Rockets Daily: Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

  • After a night of basketball played so badly that the Charlotte Bobcats were the best shooting team of the night with an anemic 40.2% clip, there is always time for a philosophical reminder that this game, even when played quite miserably and half-heartedly, always has some hilarious tricks up its sleeve, like the fantastic failure of a play that Sebastian Pruiti pointed out on NBA Playbook. In it, Hawks coach Larry Drew draws up a brilliant play based around a stagger screen that the second screener, Josh Smith, slips and heads to the bucket; of course, to further emphasize the prevailing theme of the night, Joe Johnson, the ball handler, sailed his lob to Smith directly onto the backboard and turned it over. In a game, like many between the Heat and Hawks in recent years, that should have been the highlight show that LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Smith and Johnson’s names promise, Johnson’s airball of an assist perfectly captured exactly how awful everything was Tuesday night.
  • These Nat-King-Cole-styled NBA ads featuring the younger versions of NBA stars sure are creepy as hell. Who likes mystery prophets barging in on what was once someone’s reality and predicting the great successes of one’s future? Not I. Steve Nash, on the other hand, doesn’t even seem to notice the intrusion.
  • So, it turns out the Rockets have caught that they are not so great at executing in the fourth quarter. Jonathan Feigen elaborates in this article for the Houston Chronicle that features a lot of truth coming out of the Rockets’ mouths: “‘When you have a team such as ours, we have to rely on movement to get guys shots,’ forward Shane Battier said. ‘We struggle to get Kevin Martin the ball at the end of games. The pressure is high. We haven’t found that really effective way to get him the ball down in crunch time. We have to run our cuts harder, set tougher screens, just be tougher. That’s how we have to win games. We continually have stagnation the last four minutes of ballgames. We have to find ways to get better shots when the pressure is rising.’”
  • While I feel deeply ambivalent about my personal place in the Free Darko-inspired spectrum of liberated fandom, one thing that I truly love about being a loyal fan to a team is the sincere attachment that comes from watching someone play, and usually play well (they are NBA players), 70 times a year. In Sacramento, Carl Landry is simply a scoring, undersized power forward that provides a little bit of stable offense off of a young bench. In Houston, Carl Landry was CARL LANDRY, DESTROYER OF WORLDS. The myths we as fans get to build around individual players because of our private, intimate knowledge (derived from games watched worldwide) exemplify exactly what I want as a fan from having a favorite team. Reading an article on 48 Minutes of Hell, I recognized that feeling in this paragraph about Antonio McDyess, who apparently may get dealt from the Spurs: “He’s Serge Gainsbourg, stubbled, disheveled, and in love. McDyess is the serpentine rise of smoke from Tom Waits’ cigarette. He’s Chet Baker’s My Funny Valentine—the especially long version that forgets you’re listening. Antonio McDyess is all these things and a Quitman smile.”
  • If you own a domain name like www.clydefrazierapproves.com, you probably like Clyde Frazier a lot and are reasonably awesome. As it turns out, the man who operates his blog StylePoints out of that domain, Jason Johnson, does and is those things. Johnson wrote an NBA style-heavy rundown on how today’s ballers compare to Clyde’s (ongoing) legacy over at Free Darko that should absolutely be read.
  • As further proof of Jason Johnson’s skills, I’d like to point to his piece at StylePoints focusing on a problem he’s recognized in both sports fans and society: “As a society, we’ve become obsessed with indignation and outrage.  At a time when our political discourse has devolved to the level of playground taunts and outright libel, we hold onto the notion that ours is genteel society.  This fuels our culture of false indignation.  We simply must be offended.  The problem lies in the fact that this sort of false indignation somehow develops into very real resentment. I’m by no means advocating public nastiness.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I’m just saying that there are much better reasons to dislike a team or player than a little bit of **** talk.”
  • The Dallas Mavericks have never not tried to go all in since Mark Cuban has run the show. The list of imported All-Stars that have littered (and a lot of the time, that is basically what they were doing) that locker room during his reign is ridiculous: Antawn Jamison, Antoine Walker, Dennis Rodman, Jason Terry, Caron Butler, Jerry Stackhouse, Jason Kidd, Tim Hardaway, Nick Van Exel, Tyson Chandler… if they were good somewhere else, Cuban made damn sure they were marginal-to-good in Dallas. After Butler’s possibly season-ending injury, it seems the Mavs are on the hunt again, this time with Stephen Jackson and O.J. Mayo as prey (and Carmelo Anthony as the White Whale).

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Rockets Daily: Tuesday, January 18th, 2011
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