Wayne and Santana In '08...I Can't Feel My Face

Sacramento Kings team preview

the kings are highlighted by one wildly overrated player, two mildly overrated players, and one insanely underrated player. you can choose from this list:

1. mike bibby


2. ron artest


3. brad miller


4. kevin martin

i guess everyone realizes how ridiculously bad brad miller has gotten over these past few years; he used to be a passing wizard with a decent shooting touch and a very succesful technical post game. he was, however, hamstrung by his lack of athleticism and general whiteness. the kings have kind of replicated his skills--or lack thereof--by nabbing aaron gray, another slow white dude that has all the hops of a bulldog.

kevin martin, on the other hand, scores for literal days despite the goofiest looking j this side of the matrix. he shoots a silly percentage, doesn't dominate the ball, and is almost impossible to double team because he's so quick once he gets his paws on it. he's exactly the type of player people love when they're talking about a second option because he can score without taking the high volume of shots that someone like flip murray or earl boykins needs.

that's really valuable because of the nominal top-2 options on the kings. the ron artest-mike bibby tandem could be the single most overrated in basketball. until people realize that bibby was basically a creation of rick adelman and benefitted by having a sickeningly good supporting cast, he will continue to confuse defenders only with his ethnicity and not with any kind of basketball moves. (in a serious note, what the hell is he exactly? his dad is kind of black. kind of.)

ron ron, who was the subject of a pretty admiring post over here a while back, has devolved into a kind of talented sinkhole where he doesn't realize that he might not want to take awful, contested shots every time down the court. maybe if he stuck to his strengths--defending every position and knocking down jumpers when walmart (that's what we're calling kevin martin since kmart has been taken by kenyon) and mike "black?" bibby aren't getting to the basket.

shit, if theus can get everyone to do that, they could have the ingredients necessary for a solid team that barely misses the playoffs. maybe if he does that and squeezes a good season out of the miller/gray whiteness tandem they could sneak into the 8th spot but beyond that i don't know. also, he's imposing a curfew. yeah, right.

San Antonio Spurs team preview

i used to really hate vanilla ice cream. it was bland and stupid and white, and it wasn't chocolate goddamnit. eventually--after i discovered the wonders of pie--vanilla ice cream grew on me like a creeper vine on a wooden trellis. pie and vanilla ice cream are delicious together; pie and chocolate or strawberry or rocky road? fuck that. it's gross, and you know what i mean.

now, ask yourselves why i would start a team preview with a talk about vanilla ice cream? because it's the spurs, that's why. the most boring team possibly ever. although let it be said that i do like myself some tony parker on occaision, mainly because he's my all-time favorite point guard in nba 2k7. other than him, what do you say?

this is a roster not designed to lend itself to superlatives.

tim duncan, the undisputed leader, is legendary for the fact that he's consistent on a level that's absolutely sickening. i'm not kidding. next time i see a 20/10/3 season from tim duncan i think i will empty the contents of my lunch into the nearest trash can or other receptacle. i'm joking, but only kind of.

the basic premise of the spurs as it has once been described is that they assemble a team of three good-great players and fill out the rest of the roster with people willing to run through a brick wall to win. that is an incredibly accurate portrait of the spurs as i know them, and explains why flight white has toiled away on the d-league team, unable to showcase his inSANE dunking skills to the largest audience imaginable.

but because flight isn't on the roster, the spurs will keep winning. there are no players that could reasonably called laconic on their roster. every single spur lives and dies by the bounce of the round ball. none of them have shoe deals, etc. etc. with the possible exception of tony parker, who is married to someone who will probably one day bang their teenaged gardener while tony's away at work.

the spurs will probably win the west again unless they somehow take a giant dump in the bed this year. bo-ring, but some people like it. if i could only find the damn pie.

prediction 60-22, t-1st in southwest division

Seattle SuperSonics team preview

this might be mistitled by the end of the next season. i'm kind of mixed about whether or not i give a shit that the sonics move to oklahoma (probably not.) but the handling of the potential move by supersonics ownership is shadier than a giant umbrella designed to block out the sun. honestly, i cannot fathom the thought process that would incite any person in power to suggest that the motivation for buying the team in the first place was moving it. that's harebrained along the lines of videotaping your former defensive coordinators signals to gain an advantage when you just spent the entire offseason making your team so you don't have to do that shit.

let's focus on the positve: kevin durant, ya dig? pmac got on somebody else's sidekick to specifically tell me that he's "straight lanky." i can think of no better adjective to describe the ethereal kevin durant. he literally seems like a ghost spider crawling around the court, scoring from all sections. imagine a 6'9" spider with serious scoring ability and there you have kevin durant. i dare you to have a better explanation for him than that.

