Blog Posts For Tag: Nba

I like everyone else was excited by the possibility of watching the Los Angeles Lakers and the Cleveland Cavaliers play in the NBA Finals. I relished the thought of watching LeBron James and Kobe Bryant do battle, I wanted to believe that this would be the passing of the torch from one MVP to another, and I wanted to see two players who were unstoppable defile the other team at will as the competitive stakes were raised. That reality is no more, the series will remain a hypothetical one, but I have just glimpsed into the future and seen something far more interesting, the transformation of the gentle giant into the beast whose hunger will devour all in his path.

I am very excited to watch the Los Angeles Lakers and the Cleveland Cavaliers play in the NBA Finals. I want to watch Kobe and LeBron do battle. I want to see if this is the season James is able to bring home a championship to the much maligned Cleveland sports scene or if Kobe is able to prove that he could win a title in tinsel town without the Big Diesel. The only problem is that I have to wait for two months of meaningless prologue to dispense before I get to see the seven game series.

How would you like to have a team in the early ‘90s with Michael Jordan and John Stockton as your backcourt and David Robinson as your starting center? How would you like that team to be coached by Jerry Sloan? Well that, and famed Rutgers Women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer, is the team headed to the Basketball Hall of Fame on September 10, 2009.

While the Big East certainly proved it was the best conference in the land with five teams making it to the Elite Eight and two teams making it to the Final Four, the conference failed to put a single team in an NCAA Tournament championship. Instead, representatives from two of the most down-trodden major conferences of the year, the Michigan State Spartans from the Big Ten and the North Carolina Tar Heels from the ACC, are taking their place. This match up is a surprise, but it is hardly a big shocker.

I love sports. I check ESPN's website dozens of times a day for the latest development on the NFL front and for things as silly as the New York Yankees ERA last season. I am not so completely insulated from reality that I can not appreciate how silly the idea of professional sports can sometimes be, and sometimes I wonder which sport is the silliest.

Teams like the Cleveland Cavaliers are having terrific seasons. The Boston Celtics, second in the Eastern Conference, have clinched a place in the playoffs and the Los Angeles Lakers are blowing away the competition despite the now annual Andrew Bynum late season injury. About this time fans can choose to focus on the playoffs or the lottery, and this year everyone would rather be focusing on the playoffs.

The class is just not that great this year. Only one player, Blake Griffin is considered a sure thing, and only two others are considered worth exploring. These two are Greg Monroe, a freshman power forward from Georgetown, and Rick Rubio, a young guard playing in Spain.

The NBA is in trouble. It looks more and more like a lockout will ruin any progress the NBA has made to win back fans that they alienated the last time the league went into lockout mode in 1998. Fans lost 928 games, the league lost all of the goodwil Michael Jordan helped secure, and players lost of $500 million dollars. In 2011, after the collective bargainings talks fail and this strike inevitably happens, I think fans should intervene as the owners rape the players association and demand some changes.

Sometimes it seems like every aspect of our culture rewards greedy brats. I think that trying to teach children to be respectful adults might actually be a detriment to their adult lives. We bail out a banking industry with billions after that cost millions their retirement portfolio. We offer reality shows to rich kids who do absolutely nothing and put them on covers of magazines. We even reward players who act ridiculously with multi-millionaire contracts.

So this weekend Slumdog Millionaire won an impressive eight Oscars out of ten. That kind of dominance is rare in any field. Few musicians have been able to impress the entire Grammy community, sorry Kanye West. Few presidents have been able to have four uninterrupted years of good feeling and inspirational bipartisanship, sorry President Obama. Few sports teams have been able to have perfect seasons, sorry New England Patriots.

Not much happened this time around at the trade deadline as the league has moved on from the Boston Celtics title run in 2008 and has moved onto the practice of making trades in the hopes of acquiring expiring contracts and not talent.

Holy Freakin’ Basketball Jebus!!! LeBron James went for 52 points, 11 assists, and 10 rebounds on Wednesday night in a 107-102 win for the Cleveland Cavaliers over the New York Knicks. He had the most points in a triple double since the days when men’s athletic shorts ended just below the balls and when the circus act known as the ABA merged with the NBA. He proved again that he might be the greatest single force in the league and possibly professional basketball history.

