i used to be a hoops junkie - a pretty serious one. i mean, i have a few crazy friends who were a lot more into it than i was, but there was a time when i could name almost every players on every team, and where half of them went to college, as well as name 7 of shawn kemp's illegitimate kids. now? i don't know as much. all the newcomers look the same, and i get depressed knowing they're all younger than me. i was told to brush my teeth with sensodyne.
not having cable is one big reason i fell away from hoops, but more than anything, i just haven't had time. just have too much going on - life, work, marriage, baby, and other crap - but i seem to give that same excuse for everything these days.
this past weekend, i had the opportunity to catch the nba all-star weekend on tv, which i used to celebrate every year like it was christmas. for non hoop fans out there, it's an action-packed 3 day hoops extravaganza that takes place at the half way mark of the season. here's what the schedule generally looks like:
friday: rookie vs sophomore game and a d-list celebrity game (that's not a D hyphen, but a D minus)
saturday: 3-point shooing contest, slam dunk contest, horse, and a bunch of other useless competitions
sunday: the actual all-star game: east vs west
here are 10 random thoughts i had while watching the all-star weekend
1 - the long-awaited h.o.r.s.e. competition, aka "geico" was a huge disappointment. the fact that they held it outdoors on saturday afternoon and not as part of the night events showed that david stern (the commissioner) didn't take the contest seriously. david stern can suck it. he sucks.
yeah, so it didn't meet my expectations. they only had three competitors, their shot selections weren't so challenging, and everything about it was dull. kevin durant won w/ mostly mid-to-long range shots which was as exciting as watching made-for-tv lifetime movie. i was hoping to see something more like this... (this is pete maravich at the 1977-78 horse competition.)
durant was determined, & got hot at the end... then he saw the horse trophy he won, and with a face like he's chewing on a piece of fresh crap, he regretted participating in the first place.
he was expecting something like this (left) and instead he won this (right) piece of crap
2 - i love watching the slam dunk competition in general, but the judging is always so unfair. it's not based on the quality of the dunk, but the popularity of the participant. in the past, there have been so many poor/biased judging, that really dull dunks ended up winning the contest.
like here - at the 1997 slam dunk competition, darvin hamm gets jipped just because he was a relatively unknown player on a bad team (denver), and the nba wanted its new shining rookie star kobe bryant to win it. and he did. check out hamm's two dunks from :30 to 1:00. kobe's dunks are so lame, ordinary and uncreative, in comparison.
this year, the best dunk of the night actually came from rudy fernandez, but he was eliminated after the 1st round. he's white, and a foreigner, so that didn't help his cause. ok, he couldn't manage to dunk within the 2 minute given time, but nobody seemed to mind
3 - grant hill's wife who sang the canadian national anthem is hot. and she can sing!
4 - jordin sparks who sang the star spanking banner, however, is NOT hot. but she sang well.
5 - i have to say - shaq has grown on me a little. i've always hated his arrogance and his ugly game (& still do). but i hear he buys poor kids toys and makes trips to walmart after games, and treats the 10 people behind him at the checkout line just because. he's still not funny whatsoever in my opinion.
6 - kobe is still an a-hole. i hate when he tries to show everyone that he can have fun and get along with his teammates in front of camera, except everything about it looks forced and awkward. i would accept him if he just said "screw it", and turned into a bad guy, like hulk hogan did with the nwo. he should just embrace his dark side and just play a bad guy: groom a fu-manchu, take the "mamba" thing to the extreme - wear yellow and purple contact lenses, curse and smoke, change his jersey number to 69 or 666, and recruit a 5 member ho-train that sits front row at every game (remember the pimp character wrestler that had a ho-train?) this would boost the popularity of the sport, and i would even buy a kobe jersey
7 - dwight howard had a bad weekend. first he loses the slam dunk competition to a 4'11" nate robinson by being a prop in a weak dunks (not to mention - robinson's man-sack slapped the back of howard's head), but he also got showed up by shaq during the all-star game w/ this between-the-leg pass
8 - if the refs toughen up on lebron's walking issue, i wonder how good he'd be. yeah, he's amazingly good and unbelievably athletic, but he gets away w/ so much. again - like stern and the nba did for kobe/shaq & the lakers, they are going to make lebron & the cavs win the title this year. because kobe's been so unlikable and because he returned the favor w/ such negative publicity for the league (rape charge/selfishness/a-holeness), they have been trying to replace him as the poster boy quick. they tried to do it w/ dwane wade, and they gave him a ring, but he kept getting injured. and now that the heat don't have a shaq or solid supporting star, they pretty much have no chance to win it this year.
just remember my words - lebron will be the mvp, & the cavs will win the title this year.
9 - NOT ONE washington wizard/bullet participated in this year's festivities. not in the 3-point shooting contest, not even in the rookie/sophomore game!! this is an obvious thing to point out, but the bullets are back to where they always were, during the wes unseld gm years... as of 2/16, we are 11-42, and in a way, as a long-time fan, i feel strangely ...ok. i feel like a college student coming back to a disfunctional yet comfortable home, and something inside me is telling me "ah... just like the good old days... the way it should be..." is that wrong?
10 - the west won easily, and ironically - shaq & kobe, who hate each other's guts won co-mvp's. it would have been awesome if shaq turned to kobe during the award ceremony and said loudly into the mic, "kobe, tell me how my ass tastes"
