rock my world

the houston rockets have certainly had a long journey since they were last in serious contention for the nba title this late in the season. that's right SERIOUS CONTENTION. i ain't talking about the one (if that)-and-done rox of the stevie franchise era. i'm talking about serious, been bangin since my li'l n**** rob got killed for his barkleys, shit.

the rockets, although they may only be a five seed with no hope of catching any of the top 4 teams, let alone the other two texas teams. but while the top 3 are enmenshed in a serious battle like gandalf and the balrog falling through that mountain, the rockets just lay in the cut, waiting for the suns, spurs, and mavs to beat the ish out of each other in the first few rounds so they can come in with yao and tmac's sleepy-ass eye.

the thing about the rox is that they're not the team one might expect. yao and tmac are obviously both offensive LOADS to the point where tmac was once in best-player-in-the-league discussion with kobe and yao, if he stays healthy, is THE dominant post player in the nba. believe that. if you're about to quibble with either of those statements remember that tmac took the shitbag magic to the playoffs multiple times and once drove the pistons to the brink of elimination until tay prince busted out of his shell. also, shaq is decrepit at this point and the big german is not a post player per se, deigning to venture into that world of the large only when small bodies come his way.

the rockets are not a team defined by their superstars in those respects, as so many teams are. in some regards they are similar to an nfl squad in that they are their coach's team. jvg has to garner some love for coach of the year after he took this ragtag bunch of dudes and made them the best defensive team in the league. i would look up that stat, but i'm lay-z. they still play GOOD offense, just not at the juggernaught level one might expect given their two stars.

remember: offense wins games but defense wins championships. i'm not saying the rockets are about to win a title. (ALTHOUGH remember the 2003 pistons squad. and they had way less talent on offense.) they are capable of making some serious noise come playoff time.

odenomics

we can all agree on two things this march madness:

1. greg oden will be the first person selected in the draft.
2. kevin durant was sans doubt the best player in college basketball this year.

this is not a commentary on "will kevin durant or greg oden be a better pro" or some shit like that. in fact i don't even know what the hell this is. this post has been aborted once due to exhaustion so now i'll again take up the sword of bloggership and promise not to resheath it until i'm done with this current quest.

people are really really sold on oden as the number one pick. in fact, kevin durant would have had to become a kind of hybrid between pete maravich and david robinson with a little bit of kevin garnett and tracy mcgrady thrown in for teams to begin to fathom challenging oden's stranglehold on the top spot. hell, even when oden played one handed and was honestly pretty much JUST above average and not the OH SWEET JESUS THE BIG BLACK MAN IS COMING TO SWAT OUR BALLS force that many expected he would be in the pro game nobody batted an eyebrow even as durant was doing shit that amde you wonder just what the hell it is that they put in that new jersey water. dude has spider man powers and probably will make a generation of prospects WISH they grew up in a state contaminated with toxic waste, just so they could get a taste of the shit that gave kd those skills in that body.

well anyways tourney time rolls around and durant half shits the bed and is half screwed by tim floyd bending rick barnes over the scorers table and doing him like barnes is in on a child molestation charge. one would think that once oden's hand has healed, and now that he's shooting FTs with his right ffs, he'd finally stop acting like a bitch and start getting his grown man on. not to be.

the trouble with oden, and the thing that gives him silly potential, is that the man has no idea how to play the angles on a basketball court. i mean watch him, seriously watch him, and you will see a behemoth of a man struggle with a kwame-like fervor over how to get his ass in proper position to block shots. there's a reason he's been in foul trouble the whole damn shebangabang; and that reason is that even in the mockery that is college basketball you can't just blast off and expect results. the best shot blockers, of which andre kirilenko is a fab example, know how to get themselves into position to swat a shot and not get called for a foul. oden just does not understand how to do that.

