Rendclaw

They're still on the Clippers. Donald Sterling, even though he is doing more then he used to, still isn't doing enough to make the Clippers true contenders. They are getting better, but its still one of the worst places to be if you're an NBA player. That and the fact that they share the building with one the most storied franchises in the league has to hurt, too.

Violence Storm. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Thank you. turns out I had the ROM for it.

God I loved the Wargames 87.... I need a good copy of it, too... I found it online but the sound is terrible...

there was a beat em up where you would pick up a pig and it would turn into a football and you could throw it at your enemies... and I can NOT remember the name of that game for the life of me.... Final Fight 1 was and still is one of the best of the genre... I remember playing Guardian Heroes a few times and I loved it... Renegade required technique, which was cool. Aliens vs. Predator was awesome, and Shadow over Mystara was almost revolutionary, even though it was way too damned hard.

Heh I picked that game back up after not playing it for four months or so, and I destroyed the Bobcats, 131-49. I think I need to up the sliders. I just took out that free throw thing, its ridiculous. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yeah, I use the "easy" free throw system on my franchise, but that hurts me when I play in my online league. Thankfully, judging from playing the E3 demo, the free throw system in 2K6 is much improved. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> How so? even though it was cheesy, the cross seemed to work the best out of all the free throw systems.

I dunno Rip, the way I saw it, the Suns ran people out of the gym and outscored them more than they actually stopped anyone.. The Spurs did one hell of a job in exposing them. IMO, Finley would be better served on a team like the Pistons than on the Suns.

Heh I picked that game back up after not playing it for four months or so, and I destroyed the Bobcats, 131-49. I think I need to up the sliders. I just took out that free throw thing, its ridiculous.

There is no way in HELL that Phoenix will let Johnson go. Korver would be better served staying in Philly, though I think his stock dropped after Detroit abused him in the playoffs. There is a lot of noise in Detroit about Dumars chasing after Larry Hughes, but its really doubtful that he would come off the bench. Still more noise is being made about Jalen Rose, but he costs too much I think, despite his ability to play three positions. Finley seems the most logical choice. If the Hawks got Dalembert, Watkins *and* Kwame Brown (should he ever get his head right), look the hell out.

Major props to you, Rip. We are all going to hell if we have kids sucker punching people just so their dumbshit friends can tape it. They deserved everything they got.

I am hoplessly addicted to Lays Dill Pickle chips. There are times I have to force myself away from them. Before I found those, Cape Cod made the best kettle chips... I tried Better Made YnA, I didn;t like them at all.

Final Fight 3 was the best out of all of them, hands down.... Mike Haggar's multi-hit running lariat ruled. Another game that pulled me to the SNES was Super Tennis. Back in 90-91 when I used to work at a little video game kiosk in the mall, myself and my co-workers used to have WARS over that game.... I always took Phil (the Michael Chang clone) and run down every shot. Once I learned how to serve properly I was unbeatable.

Hmm, The Pistons get Jason Maxiell... I have mixed emotions about this pickup. Sure he fits in with the Pistons almost perfectly in attitude, but I think they might have been better served by picking up a shooter. No doubt Joe Dumars is going to chase after Michael Finley, as bringing Allan Houston back there would be a big mistake. I have to agree with the consensus that the Suns got the better end of the deal by getting Kurt Thomas. Like the Pistons need more offense, the Suns needed more defense and that trade addressed that need. I just hope for their sake that they don;t stand pat on that, as they seriously need to toughen up on the defensive end. They can score, but if they cannot stop anyone when they need to, that doesn't mean anything.

But Cashman will be the fall guy, because George is a master at making other people pay the price when his own decisions go into the toilet.

with all of those kids trying to make spectaluar plays so that they can jump right to the NBA after one year of college at the most? I would take that bet too.

