by Tom Spurgeon
(Here endeth VM’s NBA week! Hope it didn’t hurt too much!)
Mostly Above the Halfway Point Division
Seattle Supersonics
Looking over Seattle’s 2005-2006 roster is like learning about the marriage of a couple you thought had broken up months ago. Last year’s experiment in having a bunch of free-agents on roster so that they’d play hard to garner a big pay day in free agency paid off really well — especially for the Sonics, as nobody wanted most of Seattle’s players despite the team’s very effective 2004-2005 season. My primary theory is that because they’re as physically unattractive as the 1986 Boston Celtics, people may expect more than even their division-winning season brought about. Or, alternatively, no one wants to break up this team before High Resolution becomes the sports-watching standard and every hoops fan in America gets to see this team and its unfortunate skin marks and tufts of hair in God’s format. My tertiary theory is simply no one has any idea who plays on Seattle sports teams.
Seattle also managed to retain the services of Jesus Shuttlesworth, perhaps the only perennial all-star and one-time film actor with star wattage so low he can be outshined charisma-wise by local WNBA players.
Predicted record: 50-32
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Denver Nuggets
George Karl, with the shady, doughy appearance and split of a bad guy on the Superman television show (Dean Cain era), enjoys as his primary virtue the fact that he looks totally in charge. He’s the kind of guy you ask about sporting goods even though he’s just standing there in t-shirt and jeans, or that you keep your eye on in a bar to see if he’s messing with your drink order by a shake of his head in the bartender’s direction. Don’t laugh — in an era where coaches seem split between corporate nobodies and confused ex-players, this is a highly desirable skill. He’s a coach and he looks like a coach.
Unfortunately, unlike other evil genius icons such as Joe Paterno, James Lipton and Governor George Pataki, Karl has failed to flatter and/or bludgeon a specific fan base into loving him no matter what the exit polls and scoreboards say. Karl’s last prominent gig as a coach was leading the 2003 World Basketball tournament team to consecutive losses against Aquilonia and the Country of the Houyhnhnms. I think most basketball fans are just waiting for the Nuggets to lose a few dozen games so this can be spat back in Karl’s face. Okay, maybe that’s just me.
The Nuggets as a team are entirely too dependent on Carmelo Anthony’s unique physical balancing act: staying skinny enough to be efficient on offense and to dodge the occasional morning practice right cross from teammate Kenyon Martin No. 1, but not so skinny he caves in to a sudden on-court pang and eats Earl Boykins.
Predicted record: 49-33
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Minnesota Timberwolves
The brief rise of the Minnesota Timberwolves a year or two ago was interesting for the unique public persona grafted upon noted post-rebound screamer Kevin Garnett, who joined the league as an 11-year-old white girl in 1982. Perhaps unique among all sports celebrities, Garnett had become saddled with an underachiever label that received consistent reinforcement through his own advertising appearances, including one in which a psychological projection of Garnett berates the real Garnett for his lack of post-season success, which one supposes was supposed to draw attention to the power forward’s high standards rather than a tendency to slip into dementia. The only thing that comes close in recent memory to Garnett’s self-sabotage through ad spot is Matthew McConaughey’s “Yep, I’m a good-looking, lightweight dumbass” cologne campaign. Thankfully, the only humiliations that Garnet suffers these days is that people seem to prefer using their remote control on the Black Eyed Peas by a ratio of 2000 airings to one, and, once again, on the court.
As for positives beyond their loudest star, the Timberwolves are no longer coached by a white guy named “Flip” and they’ve jettisoned their hateful old men — including Latrelle “The Provider” Sprewell and Sam “Magic Jeep” Cassell — for a few inoffensive younger types, something that worked really well for Cheers and not so well for that one iteration of Van Halen we’d all like to forget.
Predicted Record: 38-44
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Portland Trailblazers
Unbeknownst to most people outside the Pacific Northwest, the Portland trailblazers are an experiment in community karma. As the city itself completes a 20-year renewal that has resulted in an entire metropolitan of art-loving, bike-riding, farmer’s market- attending, beautiful souls, the Trailblazers team has in return for a string of sell-outs that would make a Greek military historian take note absorbed the entire region’s bad impulses and, as a result, devolved into a one of those gangs from a Beach Party movie. After several years of resulting player malfeasance including re-enactments of the pot-suffused car-destroying joy ride from Fast Times at Ridgemont High on I-5, and a Warren Oates movie moment regarding a poor soul bred primarily for pit fighting (not Ruben Patterson), the nonsense has finally reached the coaching staff. Nate McMillan, the longtime Sonics icon who ended up the coach in Portland the same way a guy after his first fight with his high school sweetheart might end up married in Vegas, spent a portion of the off-season in some sort of bizarre legal tussle with a leftover assistant coach who claimed McMillan doesn’t really want them there. Worst episode of Judge Hatchett ever.
The ball team’s chances depends on the development of players who would stab maturity in the face with a knife if it looked like it might cross the room and tap them on the shoulder. The Blazers somehow managed to dump Damon Stoudamire only to get smaller at the point guard position. Zach Randolph has the quick feet of someone who can dance between cars in a late-night parking lot to get in a kick or two on someone already being punched down to wheel-level. Worst of all, their center is named “Joel.”
Predicted Record: 32-52
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Utah Jazz
The Utah Jazz were my dark horse pick for the Western Conference Finals last year. I based that selection on
1) a few snippets of Nostradamus’ prose concerning a “Mehmut D’Okur” and “the third Napoleon between two rivers.”
2) wishing beyond measure for that moment when Karl Malone would want to come back to Utah and be turned down
3) they were really good in 2003-2004 and added a bunch of better players.
Boy was I stupid.
Despite my confidence in them, the 2004-2005 Jazz won about three games and one-time favorite player to watch Andrei Kirilenko, a combination of Dolph Lundgren’s Rocky IV haircut and a shoddy 1960 giveaway toy with a wire infrastructure, became a skinny Larry Krystowiak.
I think what happened to the Jazz is what happened to the Indiana Hoosiers college basketball team in the late 1990s — coach Jerry Sloan became just old enough that he could no longer kick everyone’s ass, but not quite old enough to leave most of the coaching to his assistants while he made commercials that only showed on local cable.
Predicted Record: -12-94