CRISTAL ANNIVERSARY

because traditional anniversary gifts only go up to 60 years, i had to create my own special gift to give all ten of you loyal readers. guess what? IT'S A BLOG POST!

you can drop the balloons now.

for the 100th post spectacular (yes there are 100 according to blogger, and no i have not done the research myself) i had it in my head to do a kind of greatest hits, in which i would pull top-flight and also really awful quotes and predictions from the previous 99 posts (which admittedly include one post that's entirely video and one post that's entirely pictures of chris bosh next to raptors--which also doubles as the only post made by the ethereal pmac.) HOWEVER, that would be a lot of work, and something that i want somebody else to do for me. so: anyone that wants to dig through the lamar blogom back catalogue and find some gems and disasters is welcome to do so. and i will post your findings giving you full or no credit.

also, as we reach the 100th post i'd like to place a call out for tee designs. if you have any skill at all with drawing things or know somebody that does, drop me a line of some kind and we'll talk.

and as a third item, tomorrow will begin the semi-official countdown to october 30th during which i will profile every single national basketball association team. even the celtics again! rejoice.

the most lamar blogom nba players, with accompanying paragraphs:

10. eddie griffin

now that he's gone he's cemented this spot possibly for posterity. his aura and ability will be missed sorely in the association. i wanted desperately to see him succeed at basketball. to see eddie griffin rollicking down the lane on a steve nash- or jason kidd- or even chris paul-led break would have been a joy to see, especially considering that in doing so he would have beaten a lifetime of serious psychological problems. yeah, i know he was on the nets. and i wish he was on my hometown lakers so i could have insane fights with the people bashing him which would result in me never talking to the troubled eddie griffin bashers.

9. leandro barbosa

he is a one-stop shop for all your scoring needs. blessed with a deadly outside shot and intense quickness, he is one of my favorite players to watch--provided he's not playing against the hometown lakers. whenever anything happens and he is on the court, he can affect the game just with his speed. if there is a defensive rebound, you can count on him being the first one down the floor with his vaguely hunched-over gait. the way he scores, in such a naturalistic way based ONLY on his speed and shooting ability as opposed to the virtuosity of kobe bean or melo anthony or agent zero is a pretty sight to behold. even though he can't make the suns run like his white running mate can, he can score in bunches. (except when kobe is locking him down.)

8. stephon marbury

WELL he didn't used to be one of the most lamar blogom players. but as has probably been said in countless teen movies: one summer can definitely change everything. let me take that bacl; i have written one fairly angry post defending him in the wake of some neophytes attending a summer camp at northwestern bashing him. but when he starts doing borderline crazy interviews during which he almost answers his cell phone, he has a spot on my list. combine that with $15 shoes THAT HE WEARS ON THE COURT and a newfound win-or-die attitude: "i shoot to win because i shoot to win," that should result in at least a 45-win team when combined with z-bo and some other offensive threats. i look forward to how his newfound freewheeling attitude will translate to the court. will he become the best pg in the nba, like he once claimed?

7. josh smith

j-smoove is seriously awesome. he has bounce for literally days. athleticism for weeks. and also he's really cool to play with in nba 2k7. if you think that doesn't translate into somebody being more lamar blogom, you just don't know lamar blogom. he's really really really hard to see play because let's face it: the hawks just are not on national tv. and also he plays the lakers maybe twice per year so it's not like he's even on local tv. so my pretty much only exposure to j-smoove is through the xbox 360. but he's so awesome to play with in video form that i have a perhaps unhealthily high idea of his abilities. also: he was the starting pf on the first lamar blogom team. well, the only lamar blogom team. so there's that.

6. dwight howard

now if you thought j-smoove had bounce, you have not seen this manchild in action. he can jump more than any 7-footer that i have seen play live basketball, with the possibly exception of ryan hollins who can apparently dunk off of two feet from the damn free throw line. there's sometime rawly appealing about his game. he does not have a wee bit of polish. literally if he was any skinnier he would be a total bust along the lines of stromile swift. shit, he might be the utopian vision of what stro swift could have been with like 100 extra pounds of pure horse muscle. i think that i'm actually going to hate him once he acquires some subtlety to the way he plays basketball. or maybe it could be a kind of fatherly affection; i've seen my little baby all growed up and now he's dominating fools both with his power and with his technique.

