Month: November 2004

NBA Preview: Pacific Division

by Tom Spurgeon

Golden State Warriors
One thing I like about the NBA is that Matt Carroll and Jason Richardson can be part of the same college class, yet one can easily have two more years of NBA experience than the other and not even be considered an early draftee. Okay, I don’t like that at all about the NBA, just like I don’t like the Golden State Warriors, this year’s team to throw out when you can’t figure out where a player you used to like is still playing. My favorite player on the Warriors roster is Adonal Foyle, a Colgate graduate who started a book club that had people reading once a month and then seemed to not update the site for a long while. I thought of all these kids in Oakland, clutching copies of Jack London, waiting for Adonal to come back. I’d have something else to say about the Warriors, but every time I look at their roster I see the words “Troy Murphy” and “Mike Dunleavy” next to each other and I start crying for those kids in Oakland all over again.

Los Angeles Clippers
Now here’s a Dunleavy I like, Mike Sr., whose claim to fame used to be that as an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks he’d occasionally suit up and take a ten-day contract. You’ve heard of a player being known as Instant Offense? Dunleavy was Instant Local News Feature. This team is really young, with 11 players on the bloated pre-season roster having three years or less of experience, and Kerry Kittles as its Grand Old Man. I know you can write this every year, whether or not you follow it up with a paragraph about how much you like Elton Brand: There’s no reason the Clipper can’t win 30 games. There’s no reason they can’t lose 65.

Los Angeles Lakers
With Kobe Bryant’s magnificently executed heel turn now complete, the resulting hatred of the entire outside world might create enough pressure without to mold Los Angeles Lakers fans into real sports fans for the first time. Okay, probably not, but there should be at least enough sideshow heat to keep casual fans interested until they get good again. I always thought that GM Mitch Kupchak should go back to wearing his playing days leg braces over his suit to gain sympathy from the fans for his dubious trades and draft choices.

Phoenix Suns
This is the team you’d want to play for and watch visit your home squad but not necessarily bet on a high win total this year. They should score a lot of points and allow a lot of points, and Amare Stoudamire should grab 115 rebounds a game. Of course, I liked last year’s roster, too, at least the first ten players, and they performed like LaRue Martin. It’s interesting how Shawn Marion’s career has progressed just like his nickname-sake Matrix films–I liked him a lot better back in ’99, too.

Sacramento Kings
The Kings won’t be the same without Vlade Divac flopping at mid-court and inadvisedly shaving once or twice a year, despite the fact that the team acquired all-star and decent passer Brad Miller for Scot Pollard and a two-week stay for Donnie Walsh at the MTV suite in the Palms Resort. They do feature the Betty and Veronica of guard-tandems in Bobby Jackson and Mike “Nosferatu” Bibby, and Peja Stojakovic is playing for his reputation after last season’s Chicago Cubs-like disappearance followed by Chicago White Sox-like petulance Windy City Twofer. The owners’ loyalty to Rick Adelman is touching, unless of course you’re a fan of the team.

Tomorrow: Gil’s Eastern Conference previews. And also some election stuff.

NBA Preview: Southwest Division

by Tom Spurgeon

Dallas Mavericks
In terms of roster “building,” the Mavericks are trying to put together a showpiece house by stacking the same three rooms on top of each other over and over and over again. A quick look at their roster indicates they have plenty of marginally talented centers (including all-time object of derision Shawn Bradley), poor man’s Michael Jordans (really, really poor in some cases) and offensive-minded forwards with a dubious commitment to rebounding. Coach Don Nelson’s latest stint as an NBA coach has certainly built the reputation of the early 1980s Milwaukee Bucks teams, about whom one has suspicions that with Hubie Brown as coach we might just have a videogame called “Pressey vs. Magic.” Dirk Nowitzki remains wonderful to watch when he’s on, and when he has hair.

Houston Rockets
Center and Chinese folk hero Yao Ming added a new skill this offseason that terrifies his rival. That skill is speaking English, which Ming does well enough at this point he can appear translator-free on television with Regis and Kelly, although admittedly neither one of them is a master of a language. Ming’s game is supposedly aided by the addition of Tracy McGrady. I have no idea how Tracy McGrady will fit in with the Houston team, because I’ve never seen the talented guard and seven-year veteran actually play basketball before. He is joined by two generations of under-performing Michigan power forward, Juwan Howard and Maurice Taylor, and the 103-year-old free agent signee Mark Jackson. The key to the whole Houston season may be whether Van Gundy feels he needs to keep Jackson or if he cuts him for someone younger, such as anybody else in the entire league.

