At this point, seemingly half the NBA is on Twitter. It's a wild world of training updates, questions as to which movies they should go see, and explanations of their Call of Duty prowess. Every so often, though, you also get a picture into the more interesting aspects of NBA life. This feature is your window into that world.
Julian Wright: I love tweeting about real-life things that I go through (and all of y'all too) but plz stop relating every tweet to my career...
Big Baby Davis: Now don't lie y'all!!!!! Tell the truth??? When the last time y'all had a pee dream?
Roger Mason: Just finished playing ball at Leonardo DiCaprio's crib. Spider man was guarding me. Lol. They are some cool dudes.
Jon Brockman: Spencer Hawes considering wearing the jersey #12 to represent when the republicans take back the white house in 2012. Now that there's funny
DaJuan Summers: What happen to the old Free Credit Report band???
When the NBA puts a stinker out there, at least there's always the chance of a blink-of-the-eye comeback, or at least some notable highlights. Sadly, when the WNBA's product is bad, it's just bad. Like college, but minus the screaming throngs who seem intent on erasing exactly this discussion. As long as everyone's looking intense.
Such was the case with last night's Liberty-Fever match-up, which was abysmal. The Liberty's first principle is Cappie Pondexter (pictured above), as deadly a guard as you'll find at any level, and Leon Smith's high school girlfriend. Putting her and Diana Taurasi on the same Phoenix Mercury team didn't just win titles two of the last three seasons. It made for a team so exultant that, yes, you got that familiar ol' REVOLUTION feeling in your blood. Then, because of money, a desire to get her own spotlight, and a lifelong interest in fashion, Pondexter headed to the New York Liberty.
Pondexter has gotten even more economical -- more Deron-esque, maybe -- this season, and spearheaded a massive improvement on the part of the Liberty. But if her shot's not falling, a Liberty game drags. Except unlike Kobe or LeBron, she can't make up a double-digit deficit in under a minute. That's one noticeable difference that remains; the WNBA is fast, but that's not the same as NBA-explosive. Yesterday, the Fever made sure Cappie got stuck. The Fever are led by Tamika Catchings, an impossibly strong, agile 1-2-3 who just won the league's Defensive Player of the Year for the fourth time. I like their flighty young PG Briann January, but the team wins when it follows Catchings's example.
Fever won, Pondexter was foiled even if her line says otherwise.
What I was most struck by, though, was the announcing crew's completely chipper explanation of Cappie's move. She wants to get into fashion. She wants to be #1. Forget, for a second, that we've spent all summer bashing LeBron for not wanting to be THE MAN -- if any NBA player expressed these sentiments (say, play for the Knicks to work on his rappin'), he would be crushed for them. Media would bring it up as a way of questioning his worth as a human being. Does this mean that the WNBA is kinder, softer and more understanding? Are women different from men? What do you think? Can the league simply not afford to not put a brave face on whatever its best players decide to do? Does it even pay enough to wield moral authority?
I hope that got you thinking, since what I really want to talk about is Cappie's hair. This is her during last year's playoffs:
Here's her babysitter-ish profile from this season, which is, admittedly, a return to the way she looked during most of her time in the pros:
I am more than willing to roll over and play dead if this turns into a discussion of black women's hair. But -- correct me if you think otherwise -- the spiky Cappie, however recent a development this was, seemed far more appropriate for a scoring machine who might well be the WNBA's most ruthless one-on-one player ever. Now, she's a nice, cute lady. This relates back to my discussion of Lauren Jackson's appearance -- performance art on the court, sex symbol off of it. Cappie dropped her edgy look -- one that, it should be said, was certainly stylish in its own way -- in favor of something more traditionally feminine. Good for her, I guess, except she doesn't seems like the same player to me.
I know, she's actually a better player. But from a style and presentation standpoint, it would be like if Allen Iverson cut of his braids ten years earlier. Because he wanted to be a guest on Good Morning America. Throw in a trade away from Philly, and into the waiting arms of some place that doesn't routinely audition for the title of most gully city in America, and you've got something like Cappie Pondexter's transformation.
Cappie Pondexter was never a threat to destroy America, so the cultural politics here aren't quite the same. But maybe this gives us a new perspective on Iverson's infamous look. As an athlete -- and yes, the WNBA does always come back to basketball -- Pondexter was far more striking, and apt, with last season's look. A brash scorer should look like a space-aged street urchin, not the girl next door. Am I equating being a bad-ass with a lack of femininity? Quite possibly. Did Cynthia Cooper never happen? Regardless, Cappie had her finest season, and got her widest exposure, with a certain image taking hold. I get it, she's pretty now, and I have no right to see her any different on the court -- especially when I know this is part of a larger life-goal. But just as most reasonable people prefer to remember Dr. J with his afro, or still see Brandon Jennings as "the kid with the high-top fade", Pondexter shouldn't underestimate what her on-court look means for her game.
Perhaps Cappie could take a cue from Lauren Jackson, who has insisted on a separation between church and state almost to the point of absurdity. At the same time, though, it's perfectly reasonable to think that an WNBA player could be at once stylish and intimidating. And, perhaps, more likely to click with the world of fashion.
Hopefully you got a chance to read my piece on Lauren Jackson, and what the WNBA has to do with the Positional Revolution. Apparently, any WNBA lead is like kryptonite for NBA fans, even when the column contains three times as much men's content underneath. Oh well; you are going to have to click on it for the photo, otherwise this post might not make sense.
There's one point that I left out, lest everyone on both sides get angry at me. I wrote about LJ's demented in-game appearance. She looks terrifying, but because she does so using make-up and dye, there's also an inclination to judge her as "looking like shit." These are not only traditional signifiers of femininity, or beauty, but ones that identify both as a process of alteration, or aspiration to a universal ideal. The ideal is unattainable; Jackson uses them to reify individuality, while at the same time trading in their connotations: grotesque, damaged, even crazy.
The irony is that, even if other WNBA players go out of their ways to look "girly" in a variety of context, off the court Jackson is the only one who consistently, blatantly sexualized herself along those same lines. On the court, she is hunched, glowering, and from a traditional standpoint, unattractive. Which is the point -- she's kicking ass, not making pretty. There are plenty of WNBA players who do make a point of getting their hair did, and making their faces up right, before games. No shame in that, especially if it's a national broadcast. Think of Iverson and Melo with their braids.
Back to Jackson: do a photo search for her, and you'll find plenty of shots of the league's intimidating MVP nude, semi-nude, or modeling skimpy bathing suits. Without her Joker-esque get-up, Jackson isn't just striking, she's pretty damn hot. She knows it, and wants you to know, too. But not on the court. And if the WNBA has any concerns about its best player willingly objectifying herself, they are hard-pressed to voice them -- since when she plays, Lauren Jackson does more to deconstruct beauty rituals than a whole galley of theorists could do.
UPDATE: No idea why I labeled this "update". Anyway, kindly take a gander at my lengthy piece for FanHouse on hanging out with Dave Cowens and trying to go through an NBA practice. It has Barkley gossip!
At this point, seemingly half the NBA is on Twitter. It's a wild world of training updates, questions as to which movies they should go see, and explanations of their Call of Duty prowess. Every so often, though, you also get a picture into the more interesting aspects of NBA life. This feature is your window into that world.
Nick Collison: @jHARD13 happy birthday. Although I'm a little sick of hearing about it. You're an adult now. You don't have to tell everyone
Marquis Daniels: I hate when u eat a good meal before bed and wake up feeling like u haven't eating n 3 days
Chris Douglas-Roberts: Its getting to friendly for me.I'm sorry.This is a sport where we compete AGAINST each otha.Iono about them but the BUCKS are out for blood!
Travis Outlaw: Once you get up in age. You can't chase it like you use to. Your nuts cool down! Shoutout to my granddaddy.