another issue i have is that while he's good around the bucket, he takes way too many contested shots. good post players take few contested shots, choosing instead for a sick spinoff and slam. watch some shaq tapes from before he became a fat asshole and look at how often he leaves defenders looking silly or just plain outmanned because that man had superior post moves. or akeem olajuwon. either one of those two. or pretty much any great center. sure, i think oden will be a fine player, just maybe not the superstar people expect.

we could be seeing mj/sam bowie on the microscopic scale, but durant will be better in the league.

of course, keep in mind that this is coming from the man who thought bron would flame out.

meet the new boss (same as the old boss)

d'antoni hath spawned hisself an army. whether it's the gs warriors runnin with nelly like DRAMA I'M BACK or the crazed dungeon-family-exuberance of the melo-iverson nuggets or the raptors tryna front like they know whats up, there is a serious revolution, or i guess devolution technically happening in the league today.

everywhere you look teams trying to get smaller, quicker, better shooting. that ain't bad, in fact it's pretty dern sweet when you think about it. it makes the league on the whole more watchable; when even the shit teams are playing a breakneck speed and killing themselves just to stay alive.

take the warriors for example. what they have is a roster full of tweeners-- matt barnes, monta ellis (stuck between point and shooting guards), mickael pietrus, and basically a host of others my sloth is preventing me from looking up. but the point is that they survive in a way that same roster never could have 5 or 10 years ago. when shaq was still in full effect, and guys like akeem and the admiral were patrolling the paint, no way do you get away with "hey, andris biedrins is my center is that ok?" but in this new-old nba where clutching and grasping is illegal, and any contact is looked upon with an audible intake of breath and a whistle quicker than you can say "that's not really a foul but they will probably call it one anyways" those teams can and do succeed.

they are not the suns because no-one but the suns can be the suns. their talent is off the charts not only in terms of personnel but also in terms of coaching. i guess this will sound kind of like a love letter, but they are probably the most or second most talented team in the league depending on where you put the mavericks. i mean nash is nash, matrix is matrix, amare is a beastly god, and even diaw is sensational in his own french way. it is that collection of talent along with the roll-the-ball-out-and-see-what-steve-does style d'antoni is so comfortable adopting that makes the suns the team that gets me out of my seat, hootin and hollerin like a fool the most out of any team besides kobe. yes, i just said kobe was a team DEAL WIT IT. nash to amare on the screen roll is pure floetry, especially when amare brings the thunder. and no matter how predictable it is that he's going to flush it like "i make it rain on them hoes" i still got my hyphie (original spelling courtesy keak da sneak) shoes on.

but the newbies also bring it like nobodies business. basically the nuggets are the blackest team in the league, and also the best fighting team now that ivey joined their hallowed ranks. they're also seriously putting shit together too. peep iverson and melo both deferring to each other and stepping up simultaneously. if it continues to work, it could form the single most bizarre symbiosis this league has ever ever ever seen. the most comparable people are kobe and shaq, but that doesn't even do this shit justice. basically the 2nd and 3rd most talented pure scorers in the league are playing on the same squad. and this somehow works. FURIOS GEORGE REPPIN IT OLD SCHOOL.

nellyball ain't too shabby neither. he's even got bd, who's usually vd (yeah, punning in this bitch) to chances of winning shit, buying into his scheme. not knocking fools down with statistical output, but at the same time giving it all his creaky frame will allow him. with baron, it ain't about stats young gun. maybe he's starting to recognize that, but that's seriously good. we see him move from HMM I'M OVER HALF COURT TIME FOR A 3 LATE to cool down monta, we setting this bitch up, run a play before our very eyes and we should drop jaws in wonder. he's basically mirroring the evolution of the league with his play. before he was a 3 jacking dunk dropping swag machine, now he's, as i said before, a serious dude willing to put serious time into making this team shit work.

Why I Can't Root For the Lakers

this is a first, a guest post on lamar blogom. not talking about pmac's little chris bosh is a dinosaur comparison, although that was apt. this is a true blue honest to god guest post by Dennis Danziger, english teacher at palisades charter high school and publisher-editor of mad as hell club, which can be found online at www.madashellclub.net .

