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More Than You Bargained For, Yeah

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December 20, 2023
Basketball, Sports
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Bobcats waive Ben Gordon after playoff eligibility ends - CBSSports.com

It’s endemic of having grown up around a team that had to fight for every positive the national light chose to shine, but when someone hits a weird enough record such that it matches Ben Gordon, I start to wonder. Rides in other people’s cars gave me sufficient exposure to the Ben Gordon Experience, before, during and after the period in which he was a Charlotte Bobcat. I liked watching him.

To see a player match something he did – we’re talking about Jalen Brunson going 9-for-9 from three, in on his way to scoring 50 points in leading the New York Knicks to a win over the Phoenix Suns last Friday night – brought a smile to my face, something that is fleeting in this year, as we turn to the next.

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Great Expectations

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November 2, 2023
Basketball, Sports
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(No, let’s not talk about the Clippers at this time. Thank you for your support and consideration.)

As we all knew years-plural ahead of time, Victor Wembenyama went number one overall in the first round of this year’s NBA draft. By providence, perhaps, the San Antonio Spurs drew the number one pick in a year when a generational center was available, just as they had in 1989 with David Robinson and in 1997 with Tim Duncan.

It was the inevitability that drove the madness: a little over two years ago, it was the Scoot and Vic show. Two seasons and one nationally-televised game pitting the G League Ignite development team against Big Vic’s Paris-based Metropolitans 92 later, and Victor was the clear-cut number one.

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(Approximately) 30 Thoughts On 30 NBA Teams, 2023-’24 Edition

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October 24, 2023
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Welcome back. Depending on how you count the attempt at satire written in the midst of an early life crisis in 2014, and with apologies to the time in between the 2019-’20 season and 2020-’21 – spacing more questionable than the 2013-’14 Knicks, incidentally, but with a much more logical explanation – this is the tenth time we’ll be previewing every NBA team, so for those of you here from the jump, I must express some measure of appreciation.

A reminder, and a reintroduction: if you don’t know but you’ve been here this long, Robert Horry’s name is pronounced with a silent-H (‘Orry). His name is his name. He has more rings than Jordan, if that’s your thing, and he hit several of the most important shots in league history, with apologies only via volume in both directions to Kings fans and the Kyrie hive. 

Getting back to the point: you heard about him for years in the French leagues too, right? And even before that? Ah, so you saw what his wingspan could end up being? Not unlike the Burger King jingle that mutates each fortnight but remains an earsore in every iteration, the midseason tournament is coming for all of us: growth is the only mindset.

Watch your own fire burn as mine does. A model like yours? Nothing better. Just you wait and see:

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The Aces Between

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October 20, 2023
Basketball, WNBA
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Enough of it felt troubled, if not necessarily doomed, from the start, that this isn’t unexpected. A superteam! In New York! Even if the term became irrelevant almost as soon as it entered the public consciousness, we felt reasonably confident deeming what the New York Liberty were coming into the 2023 season as something like that. Granted, no less an authority on women than Derrick Rose has mentioned superteams before, regarding one of the men’s teams based in New York City; Oppenheimer had colitis, but at least he just wrote to his brother about it rather than to the New York press.

When the final possession of the WNBA season sputtered out, a reasonably well-drawn up ATO play from New York’s head coach Sandy Brondello that took just a beat or two too long before it went awry, and that was that. Once again, the Las Vegas Aces are the champions, the first repeat title winners since Lisa Leslie and the Los Angeles Sparks upended – whom else? – the New York Liberty, featuring – whom else? – current Aces head coach Becky Hammon.

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Nothing Remains Quite The Same

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September 2, 2023
America, Basketball, Folk, Music
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It tracks that the last song Jimmy Buffett ever played before a live audience was the one on which he built his empire of relaxation: “Margaritaville,” a final salvo over this past July 4th weekend as a surprise guest of Mac McAnally, long a member of Buffett’s Coral Reefer band. Not unlike Prince exiting the stage following “Purple Rain,” or Tom Petty’s last performance ending with “American Girl,” there is something to going out on exactly the tune that laid the path for the rest.

Buffett, who passed away September 1st at the age of 76, defined the idea of getting away, however briefly. When a disgruntled coworker hits the bottle in the early afternoon, justifying it with the requisite “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” that’s a credit to the lifestyle Buffett envisioned for himself and sold at massive scale.

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Keep a Little Fire Burning

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June 13, 2023
Basketball, NBA
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High school prospect Spencer Haywood joined the then-Denver Rockets for a season before jumping to the NBA, but with a few notable exceptions, the franchise remained in muck for much of its existence. One name change, one historically high-scoring era and a couple of generations of ridicule at the hands of – oof – Kings and Knicks fans, and the Denver Nuggets have finally arrived: 47 years after joining the NBA proper, the Nuggets have won the franchise’s first NBA championship.

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Loud, Fast, And Keep Going

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May 29, 2023
America, Basketball, Music, NBA, Pop Culture
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Happy Memorial Day! Great to see you! So, now that you’re here, it’s time to attack: Do you ever think about instigators, or why a lot of people die unnecessarily? Did you see the BARRY finale? What do you fear the most, and why is it the mirror? Anyway, haha, *high five*, let’s honor some of what we thought were the dead, but they’re still living.

Jimmy Butler has fulfilled his mission and obligation as The Man for the Miami Heat. Via the way the game is played today, et cetera, he found himself at the foul line with three seconds to go, the exact three seconds and three shots he needed to close out the Boston Celtics and end any speculation that the best-positioned team in NBA history to recover from down 3-0 would do so. He nailed all three, Michelobs surely on the brain.

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Love Is A Bird Rebellious

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May 23, 2023
Basketball, Music, Sports
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1, 2, 3…

At his core, he was a dancer. If Kobe was the Baryshnikov of his era, Carmelo Anthony was Albert Torres, engaging defenders at the elbow in a perpetual tango evoking their shared Puerto Rican roots. A step forward, a feint with his elbow, a half-pivot, then: gone, with the duck of his sweatband-adorned head. It was one of the seemingly endless ways Anthony could score; it didn’t look effortless, but, like a choreographed routine done right, it usually looked like he was having fun.

Except to older heads whose respect he ended up earning anyway, it doesn’t much matter that the biggest win of Carmelo Anthony’s career happened before he ever made it to the NBA. Everybody wants to win – of course – but winning was never the most interesting nor important thing about Anthony himself. On the day when the team that drafted him bounced the last team for whom he played from the playoffs, Anthony announced his retirement.

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bitter shame hath spoil’d the sweet world’s taste

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May 16, 2023
America, Basketball, Gambling, Sports
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Prior to the penultimate round of the NBA playoffs kicking off, a matter of only negligibly less importance took place in Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center. Mere steps from the closest stop off the CTA’s green line, the future of the NBA began to reveal itself. Several sweaty executives, a handful of younger NBA players and the odd nostalgia act rolled in as representatives of the fourteen teams eligible for lottery picks in this offseason’s draft.

The prize at hand? What we’ve known for two years, at least, if not longer: French prospect Victor Wembenyama, a 7’3” stir-fry of Kevin Durant, Kristaps Porzingis and Anthony Davis, if the scouting reports and highlights are to be trusted. Behind him, Scoot Henderson, along with several other players of varying overt Christian influence. But Wemby was the target, even for the teams with barely 1% chance of getting him. Twenty years after LeBron James’ draft lottery, a prospect of perhaps even greater repute has entered the chat.

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