Danny Granger: At this restaurant on the water in greece with usa team and a cat just rolled up to the table lol
Encounters With Deities: The How to Dress Well interview
I have this certain nostalgia for the days when I used to find out about new music organically. Pre-MP3s & Youtube, when you heard a song--in a record store, on a friend's walkman/discman, or even in a music video, it was unclear whether you would ever hear that song again. So you had to hunt it down, ask around, form allegiances, sing it in your head so you wouldn't forget it. That is sort of the process by which I came across How to Dress Well, flipping through internet pages, catching one of his songs, losing the page, and misremembering his name. Someone posted a link to his stuff on twitter a few weeks ago, and then I made sure to acquire everything I could. Since then, I haven't been able to stop listening.
The guyismakingquiteanameforhimself , seemingly popping up everywhere on the net. I will forego the adjectives "ghostly," "lo-fi," "ethereal," and "hallucinogenic" that seem to always accompany descriptions of his music and just say that it is infectious. It was with great serendipity then, that I found out he linked to freedarko on his very own blog/trove of tunes. Turns out guy is a huge hoops fan, and humored me for an interview, which I present to you below.
Dr. Lawyer IndianChief: I know you've moved around a bit. i have a few questions related to that...do you have a home team or a favorite team? if so, what made that team your favorite?
How to Dress Well: my home team is, for better or worse, the denver nuggets. that's where i grew up, so those are my dudes. alex english, fat lever, hanzlik, and then dikembe, laphonso 'the fonz' ellis, robert pack etc. and fucking RODNEY ROGERS! ha, always good to take a trip down memory lane...
Dr. LIC: were you able to follow the nba when you were in germany? what is the interest in the nba over there?
HTDW: ya, actually--- the first thing i bought with my paypal earnings from cdrs was league-pass broadband, so i could watch the playoffs. no germans give a shit about basketball tho...
Dr. LIC: what would it do to the city [denver] if carmelo left?
HTDW: i've been thinking about this a lot. it would ruin us. it would put us back to where we were before melo--- i think we had the worst record in the nba the year before he came, like 18-64 or some shit.... it would be dreadful. the problem is, we're right on the edge now: if he stays, we could really put some shit together in the coming years. or we could flounder and it could ruin his career. so i appreciate his desire to leave, but i really hope he stays. if he goes, i hope he goes to chicago, where i'm living now. that team would ruin miami--- rose, corver, melo, boozer, etc. would be amazing!
Dr. LIC: because i'm from minneapolis, i have to ask where did you live when you were there? did you enjoy it? were you there during the kg years?
HTDW: ha. i was there for one summer in 2005. lived just across the highway from dinkytown--- like on the corner of SE 5th and SE 6th.
Dr. LIC: ...going to make the clunky move to asking questions about your music // basketball... i read that you have some background in the black metal scene and being in those types of bands. who in the nba is the most "black metal?"
HTDW: ha. good question. if he wasn't such a huge celine dion fan, ron ron would have to be up there. kristic just came out of nowhere, pumping his black metal quotient up pretty high with that chair throw in the Worlds-- tho that move is a bit more hard-core than black metal.
Dr. LIC: you talk about being influenced by a lot of 90s r&b. for me, new jack swing and the jordan years of the nba, go hand and hand. does this connection resonate with you?
HTDW: ya absolutely. i mean, for me it was all about my walkman and shooting the basketball in my driveway. it's also tight, by the by, that the nba is returning to some crazy kind of hey-day right now as the 90's are coming back full swing. i mean, htdw is not new jack swing and the Triami heat are not the bulls (get real-- chris bosh is as talented as one of horace grants legs), but there's some homologies popping off there.
Dr. LIC: your videos have a consistently dreamscape-like quality. if you were to create a video for one of your songs using nba footage, what would you use?
HTDW: oh man--- it'd have to be dikembe crying on the floor after the nugs beat the sonics.
Dr. LIC: one of the things that makes people gravitate toward your music is the intimacy of it. do you think this level of public intimacy is possible in sports?
HTDW: no, but that's because they're just very different domains, music or art more generally and sport. like, this is why stephon marbury became an artist with his youtubes and had to quit hoops.
Dr. LIC: ...some questions on current events...who do you like to win it all this year? why?
HTDW: i want to see denver (of course) or okc win it all, but i think it will likely be someone else. here's my bold prediction: i don't think the lakers or the celtics will be in the finals.
Dr. LIC: how do you think the miami experiment will work out?
HTDW: look, my only thoughts are: miami will NOT win the championship. i don't have a lot of faith in that crew. they'll finish 2nd in the east in the regular season and in the playoffs.
Dr. LIC: which team do you think has made the biggest improvement in the offseason?
HTDW: i'm moving to chicago, so i'm pretty stoked on their moves... they need someone like melo to take them to the next level though.
At this point, seemingly half the NBA is on Twitter. It's a wild world of training updates, questions as to which movies they should go see, and explanations of their Call of Duty prowess. Every so often, though, you also get a picture into the more interesting aspects of NBA life. This feature is your window into that world.
J.R. Smith: Fellas lesson 1 if you plan to win an argument with a woman, you already lost! You plan to tie you both win! Plan to lose you will! #dig?
Chris Douglas-Roberts: Commercials I MUST turn from.....the homeless sad lookin dogs & cats commercials & the Extenze commercials!!!! Gotta turn the channel.
Anthony Morrow: O yea I saw the video I just didn't look at it
Jordan Crawford: Charlotte has to have the best airport!! So much be goin on in this joint!!
As usual, here I tell you to read The Works. It cooks and is evil fun. But, harkening back to the posts we used to do about the post we had just done for McSweeney's, here are some further thoughts on Kwame Brown, who figures prominently in today's column.
I took this unique opportunity to plumb the depths of Kwame Brown, mostly to determine why he was drafted number one. In the column, I compare him to a Euro, except with Darko, there was at least a cloud of mythos. Chandler and Curry were much better known, but then the lowly Kwame murdered Chandler before MJ in a workout, and the die was cast. Yes, back then it was assumed that Jordan knew something we didn't. But more interesting to me is the idea that workouts -- held up today as the ultimate form of wishful thinking -- were then the latest thing in empiricism. To see was to believe; reputation was propaganda and mistrust.
What makes the story even more serpentine is that this fairly insider-y moment at once decided the pick, and placed it sorely outside the reach of anyone who wasn't a total draft nerd. The draft was, during the workout era, rendering wholly inaccessible, because workouts sought to disprove everything we thought we knew, or make unknown players into late-risers. Darko, in that sense, is more like LeBron than he is Kwame; Pavel Podkolzin or Skita are his equivalent. It makes some sense: high school competition, no matter how camped-out, is still far from perfect. You can't put the player through the paces you want see. You don't push him to max. And yet there's a reason that, today, we speak scornfully of "workout wonders".
So Jordan had a reason, just not when that really resonated enough with the public -- at least not enough to be repeated ad infinitum until it grew into its own justification. To some extent, the Wizards knew that would have sounded crazy. With this realization, they -- and every other NBA team -- opened themselves up to ridicule. Scouting being hermetic because it knew better; it also recognized its own limits, its own specialization and micro-standards, and thus resigned itself to a public face of farce. In any year but 2003, Darko wouldn't have fallen so hard. With LeBron screaming through, it was just too late to try that crap. By the next year, Euros were receding, and high schooler players measured more on the kind of pro they would make. Not, to paraphrase a paleontologist I saw on NOVA last night, looking at funny bones and delighting in what they could be. That's not science, no matter how brilliant and inventive it feels, or how badly it wants to supersede the burden of what came before.
At the time, though, NBA teams thought they had hit on the magic method. It was just a different kind, a new method adapted to a low-info climate. There were glees and squeals over finding brand new types of players; hence the emphasis on all sorts of Next Kevin Garnetts, the ultimate position-buster. Let's not even try and catalog all the absurdities passed down from Europe -- which, ironically, were suggested in play and then fleshed out in workouts. The rumor was hypothesis, the workout the experiment. Sounds perfectly reasonable, no?