5. baron davis

there is literally nothing on the basketball court that he cannot do. he can score it inside and out, dunk on andrei kirilenko with a vengeance that leaves beatrix kiddo looking like a limp-wristed teenybopper fawning over john mayer. his bullet-fedora'd championing of the high octane warriors through the playoff made him a personal hero of mine and a large percentage of nba fans. i also love him for his limitations. his physical health is in constant doubt every time he puts sneaker to hardwood. shit, he couldn't even practice during the playoff run. but when he's on the court and not crippling himself with a propensity for 3 chucking he can ball, straight up and down. even if he's not really a pure point, he can score among the best of them and also handle a team fairly competently. nellieball freaks unite.

4. steve nash

goddamn. even though i resent him every time he plays against the lakers, which is quite a lot, he is a maestro on the basketball court. to this day, one of my favorite performances of all time is his absolute dismantling of the cavs on national television. literally every time he ran down the court--no longer brushing his traditional bangs out of his eyes--something fairly magical was about to happen. whether he would shake amare free for a sickening, back breaking dunk or finding matrix in the corner for a wide-open 3, he did so with an artistic flair. he has a freewheeling style with no fear of turning over the rock and so makes passes that don't even seem remotely logical when they are first generated. however, upon their completion, they are some of the most beautiful things you will see on the basketball court.

3. gilbert AgentZero arenas

agent zero is stephon marbury and baron davis combined and taken to dizzying heights. everything that i've said about them applies doubly to the erstwhile hibachi. he makes outlandish predictions, storms away from game winning shots midflight scowling at the opposing bench, and takes money from his teammates in perhaps unreasonable shooting contests. even during a "serious" event like the 3-point shootout, he's still playing the clown and shooting threes with one damn hand. he's a gifted scorer that can even kind of distribute the rock on occasion if he wants to as evidenced by his teammates' scoring averages. he's probably the second best scorer in the league behind the second player on the list:

2. kobe bean bryant

what can i say about kobe that hasn't already been said about zeus? he's a god among men, can throw lightning bolts, and has a history of troubling sexual behavior. zeus turned himself into a goose, kobe banged a white girl in a colorado hotel. he was the subject of the first ever lamar blogom post, which actually came before the official inception of lamar blogom. in essence, he could be described as responsible for the creation of this blog. i long for the day when he can be paired with a player that will accentuate his talents and bring him once again to the glory that is the larry o'brien trophy. he might never reach those hallowed halls again, but lord willin by the time he retires he will have at least 2 mvps, a few more finals appearances, and the recognition of everyone as one of the top 3 most gifted scorers ever to play basketball.

1. lamar odom

well, he's the namesake. so maybe he should be disqualified. but that's not how i roll. he literally embodies everything about this blog. he is multitalented: he can score it, pass it, rebound it, and--judging by his earlier career--smoke it too. i love him because he has never been on a true winner. i love him because he might never have that opportunity. and i love him because he has the potential to be a truly good player. he was on pace to become an all-star in the incredibly crowded western conference forward rotation. then he messed up his shoulder and the lakers season went into the toilet. people forget this, but he could have made the lakers into a semi-special team could he and every other injured player stayed healthy. there's always next season.

bonus feature: chocolate thunder

"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.

Hustlenomics

Observe the wonderment before you read on.

Now that we've gotten our brief moment of wonderment at the Italian Stallion out of the way, we can move onto the real true subject of this post.
Let it never be said that Lamar Blogom didn't tip its cap to the hustlaz on the block. By that I mean all the real bangers floating around the league, the Patron Saint of which would have to be either Charles Oakley or the entire Bad Boys Pistons roster sans Isiah.

For all of my enamorment with the flashy O, some solid rebounding and general bad-dude stuntin gets my juices flowing almost as much. In most cases, shit goes overrecognized by announcers and sports columnists, and occasionally general managers (see Rose, Malik), but I would be completely in the wrong to dismiss hustlin' as a Right-Way-only facet of the most beautiful game.
Hustling, as a rule, creates the anti-stars sports writers slurp up like milk when they feel particularly vengeful towards the YB+F folks that create their profession. Feel like the star's mistreating you? Go talk to the grimy hustle dude at the end of the bench who sees the floor only to clean the glass. There's a reason that they're described as workmanlike; they're basically overpaid janitors.

But here I am blasting the very same people I promised to glorify with this shit. Let the beatification begin now.

I said earlier that hustling typically creates anti-stars who then become stars in their own right because they aren't paid a hundred million dollars, but then they get silly multi-year contracts for big bucks when their entire use in the first place was that they were cheap. I say that because it's like 90% true. However, the notable exceptions do exist.
Emeka Okafor and Dwight Howard are the most noticeable of these exceptions, at least in the current NBA. In both cases, neither is overburdened with especially silky post moves on which to fall back on (Chris Bosh). In both cases, they aren't such physical specimens that they become unguardable at least in part to their sheer physical size or strength (Shaq-fu). In both cases, they score a majority of their points on plays where they make a concerted effort to get the ball in a position where they can scratch their way to success.

