Tag: basketball

The whitest basketball game since George Mikan played

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s always easy to say, looking in hindsight, “I almost picked them…” when it comes to progressively watching your March Madness collapse before your very eyes.  But seriously, when I looked at the matchup between a #5 Baylor and a #12 Yale, I thought hmmmmmmmm.

Historically, you can almost bank on at least one #12 taking out a #5 on a yearly basis, and at least personally, I usually pick one #12 to topple a #5.  And in all fairness, I did get it right, with #12 Little Rock, Arkansas upsetting #5 Purdue in Southeast.  Little did I realize that this would be a year in which two #12 seeds would upset a #5 seed.

Little did I also realize that Michigan State would blow it in the first round of the tournament, and completely derail my entire bracket, as I actually had Michigan State going all the way.

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Illegal defense

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first saw the final score to the 2016 NBA All-Star Game, I thought that I was looking at a screen capture for like a video game or something.  Like when sports pundits are having a slow news day, so they do fluffy shit like video game simulations of upcoming real-life sporting events, just so they can have something to talk about.  I didn’t realize that the 196 points that the Western Conference All-Stars put up in their 196-173 win over the East, was actually reality.

Name an NBA video game of the 90s; NBA Jam, Tecmo NBA, EA’s NBA Live 94-98.  I was pretty good at all of those games.

But scoring 196 points in any of them required some pretty exceptional circumstances in order to pull off, and most certainly not as likely against human opponents.  Like NBA Jam would require the perma-fire code and use of Detlef Schrempf to rain three pointers to run up the score.  And in Tecmo or Live, I’d most certainly have to set the games to play actual 12 minute quarters, and probably turn fouls off, so I could clobber the AI opponents, steal the ball and score at will.  Even with these kinds of conditions, scoring nearly 200 points was never that easy of a feat.  In a video game.

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Rewarding bad behavior, NBA style

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR – NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, wishes to explore the idea of creating rules to discourage the use of the strategy known as “Hack-A-Shaq.” Kobe Bryant disagrees, stating that it would set a bad example for the NBA and aspiring basketball players.

I’m with Kobe on this one. In short, Hack-A-Shaq is a basketball strategy in which teams deliberately foul the worst free throw shooter(s) on the opposing team, repeatedly, to send them to the free throw line where they ostensibly will miss both or make just one out of two free throws resulting in 0 or 1 points on the possession, instead of 2, 3 or 4. It was named after Shaquille O’Neal, a notoriously poor free throw shooter, who endured countless intentional fouls, to send him to the line, to hinder his team’s offensive output. And the strategy has only grown and continued since the reveal of the name and tactic, as free throw shooting has continued to devolve into a dying art, and percentages are plummeting throughout the entire league.

Sometimes, it’s used when a team is ahead, and they want to preserve their lead, so they deliberately start Hacking-a-Shaq so that the opponents’ ability to chip away at the lead is suppressed, and they are unable to build any substantial momentum. More often, it’s used when a team is behind, and they use Hack-a-Shaq to stop the clock, minimize the opponent’s ability to stretch the lead, and to try and maximize the number of possessions they can get.

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Could LeBron become the GOAT?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

No, not this GOAT, but the acronym Greatest Of All-Time. Could LeBron James become that guy?

I don’t know why it’s so easy for me to write about basketball sometimes, considering I generally don’t care about the NBA like I once used to.  It’s safe to say that I don’t even watching NBA basketball, much less any basketball on television these days, but still, the occasional news snippets I see about the happenings in the NBA still occasionally pique my interest, and sometimes inspire words to be written.

But I read this article about how LeBron James star-struck the hell out of a Special Olympics teenager, simply by approaching and showing a little bit of love, respect and admiration for the young basketball fan.  It’s stuff like this that restores faith in professional athletes, and the world as a whole, especially when the media really loves to talk about when people, namely professional athletes, do shitty things like commit various crimes.

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Hahaha yeah right

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Easy to say since he’s retired and fat now: Reigning MVP Stephen Curry believes that he could beat Michael Jordan in his prime, with a game on the line

It must be so great for NBA players now to be able to use Michael Jordan’s name in vain, considering MJ is now 52, overweight and retired, and vastly less likely to take words as challenges, lace up his Air Jordans and get back on the court to put some youngsters in their places.  Now, under the guise of veiled respect, today’s players are all allegedly better than Michael Jordan was, and they’re not as afraid to opinionate such beliefs to inquiring ears.

Reigning MVP and leader of defending champion Golden State Warriors,* Stephen Curry is the latest of upstarts to boldly proclaim himself, basically better than Michael Jordan.  He tries to backpedal a little bit and apply a scenario of it, “with the game on the line,” but there’s little reason to believe that he simply doesn’t think he’s better than Michael Jordan.

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Maybe not such a great idea, Steph

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TL:DR – Professional basketball player Stephon Marbury calls Michael Jordan “greedy,” referencing the high cost of Air Jordan sneakers, in an attempt to promote the resurrection of his low-cost alternative Starbury shoes.

Uh Steph, I know you feel all safe, confident and empowered over in Beijing, China, while Michael Jordan is literally half a planet away in America, but have you forgotten who you’re mouthing off to and publicly criticizing?

Sure, I agree with the facts Marbury presents in his arguments, but I have to say that subsequently criticizing Michael Jordan probably isn’t the smartest idea he’s ever had.  Yes, Air Jordans are exorbitantly priced.  Yes, people have literally died over Air Jordans over the last three decades.  Yes, Michael Jordan himself is a gozillionaire because of Air Jordans.

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Happy Dikembe Mutombo Day!

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

EDIT: The link right below, stated that Dikembe Mutombo Day was scheduled to be on September 2nd.  Yet for some reason, it just spontaneously happened on the 1st.  So, I reconfigured some posts around to properly commemorate Mr. Not In My House and his very honorable day.

Yeah that’s right motherfuckers, this is 100% legit.  At least it is, here in Atlanta.  Although if it were up to me, it would be something a little bit more nationally recognized.

There’s no secret that I’ve always been a huge Dikembe Mutombo fan.  And it goes beyond just his basketball career, although I’ve always been a huge fan of how he blocked a million shots throughout his career, most of them followed up with the notorious finger wag and NONONO, the time he had the cojones to basically tell Michael Jordan to his face that he couldn’t be dunked on (although he was promptly proven wrong), he’s a pretty interesting human being as well.

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