Except, as we know today, workouts are even more skewed than whatever players do in flashes abroad, or in the fatuous playpen of high school ball. For one, international leagues and preps play have both raised their levels. You can see a player, if not for who he could be, at least reasonably well for what he is. If that's a conservative backlash against the speculative dreaming of the workout days, when front offices sought to have their wildest wishes confirmed and conventional wisdom struck down, it's the current climate. Hyped players have it for a reason. Colleges works alongside pros to generate a reasonable facsimile of who prospects are.
Where they are headed, no one knows. But the present, en masse, gives rise to high expectations, that perilous thing we call hype. Certainly, this kind of hype is preferable, more rooted, and more realistic than what workouts produced. The new science has been proven fraud; its attack on common sense and accessibility the ultimate hermetic gag. Populist hype has gone from laughingstock to an important partner in the deep thinking of the draft. Perhaps it has been improved upon; perhaps these things just go in cycle. Regardless, today, we are all scouts. And the sport is probably the better off for it.
In case you don't have Twitter, here's the most FD video ever:
List your favorite moments below! Believe it or not, my favorite shit is DJ and Russell's "interview" about defending Bates. Oh, and I was nearly on the verge of seeing Bates's PBA sojourn not as squandered promise, but exactly the kind of magical ending this barely-real figure deserved.
Oh, and some get-shit-off-my-chest I haven't been able to do elsewhere: I don't claim to own the Positional Revolution, whatever any of that means. It's an idea we've toyed with for years, spurred by changes in the league. Like, since 2004. Certainly, I would never copyright it like I have Liberated Fandom, or Libated Fandom. But, at the risk of making everyone hate me, this latest round of Positional Revolution "discussion" strikes me as a little late in the game. It reminds me of how the advanced stats people must have felt when me, Ziller, Eric, Silverbird, and others engaged in a battle over PER years after the fact.
So, to address some points made by Rob Mahoney as he sums it all up ... I apologize in advance if you hate me after this:
1. Jesse Blanchard explains the futility of matching up players by similar positions. I don't see this as requiring a new set of terms, or even universalizing themes. Players switch up, or take unorthodox assignments, all the time. It's a matter of being able to cover the team's collective ass elsewhere. If Rondo takes a shooting guard, there had better be swingman or PG able to stick the opposing PG. This isn't just heuristic on a team-to-team basis -- i.e. who can guard what other positions -- but on team vs. team. Eric Freeman says that, if the other team is running out unorthodox players, it really makes no sense to label anyone. You look at the match-ups and devise a strategy for it. It's about a more heady gameplan, not a new theory of classification.
2. Matt Moore caught a quote from Kobe that suggested he would play anywhere, as a result of Euros (and his waning athleticism). Money shot, right! I hadn't heard that line before anyone else is, but I'll leave it up to you to determine how much of his totalizing has been handled in FD many times over the years.
3. One of the several times that Ziller and I addressed these posts, from a more dignified pulpit so I wouldn't flip out. But Rob, come on. I'm not "taking Moore's point and running with it." For one, it's just weird to say that I'm following Matt here. I'll leave that there. More to the point, though, I'm trying to contradict him to prove a point. Moore questions whether we need to label Tyreke Evans; I say that, if you look at the NBA today, point guards are rising at the same time as flexible teams. This means that, yes, the Kings still would like to know if Evans is a point guard, or something else. If he's a PG, capable of orchestrating the kind of complicated system the 21st century has developed, good for him. If not, he's still amazing. Height and power still matter, but as teams grow more fluid, it's more and more on the point guard to track this stuff and make sense of it. That's important; they make it possible. THAT's why I said point guards were the gateway.
4. I am pretty sure I agree with Kevin Arnovitz, namely, that discussing this in the abstract misses the point. You adapt, or re-determine, based on either need, want, or what resources you have at your disposal. Ideally, it's a team like the Thunder, building a weird squad around a weird player. The bootleg version of that are Rob's Mavs, who should have done the same thing with Dirk a long time ago. Now, they find themselves with enough unusual talent that they can devise these schemes on the fly, or maybe even in camp. Then there's also the most prosaic version of this, alluded to by Blanchard: in a game, you make adjustments. That's easier if players are versatile. Granted, that's only revolution on a micro-level, maybe even not at all -- since it's done already. I prefer to think that it means the future isn't as far off as we think.
I like how everyone's just silent after the last dunk. Also, this still doesn't beat THE BIRTHDAY CAKE, which might be my favorite NBA moment EVER. Also, J.R. Smith needs a deal because this is his music.
At this point, seemingly half the NBA is on Twitter. It's a wild world of training updates, questions as to which movies they should go see, and explanations of their Call of Duty prowess. Every so often, though, you also get a picture into the more interesting aspects of NBA life. This feature is your window into that world.
You may have on occasion heard me sing the praises of Talkin' Ball, the Portland television program whose title says it all. At last, we have some footage to share, and boy is it a good one. Talkin' Ball is no longer filmed in an empty bar, and Jim Pasero -- the engine who really made the barley cook -- is no longer a regular part of the panel. But he was on Thursday, as was our esteemed pal Ben Golliver.
Shortly before Ben went on the air, he and I joked about the Rudy Fernandez situation as a "clash of civilizations." When Ben found a way to insert this heady phrase into the discussion (about two minutes in), I squealed with delight. But that was just the beginning of all the fun you can have with a silly cable-news cliche and a crazy little man who just can't help himself. Watch and understand, and stick around for the discussion of Potmaster Brandon Roy.
Zac Crain is a senior editor at D Magazine and author of the Dimebag Darrell bio, Black Tooth Grin. Follow him at @zaccrain.
Josh Howard didn’t stop being a Dallas Maverick because he loves weed or hates the national anthem. That was cover fire. Josh Howard stopped being a Dallas Maverick because he became conventional.
When he entered the league as part of (but not really) the fabled draft class of 2003, he was wholly unpredictable, something the Dallas Mavericks lacked at the time. Don Nelson gave that squad the illusion of unpredictability, but that team (and pretty much all others Nellie has coached) was incredibly predictable within his framework. He’s like Wes Anderson or any other director that has been called quirky, or similar. If you walk in halfway through one of their films, it might seem so, but not if you have seen all of them from the beginning. Then the quirks are rote and easy to anticipate. Nellie has been Nellie for long enough that every ace up his sleeve is, by now, a two of clubs.
But Howard was genuinely wild, in his way. He was part of the team but apart from it at the same time. That isn’t to say he broke plays, or was a problem in any way. He had a game that seemed concocted on the fly. It was all impulse. He, more than any Mav at that time, could leave the crowd gasping. Dirk Nowitzki was the inevitable. Josh was the possible.
And then he turned into Michael Finley. Worse, he turned into late-career Michael Finley.
When it comes to Howard, I’ve always thought of Michael Finley as secondhand smoke. He is a power plant behind the back fence. He is a microwave tower hovering over a quiet neighborhood. I could (probably) make a scientific case that Finley gave Howard’s career cancer. But more than that, I simply believe it’s true, maybe because I want to and maybe because I can’t explain it otherwise. I don’t want to blame chance. It has to be the fault of someone or something.
So I always think of Mike Finley.
Specifically, I think of the Finley that I grew to despise during the last few years of his time in Dallas, which coincided with Howard’s first few seasons in the league. Even more specifically, I think of one play. It’s not a single moment, exactly. It’s a sequence that seemed to happen every game.
It is the end of a quarter, or a half, or a game. The shot clock is off but there is plenty of time left on the clock. Let’s say 17 seconds. Finley gets the ball near the three-point line on one side or the other. And then he turns into a bad Michael Jordan impersonator. Let’s say Harold Miner. He palms the ball, arm extended, holding it away from his defender. You’ve seen this. Yes. Finley keeps holding it, and holding it. You reach, I teach, and, man, fuck Jordan, too. He made this happen.
