Would you rather . . . [basketball edition]

January 21, 2019August 10, 2020 ~ 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

January 18, 2019August 10, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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

June 1, 2018August 7, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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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So bad, it’s worth a post

May 29, 2018August 7, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not even going to bother prefacing the post about how I think today’s NBA is shit, it was better in the past, yadda yadda. But the sports fan in me was intrigued by the fact that both the eastern and the western conferences were going to game 7s, and when I had little else to do on a long holiday weekend, I figured why not tune in to see what was happening? When the dust settled, we were left with the Golden State Warriors versus the Cleveland Cavaliers; for the fourth straight year, which is a marvel in itself, and something that if Marty McFly told me was going to happen back in 1998, I would’ve disavowed the entire Back to the Future franchise as a whole.

I mean, going into the playoffs, I would’ve bet money that it was going to turn out this way; Golden State is the modern day super team that actually is super and actually does win basketball games. And on the other side, we have LeBron James whom with each passing year truly deserves to have his name mentioned in the same breath as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, as a player who inexplicably has the ability to win, by almost nothing more than sheer force of will sometimes, regardless of whom the Cavaliers field around him, because he just puts the team on his back and has overcome some majorly dubious odds this particular playoffs to get to where they are now.

But the point of this post isn’t about how great the Warriors are or how amazing LeBron James is, but more about how the Houston Rockets basically gifted the Warriors the west, and how they weren’t so much a team that was beat by the superior team as much as they were the squad of fucking idiots that simply didn’t understand how to change plans when it was abundantly clear that their Plan A was just not working.

The eye test when watching the game notices that the Rockets are jacking up an inordinate amount of three point shots. The Warriors too, but the difference is that the Warriors were making a few of them here and there, while the Rockets were flinging enough bricks to build a village in Zaire. The Rockets’ 11-point lead at the half was quickly whittled away and when Durant, Curry and Thompson started burying some practically half court shots to start taking the lead and begin their usual pulling away from the opponent spiel, the Rockets simply did not pivot and change up their plans accordingly. Instead, they threw up bad three pointer after bad three pointer, and I’m thinking to myself, does this team know how to play basketball inside the key?

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Contrary to Cobra Kai logic

May 20, 2018August 7, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The best defense is not always more offense. Sometimes the best defense, is actually defense.

Now if you told me that the Houston Rockets lost to the Golden State Warriors by 41 points, I’d have just kind of gone ‘meh.’ Everyone gets blown out by the Golden State Warriors these days, and seldom are there any final scores that aren’t a 1-2 point nail-biter or a 20+ point blowout. The Memphis Grizzlies lost a game by 61 points earlier this year, so 41 sounds like a tight contest in comparison.

But add in the fact that this happened in the Western Conference Finals and that the Houston Rockets were the #1 seed getting throttled by the #2 Warriors, and now it’s (sort of) worth talking about how pathetic the NBA is once again.

The Rockets and Warriors aren’t just the #1 and #2 in the Western Conference, they’re pretty much the #1 and #2 teams in all of the NBA. The Boston Celtics are somehow managing to win and play well in spite of all their injuries, and the Cleveland Cavaliers are where they are because they’re always at this point every year mostly on the sheer will of LeBron James, but neither is remotely a threat to the championship.

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I’m sure a college team wouldn’t have gotten blown out by 61

March 23, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As if I ever needed any more reason to harp on the fact that the NBA today is utter crap, along came this game the other night where the Memphis Grizzlies lost to the Charlotte Hornets – by 61 points. I had to stop and do the math in my head when I saw the final 140-79 score to verify that it really was a 61-point blowout, and yep sure enough, the Hornets blew out the Grizzlies by 61 points.

It’s no surprise to me the frequency in which I see 30-point blowouts with regularity in today’s NBA scores, but to see it somehow doubled up, now that takes a tragic amount of effort in futility to attain. Seriously, I was an NBA fan in an era where 20 points was considered a blowout, and they really didn’t happen that often. The most lopsided wins I’d ever seen in my life in the NBA up until the turn of the century was this extreme abomination clunker of a game where the Knicks beat the Jordan-led Bulls by 32 points during the 96 season in which the Bulls still won 70 games, and this stinker of a game by the Jazz in the NBA Finals, where they got blown out by 42 points by the Jordan-led Bulls.

But those were just two games in nearly a decade of watching basketball in which I saw such gargantuan blowouts. The Grizzlies somehow managed to lose by a bigger margin (61) than the total score the Jazz put up in that 1998 game (54). 61 points was typically the average score of any team that lost to the defense-heavy, hard hitting Pat Riley-coached New York Knicks teams of the 90s.

To put it in perspective, the only time that I, and probably most people my age, have ever seen a 60+ blowout was in 1992, when the United States Dream Team featuring Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and other superstars blow out a star-struck squad from Angola by 68 points. The 2018 Charlotte Hornets might be owned by Michael Jordan, but there sure as shit aren’t players remotely close to his level of greatness, that still managed to blow out the Grizz by 61.

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