NBA Eve

On the eve of the NBA season, we witness the passing of a legend. As tragic as his demise is, I have no frame of reference other than that provided by the occasionally good Sports Guy.

The man's death is tragic; no-one has meant more (sports-related) to a city probably ever. The only one who comes close is Larry Bird. Notice how all of these are in Boston.

Is that because Boston is so depressing that only sports give it meaning?

Or is it that Bill Simmons is the only column I read that deals with this shit?

We report, you decide.

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City-wide days of mourning aside, a truly joyous time is about to happen on earth. Kicking off in Miami and LA, the season starts with two tantalizing matchups. Both match Conference Finalists against their first round opponents and both involve seriously talented 2-guards.

That's where the similarities end. Miami should be (in Lamar's estimation) the most hated champion in recent memory, whereas Phoenix will be (hopefully) the most loved in the near future. The Lakers and Bulls are both former products of that 90s-Early 00s star-centric system that placed a premium on acquiring one or two players with limitless talent and surrounding them with semi-crappy but cheap players.

If anything, the Suns take the Jordan Mandate to an extreme unrelated to it and yet ultimately so. Their #1 superstar is a formerly floppy-haired Canuck obsessed with the possibility that he can be defined not by supernatural gifts of his own, but rather that he gathers his worth from making the mundane abilities of his teammates somehow transcendent of the basketball norm.

The Suns revolve around Nash, but at the same time control him. He is Frankenstein, he creates the monster, but ultimately the monster makes its master the slave.

Because the Suns revolve so much around a singular star, one might say that they fit the Jordan Mandate perfectly, but that ignores the essential reality of Sunsiness.

Sunsiness means that they are more than the sum of their parts. They assemble a whole that functions together as a whole, but to which one part is so integral that without it the entirety of the system would collapse.

Nash is not only the defining factor of the Suns factory, but he is also the one most victimized by its existence as a seamless entity. Nash is defined by the Suns system--run and shoot, shoot and run--and struggles not to overcome it. He is nothing more than a worker in the Suns farm, and yet he owns the farm himself.

Mannequin Love

The Saints cast off the pall hanging over the great city today, helping (hopefully) to finally revitalize an urban area long overdue for a change in the dialogue surrounding it.

Of course, this gives Lamar the perfect time and opportunity to discuss what's been kicking around in his brain since Randy Moss and T.O. started raising hell in the NFL.

The point is this: football players are entirely products of the system in which they play. So much so that it is impossible to divest any specific player from the team he is currently playing for, or to imagine his fit in any other system. The loss of individual identity is partially due to the lack of trades in, but that lack of trades is due more to the dehumanizing aspects of the most violent sport.

If basketball is a uniquely postmodernist game, football is a modernist product of the Industrial Revolution.

Basketball contents itself with finding the partial and half-truths that dominate the court every time 10 men set their soles on it. The ins and outs of the season lend themselves to experimentation in a quest for ultimate knowledge that forever remains just beyond our grasp.



The Right-Wayers would have you believe that there is a single truth to the way the game should be played, but their ideals have been exposed as unstable as any Fundamentalist sects'. More than anything else, the "point" of every NBA season remains the same: there are interesting and unique ways to win games. Whether or not those methods translate to championships is still under debate--the Mavericks' radical collapse in the NBA Finals struck a blow to those ready to declare a New World Order.

However, football is still dominated by the conglomeration of talents to a degree disgusting to all but Larry Brown and a select cadre of 300-pound Goliaths intent on sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

The helmets play a small role in increasing this anonymity, but what makes football such a coach's medium is the sheer number and mass of those involved. The NBA lends itself more to balletic compositions simultaneously reminiscent of the hood and opera house, while the NFL replicates the singular grind of major corporate life.



It is perhaps ironic that America would choose to so embrace a sport that celebrates the goalessness of Middle Management in perpetuity, but also perfectly sensible when one considers the glorification of those same employees by the League.

Also important is the fear of progress that football espouses on a weekly basis. The individual is ignored, or perhaps demonized in the quest for an 11-players-working-as-one ideal achievable only in that sport. The Young, Black, and Fabulous mentality that so permeates the NBA is almost completely absent from the football universe save two shining stars: Randal Moss and Terrell Owens. It is no coincidence that those two see their names most often associated with “headcase,” just as Donovan McNabb was considered slightly undesirable until he toned down his free-flowing creativity in the backfield.

Those two are concerned with only one thing: imposing their stamp on whatever game they play by dominating the field in all aspects. I don’t mean dominating in the sense of big-ass-running-back-working-the-clock, but rather dominating in that ethereal sense of the word; affecting all proceedings while having a hand in none.



Neither one touches the ball on every single play they are on the field, but both strike fear into the opposing team because of their ability to rubber-stamp the game as theirs from the moment they lay hands on the pigskin to the moment they flip it to the referee, and perhaps even a little after, depending on how loquacious they find themselves on a given afternoon.

By inspiring this fear, they transcend the sport itself and begin to occupy a higher plane not dissimilar to that of MJ, Dr. J, or Kobe Bean. That higher plane is exactly what football strives to denigrate with each passing snap, beating their will into the turf as behemoths collide.

Football analysts often marvel at the supreme athleticism possessed by these two shining stars, but bemoan their woeful honesty and expression. What these talking heads fail to recognize is that the very honesty that they pour scorn on with their outmoded ideals is a uniquely American ideal: that one man may rise above the rest based on talent alone. Not pedigree, nor politeness, but sheer artistic strength and force of will may triumph over outmoded systems designed to create and maintain a rigid caste system.



If football is a feudal society, Moss and Owens have managed to separate themselves from the commoners. They’ve broken their chains, but none join them in their revolution.

Microfracture is the new Tommy John

Amare Stoudemire is the Phoenix Suns. Correction on that: he was and will be the Phoenix Suns.

Quiet simply, he is the second most important and influential big man ever to play in the NBA. Correction: he could be.

If Amare comes back like Jordan, it will be to punctuate a Suns attack that had increasingly become a run-on sentence. There were no periods save the occasional Marion throwdown, but even then his dunks were more of a semicolon. Shooting 3s is terrific and wonderful and great, but what once seperated the Suns from their Supersonic brethren was their ability to halt their attack so that the beast that occupied the middle could take some time out to demolish the rim.

Amare's return could mark the Suns' reclamation from the world of the circus freakshow. Steve Nash's performance in the Playoffs was gutty and spectacular and blah blah blah. His performance carried a bemused smirk as he dribbled around Lakers and Clippers and Mavericks en route to open 3s and layups, but he seemed always on the verge of collapse. Twice he carried his team to Game 7and twice they succeded. However, without Amare, Nash was forced to be a working man's hero, a role he does not embrace.
Amare's return means that Nash can return to the princely duties to which he is more accustomed. No more must he stain his manicured fingernails with grease and sweat as he operates the heavy machinery necessary to win basketball games.