no he is not tmac+kg. he has tmac's weird intensity that he maintains despite the fact that he's basically at the whim of a zephyr that flies into the stadium. he reminds me a little bit of young kobe only way better at age in that he's just this waifish kid that fronts like he can score, etc. with the big boys. like kobe, i'm sure that arrogance--because what is it other than arrogance inspires that kind of confidence--is completely and totally justified. but as a result don't expect him to be putting too many banners up wherever the sonics are playing; players like him are notoriously hard to win with. kobe could be seen as the best example of that player type, and yes he does have those 3 championships, he won them when he was playing with the best big man in the league at that time.

weirdly these sonics seem a little like a natal version of the bulls that won so many championships. obviously neither the stars nor the supporting cast are there yet, but kd is an ultragifted scorer, jeff green is a "winner" (whatever that means), and they even have the big ron harper guard in delonte west. all they're missing is phil jackson and about 5 years of maturity for kd and jg.

all of their oozing potential will not translate into any performance at all this year, unfortunately. so expect a lot of long faces in and around seattle while durant finds his way into the lig. maybe a ROY is in store for him though, as he figures to be their number 1 scoring threat this season.

prediction 34-48, 4th in northwest division

Toronto Raptors season preview

let me say before i say anything else that sam mitchell looks like a black muslim leader of the fait (priest? minister? imam?) at this point, he should just change his name to sam x and get the damn thing over with. but he probably won't. just another daily frustration for lamar blogom.
despite the fact that they're lead by a person who appears to be about 30 years late to a black panthers rally, the raps are the most international team in the nba probably (i was too lazy to actually count the number of players from other countries.) suffice to say: they hail from all over the globe, plus they play in a city that is not in america.

trivia time: toronto is in a country called "canada." they talk with goofy accents there, say "eh" a lot, and their currency is something called the "loon."

the raptors are a top-flight offensive team despite or more probably because of the fact that they're mainly composed of european players. by mainly i mean at least 40%, which qualifies as a lot. their top 2 players are americans: bosh and ford, but all the rest are probably not welcome in certain parts of the south. come to think of it, the raptors are probably the KKKs most wanted franchise. it's a good thing that there's no team in alabama.

the raps play what is apparently an exciting brand of basketball higlighted by unselfish play and some pretty damn good passes. i would direct your attention to andrea bargnani's artful between the legs alley-oop bounce pass to chris bosh--which bosh botched--as evidence of that fact. that may have been the most confusing sentence of all time, and for that i am unapologetic. parse it yourself or just search for andrea bargnani pass on youtube and i'm sure your eyes will be opened like you just touched the obelisk.

bottom line is that the raps will probably be able to win the atlantic again despite the retooled celtics. we can pencil them in for another 45-win season on the strength of a bunch of euros and a player who literally looks like a raptor himself. i dare you to say that chris bosh is not positively reptillian in appearance, demeanor, and post moves. if chris bosh on the block does not scream gila monster to you, you have issues. just kidding. kind of.

prediction 45-37, first in atlantic division

Utah Jazz team preview

the jazz were a bit of a suprise last year if you only consider their two most recent iterations and forget the grandmaster that is jerry sloan.
frankly, he looks like he was hit in the face with a folding chair at a 45 degree angle; his nose perfectly continues the slant of his forehead in an almost cartoonish way. also, he's a bit of a racist asshole in the same way that all old ball coaches are. i don't mean racist in the way that he hates black people, because come on, it's not like he can avoid them in his line of work. i mean racist like if you come to practice wearing a gold chain...

just don't come to jerry sloan's practice wearing a gold chain, aight?

bottom line, he knows how to make a basketball team win some damn games. even when his supposed "best player" (the awesomely nicknamed AK47) is shitting the bed like a 96-year-old never nervous pervis he still squeezes a 51 win season out of his team. not as though the rest of the team is a bunch of slouches--boozer has overcome his negative karma from pulling the rug from under the cavs blind owner, memo okhur has let his wife show him the way to clutch greatness, and deron williams is staking a claim as the next great power guard (baron davis, sit down.)

but maybe that collection doesn't win 51 games in any other hands than jerry sloan's gnarled old ones. say what you will about him, he knows how to coach basketball.

that's why they could be headed to a better season than their last. forget all the other western conference teams, the jazz have a legit chance to add 3-4 wins to their record, which none of the others can claim. in a season where most of the teams are idling or in reverse, the jazz could be moving forward simply because of the logical progression of their talent. deron williams will only get better with age, same goes for ronnie brewer who will hopefully take the 2 guard spot for his own.

pretty much every other team in the conference has stood still, and none of them boast the promising youngsters that the jazz do. especially after they lose derek fisher, who was secretly dead weight as a shooter that can't really shoot the rock at all.

mark them down to keep the 4 seed, especially with kirilenko having a possible rebound campaign and maybe morris almond stepping up as this year's under-the-radar rook.

prediction 53-29, first in northwest division