Ten seconds. Jab step. Jab step. Five seconds. Finley takes a dribble than in no way could be considered as progress toward the basket. Two seconds. And here we are again: a heavily contested, step-back, fall-away jumper that only succeeds in drawing a groan from the crowd and maybe a bit of rim. It is a single shot, but it means everything. This is the signature move of someone who has put pride above all else. It was Finley’s move, and it became Howard’s.
Howard is sort of the son and grandson of this—affected by Jordan through Finley, and affected by Jordan directly. (That they were both handpicked by Jordan to be part of his Jumpman 23 roster and therefore under his wing is, I guess, my smoking gun.) A good enough player can handle it. For a time, Finley was good enough. With tons of qualifiers, yes—The Man, but on a terrible team, etc. But still: good enough. Howard never was. He was close. But he didn’t have the right make-up or the right situation.
The off-court PR problems? Those were maybe symptoms of his newfound pride. But I don’t believe that. Those made him more of a real person. He said the shit he wasn’t supposed to say but wasn’t alone in thinking or doing. He was maybe wrong in his choice of venue for one of those statements, but that didn’t make him wrong, or at least not wrong to speak his mind.
Be he was wrong on the court. That was more unforgivable. He fell in love with a jumper that, at best, wanted to be friends, maybe make out a little every once in awhile if they both had too much to drink. He decided he was 1B to Dirk Nowitzki’s 1A based on an injury-replacement All-Star selection and little else. He made superstar mistakes (picking up bad T’s at worse times) without superstar production.
It could have been different. He could have actually earned that 1B status. He could have been—and generally was, early on—a great defender, but he stopped trying on that end around 2005. Somehow, he was a much better defender under Don Nelson.
(Aside: You could sort of see where this was headed during the 2004 Rookie Challenge. That he was there was victory enough, given his draft position and everything else. He was a footnote to an afterthought, in a game dominated (on court) by Amar’e Stoudamire and (media-wise) by LeBron and Melo. Nelson told him to just do what he’d been doing to earn rotation minutes: rebound and play defense. Instead, and I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I feel as though he went something like 0-12 from three-point range in about eight minutes of playing time. I know, I know—wrong to judge ANYTHING in a glorified pickup game. But still. Omens are omens.)
He should have flourished playing with Jason Kidd, but the opposite happened. The Josh Howard that would have flourished in that situation—the one who always seemed to appear out of nowhere somewhere around the rim and, less relevant, regularly shut down clubs with Marquis Daniels—was long gone. He didn’t need (or want) a point guard, or anyone else, really. He had a fat man’s game: nothing but jogging and fadeaways.
In a way, Howard was still unpredictable, because I never expected that.
And so he is in Washington now, trying to come back from a knee injury and various other psychic damage from the six-month period where his status was fired on from pretty much every angle. This could come full circle. He is, more or less, forgotten now. It’s the perfect time for him to fly in from out of nowhere again.
A brief one for today, folks. For all of you academically inclined folks, SSRN is a wonderful repository of working papers, chapters in pdf form, and things that you would otherwise have to pay for. In my journeys through the site I have come across some great stuff on the social science of sports. The one that caught my eye most recently is a working paper entitled:
Sub-Perfect Game: Profitable Biases of NBA Referees
Available for download here. Economists Joseph Price (of Dave Berri collaboration and the study on racial bias amongst referees fame), Marc Remer, and Daniel F. Stone looked at over 28,000 quarters of NBA basketball from 2002-2008 using play-by-play data from ESPN.com to test (and confirm) the following hypotheses:
H1. The refs make calls that favor home teams
H2.The refs favor teams losing during games
H3. The refs favor teams losing in a playoff series.
Worse yet, the rationale for these biases is that each of them directly contributes to league revenue. As Price et al state, the "home bias" keeps the home team winning and therefore keeps home fans coming back and willing to pay more for tickets. The bias toward favoring the losing team keeps the game close--the authors refer to this as the "close bias"--and keeps fans watching on TV, perhaps also increasing interest in the game. And the "playoff bias" noted in hypothesis 3 keeps playoff series going longer, contributing to more TV revenue.
Regarding H1, the home team on average tends to have a significantly lower number of "discretionary turnovers"--turnovers called by the discretion referees--but no demonstrably different number of non-discreationary turnover--turnovers caused by the players alone. In addition, the home team accrues significantly fewer shooting and non-shooting fouls.
Regarding H2, teams down by 10 points one quarter have far fewer referee-initiated turnovers the following quarter, but this pattern doesn't emerge for non-discretionary turnovers. Losing teams also commit fewer shooting fouls, though the shooting fouls finding is open to alternative explanations.
Regarding H3, results are murkier, but teams down 0-2, 0-3, 1-3, or 2-3 in a playoff series have far fewer discretionary turnovers and get more shooting fouls.
I should add that it pains me to write about this, as I feel like the NBA refs are the most unfairly maligned refs in all of sports. Donaghy aside, we constantly hear that the NBA refs have too much control over the outcome of the game--but I can't help but wonder, given all we've seen in the NFL, MLB, and the World Cup fiascoes that the NBA refs are unfairly picked on. Zzzzzzz.
The authors point to a few potential causes of these biases all of which are very likely. The big question that remains for me, though, is how conscious are referees of these biases? Humor me and post your thoughts on this question and other proposed causes of the biases below.
I was sent to Springfield in some "fan who can write" capacity (more on that later). Still, I tried to hold onto to some shred of journalistic integrity. That is, until Claude Johnson of Claude for Greenwich 2010 and Black Fives browbeat me into getting this photo taken with David Thompson.
This was probably my most exciting Hall of Fame sighting, in large part because it was unexpected. I knew that at some point, I would walk by Oscar Robertson in the lobby and feel the profundity. But Skywalker just showed up on the charter bus back to the hotel, talking with some folks about Wilt's crazy house. I had no reason to think he would be in Springfield, and got really amped. That's when Claude insisted on this very special fan moment.
1. Thompson steps off the bus, is overrun by autograph hounds—some of whom have just the right seventies SI already waiting in hand. He obliges, but isn't trying to hang around.
2. As DT beats his retreat back to the hotel, Claude catches up and suavely introduces me to Thompson. I should add that Claude doesn't know Thompson, and didn't say anything about himself. When Thompson balked, Claude changed gears, modulating his tone a little and promoting me as a very important basketball writer. I believe he even said "don't you know who this is"?
3. Thompson, a little confused at this point, agrees, but only if we can do it quick and get out of the way of the bus that's about the drive off. Everyone scrambles into position—you can see I'm still in motion—and the Hall of Famer then jogs off into the safety of the Marriott.
4. I beam, and talk, and almost get hit by the bus. Claude Johnson, I owe you for a great story and, apparently, saving my life. But as Eric Freeman joked, if any player encounter in Springfield would end with you getting injured, it's one with Thompson.
5. A little dazed, embarrassed, and strangely free, I peek into the stuffy hotel restaurant on the way to the elevator. Willis Reed, Wes Unseld, and Meadowlark Lemon are having an animated conversation about something. Oscar Robertson sits with them, but he's reading the paper.
Jay Caspian Kang believes it must be done. Rashad must be free. Join the FREERASHAD movement over at his new blog at freerashad.blogspot.com and follow Jay on twitter
"Is it because my car is nice, clothes are nice, because I listen to Jay-Z, cuz I'm kinda cute? Or is it just "jealousy"? This has got to be the weakest emotion that anyone can have. To be jealous that I have what you don't have. But what I don't understand is why hate on just me? Then I thought, ain't no one fresher than me, no one flier than me, no one realer than me. So I am the reason people hate, prime reason you should hate anyone like me. I think it's cuz I was "BORN 2 BE HATED." - from the diary of Rashad McCants
ON FEBRUARY 10 2004, UNC sophomore Rashad McCants entered the second half of a game against Georgia Tech having only scored three points. The Heels, struggling along with a 4-6 conference record in Roy Williams’ first year as coach, trailed by five. The half started with a quick Georgia Tech run that expanded the lead to ten.
