Tag: basketball

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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So bad, it’s worth a post

~ 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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