce of weed wrapped in foil in someone’s pocket and trying to get through a metal detector at the airport (brilliant!) in that class maybe, but that’s about it, as far as basketball is concerned anyway. football, now, that’s a different matter, as already mentioned), the difference between he and bird is a) thomas is the coach - when bird was the coach for 3 seasons, the pacers were an elite team every year, and he took them to the finals his last season before following through on his promise to only coach three years to avoid burnout, basically kicking himself upstairs at that point, more or less - as well as the general manager, and thomas has been simply, almost uniformly, horrendous in both aspects. he’s crippled the team for years with a series of signings and trades that, in most fantasy leagues, probably wouldn’t have even been allowed because they were so terrible, moves that gave his team an outrageously high salary while destroying their chances to get out from under them by making them long term deals for players who either can’t play, never could play, won’t play for thomas, or all of the above. the bottom line is he has *actively* destroyed the on-the-court product; if he hadn’t the other stuff would be news, but thomas would have at least as many defenders as antagonists, because it’s sports, and if you win people just don’t care that much about the rest of it. even now just about everyone will give thomas credit for making some very good choices in the draft over the years, consistently finding talented players. it’s not that the knicks are terrible, it’s that they don’t even compete half the time, and because of the just completely absurd deals that thomas has handed out, it’s not likely to change any time soon. comparing that to what bird has done in indy is just stupid. also, you know… it turns out thomas works for the new york knicks. the media scrutiny and pressure there, remarkably, are just a little higher than they might be in indianapolis. go figure.

and for the record, i’ve never liked bird, think he was just a little over-rated as a player - not a lot, just a leetle bit though (heretical as that will sound to about 99% of nba pundits), and i think if you want to talk about some racist things in the nba, maybe you could bring up how all of the white guys on the team from boston back in the 80’s have all ended up with coaching general manager gigs, despite at least two of them clearly not knowing what the hell they are doing (i’m talking about you, mchale) while a guy like kareem abdul jabbar, who is extraordinarily intelligent - at least as smart as anyone unfortunate enough to be reading this, certainly - had as much impact on the game as anyone, and oh yeah, holds the all-time record for scoring, is in the top three in just about every category there is, won a record 6 mvps (bird won 3), and 6 championship rings (twice as many as bird or his ex-celtic cohorts managed), couldn’t buy a coaching gig until the lakers threw him a bone and made him a consultant assistant assistant to help with their big guys. that’s maybe the most extreme example, but not the only one.

the ironic thing here, as well, is mr. jackson neglecting to mention that the same thomas once said of the same bird, back when they were playing against each other (and thomas’ team consistently being on the losing end) that “if he was black he’d be just another player.” which is clearly absurd, although again, back then, with most white sports fans still getting used to rooting for the black guys that had “taken over the league” and the boston-centric east coast media fawning all over bird, there may have been just a grain of truth (see: over-rated as a player, very slightly, once again).

Roger Angell of the New Yorker wrote this a while ago. It explains something that I’ve given a lot of thought to, especially since, in my group of nerd friends in particular, I’m very well acquainted with the “amused superiority and icy scorn” phenomena and just how exceedingly fucking annoying it is to be condescended to about this.

Anyway.

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

Of course, my nerd friends do care, as ardently as the most lunatic sports fan… about computer games. Which, apparently, aren’t “sports,” which I think is “bullshit.”

This doesn’t explain the phenomena of why most Raiders fans are unbearable assholes, or why most Boston fans period, of any sport, should have thier faces sewn to the underside of an elephant for a week or two.

(btw, I got that quote from the sports guy on espn.com.)

i don’t get the ewing theory thing. wouldn’t it really only make sense to keep endlessly harping on it if a team, you know, actually won a championship, or at least noticably improved, when the ewing-ish player departed? it’s irritating enough that not only did neither of those things occur for the knicks, but how many people do you realistically think the average knicks fan would kill on live tv for a shot at having patrick ewing in his prime on the knicks right now? he wouldn’t make them instant contenders and probably favorites to represent the east, even if you got rid of randolph and curry and, oh, say every other third guy on the roster, chosen at random, and replaced them with d-league guys? i was never even a ewing fan, but man…

in other words, it’s a shitty theory, in that you’ve been harping on it for years and it has yet to actually pan out. unless i missed those new banners in msg, post ewing. of course he was always much classier than your run of the mill celtic, so i would guess that counts for something.

espn should have a sportsguy theory… get someone else with a sense of humor, a semi-decent grip on pop culture, a passing familiarity with sports, some strong, infensible opinions… EXCEPT he (she) wouldn’t be an outrageously self absorbed boston-obsessed homer! have that person fill in the current sportsguy slot. i figure it would be super difficult to find such a person, of course… probably an hour or two of combing creative writing workshops on the closest community college campus. sure, the almost guaranteed improvement in actual compositional skill would be nice, not to mention the very likely ability to not confuse one’s own lameass fratboy nostalgia with actually entertaining popcult goings on.

but hey, i hear you know jimmy kimmel! and you’re a bitchin’ go kart racer and you were going to beat that guy who’s such a jerk and what an ass for taking himself so seriously, and man you’re so much cooler than that guy that, uh… just beat you.

seriously, that was the best story ever.

i’ve been slacking on the attempts at writing about sports stuff, despite being convinced that most sportswriters are almost as bad as most sportscasters - that is, extremely, stink out loud bad. my lakers are playing way over their heads, and best of all doing so in an exceptionally entertaining way; I guess that’s as good a place to start as any.