Over the next sixteen minutes of game time, McCants put on one of the most dazzling one-man shows in Tar Heel history, scoring twenty-eight points, draining three after circus three. Unfortunately for the Heels, McCants’ performance on that night was matched by Tech’s BJ Elder, who scored twenty-four in the half, and Carolina ultimately lost the game 88-77, a star was born in Chapel Hill. But here, finally, was the remedy to the Joe Forte blues—the explosive scorer and charismatic dynamo who could lead Ol’ Roy’s Heels back to the Final Four.
Back then, when a defense of Matt Doherty was enough to start a fight at Spanky’s or Woody’s or He’s Not Here, we were desperate. Perhaps we overlooked some early warning signs with McCants. There was never any official reason behind the Doherty firing; the accepted story in Chapel Hill was that Felton, May and McCants, offended by Doherty’s suggestion that they might need a psychiatrist, incited a mutiny that cleared the way for the Roy Williams era. In retrospect, the sports psychiatrist story only seems relevant in the context of McCants.
McCants, perhaps in a first-ever in the history of lazy sportswriters using the word mercurial, actually kind of was, well, mercurial. His antics on the court were always strangely anti-Carolina. Instead of taking on any leadership responsibilities, McCants seemed to orbit around the team’s gravitational center of May, Felton and Jawad Williams—never quite engaging, but always nearby, always doing his own thing. McCants flashed the Roc-A-Fella Domination sign after dunks, he saluted the cameras, he popped his jersey and preened for the crowd. To his credit, his theatrics were acts of exultation—unlike other “emotional” players, Rashad never argued with refs, he didn’t bicker with teammates during time-outs or on the court, he was never cheap or violent. Those of us fans who count Rasheed Wallace among our all-time-favorite Heels were happy to see that Ol’ Roy hadn’t brought the stuffier parts of Ol’ Carolina Way with him to Chapel Hill.
Yet he also played with a detached, but fully-formed intensity somewhere outside the usual jocularity, sportsmanship and precision one usually associates with Tar Heel Basketball. Watching him play was sometimes like watching Mike Tyson tell a joke—you love the man, the commitment, but you sometimes wonder what the fuck might be going through his head, and if what you are witnessing is the charming mechanics of a serial masochist.
Nothing that has happened to McCants over the past few years comes as any surprise to those of us who watched his career at Carolina. College, especially college in Chapel Hill, is a cocoon. Once Rashad was fed to the wolves and every quirk, every mysterious story was exposed for what it was, once he quit being Rashad McCants: eccentric and lovable dynamo for our Tar Heels, and, instead, became Rashad McCants: public property, what would happen to him? He once equated playing at Carolina to being in jail and longed for his “freedom.” What would that freedom entail? Although nobody really talked about it, Carolina fans had already seen what was odd with Rashad.
It certainly seems telling that the last image of McCants as a Tar Heel comes right after the final buzzer sounds in the 2005 National Championship. Felton, May, Marvin and Jawad mob one another under the basket. McCants is nowhere to be found. The camera finally finds him standing alone at mid-court. He has taken off his Carolina jersey and, with a smirk, presents it to the television audience.
SOCIETY-IN-THERAPY rarely extends its graces to the professional athlete. Ricky Williams is equated to Benedict Arnold; when Milton Bradley took some time off this spring to tend to some very obvious emotional issues, sportswriters piled on the usual absurd, man-in-a-foxhole metaphors. No matter how much Zack Greinke achieves on the mound, he will always be defined by the depression that caused him, God forbid, to question if he really wanted to pursue a life as a professional baseball player.
Although our post-racial language will not allow such an easy categorization, there exists a perception of a “Black depression,” that differs from its counterpart, “White depression.” Each iteration carries its own bag of causalities and images—White depression elicits bathtubs filled with blood, minivans, Mary Kay, Sylvia Plath, Edward Scissorhands, whereas the prevailing vision of Black depression is laid out along the narratives of economic hardship, limited opportunity and the ghetto operatics that much of America uses to define the totality of the African-American experience. In neater terms: White depression is The Virgin Suicides, Black depression is the fourth season of The Wire.
It certainly doesn’t need to be said that all these differentiations are myths, and dangerous ones at that, but the way they are processed seems paradoxical to certain core American values of responsibility. Why are we quicker to forgive White athletes for lapses in mental health? Why do we turn a blind eye to Josh Hamilton’s relapse, but pile on Dwight Gooden and Daryl Strawberry? Why are there glowing Sports Illustrated cover stories about the miracle of Zack Greinke’s recovery from anxiety and depression, but none about Michael Beasley? In the most essentialist vision possible, which also happens to be the touchstone for almost all discussion of sports in America, shouldn’t America (titanic) be more willing to forgive the kid with the tough ghetto childhood than the kid who gets bored with his privileged, suburban life? Why did society-in-therapy, so eager to embrace everyone that it produced a show about a mob boss and his psychiatrist, create a state of exception for the Black athlete?
Perhaps, ironically, it is exactly the self-evidence, and, in some ways, the simplicity of the causality of Black depression that creates the very narrative used to dismiss it. Because Black depression, again speaking in as essentialist terms as possible, is perceived as being the result of economically depressed living conditions, whereas White depression is written off as chemical imbalances, treatable by any number of medications, when a Black male becomes a visibly wealthy member of society, he is subjected to this catastrophic logic: Because he is rich now, the reasons for the Black athlete's depression are now gone. Therefore, he should no long show any symptoms of any mental health problems. If he does, he is simply not appreciating what he has been given.
In his pre-draft interview with the Miami Dolphins, Dez Bryant was asked if his mother was a prostitute and if she “still did drugs.” When brought in for a workout with the 49ers, Matthew Stafford was asked to discuss his feelings about his parents’ divorce. When he said he wasn’t going to talk about it, the 49ers brass downgraded him on their chart.
What is the expected answer? What could Matthew Stafford have said to convince Mike Singletary that he was mentally healthy? How was Dez Bryant supposed to react to a stranger asking him if his mother was a drug addict/prostitute? It is impossible to believe that anyone, much less a front-office employee of a professional sports franchise, could make a determination of psychological health based on these sorts of scattershot, shock-jock questions. So why ask them? What Superman is being constructed? And what, for fuck’s sake, do we expect Superman to say?
Even if we do not know, exactly, who Superman is, we know who he is not, and he is not Rashad McCants, or any of his looks of exasperation, disinterest or anger. He is not the tattoos he sports on each arm: “Born to be Hated,” and, “Dying to be Loved.” He is not the poetry McCants has written or the mostly unexplained hiatus he took from that 2005 championship team. He is not his moodiness or his outbursts. In fact, the only NBA-ish thing Rashad McCants has done in the five years that have passed since he left Carolina, was briefly date a Kardashian.
