the most tragic and seemingly random injuries can happen without warning

just ask shaun livingston, who saw a semi-promising season thrown down a serious mine shaft when he landed badly after dunking.

the terrifying this about this injury isn't that he messed up his knee that bad, but that he did it doing something all of us who play basketball do; jumping. by simply landing funny, he will not play ball for 8-12 MONTHS. that shit is so sincerious.

the injury becomes more tragic because he was beginning to show signs of realizing his potential as a truly special point guard. sure, he might not have been magic, but he had the same height, and was flashing court vision. well, i guess we have to wait another year for the revolution to come.

thesis: it's more fun to watch an idea in its natal stages

i guess the title of this post makes what this post is going to be about pretty darn clear.

let's start with a list of totally self-actualized teams. notice that these teams are going to tend to be older and also tend to have more "glue" players, a.k.a. semi-shitty people who don't have offensive personalities.

1. pistons
2. spurs
3. heat
4. rockets
5. clippers (now that livingston broke himself)
   

i'm sure i'm leaving some people out. anyways, those teams are by no means exciting, nor do they have the potential to be exciting.*

all the rest of the teams in the nba have some great untapped resource, sometimes just waiting for a coach to free it, sometimes a resource that will never be free. even the chicago bulls and indiana pacers, two teams legitimately terrible to watch, both have some serious potential to improve their watchability when certain players reach their potential. or rather, are reaching their potential.

as i said before, when a player becomes all he is supposed to be, where the hell is the fun in that? for that reason alone, i find dwyane wade borderline unwatchable. there's no drama in his game anymore. we know that he will get to the bucket, we know that he will toss himself blindly backwards into the nearest defender and toss up a wild shot, and we know that he will be sent to the free throw line for one or two. there is no excitement, there is no drama, there is no mystery.

i guess the mystery of the players is what makes them so compelling. kobe, who is by all means a killing machine, is not entirely self-actualized. even now, as he can still tear defenses apart, there is still a kind of lingering insecurity. insecurity as in, will he get his teammates involved, or will he improve his shot selection and arc. even if we accept kobe as far and away the best in the game today, there is no doubt that he can still make serious strides. believe.

that same mystery that applies to players applies perhaps doubly to teams. the pistons, for example, are a well-oiled machine but literally no-one outside of the detroit area would ever mistake them for compelling basketball. they run their sets well, they defend alright, and they have no players outside of jason maxiell capable of making strides forward in contributions to the team. they dealt away any excitement factor when they shipped carlos arroyo and darko to the magic for kelvin cato of all people. now, they are a succesful team, but sans any drama as to whether or not they achieve their result. we know what teams they can and cannot beat, and there is very little wiggle room as to that fact.

the raptors on the other hand, are an intensely dramatic team. they are still feeling each other out on the basketball court, but bryan colangelo has created a vision with serious implications for the future. i know that they are currently leading the atlantic division, but andrea bargnani, the first pick in what has turned out to be a ridiculously awful draft, has not begun to fathom his depths. this boy has nowitzki potential, but with more D. i'm not saying he will be nowitzki, but the very tantalizing fact that he might be is enough to keep me watching. if, that is, their games were ever on tv.

instead, we get to see the heat and the rockets compete in a game that has already long since been decided.

* i retract that sentence somewhat if you consider watching dwyane wade parade to the free throw line "exciting." personally, that makes me want to vomit.

come and gone

i had the idea that i would do a rundown of what some possible rumors and their implications were pre-deadline, but was so anemic that any discussion of like vague possibilities was simply not a thing i could summon the courage to commit electronic media. instead of getting coverage about the might-as-well-have-not-existed trading deadline, you'll be hearing about why i love the phx suns.

here it is:

when phoenix traded starbury to nyk at the beginning of isiah's tenure, many people had the idea that his departure would do two things:

1. elevate new york to a collection of playground heroes capable of doing serious damage once they reached the playoffs.
2. relegate phoenix to lottery hell, an inescapable fate.

we now know that the exact opposite is true, especially after phoenix "overpaid" for steve nash. who then promptly became someone that should be counted among the all-time great point guards. yeah, maybe he shouldn't have won the mvp 2 years running, but his reinvigoration of the previously moribund nba cannot and should not be ignored.

my love, and peter's love, for the suns could be described as unconditional. even when they were slaying my lakers in a brutal 7-game indictment of kobe bryant's supporting cast and i felt as though each passing moment was a twisting of the knife, i reveled in their incredible floor spacing and passing ability. in that series at least, they made basketball look like a serious art form. they didn't have STAT, but painted a masterpiece in spite of, or perhaps because of his absence.

now that he's returned, nash is seriously even better than in his previous two campaigns. they still run fools off the court non-stop, but now there is someone to get me out of my seat. every game they play is a shout-fest as one sun or another receives a pinpoint pass from the canadian commie and throws in through the hoop with reckless abandon. when nash brings the ball up the court, we know that something incredible is bound to happen.