They have not chosen the reserves yet and the Eastern Conference has no coach, but the starters have been chosen and speculation over the NBA All Star Game on February 15, 2009 has already begun.

I will never be a professional basketball player. The market for six-foot white guys with a broken jump shot with absolutely no rotation on the ball, barely enough hops to touch the rim, and the lateral quickness of school bus in reverse is simply not there. It is also increasingly looking like my window to become a basketball writer for ESPN is quickly closing, thanks to my aforementioned non-existent basketball career and my complete lack of press credentials. My bitter broken dream be damned, I am still going to dole out my midseason NBA awards.

Basketball is a young mans game. Sure every gym has its share of gym rats in their 40s that can come out and play solid ball, slowing the game down and offering sage advice that nobody really cares about, but when it comes down to it, the game is meant for those guys that love to run out on the fast break after every rebound. The NBA is the same way. Players like Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant are among the most respected in the league, but it is the youth that drives this league. So the question is, who are the five best players under 30?

One of the running jokes in the NBA is the idea of traveling. Traveling exists in Europe, but is a rare creature here in the states. The NBA is hoping that the fans truly believe that its players are so tall, athletic, and flexible that it is possible to take a dribble from the three point line, two steps, and end up at the rim in the air.

Last season the East beat the West in the NBA All Star game 134-128. I had to look that up. Last season Sophomores beat the Rookies in the Rookie challenge, same as every year. Last season Jason Kapono won the three-point shootout. I did not even realize he was involved in the All Star festivities. There were a few other contests, but I do not remember them at all.

What I do remember is the vision of a seven-foot tall black Superman launching from a two foot jump a few feet in front of the free throw line and rocketing toward the rim to win the slam dunk contest. He became a rare winner. A winner who is not a guard.

Christmas has to be David Stern’s favorite holiday. Baseball only has its fanatical fans counting down the days until pitchers and catchers report to their Florida or Arizona home (40 days). Football does not have any bowl games and the NFL does not dominate with a useless Detroit Lions game (their biggest game of the season is this Sunday, let’s here it, hell no 16 losses in a row).

About a third of the NBA season is over and the play of the draft class of 2008 has been impressively surprising. So far the competition for rookie of the year has been more than simply a little compelling.

I have come to the conclusion that no matter what Donnie Walsh and Mike D’Antoni do this season for the New York Knicks, the mere existence of Stephon Marbury will confound them this season.

Yesterday I rambled on about the return of the NBA and the emerging talents and up and coming teams in the Eastern Conference. Today I am going to try and drill it into sports fans heads again, basketball is worth watching. Not March Madness basketball with a few hundred players under the age of 22 who will never see a professional court in their lifetime. No, real-life NBA basketball in the post-Jordan (Bulls era please) is again well worth everyone’s attention.

So why has the American sports fan continued to ignore the NBA? Yes, the game looked more like close-quarters hand-to-hand guerrilla warfare in the 1990s. Only Michael Jordan could carry the league then (and he did, to six championships).

As the first quarter of the NBA season approaches I am shocked by how little I apparently understand about professional basketball. I was sure there was simply too much talent, length, and ego in the Lakers front court for the team to run a cohesive offense. At 14-1, Los Angeles has completely made me disregard my prediction. I though I was being intelligent. I looked at the roster, looked at the names, and saw the heights. I over thought it and I was wrong.

The Detroit Pistons were the one true basketball “team” in the NBA. Individually, the starting five had tremendous faults that kept them from being true NBA stars. Rasheed Wallace had an attitude problem, Chauncey Billups had a spent too many years as a journeyman, Tayshaun Prince had a limited offensive game, Richard Hamilton could not play alongside dominant personalities like Michael Jordan, and Antonio McDyess had his prime dampened by injuries. Together they erased each others flaws. Together they beat the star-studded Los Angeles Lakers in the 2004 NBA Finals.

Let’s refresh the memory with a top ten list from NBA TV…

NBA lore has it that the team came and conquered the sure champions. It was a lesson in the lack of appreciation for teamwork. It was a return to the phenomenon reminiscent of March Madness where no powerhouse is safe from the inspired Cinderella with nothing to lose. It was a great story, but it was also mostly fiction.