What confuses me, really, is why no one seems willing to admit that Bryant, he of the “sharing the ball more” myth that all the talking head types can’t spout about enough, is actually playing the point. Derek Fisher has in fact been huge for them this year, but it certainly isn’t because of his ability to push the ball or his sparkling assist totals. Which isn’t surprising, really; it’s hard to get a lot of assists when your leading shooter/scorer so rarely makes baskets from assists. Bryant is almost incapable of slashing to the basket without the ball, and he almost *never* shoots without making a series of moves and fakes first. People talk about what a great player he is, and they’re right, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone consistently take shots with the degree of difficulty he does, and MAKE them, over and over. It’s amazing, like he’s playing a different game where, to keep himself interested, he needs to take the most difficult shots possible. And he *makes* them. That turnaround fadeaway from 16-18 feet that’s become his pet move is completely impossible to defend against, because it’s *hard* to make that shot, and he does, over and over again. Watch him shoot threes; he’s the only shooter in the league that consistently launches from 4-5 feet behind the arc. Just because he can make it.

The last game against Denver just illustrates the point, and shows how devastating he is as the post option, ala Gary Payton in his prime. He’s at least as big as anyone who guards him, usually bigger, and he can jump out of the building. And he has that turnaround. So he gets the ball in the post 16 feet away, and either the other team gives up a jumpshot that he’ll make 80% of the time (and maybe foul him in the process), or they overplay him and he drives and gets to the rim, because he can blow past just about anyone. Then he either scores, or hits a cutter like Ronny Turiaf or whoever is playing center for a dunk, or kicks out to Fisher or Farmer or whoever for a three. Or they double-team him in the post, and he uses his size and court vision to throw it to a cutting big guy (hello, Kwame Brown and his early dunks in that game) or hits Fisher or Vujacic or Farmer or Walton… for a wide open three. Next thing you know, he’s got 7-8-9 assists to go with his 25 points.

But he kills the ball movement, because he has to fake and deke and jab-step every time he catches the ball. So no one gets assists for giving it to him, but if they move and cut while he’s fooling around, he’s giving up the ball more than ever, playing like, well, a point guard. And a damn good one, too.

The fact that guys no one ever heard of or gave a shit about, like Turiaf especially, but also Farmer and even Fisher, are just busting their asses and making the extra pass and doing it in a hurry, is what makes them lethal, Andrew Bynum or no. Well, that, and the real secret weapin they have, which is Lamar Odom’s rebounding. The guy has arms that just don’t seem to end; he’s routinely getting 15 boards a game just by hanging around the basket. And because they have to pay so much attention to Bryant defensively, guys like Ariza can operate on the baseline and slash to the basket before the defense can adjust or rotate.

They are a fun team to watch, playing the game exactly the way it is supposed to be played more often than not, and when Bryant is playing point guard they’re damn near unstoppable. Just don’t expect him to spot up or dive to the basket and pad anyone else’s assist total, because it’s not going to happen. Although I bet Steve Nash doesn’t get a lot of baskets off assists either. And he’s probably the best shooter in the game, period.

the scandal isn’t that a ref is betting on games, including games he worked; the scandal is NO ONE COULD TELL. obviously, even if he tried not to, it would be difficult to have something riding on a game you’re involved in and not at least subconsciously make a few more calls (or non-calls) than maybe you would usually, but given the general “quality” of nba officiating, there’s no way anyone could look at any of his games and say “well of course, that’s why there’s a critical call right there that ALL THREE refs missed! that’s why there’s a lunatic and/or “star” call on the next play, with ALL THREE refs looking right at it and no one correcting the call!”
dear whoring-selves-with-hyper-self-righteousness-media,

please. shut the fuck up. the nba isn’t going to suffer any backlash - read again, ZERO response - from the fans over the wildly overblown referee gambling scandal. apparently the only people who thought we lived in some kind of wonderful over the rainbow, oompa-loompa infested fantasy land were sportswriters, the various paid punditry who have an official job description that reads: “bitch about absurd things as if the world is ending tomorrow, and do it better than the other station so people notice and we get paid,” and some overwound league officials. no one else, with the exception of the extremely small minority of sports fans who like to tie their own sense of self-worth to the goings on of millionaire strangers, thought it was impossible, or even particularly unlikely, that human beings would suddenly stop being human because david fucking stern said so. no one else thinks the league needs to attain a completely frigid, flawless, tedious perfection to survive, or succeed. the vast majoirty of us, i would wager (even now), are content to know that they are games, and in the end, if a ref blows a game out of incompetence or good old american venality, why should i care? unless i can make myself feel better about my own pathetically wretched existence by loudly and perpetually declaiming my own moral superiority and the obvious need for punishment, for branding, for excommunicating and expelling all those of lesser stuff, who fall when tempted. Or maybe jump with both feet.

i don’t even blame the refs for this, really. the league needs to leave the game alone for a few years, let the rules settle down a little, and let the refs talk to the players and vice versa without getting all worked up about control issues or respecting the law or whatever the fuck it is that stern thinks he’s accomplishing with his gestapo-light routine for the officials. (”it’s not a matter of fairness, it’s a matter of correctness,” indeed. what kind of degenerate sociopathic lunatic would spout something so ridiculous? about a GAME that is in the end made up of rules to prevent anyone from gaining an unfair advantage and to make the games as enjoyable as possible to watch, no less. it’s like shooting yourself in the foot and complaining that you need a bigger gun. anyway.)

also, joey crawford got rooked. tim duncan is a giant whiny bitch, and he was certainly doing things on the sideline like a petulant 3 year old trying to see what he can get away with (something i’m an expert in at the moment, i can assure you). i’m glad crawford tossed him for it.