we know with all of our hearts that he will will will find someone slashing to the basket or someone spotting up, toes just north of the three point line, or he will take it himself, defying the laws that say white boys shouldn't be able to take it in where the big men lay.

basically the entire team is a slap in the face of those who say you can't win in the playoffs with a run-and-gun style, those that say a team that is fundamentally international in nature can't compete with our own home-grown american boys, and all those that proclaim the nba is a league of individuals. the mavs might be a supreme collection of individual talent wrapped up in the premise of team ball, but the suns are the direct apothesis of the 90s-era player-as-team dogma.

once again back is the incredible

i had it in my mind that i would wait until youtube got updated with some videos before i would get officially hyphy about what went down about 1 hour ago. i, of course, am referring to the slam dunk competition during the 2007 all-star festivities.

nate-rob and j smoove offered a hint that the competition was returning to its former glory. jumping over spudd webb and tossing up a nique tribute whilst rocking the throwback took serious steps in the right direction. but there were also moments of embarrassment.

josh smith's bizarre tape-placement dunk (the one where he put down some tape on the FT line then jumped from like 3 feet past it, although some speculate he was just fixing the court) was high on the list of the reminders that the halycon days were long since faded.

(i also definitely should not be leaving out amare stoudemire's pretty-fly-for-a-big-guy display 2 years back when he teamed up with canada's number 1 citizen for some sick dunks.)

well so fast forward with me to this year. maybe it's just my expanded appreciation of the nba's rising youngsters but i was seriously geeked for this year's comp. the mere threat of ryan hollins' rumored leaping ability had me amped, but even with him as a non-invitee there was still a nice little lineup. of the quartet tyrus thomas was the only seriously disappointing one, and even he had a bizarre dunk that severed the net.

firstly, dwight howard confirmed my earlier assumption of unsafe bounce when he put a sticker of his smiling face TWELVE FEET AND SIX INCHES ABOVE THE GROUND. re-read that, recognize that it is not a typo, and then wait like a crack addict until some kind soul posts that shit up for you to see.

other highlights include gerald green dunking a pierce alley-oop that came off the backboard, then re-enacting dee brown's steez but this time jumping over real live nate robinson. nate had a decent dunk in the final, but my man gerald was just out of damn control.

now we come to the point of the dunk contest. gerald had it right when he said that it was hard to be creative now because everyone done took all the good shit. he also highlighted the importance of planning and props. nate was decent, but all he did was try to toss the ball to himself and jump out the damn building. gerald brought out a table and a cardboard cutout of nate robinson that was then replaced with the real thing.

people will still complain that there aren't stars in the contest, but i think that nate really showed why stars in the contest might in fact be disappointing. he had the title and took a pretty obviously lazy approach to this year's contest. the presence of up-and-comers like gerald, like dwight howard, and like tyrus thomas means that there will be real effort made to concoct truly creative dunks, versus relying on the power of their personality to win the contest. sure, lebron or wade might be able to throw down like these fellas but do you think they'd be even half as motivated as someone with a name to make for themselves?

didn't think so.

when people talk about improving the dunk contest, their number one idea is to reintroduce the star element. now we have the clear lamar blogom take on that shit: keep the stars in the game, give me the gerald greens, give me the andre iguodalas, and give me the ryan hollins gotdamnit.

(oh and charles barkeley beat dick bavetta and even ran backwards at the end. and they kissed on the lips.)

"fuck stairs, he can just jump up floors."

p mac, lamar blogom's spiritual guide contributed much of the material for this post, including but not limited to the title and the below awesome video.
dwight howard is basically a small child in a grown-ass man's body. he is figuratively a boy among men. that boyish quality both gives him a limitless ceiling and defines him as a player. he is, don't get me wrong, an absolute specimen of what a person looks like when he is the buffest and bounciest he can be. he honestly has bounce that puts his own body in danger whenever he flies to the rim. i wouldn't be terribly surprised if he ended his own career through some bounce-related incident.

anyways. he is not lebron james. lebron was and is a very mature, very self-possessed young man. he does not slip up on or off the court with the semi-notable exception of the hummer scandal in his high school days. dwight is prone to walking around talking like borat and riding roller coasters with his homeys. while screaming. and being on videotape. and with people around who might doubt his hardness.

i say that because he is the functional opposite of ron artest. whereas ron-ron is obsessed with his tru warrier persona and all of its trappings, dwight has seemingly very little conception about what people think of him. his game is not as polished or flowing as we've come to expect from a "good" player. even as rough around the edges as he currently is, he plays at an all star level. that very fact kind of makes me shudder at what he will become when he developes a good repetoire of post moves and no longer has to rely on his unsafe hops.

is shaq self-actualized?

yes, i do mean in the metaphysical, buddhist sense of the word self-actualized. i will try to stumble through a basic analysis of his relationship to the basic tenets of a philosophy i have a vague understanding of.

shaq as he exited college was a force to be reckoned with. never before had the league seen a big man of such size and power. power is i guess the operative word there. even at 7'0" kareem and wilt and bill russell weren't breaking backboards like it was nothing. shaq was just a plain big dude.

add that to the fact that he ran the floor excessively well for a big man and occasionally flashed some sick PG moves on the breakaway, and multiply by a pretty sick array of post moves and you have a big man that basically defined and destroyed the center position in the 90s and still today.