Memphis Grizzlies
I want to see the Grizzlies get really good so every year when they get deep into the playoffs we can see a feature on their ABA past. The good sign is that Jerry West has assembled the kind of roster heavy with B to B+ talent that makes a super-trade possible at some point in the near future. The bad sign is that there are really no players like that worth trading for these days. Hubie Brown becomes a much less effective coach when players grow accustomed to his fearsome, Cryptkeeper-like visage, but for now they’ll play hard for him and the team should do only slightly worse than last year.

New Orleans Hornets
If Baron Davis were a movie star, all of his movies would open up in April or in early October. He just doesn’t seem big-time, leading-man material. He is supported, strangely, but four almost similarly sized players, all of whom were drafted the same year: George Lynch, P.J. Brown, Rodney Rogers and Jamal Mashburn. Otherwise, this is a team so dull that the jumbotron at New Orleans Arena shows highlights from other games, despite trading for the player most likely to lead the leagues in taped segments with Ahmad Rashad, white dunkmaster Chris Andersen, who gives off the air of “failed child star” better than anyone in the league not named Christian Laettner.

San Antonio Spurs
I have a friend who is obsessed to the point of madness with seeing the Spurs great player, center-forward Tim Duncan, participate in a swimming contest. Duncan gave up swimming for an NBA career, but has kept that overwhelming swimmer’s charisma. He’d be a good corporate employee because when he screws up you can’t really tell how he’s playing any differently (lap after lap after lap), so it’s hard to pin him down as a player with flaws. He’s really the new Oscar Robertson, who in the 1960s and 1970s played better than anyone in the flow of the game, but only ever seemed to be working three quarters as hard. It remains to be seen if, like Robertson, Duncan can win a championship without a quality center to play off of. The team added the Rick Barry spawn who always does so well in statistical analyses of the game, so they should do just fine in a rapidly fading conference.

NBA Preview: Northwest Division

by Tom Spurgeon

Denver Nuggets
The Nuggets will be coached by Jeff Bzdelik a) until Superman tricks him into saying his last name backwards and returning him to the 5th Dimension or b) mid-season, when an under-performing Andre Miller, a slumping Carmelo Anthony and a brooding Kenyon Martin forces a 13-game losing streak.

Minnesota Timberwolves
Minnesota needed to win last year as Kevin Garnett sidemen Latrell Sprewell and Sam “Magic Jeep” Cassell inch closer and closer to being Curly Neal old. I also keep imagining that Wally Szczerbiak is going to wake up and finally realize he was destined to become a pro tennis player. He just looks like one, doesn’t he?

Portland Trail Blazers
Qyntel Woods was recently cited for participating in illegal dogfight activities, for the firs time opening up a professional sports team to Warren Oates jokes. Authorities were tipped to Woods when he abandoned a dog that wouldn’t fight for him on the side of the road. You know the NBA is going downhill when a player’s posse members are half-assing it, and I sincerely hope no one in Woods’ inner circle is ever given the job of disposing of an old mattress. In other Rose City entourage malfunctions, Zack Randolph lied to police about a shooting in a bar in Anderson, Indiana, a town that has the social scene equivalent to one of those floating oil platforms. Things should go a little better for the Blazers on the court, but only a little. Randolph is a throwback to production machines Mark Aguirre and Adrian Dantley, and sort of fun to watch, though.

Seattle Super Sonics
Kobe Bryant calling out the mild-mannered Sonic guard Ray Allen during pre-season surprised many NBA observers, 80% of whom had forgotten Allen exists. Nonetheless Allen remains one of two good players in a Sonics rebuilding effort that suffers from horrendous choices in the mid-to-late 1990s. Think of this year’s squad, with perpetually dewy Rashard Lewis and at least three guys who annually vie for the league’s Greg Kite Acne-Filled Shoulders award, as the Jean Doumanian cast of Saturday Night Live, the year with Charles Rocket. I’m all for the Sonics doing well, though, because head coach Nate McMillan looks great with his arms crossed while wearing a suit, which is the hardest to master of all great coaching skills.

Utah Jazz
The Utah Jazz played really well last year despite a starting line-up that included Andrei Kirilenko, the guy who kicked America’s ass at the Olympics, and three founding members of the Steppenwolf Theater Company. Kirilenko recently signed a humongous contract, which according to the rules of the NBA means he might begin to suck now. This would be too bad, because he’s fun to watch, like a bad guy in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie that also plays defense and runs the floor like it’s 1984 all over again and he’s Michael Cooper. In the off-season the Jazz signed Carlos Boozer, who has the game’s most annoying calm face-–he’s the guy who always outside the party house being talked out of some misunderstanding. The Jazz are coached by Jerry Sloan, who at 60+ years old is still the last guy you want to see coming towards your car with a golf club.

