- Rockets fans, I tire of your continued attacks upon tanking. In Houston, there has been a long, glorious history of losing for the future, one that has brought Houston to basically every height it’s ever reached. Victory over Lakers in Game 6 of Western Conference Finals off of Ralph Sampson’s fingertips? Tanked our way to that giant. Two back-to-back championships on the back of our devout Muslim superhero with the footwork of Kevin McHale and Micahel Jackson’s lovechild? You guessed it, tanked our way to that guy. Long after the lottery was put in place (basically because the Rockets had lost their way to consecutive number one picks), arguably the Rockets’ best player after Dream, Yao Ming, was also collected through a miserable season. When attacking tanking, we Rockets followers gnaw upon the very hands that fed us for so long. I, for one, am a vegetarian, so I gladly welcome the tank that seems so unlikely to come at this point.
- There is no arguing that the New York Knicks suck when even the most obnoxious Manhattanites admit so themselves, and even in this post-Isiah world, it really feels like we’ve come to that point for the first time in a while. After an entire offseason of hype-inducing MSG commercials and free-agent signings that literally didn’t seem possible, the Knicks have had to actually play basketball games, and those haven’t exactly gone so well for them. As has been reported by anyone who’d had the displeasure of watching this team take the court this year, point guards don’t play for the New York Knicks anymore, a fact that has very quickly reminded all watching exactly how much Mike D’Antoni and Ama’re Stoudemire rely on those little guys with the vision and speed and sneaker deals and so forth. Somehow the blame for this has fallen on Carmelo Anthony, simply doing what he’s always done (take heaps of inefficient shots inefficiently) in a world where people actually care about what he does now, instead of all of the people who put them team together and forgot the cardinal rule of today’s NBA. See, some think that hat rule requires a team to have an elite point guard to compete, thanks to the 2003 rule changes that have allowed perimeter players with the ability to get into the lane free reign; rather, in this league, a team doesn’t really need one of the league’s best point men to vie for the title: it just need a competent one. Portland, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia— all battle for their conference’s top spot without a premier point running the show, yet none have the nightly disadvantage of a black hole of ball distribution. A similar problem to New York’s has popped up on the nation’s other pole in LA, where Derek Fisher and a hobbled Kobe Bryant seem like less than enough playmaking in a world without the Triangle; the main difference is the level of talent wearing purple and gold. The paradigm shift form the rule change did happen, don’t get me wrong; it’s just that instead of creating an unrealistic cutoff point for those striving for greatness, the shift just made sure that there’d be a bare minimum required for those who really wanted in the winner’s circle.
- Flip Saunders got the axe in Washington this week when he really didn’t deserve it, and that’s not so great for him. Still, my endless babbling brook of pity stops a little short for the Flipster, as his future employment as a head coach is all but assured thanks to the NBA’s eternally strange “blame the coach sort of for now until firing the general manager much, much later and blame him for everything” policy. Yes, Ernie Grunfield assembled a hodgepodge of basketball morons. Yes, he was already there before new owner Ted Leonsis took over, so Grunsy isn’t even the owner’s guy. Yes, things better change if the Wiz plan to hold on to their seminal, once-in-a-generation talent, John Wall… but none of this matters when there’s a perfectly good coach to fire. This is why the NBA’s coaching carousel exists; so rarely are good coaches let go for the right reasons that we invariably see their faces stalking some new sideline before he can buy a whole new tie collection to match his new team’s home colors (Just wait out Triano, Flip; you’d look good in purple). It would be nice, just once, for us to actually figure out whether a coach is good or not by giving him something with which to work. You know, something that’s not Jordan Crawford and Andray Blatche?
- Quick question: why wasn’t Kevin Love born and raised in Houston, where he’d invariably want to return after signing his four-year-extension that incomprehensibly allows him the opportunity to bounce to greener pastures (or at least less heavily-accented pastures) after three years? As if the Clippers and Lakers fans needed yet another thing to sweetly daydream about while they go grab fugu or wear pants with skull patches sown onto them or whatever terrible things that they do (I know this is borderline-illiterate gibberish. Allow me this). David Kahn’s Freudian desire for disapproval looks like it just cost the Wolves an all-timer, but the Rockets won’t even be able to touch him. Remember that before allowing yourselves to be inundated with false hope in a couple of years, Rockets fans; at this point, I’ve become the NBA fan version of a scorned lover, already dismissing future relationships because of how much they’re assured to break my (Houston’s) heart.
- Some look at the sudden disappearance of Lamar Odom’s production in 2012 and see a system player ripped from his comfort zone, left useless and irrelevant without the girders that had once propped him up still in place. I’d like to dispute that assessment by simply looking a few inches down the bench at Shawn Marion, a guy who got all of the same shtick only a couple of years prior. After leaving Phoenix and experiencing travails with the Heat (a team that started the likes of Chris Quinn and Mark Blount) and Raptors, Marion’s grave had been long buried. Plug him in the another fitting system, though, and he’s a World Champion game-changer. Both share a ton of versatility that can come off as aimlessness without the proper cookie-cutter shaping their talents into what they could really be. What’s dough without shape? Well, it’s still delicious, salmonella-heavy cookie dough. Maybe that was a bad analogy.
Catch me on Twitter @JacobMustafa and in this weekly notebook every Friday. Thanks for spending your time here.
