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Tag Archives: NBA

Til the Casket Drops

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April 29, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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On the Waterfront (1954, Columbia Pictures)

“I apologize for us being healthy. I apologize for us playing who was in front of us. I apologize for all the accolades we received as a team and individually. I’m very, truly sorry, and we’ll rectify that situation this year.” – Steph Curry, October 2015

So often, when assessing the circumstances surrounding a season and its participants, onlookers make the critical error without the proper framing. This is true of culture – Lemonade as the greatest work of artistic liberation this year, this decade or this century, let alone this week – but is dominant in sports. Conversations abound concerning Karl-Anthony Towns’ place in the all-time NBA player hierarchy with, now, nearly as much frequency as LeBron James’, if you look in the right places.

Rare is the situation that doesn’t need the benefit of hindsight to have a definitive historical identity waiting in the wings. This season, the NBA gave us two, possibly three, teams whose historical contexts seem almost preordained. Rarer still is the fact that each team faces unique circumstances which are fascinating in a vacuum but even more so when contrasted with one another.

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Three Company

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April 15, 2016
Basketball, NBA
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Ezra Shaw/Getty Images via the New York Times

Alright, settle down. Have a seat, take a five. Can we just take a five, please? Put your feet up for a while and relax. Especially you, Kobe. You’ve had more than enough to last you a lifetime. Now that the NBA’s regular season has drawn to a close, we all have a moment to catch our collective breath and reflect on what has just happened, which: what has just happened?

The Golden State Warriors have reset our perceptions of what basketball is and what can be accomplished within its strict confines. In particular, Steph Curry has been a supernova among supernovas; along with seemingly every other forum featuring a human being, a pair of eyes, a computer and a relative understanding of the game of basketball, we have covered them both extensively here already. The single most emblematic action this team routinely commits is the very play setting the standard for the league as it is now, the three-point shot.

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Golden Year

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April 11, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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The Man Who Fell To Earth

Every year during the NFL season, the remaining members of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins gather to engage in the most obvious display of schadenfreude possible between ostensible peers in the hushed community of professional athletes. On the occasion of the last remaining undefeated team losing its first game of the season, Mercury Morris and company sacrifice a few bottles of Cristal to the sports deities in exchange for their annual moment of relevance, leaving the rest of us to go on mowing our lawns and picking up our children from not-American football practice° while pondering whether the ’85 Bears could’ve beaten the Panthers from this past season.

Watching history be made doesn’t usually feel so… humdrum. For the Golden State Warriors, making history has become as routine as showing up for the morning shootaround. Win #72, against one of the only teams who plausibly stand a chance in any single game, let alone in a seven-game series, felt almost mundane in its execution, and yet it may be the most important victory thus far, Crying MJs be damned.

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Rolling Stone

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March 31, 2016
Basketball, NBA
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Thomas B. Shea – USA TODAY Sports

Potential is a fickle mistress. In the right hands, she can grant you the world, mold you into a giant, open doors where once there were merely plastered walls. Precocious potential can just as easily buckle under the conspiratorial weights of onlookers, both the hopeful and the atheistic. It takes more than a little bit of luck to successfully extract talent from potential, with many left wondering whether the pursuit is alchemical in nature. We’ve covered this before, of course, but it’s worth doubling back anyway.

When surveying the biggest stories left to contemplate during the dwindling NBA regular season, one sees quite the smorgasbord of offerings: the Golden State Warriors’ courtship of 73 victories°, Kevin Durant’s impending free agency¹ and a teammate dispute in Los Angeles that somehow pulls the double magic trick of 1) dimming the spotlight on Kobe, and 2) making Iggy Azalea a sympathetic figure. Strange days, indeed.

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Boiling Over

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March 2, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Fantasia 2000/Walt Disney Pictures

By 1924, American popular music was undergoing a systematic shift. Going were the days of classical dance hall music, with it the borrowed waltzes and concertos which had for so long dominated musical thought and exploration. Polyrhythms and improvisation found their way into compositions with alarming regularity via the African influences from port cities like New Orleans, which many cite as the birthplace of jazz. Perhaps the most emblematic composition of that time, and one which stakes a claim as the most important piece° of American music ever, arrived via George Gershwin, sans his brother Ira, in the form of a commissioned work that, if the composer is to be believed, was written in only three weeks’ time.

“Rhapsody in Blue” opened on February 12, 1924 in a concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall. Mainstream critics left the afternoon showcase confused, with New York Tribune critic Lawrence Gilman saying of the piece, “Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!” By 1927, the recording from Paul Whiteman’s band had sold over one million copies. Perhaps related, the Tribune went under in 1966.