NBA Preview: Western Overview

by Tom Spurgeon

Here are my general predictions for the western portion of the National Basketball Association, now split into three divisions so that Gil could catch me not knowing anything about the league’s change three days after I lied and said I was done with this report. [Ha-ha! I knew I could trip you up by asking who you liked out of the South Central Eastern Plains Division, y’big jerk! –ed.]

1. The Los Angeles Lakers will win a lot of basketball games this year, despite losing Shaquille O’Neal to the Miami Heat, because their doing so will irritate me. Also, because Kobe Bryant brings the manic energy of the never-been-hugged to basketball games that not even the parents of the other players bother watching.

2. Kobe Bryant’s dad will score 22 points one night in a basketball league that will refuse to employ Dennis Rodman.

3. Qyntel Woods will at some point in the season be tempted to leave Portland Trailblazer teammate Damon Stoudamire on the side of the road somewhere.

4. Kevin Garnett will make another slightly humiliating commercial that hints at his inability to win.

5. Carmelo Anthony will eat something Kenyon Martin leaves out in the locker room, causing Martin to repeatedly say, “It’s cool,” until three hours later when he drives over Anthony in his Escalade.

It’s finally here!

No, you ninnies, not the election! I’ve already cast my vote, and it’s for Apple Pie and a Tanqueray & Vicodin cocktail tonight! It’s the new NBA season that has ME so juiced up!

Other blogs can keep regurgitating their political rantings (that goes double for you, Sullivan); for the next two days, Virtual Memories is devoted to professional basketball!

Today’s big-ass entry is a preview of the Western Conference, written by Tom Spurgeon. Tom’s not just a hoops geek (it’s in the genes; he’s from Indiana), he’s also an unparalleled chronicler of the comics industry, and now he has the Comics Reporter website to prove it (as if his great book on Stan Lee wasn’t enough)! Without further ado . . .

I Hump This Game

by Tom Spurgeon

The best thing about professional basketball in America used to be that everybody hated it. It was an urban game played by men in bad suits in largely undisciplined but fascinating fashion, with success dependent largely on how well your college game had been imprinted into your memory. Then Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came along. Bird and Johnson were gym rats with enough in the way of physical gifts to make the game bend to their will. For seven or so years the National Basketball Association combined individual expression with a beautiful notion of flow and pressure that emphasized getting the best shot at the goal possible, usually as quickly as possible. There were great teams, like the Los Angeles Lakers, the Boston Celtics, and the Philadelphia 76ers; there were great rivalries like Dr. J versus Larry Bird and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar against an America That Did Not Understand Him.

Then Michael Jordan showed up and dunked on everybody and scored 75 points on the Celtics because his teammates included Lee Atwater and a guy from the Gap Band and things went right to shit.

Okay, it took a long time. But things did go to shit. Players started to be paid for their “entertainment value” as much as their ability to actually play the game, sort of like a company giving the person who has the most pencils in the roof above their desk the biggest salary. Players began to realized you could take three-pointers and no one would yell at you for missing them the way they did shots you should actually make. New teams showed up and employed more bad players and made a star of Muggsy Bogues, who would have been another generation’s favorite Globetrotter. The structure of salaries and ticket-demands for new stars, or at least one that sort of were like the good ones, made owners pay some really dubious talent a lot of money. Shaquille O’Neal terrified the land by making rap albums and movies with Judd Nelson.

Gil Roth’s beloved New York Knicks tend to be blamed for this state affairs, and the only way in which I disagree with conventional wisdom is that I believe it should come with sizeable electrical shocks for everyone involved when I think that way. Michael Jordan settled into a very set offensive system with the Chicago Bulls that basically allowed him to stay the same player he was by surrounding him with players who only did a few things very well – sort of like building a soapbox derby car where you skimp on every other item because you own killer wheels. Instead of making a superior team out of generally superior parts, the Knicks decided to afford a wonderful college player turned selfish pro named Patick Ewing “local Jordan” status, surrounded him with players as flawed as the Bulls, and sold the referees on the fact they should be allowed to play like the Hanson Brothers because, well, they were the logical rivals.

Fast forward seven years later and there’s America losing the Olympic Gold and Americans being happy about it. If there’s any hope for the NBA at all, it may be found in one curious and undeniable fact.

Everybody seems to hate basketball again.

I believe I can cry

How come this stuff doesn’t happen when Billy Joel & Elton John are touring together?