In Howard's situation, the lack of a polished post game can be at least partially attributed to his overall rawness; he's basically a colt out on the court. I guess some of his success is indeed due to his physique, but a lot of it happens simply because he wants it more than the next dude. A great part of watching his development into a truly unstoppable force is watching those unsanded corners evolve into the smooth curves of one truly in tune with his given position. Now that I'm saying this I realize that he will probably become a nemesis when he sheds his youthfulness.

Okafor, on the other hand, has no excuse as readily available as Howard's youth and lack of college experience. Dude was a 4-year senior who played big minutes in the big time well before he crossed some state lines into Charlotte. Despite his experience in a great program and starring in the Big Dance, Okafor was all hustle (baby.) Typically those types of players crash and burn if they're expected to shoulder any kind of load at all on an NBA team, regardless of location or status.
But Okafor once again beat the odds. He's generally recognized as a franchise-type defensive player, and maybe-kinda-sorta getting there on offense. But, watch a Bobcats game (hard, I know) and you will see a man totally defined by his will to live. A truly low-rent version of Okafor is available in Los Angeles, who goes by the name of Ronny Turiaf, although he might fit more in the Dennis-Rodman-mold than the Charles-Oakley-type.

I've got nothing to say

Now is the dead zone.

Nothing of note happens save the theoretical. Big ups to Free Darko to find rage in the tiniest of things (who knew Jared Jeffries was so polarizing?)

That being said, its time to talk about my sleeper: the Orlando Magic.

Led by Horseboy, the Magic are poised to wrest the Eastern crown from the weakening Heat and suddenly beyond-mortal Pistons. They have the horses--double figuratively--and if JJ Reddick heals up in time to become a decent pro, he could stretch the defense enough for Horseboy to do his damage down low.

An unheralded addition to their lineup is the Great White Mystery of Darko Milicic. Say what you want about him, but he has not had the depths of potential even remotely plumbed. Burying him on the Detroit bench was a bad move, but swapping him for Kelvin Cato was a worse one, especially now that Detroit desperately needs someone of his stature to occupy the middle now that Afroman has departed for the windy city.

(Aside: Is it possible that B-Walls will be picked up by the wind due to the drag created by his 'fro?)
Now is the first year when Grant Hill's health has not determined their contender status. Even if he contracts more knee and ankle disease, Hedo Turkoglu is another defense stretching solution.

Jameer Nelson is one of the best cheap players in the league. Unspectacular on offense, but a steady hand at the point and on defense, Jameer is the not the type of player to lead a team to the promised land. He is, however, exactly the type of player not to lead them away from it.

The Magic are a team in no need of a powerful personality outside of Horseboy, who may or may not harness his skills in time to allow his teammates to jump on his back. And besides, he may not even have to--if Darko shows up as the Dirko we thought him to be way back when Horseboy's load will be dramatically reduced.

The Dirty (Half) Dozen

Where would a ridiculous team with no basis in reality be without a bench?

Nowhere, that's where.

So for today's column, I give my fantasy soldiers some reserves with which to galavant into battle.


G: Eddie House

Thug sets the world alight like no other when his J drops. He wasn't a world beater in the playoffs, but he's a monster on the way there.

Maybe the Suns needed to work harder to get him open shots, maybe they needed to run him off of screens more, maybe they needed to have him on the floor more often, but something didn't work.

That's why he's on the bench.

G/F: Andre Iguodala

The other AI, a defensive wizard with mad hops and a penchant for throwing down dunks that would make Shawn Kemp say "Damn!"

He deserves a spot on this squad if for nothing other than his hammer blows to the rim, but when you add in the ability to lock down on opposing shooting guards and small forwards, you have a guaranteed spot and a seven year contract.


F: Chris Wilcox

We'll call him the Professor. I think he needs a sweet nickname. Plus, Chris Wilcox just seems like a name for which that nickname is suited.

Nicks aside, he runs the floor, rebounds, blocks, dunks things, and generally creates havock. That type of person is good to have around, especially if he's just coming out of his shell.

His improvement might not be Dwight Howard-esque, but he might develop into a dead man's Amare Stoudemire. Even if he never learns to play defense properly, who wouldn't love to have a supersized dude nicknamed the Professor flying around?


F: Udonis Haslem

If there's one thing I love, it's undersized power forwards. If there are two things I love, they are undersized power forwards named Udonis.

