This week in the NBA

[Precious Roy 0]

Did'nt Zo get traded but refused to show up?

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he was traded to Toronto and never joined the team...part of the Vince Carter deal....but I was under the impression that Toronto planned on waiving him anyway and just wanted the cap space. If Toronto thought Zo would actually suit up for them they were INSANE...why would he want to play for the Raptors when he wasn't happy on the Nets? That whole trade was fucking stupid...TO got NOTHING for Carter

[Precious Roy 0]

real good game between the Celtics and Grizzlies BTW......I love watching Memphis play...and Pau is rocking a MANLY beard!

[Precious Roy 0]

Ricky Davis hits a 15 footer at the buzzer....Celtics win by 1....great game

 

I wonder what's on ESPN?

[Fökai 0]

It looks like Kobe and the Lakers will cost me a thousand dollars (on a $20 parlay) by not covering the spread (+5). My hat is off to Smush who put up a donut in 27 minutes.

 

...and that Nets buzzer-beater was sick.

 

EDIT: Hey, Zo, if you don't want to draw the foul, don't put your hands on their waist when they're attacking the basket. It's a little TOO obvious.

[Precious Roy 0]

The Nuggets are interested in The Mailman? What?

[Precious Roy 0]

In the battle of angry cousins we've got Marbury v. Telfair tonight. Telfair picks up 3 fouls in the first 5 minutes trying to check Starbury

 

Knicks putting it on the Jailblazers right now.....hope I don't jinx em

[alfdogg 0]

whoops

[Kurt Angle Mark 0]

Clippers hand Wizards first lose of the year 102-97

 

Brand with 31 and 13, Maggette with 20 in his first game of the season

 

Clippers tied with Spurs for West lead

[Cuban Linx 0]

Portland beat the Knicks thanks to Precious Roy jinxing them and improve to 2-2. I better celebrate that now since they probably won't be at .500 too many more times this season.

[Precious Roy 0]

Portland beat the Knicks thanks to Precious Roy jinxing them

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[The Czech Republic 0]

Steve Nash dresses like I do, kinda

[Precious Roy 0]

I'm getting kind of sick of seeing the same teams in the nationally televised games. Miami AGAIN....and Miami v. Houston with no Shaq and no T-Mac....yawn

 

Phoenix v. Detroit should be good. Boris Diaw has moved into the Suns starting lineup. Kurt Thomas is only averaging 4 boards a game, he needs to come up big against the Wallace boys.

[Ripper 0]

Thanks alot Phoenix. Hopefully they sat down James Jones for him. Him on the court with the starters can be dangerous.

[Precious Roy 0]

yes, I believe Jones is now coming off the bench

[Rendclaw 0]

T-Mac might miss three weeks.  On the local news, they showed him leaving Toyota Center after getting treatment for his back yesterday and he was having a really hard time walking.

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That's a pity. He's had back problems for a long time too, and the dude is what, 25?

[Kurt Angle Mark 0]

Clippers win again against the lowly Hawks

 

Brand with 23 and Cassell with 21

 

They go to 5-1, #1 in the West

[alfdogg 0]

Lot of Piston fans in Phoenix, it seems.

[alfdogg 0]

Wow, is it me or is Cheryl Miller getting really fat?

[bobobrazil1984 0]

What a fuckin' game this (Detroit/Phoenix) is! I'd love to see a playoff series between these two.

 

Great clutch play in the last 2 minutes by Detroit. I noticed they switched to the Zone and had Ben Wallace on Nash on the key, blocking a bunch of possible passes. Big Shot Chauncy!!!

[Ripper 0]

Great game. Despite the losses, I like that Phoenix is hanging in there with every team they have played and honestly could have/should have won every game. The lack of a post player is hurting them, but all they have to do is hang around in the West and they will be in great position when Amare comes back.

 

Amare doesn't even have to play well when he comes back, just give them a semblance of a presense in the low post, because without one they are dead in the water late in games.

 

Diaw starting and Jones coming off the bench is looking damn good, and Barbosa has a run going now. Hopefully they can keep it going. Kurt Thomas started getting that Jumper to fall and Brian Grant has his knees for now. This can be a very deep and and dangerous team once the major piece is back on the court.

 

And honestly, I am sick of listening to Charles talk about how the SUns can't win because they can't play D. They play damn fine D this year. Teams aren't coming back because phoenix aren't getting stops. They aren't getting points. There were 5 mix-matches on that court tonight and they shouldn't have been in the game...or any of the games they have played. The suns "big man" is 6'9". Still one of the elites in the west in my eyes.