And you can fuck right off with this statement. I had just mentioned in my last post before this one how Kobe wasn't even my favorite NBA player, but I think it's just a little ridiculous to villify him for something that noone knows, and is all based on assumptions and media speculation. That's all. I've been a Laker fan pretty much my whole life, and I grew up loving guys like Magic Johnson, who's still my favorite (and in my opinion the best) player to have ever played the game. Kobe is a long ways far from those days, but so are a LOT of players today. For every Tim Duncan, there's a Ron Artest. For every Steve Nash there's a Vince Carter. And so on, and so forth. I just don't see what's so particularly bad about Bryant that's earned him the amount of hate that he has, but that certainly doesn't mean I'm riding anybody's jockstrap, and if anyone is being ridiculous in this discussion, it's people like you who put so much negative energy into hating someone they'll never meet. If you are going to take such a strong stance defending Kobe, expect to get some heat for it. That statement was more joking than serious, and after I read it, I thought about editing it and putting in a smiley to tell you I was joking, but I thought that the statement was ridiculous enough not to merit one. I'll make sure to do so in the future, if only to spare your feelings. And as for the media assumption, I think its pretty much common knowledge that he fucked around on his wife, which is bad enough. I didn;t think he actually was guilty of rape for the get-go, and I said so in the thread involving the trial. What he was guilty of is *horrible* judgement, and if you couple that with the facts that Shaq had the majority of fans and media on his side during that whole soap opera, the fact that the Lakers got blown the fuck out by the Pistons in 5 games, and Kobe not being as mature as he said he was to anyone who would listen, he is also going to get heat. All of those negative things (real and perceived) are going to count against him. In fact the smartest thing he has done lately since this whole thing started was to keep his mouth shut and just take care of what he needs to. he knows that his reputation is damaged, and the only way he can repair it is to shut up and play basketball. I don't hate Kobe because I do not know him personally, but it is rather upsetting to see someone of his talent level do things on and off the court that he should have known not to do. And when he does, just like anybody else, he is going to get rapped for it, and not just by me. What I feel towards Kobe isn;t hate, X. its more like exasperation. And when you sit back and blindly defend him and say things like he has no ego, when you could ask anyone who can look at him and his actions objectively (like I have been doing, despite your thoughts that I hate the man) and say that he does, people are going to say that you have blinders on in regard to him. As an example, I would rap Dwyane Wade if he started going knucklehead, as much as I like his game. I used to have all kinds of love for T-Mac, but after his performances in the playoffs, I am more fed up with him than ever. Vince Carter, don;t even get me started. I will always go more towards guys like Tim Duncan, who just play ball and don't do knuckleheaded things on and off the court, his performances in the Finals aside.

Thank you, Precious Roy. As for the NBA of the 90s, it's what I grew up with, so I have no problems calling it my favorite era. 'Course, it always helps to have the local team win six titles in eight years with the most popular basketball player ever. Tell me if this makes any sense: the NBA has grown up along with the young fans of the Jordan years. It seems like everything of the 90s was really kid-friendly and family-oriented from a marketing standpoint: the most objectionable guy out there was Charles Barkley, and the uniforms and courts were all flashy and gaudy. Now you've got Ron Artest and Ben Wallace starting riots, Allen Iverson popularizing his whole gangsta image, the Kobe Bryant media circus, so on, so forth. All the really flashy jerseys, like the pinstriped Magic, mountain range Jazz, track-uniform Pacers, traded all those in for plain boring jerseys. It seems like on one level or another, they're not marketing the NBA as heavily to younger audiences as they were before. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I hate to play this card, but the media has gained so much in the way of sniffing out stories and investigative methods, that if things were like are they are now back then, you would have heard more about the foibles of their players. Especially after the brawl are the Palace, I think the NBA realized that they should focus more on the positives in the league and turn the other cheek to the negative. Back to basics, as it were. I don;t need to see flashy jerseys and all of the bells and whistles (Finals pregame concerts, anyone?). To me, its more about the guy wearing the jersey and what he can do for his team rather than the color or font of the jersey he has on. ::sighs:: there is another sign of me getting old. I'm starting to sound like my uncles when I was a kid.

Yes! Fuckin' yes! I completely agree. And for all the dissing of the recent Pistons: They probably play better and more consistant D today then they did back then. They just had a lot more offensive weapons. It's that sort of tradeoff. And the Jazz in the 90s would still get beat by the Pistons today. cabbageboy has some wacked out views on the teams of the 90s; that had to be one of the worst decades in all of basketball for the sport. It just ruined the entire "Team Effort" vibe of the 80s that is only returning now. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I could not agree with you more. I just hope and pray that the Spurs and Pistons contend with each other for the title like the Celtics and Lakers did back in the day. Both of those classic teams had their stars, but they also played the team game on both offense and defense. Sure, the Lakers were Showtime and up and down the court, but they could play decent defense too. The Celtics were the mirror image of that: a little bit better defensively, but not bad on the break, either. That's why almost every game, whether it be regular season or the Finals, had that Game 7 mentality. It didn't hurt that the teams didn't like each other very much, either. A true rivalry. The Spurs and Pistons are the poster teams for the team play concept, something that has been SORELY lacking in the league for at least 10 to 12 years. The Bulls were the closest thing to it through that span of time. And as for the Jazz, they suffered from not having enough quality complimentary pieces around Stockton and Malone to get over the hump. I give big time respect to those two for doing it as long as they did, but they had their shot in 98, and thanks to a non-call, they didn't get it.

They stopped calling traveling consistently in the late 80s, I think. Jordan and a few others would walk almost every time, and if that book The Jordan Rules is to be believed, the refs would look the other way almost every time.