(if you don't believe me, just look at the fact that scott pollard of all people is still being payed to play basketball. also, the career of earvin "don't call me magic" johson for further proof.)

BUT, and this is a big but so it was capitalized, shaquille has never come home with an mvp award. the case could be (and has been) made that he has never even deserved an mvp award. even in 2001, where the case for his dominance was strongest, AI pulled a substandard sixers team on his narrow shoulders all the way to the finals. (in a continuation of the shaq-killed-the-center argument, they had todd macullogh.) how is it possible that the big man that defined a generation was not capable of putting together a season for the ages?

the easy response is that he's lay-z, and that covers most of it. whether it's spending the summer rapping or amatuer policing, shaq has never put off-season conditioning high on his priority list. basically the season was his chance to get back into shape. even then, he still took off a week or two to rehab a toe or ankle some would have gritted their teeth through. not to denigrate shaq's force of will in the paint, nor to take anything away from the fact that he has 4 championships to his name, but he has not ever been the one force on his team that opponents had to contend with.

in orlando there was penny, in LA there was kobe, and in miami, there is wade. all of those are superlative basketball players that were all making all-nba appearances while shaq was their running mate.

even as i'm saying this, i'm realizing that MJ never did shit in terms of championships without pippen, but let's just ignore that because mike was the most self-actualized player ever at all stages of his career.

shaq never lived up to his potential for dominance. sure. he's had good seasons, great ones on occasion, his most notable one in 2000 in his first year with the wizard of hollywood. and though he dominated games a great many times during his career, he never

1. led the league in rebounds
2. scored more than 30 ppg

i know that there's technically still time for him to do both, and he's still somehow averaging 20/9, but let's not kid ourselves. shaq o'neal is waaaaaaaaaaay on the downside of his career. every time i see him humbly stumbling around the court, basically staying afloat on his aura and some still pretty good post moves, i shed an inner tear reminiscing about what was and what could have been.

how far have the mighty fallen?

feast your eyes on this iconic image of cwebb and kg before we move on.all done? fantastic.

basically that image is symbolic of the different paths that the two players chose, kg redefining the PF position and cwebb kind of trying to but not really doing as well as everyone thought he would.

no one will ever dispute certain things about webber: he's a phenomenal passer, he has awesome hands, and his knees have so thoroughly betrayed him that he looks like a particularly spry 50-year-old hobbling around the court.

as i type this, the lakes are squaring off against his new pistons on a national stage, and cwebb has 11 points/6 rebounds/5 assists at the half. pretty good numbers, especially considering he has two bad knees. he's around 50% from the field, but it's readily apparent that he is quite simply not the player he was in sactown's laker-killer heyday, nor is he even the player he was last year when the 76ers sold him as the solution to iverson's woes. we all know how that worked out.

webber is not a tragedy; he was a pretty special player before his knees betrayed him, although perhaps not all that he could be. his career was not done in by a tragic character flaw, instead done in by failing health and failing teams.

he was a great player in his prime, there is no doubting that. he could score in the post, had great court vision, and ran the floor very well on rick adleman's run-and-gun queens. he would have captured a championship in those years were it not for the meat-grinder shaq-and-kobe lakers of that time. but webber's career is somewhat defined by excuses like those.

in michigan as a member of the fab 5 he shot his own self in the foot, the infamous phantom timeout ending their shot at a national title and collegiate glory. he underachieved alongside juwan howard as part of the Twin Towers of the washington bullets, and toiled away on exciting kings teams while the lakers complacently ruled the roost. he failed to capture a championship, and will probably continue to fail unless the pistons pull off a heat-like miracle this summer, due to what can only be described as punishment by the gods of the hoop.

lord only knows what transgressions he committed to deserve such a fate.

just to say i told you so and have a record of telling you so

bears about to win this shit.

gilbert being gilbert

gilly and deshawn stevenson put 20k on a 3-point shooting contest.
gil shot one-handed from college distance, deshawn regular-ass from pro.
watch it happen.


also, ryan hollins can apparently dunk from the free throw line

wait for it...

OFF OF TWO FEET. basically, that's unheard of. if he can for real do that, then DAMN.