Here's the deal, not about Lamar in particular, but about the Lakers and the Laker fans and why I can't root for them even though I've lived here for 25 years and love bball.

Laker fans seem to care more about who's sitting courtside that who's playing on the court.

In moved here in the early 80s, I attended my first NBA Championship Game. Lakers vs. Sixers at the Forum. Kareem vs. Dr. J. Does it get any better than that?

I'm sitting about 20 rows behind the Laker bench, the game's on and I can't help but notice that lots of people, not two or three, but dozens are focused anywhere but on the court. They're looking left, looking right, not to see who's setting picks, but who's in the stands.

Then the buzz, "Where's Jack?" Oops. Jack wasn't in his seat, no where to be found, and people were actually concerned about that than they were that the Lakers were behind.

That's the moment I realized I could never root for the Lakers. The Clippers, sure, the Lakers never.

Eventually Jack settled into his courtside seat and the people around me relaxed and watched the game, when they weren't oogling and gossiping about Jack or Diane Cannon or the stars du'jour who had courtside or near courtside seats.

The other moment that solidified by anti-Laker feeling was a few years back. I remember when the Lakers had won back-to-back championships it seemed as if every third car was proudly waving a Laker flag. But the moment they lost, the car flags came down. Never to be seen again.

This sort of fan behavior would never happen in a real city like NYC, Boston, Chicago or DC.

what you know about mvp candidates?

clearly not as much as this man, averaging a cool 57.5 points over his last two games. lamar blogom was in full effect at friday's game, believe that.

(as a little post script to our presence there, i would like to submit a person for review as the biggest douchebag ever. he came at halftime and started chanting m-v-p immediately upon sitting down. he turned out to be tolerable because of kobe.)

at this point kobe cannot be quantified by normal means. i guess if i remembered mj in his prime i would call his performance jordan-esque, but i didn't so this is my baseline for "get on my back i'm taking you there" performances. at the end of friday's game with the lakers down nearing the end of the 4th i started to get a sinking feeling; it's usually at those points in games when kobe takes over, or tries to, and the lakes more often that not find themselves losers despite of kobe's attempts at heroics. his heroism usually means attempting damn near impossible shots and rimming them out, but on this occasion it manifested itself as several "forgot about dre" threes, including the tying one in zach randolph's fat face and another spinning away from a double team.

kobe is the last true scorer left in the game, with even the tireless iverson choosing to make nods towards deferring to his younger running mate as the season wears on. kobe is also a throwback to an earlier era, an era in which you did not like your opponents. in fact, you hated them with all your heart and would rather die than see anyone you were up against stride off the court flush with victory. kobe is unique in that he possesses the killer instinct most people only dream about; he will rip out your jugular if it means a shot at victory. and that desire to win can be misconstrued.

he is the utlimate alpha dog. if we accept kevin garnett as the ultimate second banana, always willing to defer, always seeking to make his team better, kobe cannot and will not accept the fact that anyone could ever ever ever be better than he is. that attitude probably doomed his relationship with shaq, but it also gives him a fighting chance in his post-shaq career. he is simply not content to fade into the twilight as a great scorer that cannot win a game of team basketball, even after he's proved himself as pretty much everything possible.

there are 3 banners hanging up in staples in large part because of him, and it is very possible that with a little luck and little personnel moving skill there could be a few more in the rafters before he hangs up his sneakers for good.

round and round and round we go

notes before we begin: i am aware of the mavs suns thrilla in big D that happened tonight, but i only caught the 2nd and 3rd quarters because i was busy getting boards and buckets for the pimentos of the palisades recreation league. PMAC who has long existed only in the shadowy background of lamar blogom as a co-contributor will be contributing a post i'm told is entitled "do the heisman that ho." we should all be excited.

