Tag: basketball

When the venue becomes more notorious than the team

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Apple News seems to know to look more for stories that have the capability to entertain instead of just depress me with the shitty way the world is.  That being said, I came across this story about how the American Airlines Arena in Miami were foregoing their partnership with the venue, and that the naming rights for the building were up for grabs.  And among the numerous companies that would love to slap their name on a building and be THE home of the Miami Heat, one rose to the top of the heap, in terms of intrigue, interest and sheer entertainment potential.

Bang Bros, the pornographic website, has apparently put together a very serious proposal and ponied up a ten million dollar bid in order to acquire the rights to the venue, hoping to name the place the Bang Bros Center.  To which it doesn’t take a 17-year old to realize that that would make it the BBC, which most certainly doesn’t represent the acronym for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Needless to say, despite the fact that there is probably a 100% chance this will never happen, no matter how seriously and legitimately Bang Bros presents their proposal, I have to say that this one of the more funny and classic attempts for a pornographic company trying to crawl out of the dark and dirty recesses of the internet and into something physical and tangible, and in this case, really, really huge.

The funny thing to me is that there aren’t a ton of cities that could probably be more likely to get away with smut like this, but I’d have to put Miami up there as one that could.  It’s a city full of vapid and superficial people, a ton of men and women who look like they’d be in Bang Bros’s library somewhere, and the general culture of Miami is pretty loose and probably where a ton of porn is shot anyway.  And the majority of people who go to Heat games are probably a more concentrated sample of the culture, considering the ludicrous price of going to NBA games, and that they’re places for people to show off more than actually watch basketball.

But of course this isn’t going to happen.  No city in their right mind would sell out their treasured sports venue to a pornographic website, no matter how much money they’d offer up.  Primarily due to antiquated beliefs like “for the kids” and general integrity, and not just the fact that aside from Bang Bros, there are probably other, more boring and square companies with deep pockets are probably more than willing to +$1 anything Bang Bros comes to the table with.

But let’s be real here; there is a rare opportunity in this where a venue could become way more newsworthy than the team(s) that play in it.  Like, it wouldn’t matter if the Miami Heat had the 1992 Dream Team starting or the shitty roster called Team USA that just lost two straight international games, the product on the court wouldn’t come close to garnering the attention that the name outside the building would.  And in that regard, that’s about the greatest blessing a franchise could possibly want, where it wouldn’t matter if the Heat had to hit the ceiling of the salary cap or not, people would still show up to the BBC, just because all dudes and their bimbo dates just want the kick of going to a place called the BBC.

Shit, even I’d considering actually going back down to Miami and foregoing a baseball game for a night, just so I could go to the BBC and take a hundred sniggering Boooker T mugshot face selfies, just so I could boast on social media and/or my brog about how I visited the BBC.  And surely, I can’t be the only dude on the planet that would feel the same way.

As far as I’m concerned, the fact that this is all but guaranteed to fall through, seems like one of the more tragic decisions of foregoing great profitability in the name trying to operate business with a modicum of integrity.  Last time I checked, I didn’t realize those things were so mutually exclusive.

lol the Knicks­­

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I’m sure I’ve probably said before in my brog, when I was a kid, I used to love the New York Knicks.  Starter jacket, baseball cap, Ewing jersey, always played the Knicks in NBA Live and NBA Jam, etc.  The worst moments in my sports fan life back then were when the Knicks lost to the Houston Rockets in the 1994 NBA Finals, and then when they lost to the Indiana Pacers in the 1995 playoffs when Patrick Ewing missed a fucking finger roll.

Needless to say, I eventually learned what just about everyone who ever follows the NBA eventually learns: there’s no team that symbolizes failure more than the New York Knicks.  Back in the day, it was the torture of having a competent team make the playoffs every single year, but then losing via the existence of Michael Jordan, or because simply they’re the Knicks.

Despite the fact that I only follow the NBA as much as ESPN and the news covers it occasionally, it doesn’t take a blind person to not see that the Knicks are still pretty much the living embodiment of failure in the NBA, except now they’re a shitty team that doesn’t even make the playoffs, and no matter what moves they make or whom they acquire in free agency, they can still never get over the hump and even sniff what a playoff chase even smells like.

To my understanding, the Knicks have tried tanking 350 times over the last two decades and at a quick glance, have finished under .500 like 18 out of the last 20 years.  Twice, they finished with 17 wins, which is futility that has to have effort put into it, because practically three-quarters of the league gets into the playoffs, it takes a conceited amount of effort to actively not make it.  Yet in spite of all these shitty seasons, the team can still never cash in on the draft, and they just continue to suck year after year.

