Month: October 2005

by Tom Spurgeon

Phoenix Suns

That sound you hear from America’s greatest city without actual city stuff is either Amare Stoudamire’s knee ligaments grinding during rehab or the sound of men all over America scrambling across the room to change their Direct TV pre-sets to some other team to watch as an ongoing back-up. In the kind of move that epitomizes the NBA today, the Suns responded to their failure to go over in the 2005 Western Conference Finals by dropping a lot of what worked about their team and adding parts that have a 50/50 chance of acting like so much corn syrup in the gas tank. Did no one other than San Antonio pay attention to the great NBA teams of the 1980s through mid-1990s, where teams stood pat and added maybe one Mychal Thompson per year, one James Edwards and then only in a reserve or supporting role? Suns point guard Randolph Mantooth will build on his largely undeserved Best Actor Emmy from last year and Phoenix will continue to be a great place to golf.

Projected Record: 81-1

* * *

Sacramento Kings

Does anyone out there think that Peja Stoyakovich still misses Hedo Turkoglu? Not on the court — no one misses Hedo on-court, especially as he grows a half-inch every year — as much in the clubs, hitting on women together in tight jeans and unbuttoned shirts. I imagine Peja trying to bond with other teammates, shivering in a fishing boat underneath a purple hat somewhere with Brad Miller, going to Vegas and screening female interns on a reality show with the Maloof Brothers, or going to mosque with Shareef Abdur-Rahim before realizing that things would never be the same again.

I think this Sacramento team would have won a lot more games than most current squads were Kang the Time Lord to assume ownership up and make them play in previous eras; at the same time, I can’t see this team getting past the first round of the layoffs. I have no idea what that means, but I can totally see the matching up well against the New York Rens. Speaking of match-ups, I look at their roster changes of the last year or so and I swear they’re trying to find way to match-up with the Portland Trailblazers rather than team that make the playoffs.

I wish I had Rick Adelman’s job security, and I’m self-employed.

Projected Record: 42-42

* * *

LA Clippers

Wouldn’t the Clippers be a good match for their previous home San Diego, and not just because of the name? How did this not work out the first time? People like visiting San Diego; I bet the Clippers would get more press coverage if they were to move. They could host their own all-star game. They could have celebrity-free crowds, even minor-celebrity-free — the San Diego audience would be like a better-dressed Dallas, or a slightly less obese Sacramento. A pleasant team with a second-rate history, the Clippers would fit San Diego’s personality far better than cruel, snotty Los Angeles. No one would make fun of Elgin Baylor’s strange 1982 haircut, or Elton Brand’s Unseld-lite style of play, or take bets on how soon they ruin their latest 17-year-old point guard prospect.

Wouldn’t a move to San Diego give me something to write about?

Projected Record: 28-54

* * *

Golden State Warriors

My suspicion is that the Warriors will be this year’s false-hope team, by which I mean you should withdraw your attention from the team and start paying attention to the fans, just for that sweet, delicious moment when they’re let down one more time. Despite winning a bunch of games at the ass-end of 2004 that only mattered to three drunk guys sitting in the Terrible’s Casino sportsbook, nothing about the way they play ball really signifies anything more than potential for future junk wins. Those kinds of opportunities just aren’t on the menu for a full 82-game season.

Two notes on the roster. First, we should all pause and celebrate the largely undistinguished career of Calbert Cheaney, who came into the league as a Big Ten first-teamer but has survived roster to roster like an NAIA scoring runner-up. Second, everyone should reorient their start page right now to Adonal Foyle’s web site, a rarely updated but always amusing stab at declaring oneself the Smartest NBA Player, just without the John Ameche overtones. It’s the perfect on-line destination for those of us who have always wondered how the all-time Warriors shot-blocker felt about the latest dispersal of funds in Iraq.

Projected Record: 28-54

* * *

LA Lakers

When it comes right down to it, I have about as much interest in Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson as I have in any other hot media couple from the mid- to late-1990s. That would be none then; if possible, less now. Shaq and Kobe was the sexier pairing anyway; Phil and Kobe is like that unfortunate hook-up between leftover stars on the late seasons of a primetime drama, the one that makes old fans say, “I’m glad I don’t watch that anymore.”

In other news, Scottie Pippen has been brought on board to teach Lamar Odom how to be Scottie Pippen to Bryant’s Michael Jordan. One imagines a master and grasshopper relationship where Odom is forced to speak three octaves lower, trade insults with Charles Barkley, and stay on the bench during the last few seconds of playoff games. Oh, I’m kidding; Pippen was a great, great player nearly every second he allowed the coach to keep him in the game and Odom has only the cautionary high-living-as-a-young-player story of a great player. Still, it makes you wonder when the modeling stops. Did Jackson bring in Dave Debusschere to teach Horace Grant how to shoot 12-footers? I don’t recall, but I’m guessing “no.”