Phil gets blame in my opinion because he didn;t do enough to try and defuse the situation before it got so far out of hand that there was no way to repair it. I agree that Kobe's ego was the mitigating factor in the destruction of a team that won three championships, though. Kobe was being heralded as the next Jordan from the jump. That was only exacerbated by his idolization of Jordan, to the point where he was doing a lot of things like Mike, from game play to speech patterns. But I'm not surprised by that, considering how immature he *really* is, as we found out when the rape trial started, and his inexplicable running off of Karl Malone, one of the very few people that publically took up for Kobe. Shaq is far from innocent in this situation, because if he had stayed in shape and kept his focus, chances are that Buss would have re-signed him. All three of them are to blame, almost equally.

Fuck the 90s, I miss basketball in the 80s, where you had guys sitting four or five places down the bench that could acutally shoot and play defense well enough that you could give your starters and superstars precious minutes of rest. That is the one thing that the Jordan Era ushered in, and its sad. Guys wanting nothing but the dunks and flashy plays, and had minimal amounts of fundamental knowledge of the game AT BEST.

X, you have to seriously get off of Kobe's jock or you will walk bowlegged for the rest of your life. I would never deny that Kobe has immense talent, but he (like so many others before him) takes that for granted. He has just as big of an ego as Shaq, which is part of the reason why they could not co-exist. Kobe has it in him to be the best player in the game bar none, but as long as he has these dreams and visions of being Michael Jordan V2.0, he never will attain that goal. Hell, even Jordan learned that he had to pass the ball and keep his teammates involved some of the time. While Shaq is just as much to blame as Kobe and Phil was in their team imploding, the fact remains that Jerry Buss decided to not take a chance on re-signing Shaq and go with his boy Kobe. Shaq made a mistake by making the issue public and Buss made his decision accordingly. Personally it was a mistake, because if I was the owner of the team I would have sat all three of them in my office and laid down the law. Play together, help the team win, set your personal agendas aside, or else. Kobe's and Shaq's immaturity and Phil's ego pretty much wrecked that team. Kobe deserves to be vilified for not only cheating on his wife then doing the boneheaded thing and buying his wife that ring as a form of apology (which guarantees that she will have his balls in a sling until he gets up enough chutzpah to divorce her), but also in trying to deflect heat away from him he ratted out a teammate, which is something you just do not do. He acted stupidly from beginning to end, and he deserves the hit that his reputation has taken. He thought his fame could protect him from all harm and all it did was save him (in some ways) from getting convicted. The nation saw just what kind of person he is, and the majority of them did not like what they saw. As for the Lakers right now, they have turned into a slightly better version of the Knicks. THey have Kobe and a bunch of small forwards, and their cap is maxed out. Phil said that he doubts that the Lakers will succeed with the way things are now, and for once, I agree. They are a .500 team at best, and their former whipping toys the Clippers are doing better than they are.

And it was obvious that he was a project, despite being taken with the #1 pick... we shall see what he has grown into in the next two or three years, if that long.

They can only go to the "we play better when our backs are against the wall" card so many times and it caught up to them. If they had won a few more regular season games, they might have had the home court and who knows what might have happened. I like the Spurs so I can't be too terribly disappointed that they won. Props to them for being just a little bit better, and to TD for showing up like he was supposed to. The Pistons need more offensive punch from their bench, to be sure.... They'll keep the starting five, though Tayshaun's and Ben's contracts are up soon.. I think they made some terrible decisions as far as trading and acquiring bench players this year and I think that caught up to them in the end, as doing a seven man rotation is not going to work very well. McDyess can;t do it all by himself. The officiating was terrible on both sides, to be sure. It will never be done, but the officials should be regulated by an independent agency, give them some teeth to fine, suspend, and even fire officials who are inconsistent without due cause.

Zo acting the way he was in the series against the Pistons used up about all of the goodwill I had towards him. He was always in need of a tranquilizer through most of his career. I loved the Lakers when I was a kid, but after Kareem retired and Magic got HIV, most of the reasons why I watched them went away. The struggles during the early 90s, the fleecing of Shaq from the Magic, Kobe's ball-hogging ways, the hiring of Phil Jackson, all of this turned me off of the Lakers despite their success... it seemed to me that they sold their soul for those titles. Now I just hope and pray that the re-hiring of Phil blows up right in Jerry Buss' face.

Ugh, don;t bring up Phil Jackson. I have hated that smug, know-it-all bastard for years, and after something I heard today, I hate him even more. He still refuses to give the Pistons any credit for winning the title over his heavily favored Lakers, and dogs them out at every opportunity. As much as I loved the Lakers of the 80s, I just hope and pray that this current squad goes down in flames. Kobe and Phil, with their actions and attitudes, don;t deserve a lot of the accolades that they get nowadays.