[Dangerous A 0]

At least your team put up a fight against the Pistons. The Kings played like absolute fucking pussies against them and then again against Denver in the fourth quarter. This keeps up, Adelman will be gone by January. Or at least he should be.

 

Detroit looks awfully fucking good so far this year though. It seems that Flip Saunders has tweaked with the team so their offense isn't so, how do I say, offensive. They still have that killer starting five and the bench isn't anything to sneeze at either.

[Adam 0]

I'm pulling for the Clippers and the Warriors in the West, just because it'd be Bizzaro world if they both made the playoffs.

[Guest guerillagenius]

The T-Wolves are really under the radar this year, they could be 5 - 0 with there two losses being back to back overtime games. I like what Casey is bringing to the club a nice hard nosed defensive philosophy.

[Black Lushus 0]

man I am so out of it as far as keeping up with the NBA this season, I had no clue that little poser bastard Jason Williams was on the Heat until last night...

[The Czech Republic 0]

Flip Saunders is undefeated in Detroit and Larry Brown can't get a win. I love it. Seeing as he invented basketball (credit: Scott Skiles), he should be doing better than 0-4.

[Dangerous A 0]

I found a great article on SI.com about defending the NBA and it's image...

 

 

The other night at the dinner table I opened a packet of reader mail from Sports Illustrated and there were -- lo and behold! -- several positive responses to an NBA story I had written. Fortunately, my wife reacted quickly, yanking my face out of the meat loaf and administering smelling salts.

 

OK, I'm exaggerating. We weren't having meat loaf.

 

Covering the NBA these days is not unlike carrying the mail: You're flabbergasted when you get a compliment. Whenever strangers find out what I do (a couple weeks ago it happened at a wedding reception), I inevitably get what I call the Old White Guy Sermon. (There may in fact be old black guys delivering the same sermon -- I just haven't heard them.)

 

The Old White Guy Sermon (hereafter the OWGS) begins with a paean to the past. The sacred names of Bird, Jordan and Magic are conjured up, and sometimes we go back to West and Robertson and sometimes all the way back to Cousy and Russell. Then we move to last year's riot at the Palace of Auburn Hills. Then it's on to Allen Iverson and how he has single-handedly destroyed the city of Philadelphia, if not the entire republic. There is generally a dissertation on how traveling and double-dribbling are never called by optically challenged NBA referees. A mention of corn rows and tattoos can be reliably predicted. And quite often the OWGS ends with a tip of the fedora to the sacred game of college basketball and a reverie on how wonderful the world would be if everybody played like Duke.

 

From time to time in this space, as well as in the pages of the magazine, I have criticized the NBA. It is unquestionably a league with problems, and over the years I've felt that the league office has been slow to deal with some of them. But this engrained, knee-jerk negativity to the NBA is not only getting old but it's also unjust. (Particularly when you have to listen to it at a wedding.)

 

For this week's five-pack, then, I thought I'd dissect the major points of the OWGS, see what makes sense and what isn't worth two cents.

 

1. The players are bad guys.

Whenever I hear this, I ask the sermonizer to be specific. He usually can't get much beyond Ron Artest, Iverson and, of course, Kobe Bryant. I respond thusly: Artest is a deeply confused young man, Iverson dresses like he's 14 years old and sometimes acts like it, and Bryant, though he wasn't convicted in a court of law, made a big mistake. But there are deeply confused young men in every sport, not to mention deeply confused young men in journalism. My sons, 28 and 26, sometimes dress and act like they're 14. And the list of pro athletes who have faced charges of assaulting a woman is long and by no means exclusive to pro basketball.

 

There is no question that too much money at too young an age has given many of the league's young players a perverse view of reality and a disturbing sense of entitlement. But that can happen to anyone who gets too much too soon. I guarantee you that phenoms in other pursuits -- Britney Spears and tennis player Maria Sharapova to name two -- have as misguided a view of how the world works as the callow millionaires in the NBA do.

 

2. The players are more interested in showing up their opponents than in playing ball.

The sermonizers have this wrong. They're actually talking about the NFL, which gets an enormous free pass in our culture. I don't know how people watch pro football, far less venerate it. Endless stoppages of play. Multiple injuries. Disgustingly overweight linemen. Coaches throwing flags to call for replays. And -- most of all -- preening players who celebrate tackles and pass deflections, never mind touchdowns, as if they've won the medal of honor.