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Beale Street Blues

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February 26, 2016
Basketball, NBA
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Frederick Breedon/Getty Images

Last Thursday, the NBA’s trade deadline came in like, if not necessarily a lion, then a tiger cub exploring wilderness without its mother for the first time, but it went out like Dwight Howard – generally functional, marginally compelling, much more infuriating and with its movers likely coming away with the impression that they are all champions, no matter what.

While arguably the biggest move of the day involved Orlando sending Tobias Harris to the Pistons for Brandon Jennings and Ersan Ilyasova and was more or less functionally about basketball, a number of less-heralded moves seemed to speak to the cultures of the teams involved: Cleveland traded for Channing Frye to hedge against Kevin Love questions, Oklahoma City nabbed Randy Foye as a more stable proxy for Dion Waiters in the backcourt and the disappointing Wizards ended up with the annoyed Markieff Morris. None of these says “cultural fit” so much as it does “cultural change,” but sometimes in the NBA, as in life, a move is good for the soul.

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“The Reality of Experience”

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February 18, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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New York Knicks' Kristaps Porzingis smiles after sinking a long three-point basket during the second half of the NBA basketball game against the Milwaukee Bucks, Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016 in New York. The Knicks defeated the Bucks 100-88. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) ORG XMIT: NYSW106

Courtesy of USA Today Sports

It happens every so often: out of the inbounds pass, someone, whether Jose Calderon, Langston Galloway or another person whose legal job description is “playing basketball,” will jog up the court, turn, see a 7’3″ Latvian who can’t legally drink in the United States and hurl a pass in his general direction above the crest of the three-point line, like someone lazily tossing a frisbee forehand. Upon surveying his amicably deserted surroundings, the young giant will hoist a shot, hold his still developing form and, much to the delight of damn near anyone who is lucky enough to be present no matter the arena, watch his effort sail through the rim, as easily as depositing a letter in a mailbox.

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Forget-Me-Not

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February 17, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Getty Images

Both on and off the court, NBA All-Star Weekend always manages to provide once-in-a-lifetime moments and opportunities. This edition, held over the weekend in Toronto’s polar hellscape, was no exception, with a live reading of Space Jam and an all-time classic duel between Zach LaVine and Aaron Gordon in the Slam Dunk contest° preceding a record-smashing Game on Sunday.

Amidst the revelry, it would have been easy to miss the announcement of this year’s finalists for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Along with Shaquille O’Neal, Sheryl Swoopes, Kevin Johnson and Yao Ming, Allen Iverson received a nomination for the players category, re-opening a dialogue which had somewhat flamed out since Iverson last played in the NBA in 2010¹.  It stands to reason that Iverson deserves to be in the Hall, if only for the sake of his play and, subsequently, his influence not being so easily forgotten.

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50 Shades Of Super Bowl Hurt

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February 9, 2016
NFL, Sports
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I had about 300 words down for why I love the Super Bowl (and Peyton Manning and the Panthers), and why the Panthers were going to win 35-13. Pretty glad I didn't publish that sucker, now that I think about it. So, we're not quite 48 hours past the end of Super Bowl 50, and I think I'm about 85% recovered from the loss. I was convinced that the Panthers would win. I thought that their play throughout the season, coupled with a declining Peyton Manning, would result in a fairly easy win. I ignored the fact that this was Cam Newton's first SB, and I covered my ears when smart people talked about the likelihood of Von Miller and Demarcus Ware shredding the tackles for Carolina. Of course, the latter happened to a degree that we've never seen before, and the Panthers seemingly were overmatched from the first drive on. At the end of the night, I end up sitting through my third-toughest sports experience ever, I think (In case you were wondering, I actually wrote down my other awful sports experiences). Read More

Draymond: Defender of the Universe

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January 29, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Noah Graham/Getty Images

Following a fan vote which understandably, if unjustly, selected Kobe Bryant to the start for the Western Conference All-Star team, Draymond Green was the odd man out. His all-existence teammate Steph Curry was an easy choice; Klay Thompson was likely to make the cut anyway, having been an All-Star in 2015 and the acknowledged second-choice weapon of the Golden State Warriors’ attack.

But what of Green? Indeed, he was an almost unanimous selection of pundits and the like to make this year’s squad, and sure enough, Thursday’s edition of NBA on TNT made room for the announcement of All-Star reserves, with Green among the most prominent. The man who once favorably compared himself to Al Gore is, finally and deservedly, an NBA All-Star.

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