The whole lottery system is something that I actually do love about the NBA, because it does actively attempt to deter teams from tanking, because unlike in MLB and the NFL, the worst record does not automatically guarantee the first pick in the draft.  Subsequently, the lottery has pretty much existed to troll the Knicks into having one additional layer for them to fail through, and it’s never been more prevalent than just this past lottery.

The big story in basketball over the span of the last two calendar years has been the saga of basketball phenom prodigy, Zion Williamson, from his rise in a South Carolina prep school, to his mandatory year in college, which ended up being the reviled Duke Blue Devils, the controversy of the sports century when his foot exploded out of his Nikes, injuring him, to his inevitable position as the very obvious first pick in the upcoming NBA Draft.

As Zion posted highlights after highlights for Duke, the NBA gave a college try for the first month of their own season, before the pretenders then immediately began a tanking spree, with the hopes of having the best odds in the lottery, which would increase their chances of getting the first pick, which was obviously going to be Zion Williamson.

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Not sure how this keeps happening, but I’ll take it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Of all the strange anomalies to ever occur in sports, I think at this point, it should be worth mentioning Duke’s struggles against Virginia Tech: in basketball.  For the third-straight time while Duke was a top-5 ranked team in the nation, they’ve gone into Blacksburg and left losers. 

In 2011, they were #1 in the nation and lost to the unranked Hokies.  In 2018, they were ranked #5 in the nation, only to get upset again by an unranked Hokies squad.  And then came last night, where the #3 Duke Blue Devils, clearly starving for talent because they only had R.J. Barrett and Cam Reddish but no Zion Williamson, were clearly depleted beyond survival, and did the job to #20 Virginia Tech.

Full disclosure: I didn’t even watch the game.  I knew it was on, I like college hoops well enough, but Duke is Duke, and Tech is still Tech, even if college basketball is very much their secondary sport.  I figured it would be just another L, which would likely bounce Tech out of the top-25.  Lo and behold, I glance at my news feed in the evening, only to see headlines about how #20 Virginia Tech upsets #3 Duke in Blacksburg, again, and suddenly I’m laughing aloud in my recliner.

Not only will Virginia Tech not be bounced from the top-25, a win against Duke will likely shoot them up a few positions, while Duke will undoubtedly drop, again, hopefully out of the top-5.  This reiterates the sad notion of just how much Duke has put all their eggs into the Zion basket, and despite the fact that they still have two of the top recruits in the nation playing their asses off, it’s like the rest of the entire program has thrown in the towel because Zion’s not there. 

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UNC-Duke, and the sad state of the future of basketball

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fact: #8 North Carolina defeats #1 Duke in the latest edition of the so-called greatest rivalry in all of sports

Fiction: #8 North Carolina defeats #1 Duke in the latest edition of the so-called greatest rivalry in all of sports solely because super-prospect Zion Williamson went down with a knee injury 30 seconds into the game when his foot exploded out of his shoe when trying to pivot

There’s a lot to talk about when it came to last night’s UNC-Duke matchup; it was the hottest ticket in all of sports, with tickets costing only second to the Superb Owl, the fact that among the litany of celebrities present for it was previous president Barack Obama, that it was the first time of the year where Duke’s super squad would be meeting arch-rival North Carolina for the first time, among other things.

But when the hoopla all died down and the final horn blew, it was #8 North Carolina cruising to an easy victory against the #1 ranked Duke squad on the road, where the Tar Heels scored the first basket of the game and never looked back the whole rest of the way.

The thing is, as the game chugged along with Duke being completely incapable of closing the margin to under seven points, the ESPN analysts began preemptively apologizing for the anticlimactic and completely uncompetitive contest, and were making all the excuses in the world that Duke was “devastated’ and “shell shocked” over the loss of their superstar (and likely one-and-done-er) Zion Williamson, after his shoe blew up on him 30 seconds into the game, leading to, a knee sprain.

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Would you rather . . . [basketball edition]

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I saw this clip of Steph Curry slipping and falling on his ass during a fast break where he otherwise had a completely uncontested dunk, and the first thought that popped in my mind was can Steph Curry even dunk at all?

A cursory Google search quickly reveals that Steph can indeed dunk, but if you look at this “top-5 dunks” of Steph Curry, it’s evident that as good of a shooter he is, he’s still physically limited in his dunking capabilities, and it’s more like the same four dunks, and one slightly more impressive but still fairly ordinary dunk.

But the question that emerged from all this was, would you rather be the greatest shooter of an entire generation, or be able to occasionally be able to posterize someone with an emasculating and iconic dunk?