 

Pro basketball had a spell in the mid- to late 1990s when players taunted each other after dunks and demonstrated other forms of unsportsmanlike behavior. It looked awful and hurt the game. By and large, the league's best players got the message and, while it still happens, it's hardly epidemic, as it is in the NFL.

 

3. Nobody plays hard until the fourth quarter.

A desultory first half in the NFL means the teams are "feeling each other out." In the NBA, it means that everyone is laying down on the job. This claim is utter nonsense. And the amazing thing is, I hear it from the sermonizers right after they tell me, "I never watch a game." So how do they know?

 

4. Players skills have deteriorated.

Probably true. But deteriorated from when? I do think the game looked better in the '80s and through the early '90s. But I guarantee you it didn't look better in the '50s. And deteriorated why? Certainly the infusion of young players, who have not refined their skills, is part of the reason. But part of the fault lies also with the coaches, who, concerned about their jobs, have taken control of the game away from the players.

 

Did the Phoenix Suns look like a team without skills last year? Hardly. That's because they ran up and down the court and played a players' game, not a coaches' game. Endless isolations and one-on-one play will necessarily produce an inferior product.

 

5. Hip-hop culture has co-opted the game.

Probably true. It doesn't matter that Bryant and Tim Duncan and Ray Allen and Dwyane Wade and Chauncey Billups and Grant Hill and Elton Brand and Richard Jefferson and Michael Redd and Ben Wallace and Bruce Bowen and Emeka Okafor and Chris Bosh (and that's not even to get into the white guys) are about as hip-hop and urban as Larry Bird and John Stockton. The game has been marketed in an edgy fashion that appeals to black culture, more specifically, young black culture, and white America, to a large extent, is turned off by this. It may not be racist. But it is racial. The sermonizers see a game that isn't played for them, and so they take it out on the game. The players stink. The quality stinks. The referees stink.

 

Even in the glory Magic-Michael-Larry days of the '80s, pro basketball never had the secure hold on American sports culture that football and baseball do even today. The players mattered, but the game didn't. And so the NBA has always been defined by its weaknesses, rather than its strengths. Barry Bonds acts like an idiot and that's on Barry Bonds. Terrell Owens acts like an idiot, and that's on Terrell Owens. Iverson rants about how he dislikes practice, and that's on the entire NBA. I can't even imagine what people would be saying if the NBA had a steroid problem like the one plaguing baseball right now. Or if Iverson had torn apart the 76ers in the same fashion that Owens tore apart the Philadelphia Eagles this season, I honestly feel he would've had to fear for his life.

 

I want to emphasize again that the NBA has problems, and I will no doubt be addressing them in the months ahead. But I am declaring right now that I am officially sick of the OWGS. NBA referee Bennett Salvatore happened to be at the same wedding I was at, and I said, "Man, you must get it all the time because people recognize you."

 

Salvatore had an answer. "As soon as they start up, I say, 'Oh, you're mistaking me for my brother Bennett,'" said the veteran official. "'I'm Harry Salvatore, and I don't know what you're talking about.'"

 

 

By Jack McCallum

[Ripper 0]

I would still like to see a legitimate reason for people to put down Allen Iverson. He hasn't even gotten into one of those womanly NBA scuffles in his 10 year career. I don't think he ever got 2 technicals in the game. What has Allen Iverson done that is so 14 year old like in thinking and thug like?

[lomasmoney 0]

He talked about practice man, practice

[razazteca 0]

What has Allen Iverson done that is so 14 year old like in thinking and thug like?

"Talking about practice..." and dressing like Cam'ron when he be clubbin'.

[Ripper 0]

Allen Iverson said: "I go out there and play injured, play hard, get us to the finals, leave it all on the court and we in here talking about me getting traded because of practice. PRACTICE. We aren't talking about anything else that I do for this team. We talking about practice."

 

This of course made a legit argument thus needed to be edited down to "Practice...PRACTICE?"

 

Oh the wonderful world of sports media. The same one that till this day will say Ron Artest asked for a month off to promote his rap album when in truth, both artest and Carlise deny he asked for time off and he was promoting a R&B album for a female group.

 

Thats just plain sloppy reporting.

 

And I have never seen Allen Iverson dress like a gay guy when he goes to the club. Kobe maybe...but never Allen.