This is Kawhi Leonard’s world. We’re just living in it.
In an NBA Finals that was supposed to be dominated by the Big Three, Tim Duncan’s potential farewell, Gregg Popovich’s in-game interviews and Pat Riley’s slicked back hair, there has been a runaway star in a player who seems to want to be anything but. Kawhi Leonard is the soft-spoken, three-pointer-making, slam-dunking phenom who is leading the San Antonio Spurs against the two-time defending champion Miami Heat.
I’ve grown tired of Mock Drafts, so instead I’ve made myself the hypothetical GM of every NFL team and simulated the first round of this year’s draft (If Kevin Costner can be a fictional GM, why can’t I?). Anyway, I wrote about the first 10 picks in Part 1 and covered 11 more in Part 2. Here’s the final part of the trilogy.
We’ve nearly survived the first round of the NFL Draft! Now it starts to get interesting, as we reach the part of the draft in which the best teams of last year try to improve upon their already stellar rosters. It’s the final eleven picks of the first round. Let’s get drafting!
I’ve grown tired of Mock Drafts, so instead I’ve made myself the hypothetical GM of every NFL team and simulated the first round of this year’s draft (If Kevin Costner can be a fictional GM, why can’t I?). Anyway, I wrote about the first 10 picks in Part 1. Check back tomorrow for Part 3.
We’re now entering the middle of the first round. You still with me? Good. Most of the big players may be off the board, but the following names are worth learning, as you’ll be hearing them on Sundays for a long time to come. Without further ado, here are the next eleven picks (Sorry, 32 is a weird number and isn’t divided by three evenly).
The NFL Draft is the biggest football event of the year, behind only the Super Bowl. Since its inception, the Draft has grown from a collection of anonymous dudes in a room picking college players to a television ratings bonanza that is broadcast in primetime and spans three days. The NFL Network now provides coverage from the early NFL Combine, and you can now catch footage live from the Pro Days of the Draft’s biggest stars.
But undeniably, the worst bi-product of the NFL Draft’s ascension from non-event to the blockbuster of the NFL’s offseason is the endless cycle of mock drafts and marginally updated mock drafts. The NFL Draft keeps Draft experts in business the same way Game of Thrones has single-handedly kept the fake blood industry alive. Every few weeks, Draft experts produce articles that drum up the hype train of certain players while decrying the follies of others, who ran 40-times slightly slower than expected or failed to prance around their Pro Day with just the proper flair.
I’m not interested in mock drafts. I don’t want to read Mel Kiper’s predictions on how the NFL Draft will play out, like he’s Professor Trelawney trying to read tea leaves. I don’t want to know who these teams will draft, but who they should be drafting.
Let’s give the Boston Red Sox a round of applause for the team’s collective acting performance following Michael Pineda’s first pine tar incident. Give them all Oscars, Emmys or those little participation trophies your cousin gets for being in the school play. The entire team pretended like it was no big deal and goaded Pineda into pulling the same stunt again, making certain the second time that the New York pitcher was promptly removed from the game. Genius. Evil, but genius.
That was my assessment of the situation, as I watched the home plate umpire wipe pine tar from Pineda’s neck like a mother trying to clean a newborn child that has yet to master the art of inserting a spoon into its mouth. I’m a devout Yankees fan, but game had to recognize game, and Boston seemed to have turned its mind game up a notch when they convinced Pineda it was safe to lather his pitches with pine and let ‘em rip. But that’s not how the larger baseball community saw it.
College basketball has become an Etch-A-Sketch. Each year, as the season progresses, an elaborate drawing forms. Star players emerge, storylines form, Cinderella crashes the ball, and by the end, we’re left with an ornate image to remember the season by. But the moment the season ends, the slate is wiped clean, because any player using half of what he learned in his introductory business classes is packing his bags and heading straight to the NBA Draft. The next season, we learn the names of a new crop of freshman, the names of tomorrow’s lottery picks, and the cycle repeats itself, with a brand new drawing.
My bracket sucks. But if you’re being honest, so does yours. We all take part in this ritual every year, filling out a bracket and placing our hopes and dreams for riches in the hands of a collection of college kids who can bounce a ball up and down on a hardwood floor better than you and I. Every year it ends the same way, crumpling your bracket into a ball and trying to throw it through the miniature basketball hoop above your garbage bin. You always miss the shot too. Insult to injury.
The problem is this, we only think about filling out this bracket during the few days between Selection Sunday and the first tip in the Round of 64. We don’t analyze our mistakes when the NCAA Tournament is freshest in our heads; instead, we wait and repeat the same mistakes that sunk our bracket the previous year.
Well, not me. Not this time.
Few things have been a part of my life for nine years. Those formative years of high school only lasted four years, and college was only four more after that. Only a handful of my friendships have reached the decade mark, and after family, few things have been a part of my life as long as the silly sitcom that ended Monday night. But with the airing of its final episode, How I Met Your Mother wrapped, bringing an end my nearly decade-long romance with a television show.
I exist in a perpetual state of catch-up when it comes to movies. I rarely see them in theaters and while friends are raving about today’s must see films, I’m still working through my queue of flicks from yesteryear.
You can trace this phenomenon back to my childhood, when I was convinced by friends to sit through an endless stream of raunchy comedies marketed for immature teens that recycled the same jokes about genitalia over and over again. After blowing through my weekly allowance on movies that left your feeling numb for all the wrong reasons, I resolved to no longer pay for bad movies. I vowed to only pay to see Hollywood’s very best on the silver screen and wait for the remainder to make their way to the HBO/Netflix circuit. So far, it’s been working. Here is a sample of movies I’ve seen in the past few years: Django Unchained (I’m a Quentin Tarantino fanboy), Inception (I’m a Christopher Nolan fanboy and didn’t want the ending spoiled), Hot Tub Time Machine (Hey, I never said I was perfect). It’s much like I stowed away in a bomb shelter from the movie-verse for a year, and since emerging I’ve been a year behind everyone else.
Sports are so arbitrary when you really think about it. It’s just a collection of athletes, exhibiting an arbitrary set of skills, governed by an arbitrary set of rules. You can throw a ball through a hoop? Good. You can throw it through a hoop behind this line? Even better.
It’s the arbitrary nature of sports which leave me finding them rather meaningless at times. When a man throws an oblong ball and another man catches it, the action doesn’t directly affect anything in the outside world. Wars are still fought. Diseases still kill. A ball passing through space doesn’t alter race relations or alter prejudices. It’s just an object traveling through space.
Tuesdays With Horry 