IT IS NO SECRET THAT THE NBA has lost its personality. In this post-Gil-era, the mold of NBA superstar is more blank, unobtrusive and corporate-friendly than it’s ever been. Kids no longer run up and down the court with a specific player’s demeanor in mind, but rather, professional basketball has become a TV show in which every character aspires to be the bland, beautiful straight man. Of the top ten players in the league, only Kobe has a distinct personality, a set of easily codified traits that define who he is. What, really, do we know about Dwight Howard? When he came into the league, he was a shy, Christian kid who was so naïve that he once said that there should be a crucifix on the NBA logo. Now, he is Dwight Howard, smiling, corporate superman, stripped, with Mao’s efficiency, of any religious ornamentation. Howard’s quirks are so calculated, predictable, that he comes across as a gigantic Katy Perry. Kevin Durant is celebrated for his candor, but only in contrast with the clamminess or meanness of his fellow players Dwyane Wade is not much more than a collection of commercials, post-hipster glasses and velveteen suits. As for the league’s self-appointed King, part of the shock and rage over Lebron’s Decision Summer came from the fact that we are simply not used to such disturbances of our expected boredoms, especially from a guy who has Jordan-monotoned the cameras since his freshman year in high school. Even his recent twitter vendetta seems staged—the virtual flailings of a desperate, and, ultimately, blank man.
While it’s undeniable that a culture of sameness has arrived, one has to wonder if this is a product of the league’s relentless push into international markets (strip the game of the “Americanness” that might offend people in Europe and Asia, and watch it grow!), or if it is truly a reflection of something much more ominous: a society that has built up an industry of mental health to tamp everyone down into a docile vessel. Is there so much difference between McCants and Charles Oakley? Is he more polarizing than Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf? The NBA once was a place where volatile personalities were used as weaponry—players like Lambeer, Oakley, Mahorn, Andrew Toney and Mourning played not so much as individuals on the court, but as embodiments of their unchained egos.
What I am trying to ask is this: are we really still willing to accept eccentricity?
FREE RASHAD is for all of us head-cases, the misunderstood. It is for all of us who wanted to walk the earth with Ricky Williams, for those of us who listen to Mike Tyson and see a vision what we might be like if we had lived through a similar chaos. It is for those of us who, like Rashad, have never quite been able to bridge the gap between our conception of self—no matter how catastrophic it may be—and the functioning world. It is not as much a movement to get Rashad McCants back in the NBA, as it is a lament for the league we have lost. We accept, as Rashad has, his shortcomings as a teammate, as a basketball player. We are not even saying that if we were the GM of a team, we would offer our hero a spot on the roster. Rather, we ask for the league to FREE RASHAD in the hopes that it will restore a coliseum of volatility, a celebration of the eccentric, and, perhaps, in turn, delay the ever-expanding norm of the corporate, World-Wide National Basketball Association.
I know you're all sick of my shilling for FanHouse, but I have your number. Ziller and I now have a regular column. Today's romp discusses McGrady's exile and how it had to be; ref bias, but not like you think; more and more Positional Revolution, including a nod to Total Football I swore I wouldn't make; and a soccer-based race for the top at the bottom.
The Works airs every morning, no matter what happens in between. As its name suggests, it is somewhere between a mess of ice cream toppings and a drug delivery device.
Luke Harangody, Boston and the Gathering Whiteness
Jack Hamilton concedes that if you’re a Celtics fan who’s reading this blog, you’re probably not a racist, but still secretly believes he’s even less racist than you. He writes elsewhere about music and other wonderful things. You can find him @jack_hamilton
The news that Shaquille O’Neal is now a Boston Celtic has been greeted with a desultory enthusiasm, as New England collectively smiles and lightly shrugs its shoulders. The Celtics have a long and speckled history of late-career renewal projects, from the memorable and successful (Wayne Embry, Bill Walton) to the forgettable and frankly depressing (Pete Maravich, Dominique Wilkins). Clearly Shaq brings along his own unique baggage to his sixth NBA team, but hey, the beat writers’ jobs just got a little easier, he swallowed his pride and signed for the veterans’ minimum, he’ll fill in credibly for Kendrick Perkins on the offensive end (we won’t talk about the other end), and with Kevin Garnett and the newly-signed Jermaine O’Neal, Danny Ainge has just successfully assembled the greatest collection of big men in the history of 2002.
So there’s that. The potential downsides are even duller and more predictable: Shaq wrangled an overly magnanimous two-year commitment from the team; his track record of toeing the company line when playing time and such don’t go to his liking is spotty, a worrisome issue if Perkins manages a recovery sooner rather than later; and, lastly, let’s face it, as Robbie Robertson said in The Last Waltz, it’s not like it used to be.
As a native Bostonian who’s spent a reckless amount of his conscious life pondering the various conditions of Celtic-ness, I confess to finding it hard to care. I like O’Neal well enough and in his prime he was one of the more memorable and compelling athletes of my lifetime, but he’s now the dumbest kind of interesting, the basketball equivalent of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book that you’ve already read cover-to-cover. His tenure in Boston will be of minimal cultural significance, and that will be just fine, and in many ways his signing provides a nice flourish to the narrative of Danny Ainge’s quixotic, “I want to grow old with you” offseason, the one that has the Celtics committing to a Wild Bunch-style final stand against the marauding usurpers in Orlando, Chicago, and of course South Beach. Shaq’s primary utility over the coming days, weeks and months will be cram this story into the molding of archetype. But I don’t think it’s the whole story, or even the story of the Celtics’ offseason. To claim it as such would be to willfully ignore the events of June 24, 2010, namely the dawning of the Luke Harangody Era and the new new whiteness in Boston basketball.
When it was announced that the Celtics would be using the 52nd pick in the 2010 NBA Draft to select Notre Dame’s Luke Harangody, the jokes, as they say, wrote themselves. Boston’s love affair with the white athlete is copiously documented and has a tendency of revealing itself in ways humiliating for those of us mistrustful of 19th-century ideas of innate racial character. Rarely has this been more perfectly exemplified than through the figure of Brian Scalabrine, whose position on the roster Harangody may soon usurp in a capital B, capital D “Business Decision” freighted with symbolic significance.
The Scalabrine Era in Boston was long-lasting, fascinating and mostly disgusting, a potent and unseemly cocktail of ethnic solidarity, backlash resentment and culturally retarded imaginings of white skin and its relation to the perennially popular bullshit “intangibles”: heart, hustle, grit, toughness, character. Most of this wasn’t really Brian Scalabrine’s own fault: he’d been the beneficiary of one of the worst contracts of the Danny Ainge era, cashing in on an overrated and overexposed run with the Kidd-era Nets and the influence of the Brain Doctor run amok in Beantown. Nor was it his fault that both prior to and during the Garnett years he was the most visible white player in a period during which Boston basketball became first unprecedentedly black and then unprecedentedly black and successful, a crucial shift from the times when widespread fan carping about the selfishness, laziness or “immaturity” of Antoine Walker or Ricky Davis or Paul Pierce (yes, even Pierce) could be comfortably couched by the team’s actual mediocrity.
But how those “Scal-a-brin-e” chants at the Garden and countless barstool encomia to the redhead’s gritty determination still stick in the craw. I remember attending a Celtics game several years ago with an out-of-town friend who is not a basketball fan. The Celtics were blowing out their opponent and at some point in the fourth quarter Doc Rivers called Scalabrine off the bench and the place went ballistic, cheering like crazy every time he got the ball, sometimes booing when he didn’t. “Why are they doing that?” my friend asked. I shrugged it off but the answer floated between us, obvious and awkwardly unsaid: because he looks like them.
It sounds innocuous but it’s not, and most racisms aren’t much more complicated than deciding you like people who look like you more than you like people who don’t. In sports, and especially in Boston, this plays out in a perverse and deeply fucked-up narcissism, as white people in a predominantly white city talk themselves into believing that Larry Bird or Tom Brady or Curt Schilling are somehow reflections of them, which in turn makes it oh-so-easy to elide something as superficial and tangible as skin color to something as vague and subjective as “integrity” or “character.”
Of course, the crucial difference between Larry Bird and Brian Scalabrine is that Larry Bird was extraordinarily good at basketball, whereas Brian Scalabrine is one of the worst players in the NBA. Curiously this meant that the platitudes of work ethic and gritty determination were redoubled, and the imagining of Brian Scalabrine as lovably oppressed underdog took shape. At its core was some truth: Scalabrine did work hard, and more importantly, he appeared to work hard. Of course, the reason that he appeared to work so hard was that the game of basketball was quite difficult for him, and the reason it was quite difficult was because he sucked at it.