He was the unsung hero of Game 6 of the NBA Finals; the Heat wouldn't have had a chance without his retarded 15-foot Js that looked they were never going to fall.

Udon also doubles as the only member of the Heat I would not glare at if I passed him on the street. Dwyane can't even spell his name right and now he's Finals MVP? Come on.


G: Mickael Pietrus

On the squad for his defensive wizardry if nothing else. As a huge bonus, if he ever figures out how to play offense, we have a latter-day Kobe on our hands.

That's a lie, but if you know someone who started as only being good at defense and then evolved into a threat on the offensive end, please let me know and I will change it.

G: Marquis Daniels

You may remember good 'Quis as the only Maverick to show up for Game 6. You may also remember him as the subject of Avery Johnson's curious decision to bench the most productive scorer on the floor.

He made White Chocolate and Dwyane Wade look like the bitches they deserve to look like on a nightly basis.

Then, he was traded for Austin Croshere.

There is no good explanation for someone with sick driving and some point guard skills should be shipped off for a do-nothing whiteboy who has his run of glory 8 years ago in college.

G: Bobby Jackson

Maybe I missed something. Did Bobby Jackson kill someone's dog?

For some reason, he went from ridiculously talented backup to shitkicker that no-one would touch. I can detect no reason other than pet slaughter to justify his free fall from grace.

He's a steady hand backing up the point, one who can stroke the occasional 3, pass the ball to the open man, and penetrate the paint when necessary.

A good 12th man unless he kills another cat.

Raw Power

The culmination of the starting five will include a bench; it would be lame to finish this with only one person, no matter how special.

There is a percieved decline in the American center. The so-called "Heavyweights" are a dying breed--Shaq is their last outpost in the landscape of the NBA. But Shaq also killed the center. More on that later.

Right now, we're going to talk about the center, as well as the bench for this team of legends.

Center: Dwight Howard

Howard's game is about as cultured as Borat during his meeting with the Southern wine-tasting gentlemen. There's power to it, and a certain sincerity, but none of the polish that truly creates a gem.

As it is, he is the ultimate diamond in the rough. In this case though, he is not a shining star in a sea of mundanity. Rather, he must combat his own horselike uncoordination in a quest to meld a more perfect model of what a center should look like.

To take this analogy a little too far, he is like a piece of coal. Only with time and pressure will he evolve into the most valuable and unbreakable gem on the planet.

For a piece of coal though, he's pretty damn good.

The Sun Switches Horizons

Basketball and life are cyclical.

Since 1999, the Lakers and Spurs have dominated the universe with the exception of the 2004 anomaly. The East has been dominated by subpar teams of late-- even the Heat last year were broken for a champion. It was only due to injuries or chaos that any Eastern team has risen to the ultimate pedestal of late, but dominance is swinging back across the center of the country.

With the infusion of 'Mek, G Walls, 'Bron, Bosh, Villanueva, Dwight, and even Public Enemy Number 1, the East's underdog status is in danger of disappearing for the next decade. The West's collapse is imminent, unless sustained by the creative forces that summoned both PHX and DAL.

With Colangelo's departure that invention is looking less and less imminent. The East is embracing a new age of basketball player, while the West attempts to replicate that success with entire teams.

One of those two is sustainable. I guess we'll find out.

In Which the Quandary of Darko is Discussed

Darko is perhaps one of the biggest quandaries of the 2003, or any draft. See my post yesterday for why he didn't fit in with the Pistons, but it's debatable whether or not any of the players drafted before or after him would've added a damn thing to that mix.

The Pistons' starting 5 was and is a mortal lock every single year. It is very probable that had anyone--aside from LBJ--been drafted to that team, they would have spent the majority of two years languishing on the bench. 'Melo, Dwyane, and Bosh are all very good players, players that would start for any team in the league... Now.

Had the Piston's picked any of them, we would still be reading stories about how they're flourishing in practice, or waiting for their chance to shine.

By drafting Darko, Joe Dumars sealed his fate as a disappointment for the Pistons. With a coach that hates rookies and foreigners, it is highly retarded to pick someone in the draft who is both. It's avoidable to pick rookies in the draft: Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were both veterans of sorts.

However, someone as raw as Darko was doomed to languish, forever lost, on the Piston's bench simply because Larry Brown rocks it like the Know-Nothing Party. Now that Darko has found his place on the Magic, he has a chance to establish himself as another premier player emerging from that draft of yore.

If Darko does pull the sword from the stone and takes his place at the Round Table of King James, the Magic will wield a frontcourt the likes of which the world has never seen. Dwight Howard is still immature, and look what he does on the daily.

If the Magic get their hands on Rudy Gay, watch the fuck out.