Archive for the 'NBA' Category



26
Sep

Roundup

Image via Flickr user Nrbelex

Dwayne Perkins was one of the first people I met when I started doing stand-up in LA.  He’s one of the nicest people in this town, and he’s one of Rolling Stone’s 5 comics to watch.

This catch by Morgan State’s Edwin Baptiste is great because it’s just amazing to watch, and it also validates the theory held by my wife and I.  Namely, that athletes are more likely to have memorable names than the average person.

Former NBA player Jon Bender helps rebuild New Orleans.

Mission accomplished…for Osama bin Laden.

Given the Palin problem, now might be a good idea to (re)-familiarize yourself with Thomas Eagleton.

29
May

Jason Whitlock is fat, stupid and blind

That headline may sound like a childish, personal attack if it weren’t so very true.  Clearly, the guy is morbidly obese.  And his idiotic proclamations about sports are approaching legendary status.  Finally, we find out why his writing is so uninformed.  He’s fucking blind. 

But there’s one issue driving improved ratings that likely won’t be touched by all the NBA talking heads on TNT and ESPN.

Tattoos. Or rather the lack of tattoos in the conference finals.

Part of the reason more people are watching these playoffs is because the average fan isn’t constantly repulsed by the appearance of most of the players on the court. Most of the key players left in the playoffs don’t look like recent prison parolees.

The only accurate way to describe Garnett, Pierce, Duncan, Allen, Manu, Parker and even Kobe is "clean cut." Yeah, there are a couple of tattoos in that group — Duncan has something on his back, Kobe still has his post-rape-allegation tat — but the Lakers, Spurs and Celtics have far less ink on average than your typical NBA franchise.

Like most of the nonsense this guy spews, this isn’t based on any evidence or facts.  It’s just his own clear distaste for tattoos projected onto the entire population of pro basketball watchers.  Obviously, anyone even remotely familiar with the rosters of the remaining  squads can  do a quick search and come up with various  examples of Kobe’s ink, KG’s ink, Chauncy Billups’ ink, Tim Duncan’s ink, or Luke Walton’s ink.   But that isn’t even necessary.  Whitlock’s idiotic thesis is refuted by the image that’s featured on the web page where his column appears.  God bless ‘Sheed.

 

 

10
Aug

Gilbert Arenas: Asshole

A week or so ago, Gilbert Arenas posted an observation about shark attacks on his blog. The crux of the post was that there are no such things as shark attacks because they all happen in the water, which is the shark’s domain. Initially, everyone remarked about how it was kind of an old premise that he was trying to pass off as a new observation. Turns out, it’s worse than that. Arenas was finally forced to admit that he stole the joke from comedian Ian Edwards. Arenas is a smart guy, so I was expecting a candid, honest mea culpa. Instead, here’s what Agent Zero had to say.

Listen, nobody even heard of Ian Edwards before me. He’s no Chris Rock. I helped him become famous. Now everybody is going to YouTube and looking him up.

The joke was worth about $7 when I heard it, now that I’ve used it’s probably worth a little bit more. I’ll sell it back to him for $7.78. Seventy-eight cents, Ian, you can put that in a royalties check made out to me.

Puffy and Ashanti made careers out of stealing other people’s beats. This is America, the land of the reused.

If you think about it, nothing is original. Every joke has been retold at some point. What I did was recycle a new joke instead of waiting for it to get old. It was too funny not to. I mean, at least I picked a good joke, right? It’s not like it was some lame, “Yo momma” joke.

It’s one thing to steal someone else’s joke. (And that’s what you did, Gilbert. You stole it.) It’s an entirely different level of assholery to then defend said thievery with this lame explanation.

Here’s Ian Edwards performing that very bit on Conan.

18
May

ESPN’s True Hoop tells Leandro Barbosa’s story.

One of my daily must-reads is ESPN’s excellent NBA blog TrueHoop by Henry Abbott. They’re currently running a piece detailing Brazilian sensation Leandro Barbosa’s journey to the NBA. Canadian writer Gregory Dole recounts the tale of escorting Barbosa to the US for his round of workouts with NBA teams. Apparently, Dole saw Barbosa’s on a Brazilian basketball mix tape and knew he was an NBA caliber player the moment he laid eyes on him; which is pretty much how the rest of the basketball world felt once they saw him in a Phoenix Suns uniform.

Here’s a taste from part 1 of Rolling with Barbosa:

However buried deep in the goof’s mixtape is a guard who is off the charts. The player’s skill seems almost unbelievable, like a legend of street basketball. I can’t really begin to describe it other than to say that he is off the charts. Off the charts and from some unknown universe. An alien basketball lifeform, unlike anything I have never seen before.

Like all Lakers fans, I’ve seen exactly what he can do in the playoffs for the past two years. If you haven’t had the pleasure, here’s a little taste of what The Brazilian Blur is like on the basketball court.

10
May

KG, are you listening?

Via GetGarnett.com

01
May

Driving (to the hoop) while black

Surprise, surprise. Racial profiling exists on the basketball court.

Via The New York Times

“An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well.

A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.”

16
Apr

There’s no laughing in basketball.

They’ve already done away with the scourge of throwback jerseys and baggy jeans. Apparently, the NBA is now out to crack down on the rampant chuckling, chortling, and guffawing that these thuggish players are so fond of. Tim Duncan, you’re on notice!

26
Mar

Jemele Hill is smoking crack.

I’m a Kobe fan, but this piece on ESPN’s Page 2 arguing that he’s better than MJ is ridiculous. Anyone who types these words can’t be taken seriously as a sportswriter.

“Kobe is just as good a defender.”

Wait? Was Kobe ever named defensive player of the year? No. MJ was. Was Kobe voted first-team all defense a record nine time? No. MJ was. Maybe Jemele is too young to remember that MJ averaged 37 pts. a game in his second full season? Maybe she doesn’t realize that MJ scored 63 pts. against the Celtics in the Boston Garden in the playoffs. That’s 63 against one of the best teams ever in one of the toughest arenas to win in ever. Maybe she doesn’t realize that the talent level in the NBA has been watered down due to expansion and that the guys on the end of the bench in today’s NBA wouldn’t have been good enough to make an NBA roster pre-Raptors, Grizzlies, etc?

Or maybe she’s just smoking crack? Yeah. That’s probably it.

22
Mar

Tell me again how thuggish the NBA is.

10
Mar

White men can’t jump?

Bostjan Nachbar didn’t get that memo.


In other NBA news:

Gheorghe Muresan is teaching a fellow giant how to play the game.

Chuck Klosterman extols the virtues of Agent 0.

A video interview with renaissance man Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.




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