This wasn’t a leap many fans were willing to make, and it’s here that the underlying racism of the cult of Scalabrine was most nakedly revealed. If you watch any amount of Celtics basketball and come away with the impression that Brian Scalabrine works harder than Kevin Garnett—and rest assured, there are people who believe this—there are far deeper pathologies at work than simple stupidity (although that’s assuredly at work as well).
It’s important here to bear in mind that, aside from possibly sex, sports is the earliest sphere of American culture where a myth of innate white disadvantage began to take hold. This is revealed in recognizable if incoherent form as early as Jack Johnson, but I’d venture that by the 1970s (and probably earlier) the idea that black men were inherently blessed with more athletic gifts than white men had become more or less common currency. Of course, many white sports fans and commentators continue to cling fast to the notion that white athletes are more “cerebral,” but the fact is that the various narratives of white disadvantage that now circulate through the American right were initially rehearsed in sports. And many fans who prattle on about how “hard” Brian Scalabrine plays don’t like to have it pointed out that this is because he sucks at basketball; they prefer to believe, either deep down or disturbingly close to the surface, that Scalabrine works harder than his darker-skinned teammates because these teammates have an innate and effortless advantage.
In a sense Scalabrine was something of a bridge figure—he’d started his tenure in Boston when the team was nearly unwatchably bad, and he managed to stick around through the Garnett/Allen acquisitions and the revitalization of Celtics basketball. The fact that he did this as the token white guy isn’t insignificant, because being the token white guy on a bad team where you’re expected to contribute is qualitatively different than being the token white guy on a great team where you’re expected to stay on the bench at all costs: one is tragedy, the other farce, or something.
The lack of basketball expectations meant that Scalabrine essentially came to function only symbolically, as a sort of imaginary space where white fans could try to make sense of what it meant to emotionally invest themselves in an unmistakably black team that was also very, every good. There started to be a sort of faux-irony attached the chants that didn’t exactly help things, because let’s face it, Boston hasn’t exactly earned the right to be ironic about that shit.
Now Scalabrine is gone, or at least appears to be soon, and it would seem that his symbolic void will be filled by Luke Harangody, a scrappy white boy seemingly from central casting: burly, undersized, questionable athleticism, even the Notre Dame pedigree, trading one questionable Irish mascot for another. The catch is that Harangody might actually be—gasp—good; when the pick was announced I braced myself for snarky texts from Boston-hating friends (and oh, how they came) but as a fan I found myself excited. It was a great pick, reminiscent of the Leon Powe heist of a few years ago: Harangody had played four highly productive seasons in a power conference, generally a decent (and painfully obvious) barometer for a productive NBA career. All physical limitations aside, he knows how to play basketball, and while there’s an outside chance that a first-round project like Daniel Orton will end up a star, if I had to choose which one had the better chance at a solid eight to ten years in the league I’d go with Harangody, and you probably would as well.
So now we’re looking at a situation where Boston might have landed its first genuinely effective white player since—who? Dino Radja? Even the Croatian chain-smoker never really achieved full-on lunchpail status with the Boston palefaces. After years of pulling embarrassingly overenthusiastically for Brian Scalabrine because he was white and sucked, along comes Harangody, who’s white and who might not suck (emphasis on “might”): this could fuck up the whole storyline.
If Scalabrine was the face of a new post-Bird whiteness in Boston, where racial solidarity had to be reconciled with gross incompetence through stories fans told themselves to naturalize this incompetence, Harangody could be the new new whiteness, complicating the myth of difficulty by actually being good at basketball. What happens if Luke Harangody is Big Baby Davis, a not-great but exceedingly serviceable NBA player who fills a role on the basketball court instead of simply in a deeply symbolic racial imaginary? What happens when he’s corralling offensive rebounds and feeding Ray Allen on the perimeter rather than sharing garbage-time with the likes of Bill Walker and J.R. Giddens? What happens if Brian Scalabrine and Luke Harangody share nothing more similar than a highly chant-able, four-syllable last name?
The jury is out and I desperately want to be surprised, but I already wish I hadn’t drawn attention to that last part.
For those unfamiliar with J-Zone, there isn't a lot I can tell you that you can't find on his Wikipedia page: Producing for everyone from Biz Markie to the Lonely Island and E-40, dropping a string of classic albums, writing for Slam and for Dante Ross' website...The man played a seminal role in the (then-viable) independent hip-hop scene of the late 90s/early 2000s, rapping with as much personality as a young Eazy-E and cultivating "swag" before infants knew what swag was and consequently killed the term. He is perhaps best known for developing a distinct production style that follows in the tradition of Prince Paul, DJ Muggs, and Psycho Les, but is all his own. But beyond J-Zone's musical talents, he has also been a world-class tastemaker. His opinions on music, film, women, and fashion, have always been influential, and his hoops knowledge--which he often expounds upon on his must-check twitter feed--is critical. Zone was cool enough to give me his opinions on the recent NBA happenings, and what follows is our interview: Dr.Lawyer IndianChief: Why do you think that in the US, NBA basketball consistently been third in popularity behind the NFL and MLB for the past few years?
J-Zone: Because there haven't been characters in the NBA like they used to have. Basketball players are unbelievably bland and boring individuals. With the exception of Ron Artest, AI, Shaq and Delonte West, who is quote worthy? These dudes are 28 years old and all they talk about is playing X-Box and being a Drake fan. In baseball, you have Carlos Zambrano dismembering a Gatorade machine with a baseball bat, then have Pedro Martinez claiming he'd wake up the ghost of Babe Ruth and drill him in the ass, with a pitch. Then you have Pedro throwing old man Don Zimmer to the ground and watching him roll about 5 miles. Baseball players still have jheri curls, which is a great thing. Keyshawn Johnson gave the NFL some life when he left a voicemail to his exes new man saying “he as nothing but free time” to whup his ass. Entertainment. The NBA has lost so much of it because these dudes have zero personality. Dr. LIC: You've been pretty open on twitter about the Lebron situation and predicting he won't win a ring. Who do you think presents the biggest problem for the Heat? Do the Heat even make it out of the East? J-Zone: It's easy to say “we just wanna win”, and insinuate that there will be no ego issues. OK. That’s D-Wade’s team. Remember when everyone packed up and went to LA in 2004, only to get mopped by Detroit? Those guys weren’t on the same level as LeBron, Bosh and Wade in terms of individual star power, but everyone just gave em the chip after the trades went down. And now, teams will be anxious to whup Miami's ass after LeBron guaranteed a bunch of titles. Despite all that superstar talent, I still don't see them getting it done. I’d still want Wade to take the last shot too, and I can’t see LeBron rolling with that when the time comes. I'm curious to see if they can get past Boston or Orlando, let alone whoever comes out of the west.
Dr. LIC: What is Lebron's legacy now? If he does end up winning a ring, does he redeem himself? J-Zone: No. He's in a spot where he can't really win no matter how the chips fall. I don’t blame him for leaving Cleveland, but I thought just following the wave to Miami was a little weak. The difference in Jordan, Magic and Kobe -who I’m sure LeBron wants his name mentioned alongside- was they wanted to beat everyone, including their fellow superstars, with the help of one other key guy and a good supporting cast. Get some real help, but forming a dream team takes some of the fun out of it. I personally would’ve liked to see him in Chicago with Noah, Rose and Deng, but whatever. He’s fucked either way, it’s a Catch 22. If he wins, they’ll say he took the easy route and if he loses, he’ll be tagged as a bum. I’m sure he saw that going in though.
