Tag: basketball

A little bit of basketball talk

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In a perfect world, the NBA schedule would have had the final regular season Lakers game on Tuesday, and the final regular season Warriors game on Wednesday.  Instead, both games are on at the same time, in the same time zone, in the same state no less, as in Oakland, the Warriors are knocking on history’s door, as they go for record-setting win #73, while in Los Angeles, Kobe Bryant suits up for his last-ever NBA game.

Now I’ve made no secret of my general ambivalence towards today’s NBA, often waxing philosophy that it’s putrid shit compared to the golden age of NBA I was a huge fan of throughout the 90’s.  But I’d be the first among many to admit that on April 13, was a one-in-a-million kind of magical night that, even for one night, a curmudgeon like me can even sit back, look at the night as a whole, and go god damn.

The Warriors broke the record that I’ve said time and time and time again would probably never be broken in my lifetime, and Kobe Bryant hangs 60 points on the Jazz on his way out the door.  I had and still kind of have a difficult time in thinking about which was more impressive, because sure the Warriors winning 73 games is now going to be the new record we’ll probably never see get broken in our lifetimes, but a talent like Kobe Bryant is a guy that we’re probably not going to see in equally a long time.

Continue reading “A little bit of basketball talk” →

Is there any worse team historically than the 76ers?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s funny, I like March Madness basketball, which has just anointed two competitors for the national championship.  I love baseball, whose’s Opening Day is literally on this day that I’m writing this.  But I think the NBA is more or less garbage, and here I am writing about it, because apparently, I can’t not talk about train wrecks.

Originally, I looked at the standings, because in spite of all the times I’ve said the Warriors will never catch the greatest team of all time, the 1996 Chicago Bulls, they’re currently sitting at 68-8, with six games to go.  Sure, they’ve got a tough remaining six left, as five of them are against playoff-bound teams, and two of them are against the Spurs, whom if not for the Warriors themselves, would be recognized as having a truly fantastic season in their own right.  But seeing as how the Warriors have lost pretty much one out of every eight games to this point, the idea of them going 3-3 in their final six to fall short of the 96 Bulls seems like its own impossibility.

I’d like to believe that the Spurs would love to be the team to deny the Warriors from breaking the record, or even hitting the 70 win plateau, but Gregg Popovich is also a big-picture guy who could just as easily not give two shits about stopping the Warriors if it meant resting his regulars so that they’re better prepared to face the Warriors in the playoffs, where it matters.

Continue reading “Is there any worse team historically than the 76ers?” →

Extreme Cheapskates: Kawhi Leonard edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Actually, I love reading about how the San Antonio Spurs’ Kawhi Leonard is kind of a cheapskate, driving around in a nearly 20-year old car, and makes a big deal about free wings.

  • Leonard still drives a 1997 Chevy Tahoe that’s nicknamed “Gas Guzzler.” He does it because “it runs and it’s paid off.”
  • Leonard freaked out after he lost a book of coupons from his sponsor Wingstop last summer and asked for them to give him new ones so that he could get free wings—even though his new $94 million contract had just kicked in.

So basically, one of the better players in the NBA right now, a year removed from a championship, and on a team very much in contention for another one, and is currently on a fairly freshly-signed 5-year, $94 million dollar contract, still understands the value of a dollar, and the importance of not being frivolous with money.

Continue reading “Extreme Cheapskates: Kawhi Leonard edition” →

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.

Continue reading “The whitest basketball game since George Mikan played” →

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.

Continue reading “Illegal defense” →

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.

Continue reading “Rewarding bad behavior, NBA style” →

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.

Continue reading “Could LeBron become the GOAT?” →