Much like Wicked tells the story before Dorothy came to Oz and defeated the Wicked Witch of the West, this blog entry will tell what happened before the Pistons unexpectedly arrived in the championship series. The volatile relationship between Shaq and Kobe had become too much to bear. Both wanted to be the leader of the team and no matter how many alley-oops and kick outs highlight films show from those playoffs, the team had become split with factions and egos that even Phil Jackson could not hold together.

The other two stars, Karl Malone and Gary Payton, were shadows of former great players. Malone was hobbled and useless apart from an occasional spot up jumper and Payton rarely made it off the bench as it seemed Jackson held a grudge despite beating him in the 1996 NBA Finals.

Warning, this clip contains language some may not find appropriate from www.faym.ebs.com…

The Lakers were waiting to fall apart and the Pistons were simply good enough as a team to beat a Los Angeles squad that played as individuals and not the team that the team that won three straight championships. The following year the Detroit Pistons returned to the NBA Finals and put up a fight, but could beat the San Antonio Spurs, a team with talent and an all for one mentality.

The reality is that Joe Dumars knows this and is starting a new philosophy – star talent. Allen Iverson is hungry for a championship. His career is entering its limelight and he wants to go out with more than a single game win in the finals. His hunger, his drive, and his still-shocking ability to score at will are what Dumars wants.

Iverson will have Hamilton, Wallace, and Prince to help him. That is a much better supporting cast than he had in 2001 when he led the 76ers to the finals and single-handedly won game one before dropping four straight.

These are some highlights from one of the most dominating single game performances in NBA Finals history from the NBC archives…

The loss of Billups will hurt and whether or not McDyess accepts a buyout and returns to Detroit remains unknown (but highly suspected). The change at point will mean a new game in the Motor City. It is too early to tell what will happen, but not too early to guess. I think the abrupt change in team chemistry destroys the team. Luckily, Iverson’s $20 million contract expires after the season so it is a calculated risk.

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The Los Angeles Lakers may be overwhelming favorites in Hollywood to repeat as Western Conference champions, but the Western Conference is so deep that to say anyone is an outright favorite is foolish. There is another problem too. That problem is height.

The Lakers are too tall. The court at the Staples Center is the same around the league and people who get excited about having Lamar Odom, Andrew Bynum, and Pau Gasol starting in the front court forget that they have to fit on the court. One of the basic principles of an offense is spacing. When the front court has two 7 footers and one guy who is 6 foot 10 the issue of court space becomes apparent.

If you still have a problem imagining why this situation would be a problem, just think about trying to play 5 on 5 basketball on a driveway when you were in high school. The game gets clunky because nobody can move and rebounds end becoming excuses to beat each other up.

The Lakers have a few options. They could put Odom on the bench or they could trade Odom. Gasol was never a center and his deficiencies were exposed no matter how many points he put up. Bynum is thus the only option to start. Odom may not be so keen to accept to a relegation to the bench to start the game though. The Lakers could probably swing some sort of a deal that could benefit both sides with Odom’s expiring contract and all around talent.
 

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This is far from a bold prediction. The only other team that anybody could argue would stand in the Celtics way is the Detroit Pistons. The Pistons play the ultimate five man game in the NBA. Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, Rasheed Wallace, and Antonio McDyess are savvy veterans who know how to play the Detroit Way. That way has not made it back to the Finals in three seasons though.

Sure Kevin Garnett is no longer the Kid, Ray Allen is increasingly becoming one sided, and Paul Pierce is not as quick as he once was, but this team also dominated the Eastern and the Western Conferences last season. The Celtics won an NBA high 66 games and decimated a very talented Lakers team with a suffocating team defense.

Garnett will always be a team player and Allen and Pierce may be far enough from superstardom to revel in the role as teammates who are set to make a run at a dynasty. These are the last years of their careers and they already have all the money and accolades they need. Going out a champion, even after winning last season, is probably the only thing on their minds.

It is surely the only thing on the mind of those Boston fans who embraced the trio last season at TD Bankworth Garden. What’s more is that the Celtics got a draft day steal in Bill Walker. Walker was once a heralded prospect out of high school, but three knee injuries knocked him down into the second round. He is still full of talent and could be ready to blossom this season like Rajon Rondo did last year in the finals.

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So the question is what is going to happen with the New York Knicks this season. The team has a roster on the floor at Madison Square Garden that is nearly $40 million over the salary cap with nobody willing to take a pay cut and very few players willing to pass the ball.