well it started when mj posted up in his austin powers inspired red crushed velvet jacket and told the five media members of charlotte that bernie is his dawg, but that dawg ain't got no bite. or maybe it started when james dolan made the confusing (to say the least) decision to get all reup gang with isiah thomas' contract. i already dropped knowledge on that. well anyways the carousel spun on over to ill-waukee and found terry stotts sitting at his desk like "what do you want from me all my dudes are injured?" as you can probably tell, the carousel was having none of it.

anyways so they hired someone with an unpronouncable last name in which K is prominently involved. LOOKS LIKE WE GOT OURSELVES ANOTHER ONE. maybe this one will have the good sense not to piss me off by coaching duke and tossing gilbert off his roster.

(by the way how much you pay for the pay-per-view showing of gilly playing against the blue devils. i'm prepared to drop $200 if he lives up to expectations. i demand, however, that he play with the long beach state team and that snoop dogg and dick vitale are announcing. snoop would be doing play by play, and at least one time in the game, vitale would have to rep the LBC. just saying.)

actually i take back that the new coach k's name is unpronounceable it's Krystkowiak which ain't so bad as far as these things go. i'll still be saying his name with a scowl unless the bucks turn into some ill shit when everyone is back and healthy and running. the bucks have the potential to be a fine team in the eastern conference. if they can stay healthy, which is a big gotdamn if these days, they have the potential to be a sick squad on offense. there was a reason everyone and their bro (incl. i think me) was ripping the raps for their trade for tj ford, and that is that c villy is so silly when he's healthy.

but they do have to play some defense to win some b ball games. and while winning is sometimes not as high on the lamar blogom priority list as some might like, winning is essential for the bucks because they don't have a single player that makes watching them redeeming in its own right. i guess redd can be fun at times--when he's draining jumpers in front of at least 2 defenseless defenders to be totally specific--but they don't have someone like j.r. smith or j smoove or even shaun livingston--someone that can delight and confound within seconds of each other. every player on their roster is a model of self-actualization, which basically makes them the young spurs, without any defense or a dominating underrated post player. that's right, i said that shit.

in order to become watchable i suggest they do 1 of 3 things--

1. start playing defense
2. draft someone electrifying
3. play at a blindingly fast clip

really any one of those 3 would be fine. OUT.

hold your applause

as it turns out all it took to shut down the mavs streak and make dirk shit himself was just the GS warriors and baron davis on some "i'm back like spandex" shit. that alone should tell you something about what we here at lamar blogom (WE ARE NOW A DOTCOM, REKOGNIZE) value so much about the lower half of the nba.

it ain't that the lower half is better on some metaphysical level. actually fuck it, it is that the lower half is better on a metaphysical level. you heard it, i said it. as pmac, who's the spirit animal of lamar blogom said "fuck discipline, i'm tryna see bangtime." word to god on that. no-one in their right minds would rather watch some spurs-jazz play-executing bonanza than the suns and the warriors banging on each other in a serious point scoring contest.

there are those who would argue by gloryifying the pursuit of points (and bangtime) above all else, i'm ignoring a key aspect of the game; defense. they would also argue that i'm merely a novice at basketball appreciation or whatever the hell it is that they call it. those are the same people that will argue that ball is jazz, and that jazz>hip hop and everything else. these people are not to be trusted. any man that holds bruce bowen above josh smith is not a man to me. as in "i don't like you go away please now thank you."

anyways, so that was a totally different thing. back on topic. the point mainly is that sheeit happens in the regular season that makes people all irrational and goggly and sweaty under the collar, etc. don't believe me? check the eastern conference from last year. while the pistons were rolling up on the eastern conference, beating ass like everyone was redheaded step-children the miami heat were laying in the cut maybe popping their head out for short stretches. then, playoff time and they are not to be denied. as good as the pistons looked in the season, the cavs damn near broke their backs--and would have if lebron had half of a supporting cast-- and the heat jumped all over them like nobodies business.