Make no mistake, Steph Curry is arguably the greatest shooter of an entire generation.  Frankly, I would absolutely put his name up on the Rushmore of shooters, along with Larry Bird, Ray Allen and Reggie Miller.  It’s debatable on whether or not he’s even better than all of them too, because none of them really revolutionized the three-pointer like Curry did, to where he’s kind of changed the entire game of basketball to where teams revolve their offenses around threes.  Not just in the NBA, but it’s trickling down to the college ranks, and all throughout high schools and gyms across America, the three is at an all-time high now, and now just the one solitary skill set that the token white player on the team spots up with in the corners.

But the reality is that Steph Curry can’t really dunk.  I mean, he can dunk a basketball sure, but he’s not posterizing anyone any time soon.  Even if Patrick Ewing were still in the NBA, at no point would Steph Curry be able to dunk on him, which says something, because pretty much everyone in the 90s managed to dunk on Patrick Ewing.  And dunking is the one skill that defines basketball more than anything else; it’s the thing that markets the game, it’s the thing that sells jerseys, posters and other merchandise, and it’s the thing that all kids want to emulate the most in their driveways.

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Of course Stiffen Pippen thinks this

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Impetus: former NBA great, Scottie Pippen, believes Duke’s Zion Williamson ‘has done enough’ to be the #1 pick in the NBA draft and should shut himself down now and not risk getting injured

To those who don’t know the context, Scottie Pippen is considered one of the cheapest men on the face of the planet.  Perhaps not quite as artificially manufactured enough to end up on an episode of Extreme Cheapskates, but he’s still notoriously cheap to where there are articles all over the internet about his cheapness, from his peers, and more notably, pretty much the entire restaurant industry.

Needless to say, when it comes to the topic of money, it shouldn’t be any surprise when Scottie Pippen’s stance is on whatever side banks the most amount of money with the smallest risk of losing it.

Like his opinion of Duke’s freshman superstar, Zion Williamson; he of the 6’7, 275 lb. man child who is still growing, and is currently tearing up NCAA basketball with his monster dunks and Mutombo-like rejections.  He’s played 16 games of college basketball, and has been putting up some prodigious numbers, but again, it’s just 16 games, in his first year of college ball.

But that’s more than enough for Stiffen Pippen, who’s completely convinced that he’s proven that he’s already worthy to be the consensus #1 draft pick in the next NBA Draft, and he’d be better off shutting it all down now, and preparing for the draft.  I have a hard time thinking of a more selfish and self-serving suggestion, and sure, there’s always the argument of what college does for a ringer student-athlete like Williamson, but still if you’re remotely close to my line of thinking, accomplish one fucking thing before screwing everyone around you.

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Just when you think the NBA couldn’t get any dumber

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It was naïve of me to think that the Houston Rockets attempting a million three pointers when it was apparent that nobody had the NBA Jam fire code running was the dumbest thing to happen in the playoffs.  After all, the NBA Finals hadn’t yet occurred.  And much like tempting Murphy’s Law, something worse must occur.

Obviously, I didn’t watch the vast majority of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, but thankfully I watched the part that really mattered.  Where Cavaliers guard JR Smith corralled an offensive rebound on a missed free throw, with the score tied at 107 with five seconds left, but instead of calling for a timeout or attempting a game-winner, he dribbled it out to half court and let time expire – much to the abhorrent dismay of his teammates who clearly understood the situation better than he did.

Despite the fact that Smith alleges that he thought a timeout would be called or he was going to get fouled, the fact of the matter is that he clearly was not aware that the score was tied, and that he could have very well won the game, had he even bothered trying to get a shot up or passed it off to someone else who could.  Commentators quickly and often, pointed out claiming to have heard that immediately after the gaffe, Smith claimed to have “thought we were ahead,” which is mortifying that a guy would lose track of the score, in the NBA Finals.

This isn’t really a big deal if the Cavaliers won the game, but naturally they lost in overtime, magnifying the incident fifty times over, as the sole reason why they lost.  And this isn’t an instance where a player could politically correctly state that the team lost as a team, because LeBron James scored 51 points and JR Smith’s brain fart is what denied the Cavs a chance to even win in regulation.

Bottom line is, JR Smith is an idiot.  He’s a bonehead that somehow managed to lose track of the situation in the most critical part of the game in the most critical part of the season, in the NBA Finals.  Regardless of if he actually knew the situation and was hoping for a time out or to pass the ball off, or he did in fact forget, neither changes the fact that he’s an idiot.  His excuse that he was waiting for a timeout or that he was going to get fouled is weak, because as the ballholder, he himself could have called for a time out, several of tenths of a second faster than the coach could have, but he didn’t want to take accountability for that decision.  Or, despite the fact that when he snatched the offensive rebound, he had the ten-foot tall Kevin Durant up in the air and could very easily have gotten up a fairly uncontested shot at close range up and made a game winner, but again, no accountability assumed there either.  Neither of which are any better than simply having forgotten the score at the most juncture of the game.

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