Mike D’Antoni and Donnie Walsh have inherited a mess left by Isiah Thomas and must figure out what to do. The first step was drafting Danillo Gallinari for the future once all the expensive contracts are traded away or expire. The second step was to sign Chris Duhon.

Duhon is not a scorer. The Knicks needed somebody to distribute the ball. That is Duhon. As for his defensive weaknesses, D’Antoni used to coach Steve Nash, another defensive mess, and still almost made the NBA Finals. He will allow Crawford to become the leading scorer without him worrying about Stephon Marbury stealing his shots.

Realistically, this will be probably be a throw away year as the team is stuck with the current roster. At the very least D’Antoni and Walsh will be able to see who can fit into the new system without many expectations from fans.

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The next few seasons will probably belong to the Celtics, Pistons, and Lakers, but what happens after the stars from the ‘90s finally call it quits?

The answer, sadly looks like the West will still in control. The Portland Trail Blazers have a bright future with Brandon Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Greg Oden. I cannot include Jerryd Bayless on that list until he proves something.

Just look at two of the teams in competition now to see who will likely be at the top of the West in three or four or five years. The Utah Jazz and the New Orleans Hornets have two of the league’s best point guards now, and they are still young. Deron Williams may run in Chris Paul’s shadow, but he knows how to get the most out of his teammates in Utah, just as Paul knows how to make everyone better in New Orleans.
This is an interesting developing rivalry because 1) the Jazz are originally from New Orleans and 2) Deron Williams and Chris Paul have been compared to each other since college. I think this is going to be the series to watch over the next few seasons. These guys do not hate each other as far as I know, but they will always be compared to each other as log as they play in the NBA.

Out East, the future comes from Florida and wherever LeBron James ends up. The Orlando Magic have a dominant center in Dwight Howard. Rashard Lewis, Mickael Pietrus, and Hedo Turkoglu will probably be around for a while and will give the team enough talent for the next few seasons. They can all shoot and are long enough to cover a lot of ground on the perimeter while Howard dominates the paint.

The Miami Heat looked lost last season, especially after trading Shaq. Now the team has Dwayne Wade and Michael Beasley are big enough talents to base a future on. I know I did not give Bayless the nod earlier, but rookie Beasley is guaranteed to be a beast. Add some three point threats and a point guard to bring the ball up and this team could be scary.

LeBron James could stay in Cleveland, he could move to New York and play for the Nets or the Knicks. Who knows? Wherever he ends up that team will be a contender. There several possibly great teams (the Bulls, the Thunder, the Raptors, etc.), but their future is not as clear yet as these teams.

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Perhaps I remember too fondly the days of Reggie Miller, Rick Smits, and Mark Jackson, but I think the Indiana Pacers could be ready to make some noise in the Eastern Conference. The team has Jim O’Brien as head coach. This is the same man who happily let Antoine Walker, Paul Pierce, and Walter McCarthy launch threes in Boston earlier this decade.

There are a number of differences between those Celtics teams and this team. The main one is that this team has much better shooters. Walker was simply a power forward who liked to shoot threes. He was not a bad or a good outside shooter, but he loved to launch them from 20 feet out.

This Pacers team has player like Troy Murphy, Danny Granger, Brandon Rush, and Mike Dunleavy (yes, Mike Dunleavy) can shoot it from outside. This team is now free of the promise of Jermaine O’Neal’s healthy return. Every season he was supposed to return to All Star form, but only spent half the season on the disabled list. This time the team can move forward mentally and find a new focus.

That focus appears to be Granger and Dunleavy. The players had nearly identical averages for points, boards, and steals. While Granger has the athleticism necessary to stand out in the NBA, Dunleavy is the pesky coach’s son who manages to annoy the other team. With T.J. Ford penetrating (he does not shoot threes) the defensive collapse is sure to get somebody open.

The other part of the team that I like is Jeff Foster. The man cannot score under any circumstance other than a put back, but he can rebound and with so many shooters on the court in O’Brien’s offense the team needs a pure rebounder. Foster is the best offensive rebounder in the league and his numbers should go up astronomically this year.

The bench is not too shabby either. Jarrett Jack, Brandon Rush, and Eddie Jones are not going to win the sixth man of the year award, but they will keep the shots dropping in the basket while the starters rest.

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