well now we fast forward to a few days ago and we see the mavs absolutely tearing up assholes like it's shower time in prison and we think to ourselves "how are any motherfuckers even about to talk about this team can be beat?" but recognize that playoffs literally are a second season with some tangential relationships to the first. even those fade into the deep background after the first round, and then shit might as well have not even occurred when it comes time for the finals. ever heard of shaq?

you did what?

james dolan, you are retarded.

how you about to give an extension to sans doubt the league's worst gm? he got picutres of you with a dead girl and a live boy? seriously isiah is fucking retarded. i guess less this year but since because he's been trying to save his damn job. maybe it's nice of dolan to give the nice boy another chance to fix the situation that he messed up so memorably. at this point though please; big snacks is getting run on the court?

nvm that it's mind blowing that he even got his fat ass paid in the first place. DUDE HAD ONE GOOD GAME IN LIKE 1,000. why do people insist on looking at tiny sample sizes and trying to assume that that shit will happen on the regular? clearly that was a spectacular game, not the rule. people don't figure shit out suddenly like lightning bolts hitting them in the head. tim thomas ain't going to suddenly become motivated as shit, jerome james ain't about to drop the pig feets and start hitting the gym. shit, kwame brown ain't about to grow a damn brain even if you handed him an instruction manual like THIS IS HOW YOU PLAY BASKETBALL STOP ACTING RETARDED.

people who are bad for protracted stretches of time and then have one good game or one good series or one good playoffs are not suddenly this jesus figure that realized "oh, i've been doing this all wrong this whole time and now i know what to do, can somebody give me my damn cash please?"

EVER HEARD OF A CONTRACT YEAR BUCKO?

ironic that isiah puts together this virtuoso performance (which, news flash they're still five games under .500 are you stupid james dolan?) and hoodwinks his boss just like he got hoodwinked by just about everyone on his damn roster. memo to everyone in the league: you are in an abusive relationship with players who put together one good year or whatever. it's time to stop.

ERIC DAMPIER IS GETTING PAID MORE THAN CARON BUTLER. IT'S HONESTLY NOT THAT HARD TO REPLACE A BIG DUDE WHO CAN KIND OF BLOCK SHOTS AND REBOUND. literally go to any major college anywhere and you can find someone intimidating. like damp is somehow better than dj mbenga? bitches, get your shit together.

a study of the insanity that takes place during the month of march

what is it that the american people find so compelling about march madness? is it the endless shots of coach k glowering on the sidelines? the occaisional bob knight moment of danger? joakim noah acting a fool?

i would say that it's none of those three things. i would say, and this is pretty obvious to me, that the appeal of it lies in george mason, gonzaga, and vilanova. the zags first bust onto the scene with a floppy haired, floppy dicked rebel named daniel dickau. vilanova shocked the world by shooting 79%(!) in the title game against the hoyas. george mason got to the final four before it ran into joakim "i am the most annoying college player ever because i have a stupid haircut and run around the court looking like a moron but manage to be effective" noah and the FLA gators. (p.s. to that sentence--who would have figured that florida would be the first ever school to hold both the football and basketball titles simultaneously?)

all three of those teams are/were ridiculous underdogs because not only of the fact that they're tiny schools but also because they're a bunch of whiteys (i mainly mean gonzaga here) scrambling around the court shooting and passing and setting picks. that could be the reason why gonzaga is perennial underdogs despite making the tourney 9 of the last 9 years and even being pretty highly ranked in the days of the 'stache. at this point, don't even mention them as underdogs--they're perennial contenders who make the tourney every year and start a bunch of honkeys. whiteness shouldn't=scrappy underdogs.

the magic behind the madness is the possibility that one team, preferably from a mid-major, will have some sort of magical 3-draining run that takes them into the tasty 16 and beyond. basically cbs lives for the shots of reserves leaping around and locking arms and crucifying each other while their team hangs with a big dog. the tourney is the ultimate time for the size of the dog in the fight vs. size of fight in the dog theory to be put to the test. time and again we see a small scrappy team with some outside shooting touch hang around with the dukies or UNC or uconn, eventually snapping their back with a well placed run in the last 5 minutes of the 2nd half. the biggie makes a desperation comeback, one that always seems to fall a little short.