With Kwame Brown as Bison Dele.

Projected Record: 4-78

by Tom Spurgeon

Although none of its teams are likely to lose a game to an Israeli club squad anytime soon, the Western Conference of the NBA remains the junior circuit of the two because of history and mythology. A team in Sacramento not only sounds less interesting than one in Kansas City or Cincinnati, it is less interesting — there’s no connection to regional college passions, or the great Midwestern industrial league teams. The Clippers won titles in Buffalo, collected injured legends in San Diego and became synonymous with massive incompetence in Los Angeles. The Western Conference’s most emblematic franchise isn’t the Lakers but the Phoenix Suns, the pride of a city where one can imagine having season tickets for 10 years and never seeing anyone else you know at a game, spreads of houses connected to other spreads, each of which boasts 32 sports bars and 1,700 Dan Majerle look-alikes.

When I think of the Western Conference I think of Ralph Sampson, power forward, Mark Eaton, All-Star, and the 1979 Seattle SuperSonics, last great champions of the NBA’s recreational cocaine use/random sucker punch era. I have no love for basketball in the West; these are players that embrace Oakland and reject Vancouver; these are fans that describe Scottie Pippen as handsome and who feel Chris Mullin was a better player than Isiah Thomas. You could lop the league in half and I’d happily move to the other side of the Mississippi to celebrate.

Then again, the West has most of the good teams. What follows are my thoughts on the Western Conference basketball squads, in order of projected finish. My projected finish will be in the exact same order as last year’s actual finish, because I like cut and paste only to a certain point and last year proved forever I have no idea what I’m talking about when I put my own order forward.

Hey, dear VM readers! The NBA season kicks off next week, so it’s time for the annual VM NBA preview! Official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon & I are spending this week profiling all 30 teams. (We might also get some guest-commentary from readers about their home-town teams.)

Let’s kick it off with Tom’s NBA 2005 introduction:

NBA Basketball 2005
by Tom Spurgeon

An oft-ignored key to professional sports in America is how effectively they straddle the seasons. Basketball, especially as the game has been re-imagined since the 1970s, is in the minds of most a summer game. It’s a game of playgrounds and parks packed with bodies young and those that remember youth trying to hold the court as long as possible. Playground basketball has a bad reputation vis-a-vis its effect on the traditional, more formal competitions, but in actuality the game is closer to its best in such circumstances than sandlot football or tree-bush-sidewalk-home suburban baseball could ever hope to claim. You can carve a space for yourself in a pick-up game in Seattle’s Denny Park or near the New City Y in Chicago by rebounding and playing defense, whereas football played between two driveways rarely rewards fine pass-blocking technique and hockey in the street, well, that’s a comedy sketch, not a contest. Basketball in the summer feels real, and not just the last game of the day, before dinnertime, but the first and the second and the third, stretches of movement and muscle and skill that ignore the final score.

And yet most of basketball is played in the winter, in white-hot arenas that one must leave in a heavy, three-quartered coats, opened to catch a flash of number. It’s swimming lessons as opposed to summers at the lake, heavy footsteps on the iron indoor track at the Y rather than a run by the river. There are significant basketball memories in harsh, cold places like Syracuse, New York, Minneapolis, Minnesota and Hershey, Pennsylvania; when one thinks of the old, great barnstorming teams they ride on buses in the gray cold of wintertime, hitting factory towns and playing in what would amount to cages, a snatch of summer put in the coldest most inhumane buildings imaginable. Basketball is packed high-school gyms and temporary legends, funny insults lobbed at the bench and Iron Crown beers downed in the car. When the great NBA teams of the 1980s met to do battle for the world crown in early June, they were finishing arguments begun in backcourts all the way back in January, heated discussions echoed in bars where men drank because it was too icy to drive home and into the mountains. Magic versus Bird was the conclusion to an argument that began with Dr. J’s hands around someone’s neck months earlier. The Showtime Lakers were built on Kareem’s turnaround punch the first game of the season in Detroit.

I’m not sure the modern NBA has ever understood its place in the cold, preferring instead the summer, and the Finals, and the Dream Teams, and even the WNBA. The other sports have always known how the second season comments on the first. October’s final showdowns represent the boys of summer all grown up. Football’s winter playoffs underline the battles of Fall against a more severe backdrop (a big reason the warm-weather Super Bowl generally disappoints; it should take place on an ice floe). I’d suggest the NBA has lost a sense of winter, the cold backdrop and artificial heat that links the game to its high school and college roots, that feeling of men at work, stripped to the bone, prepared to match determination and skill and muscle. Basketball is a winter sport, and needs to be once again, although the fragile athletes and ugly, undisciplined basketball made common by rampant personnel changes all scream back that no attention need be paid until June 1. And that’s okay, too. It’s just not the same.