that's the magic--any team can beat anyone else. so sue me if that's the most obvious thing in the world.

the tourney is kind of like the american dream that way; work hard enough and you just might, just maybe might sneak into the promised land. find yourself dancing on a court that says final four in the center, the big scary black people trudging off like "you're on me like a white shadow."

oh you thought we was done?

man oh man i was 100% prepared to throw the lakers and heat to the curb as two of their top players both went down with shoulder injuries. little did i know that the glaring duo that used to set staples center on fire would once again don their worn costumes and engage once again as masked crusaders.

neither is what they once were--kobe has moved from immature kid to the mamba, capable of striking with instantaneous speed at 99% accuracy; and shaq is now the big delegator, comfortable with the fact that he's not the best in the building. curiously, both of their chief supporters, the men who have enabled them to become this way, are both out with severely messed up shoulders and possibly shelved for the rest of the season.

it would have been perfectly excusable for both teams to fade from playoff contention, or in the lakers case fall to the 8th seed, which is actually worse. but these two masters--one former and one currently resplendent--were not having a damn word of that. kobe hung with the suns until the final seconds, and shaq turned in a vintage performance against his old nemeses the deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetroit pistons. we're talking flabby, been sitting on his ass, rehabbing a bum knee shaq, not BIG SHAQ DIESEL A.K.A. THE BIG ARISTOTLE.

these two are stars of another era. yes, i know it was only 4 years ago that they were lighting shit up on the reg'lar, and i know that kobe is still a dominant scoring threat, but the two-star system of championship winning is supposedly on its way out. new nba and all that. shaq and kobe are a call-back to the era where a single man, by the force of his will and talent alone, could sling a team onto his back as if it were a load of bricks and carry that team until his knees collapsed from under him. iverson is another of that era, as are the entirety of the post-30 nyk knicks.

this stretch in which they both drag their moribund franchises will be interesting not only to see if shaq still has it, or if kobe can lead the lakes through the fiery west, but as the ultimate acid test: can one man still make a team superlative? are they done, or back like jordan, wearing the 4-5?

P.S. check out lamar blogom guesting on some real shit over at never mind the bats it's a good blog.

somebody pay gerald wallace his damn money

gerald wallace looks pharaonic when he has his mouth closed and is grimacing.
that he is a resident member of the nba-players-who-look-distinctly-like-other-things club (chris bosh is the president; he strongly resembles a raptor) is reason enough to pay gerald more than the midlevel that he's currently getting. add in the fact that at 24, he's been steadily improving and seems to finally be healthy, and that he has bounce out the building, and that he steals like it's watts circa 1993, and that he scores without a jumper. this is a bad, bad man.
if he doesn't get paid, and there's a good chance he won't, given that every team but his current one and the orlando magic is either over or close to the cap, this is going to be some serious scandal. he didn't get paid 2 summers ago, even though every gm in the league should have seen this monster struggling to break loose.
the one major thing besides the fact that he's injured a lot that's hurting is value is that he plays in charlotte, which is an nba wasteland. he does have good stats on a bad team, but this is a bad team that's going places. however, they're not there yet. they're probably one or two years and one free agent signing away from bursting onto the eastern conference scene like illmatic. reckognize that they have had no bad contracts, and one semi-bad draft pick unless morrison figures his shit out, then they're model nba citizens.
that ain't the point, but it kind of is. gerald can't get paid if he's got no exposure. i would draw parallels to hood mixtapes. people know that shit's bumping every block but since sony ain't exactly sending A&R riding through the hood like "what's up" no-one but the streets heard that sound.
that is simply not right. someone should pay this man his money. i hope its the suns, and they show the world what new-age james worthy looks like on the new-age showtime lakers.

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.