Dr. LIC: Any thoughts on LeBron thanking Akron, Ohio, but not Cleveland in his recent farewell newspaper ad? [Ed. note, this was before LeBron caved and thanked Cleveland in Akron]
J-Zone: Neither LeBron or Cleveland owe each other anything. Its like your first girlfriend, your whole social circle knows you as an item. But you reach a point where you hit a stalemate and break up before you marry. If the dude goes on TV and tells the world they’re breaking up before he tells the girl or if when shit goes wrong the girl tears him down, both are equally at fault. LeBron doing the whole ESPN thing was corny and arrogant in an unlikable way, but at the same time, grown ass men in Cleveland running around burning jerseys when they should’ve been at work or home with their kids is even stupider. It’s big business, players make moves all the time. If a 25 year old athlete is all your city has to be proud of, you’re in deep shit. Fuckouttahere. He leaves and the entire city nosedives? That‘s deep.
I knew he was outta there when the Cavs choked in the playoffs for the umpteenth time and they got booed crazy. And how many rings does LeBron have? Last time I checked, one, the one around his bathtub. So he, ESPN and everyone who felt indebted were all frontin. Only Kobe deserved that type of attention for a god damn trade and he probably wouldn‘t have even done that. Everyone involved was super corny. Unemployment is documented at 9%, and realistically its around 20%. At the time, oil was gushing into the Gulf. The amount of attention everyone gave that situation was disgusting. It warranted one day of headlines, no more. That shit was on the cover of the newspapers for a week straight. I thought Miami was a soft move, but at the same time this is a business. Fuckouttahere.
Dr. LIC: What are the Celtics trying to do stacking up old guys like Shaq and Jermaine O'Neal, following the signing of Rasheed Wallace last year?
J-Zone: Get endorsement deals with Ben-Gay and Motrin.
Dr. LIC: I know you've never been much of a Knicks fan, but for comparison sake, How can you contrast the D'Antoni style Knicks with Riley's Knicks with Van Gundy's Knicks, style-wise?
J-Zone: By their activities in May. Two of em are either still playing or explaining why they just lost. One of em has been done for over a month and is sampling D’Anillo Gallinari’s new summertime Cibatta bread.
Dr. LIC: Also, did you ever have any allegiance to the Knicks? If not, who did you follow growing up in NY? J-Zone: I used to like the Knicks, especially in 1991-92. That’s when Greg Anthony jumped off the bench in a Hawaiian shirt and got into a brawl. But believe it or not, I was always a Blazers fan. Clyde Drexler was my favorite player growing up. The 1992 finals when they played Chicago was when I gave up and finally gave Jordan his props as the best ever. You couldn’t tell me shit about the Portland Blazers. Clyde, Terry Porter, Cliff Robinson, they were fuckin legit. I knew I wasn’t a die hard Knicks fan when I was cracking up at Reggie Miller just killin em and throwing Spike the choker. I watched that shit live, and I was lovin every minute of it. I was rootin for Reggie because he had the balls to straight shit on the Garden. He left without crutches, so in that case, the Knicks deserved to lose. I would've broke his legs the way he shitted on us!
Dr. LIC: Does Amare Stoudemire offer the Knicks any improvement over last year?
J-Zone: No. Well, maybe if Steve Nash finds a way to join the Knicks.
Dr. LIC: How do you feel about Amare's well-publicized trip to Israel and his quest to find his spiritual roots in Judaism?
J-Zone: Hey whatever makes the man happy, that’s his personal life.
Dr. LIC: What happened to Allen Iverson?
J-Zone: He’s probably back in the studio to do a part two to “40 Bars” and doing an album with T-Pain. Now that he’s out of the league, David Stern won’t care. I respect AI but he's the NBA's greatest all-time 21 player.
Dr. LIC: What has to happen for the Knicks to go .500 or better this year?
J-Zone: A whole lot of forfeits in the Atlantic division.
Dr. LIC: Any thoughts on the Nets moving to Brooklyn?
J-Zone: As much as downtown Brooklyn has been gentrified in recent years, the Nets’ audience will be primarily comprised of Idaho natives that are thrilled to be in the hometown of that Jay-Z guy.
Dr. LIC: Ron Artest or Lamar Odom? Who do you roll with?
J-Zone: Artest all day! They’re both from Queens, Ron is from Queensbridge and Odom is from Jamaica. Odom grew up not too far from me, I live in Jamaica. But marrying a Kardashian is not hip-hop. Thanking your psychiatrist after winning a title is very hip-hop. Ron-Ron all fuckin day.
Dr. LIC: Any other predictions for this season?
J-Zone: Delonte West will get caught on a Harley hiding a 22 in the bell of a sousaphone. That's my main man though, and my twin!
In the inverse spirit of the Black-comedy-as-penned-by-a-Jew (most recently typified in Neil Berman’s appearance on I Know Black People) and Jews-writing-about-Asians (um, Flower Drum Song?) we present Robert Levertis-Bell (not a Jew) and Jay Caspian Kang (not a Jew) and their feature film treatments of the Amar'e Stoudemire (not a Jew?) pilgrimage. Follow the not-Jews on twitter at @thatkidicarus (Robert) and @maxpower51 (Jay).
There is also a contest! Anyone who wishes to film a scene from either Robert or Jay’s screenplays can submit it to freedarko-at-gmail-dot-com. Don’t worry about racial or religious accuracy—we can all suspend our disbelief, at least that much. The winner will receive a free copy of both FreeDarko books: The Macrophenomal Pro Basketball Almanac and the upcoming Undisputed Guide to Basketball History. These best of the best will also have their work featured on this very site!!!
Furthermore, you should check out Shoals and Spencer Hall on FDPTDOCNBAPC, and consider getting in touch with FD about app development.
THE ALL STARS OF DAVID a romantic comedy by Jay Caspian Kang.
After missing a last-second lay-up that would have won the Knicks their first NBA championship in over forty years, twenty-nine year old DAVID PERCY (Chris Webber) drinks away his sorrows at Scores. When we first meet him, it is five in the morning. At a floura-lit table near the back, the strippers are stacking their singles. His teammates are nowhere to be seen. After being told by a bouncer that closing time has long since passed, Percy, a notorious carouser and serial womanizer, takes out his cell phone, punches in a long-forgotten number and leaves a weepy, drunken message.
The next afternoon, Percy wakes up and listens to his voice mail. Along with the expected consolations from his agent, his manager, and Knicks team-owner-and-former-President-Barack Obama, there is a message from a timid woman. She says she watched the game and wonders if he is doing okay. This woman is EVE KEDEM (Marissa Tomei), Percy's girlfriend from college who he dumped on draft night. Convinced that the material world was to blame for the cessation of their love, Eve rediscovered her Hasidic Jewish roots and moved out to Long Island.
The two meet in a diner under an ugly bridge. Eve listens to Percy talk about his growing disillusionment. He says, "It used to be about the love of the game, you know, back when we were a thing. But now, it's just about me, about my need to be great. What I realized last night in that strip club is that I don't love the game anymore. I only love what the game does for me." He confesses that he envies Eve and the peace her devotion to G-d has brought. She almost-touches his head and says, "men like you always seek out comfort from old girlfriends because you want to remember that even before you became you, that there was something worth loving."
Then she looks him straight in the eyes, does that Marissa Tomei squint-thing, and says, "There was something to love, Percy. But it's been too long for me to know if that something is still there."
What follows is a montage of Percy in famous New York spots: eating corn outside Cafe Habana, drinks w/ Jay-Z at 40/40, at various nightclubs w/ NBA stars KEVIN DURANT, RAY ALLEN, DWIGHT HOWARD and YAO MING. In each shot, Percy's mood is pensive, reflective. His hand is frequently in contact with his chin, which, as we know, is C-Webb’s go-to move when he wants to look pensive. When the montage spills out, Percy is sitting with JALEN ROSE at Katz's Deli. He is looking up at the sign that points out the exact spot where Meg Ryan faked her orgasm. After a hazy moment of reverie, he bolts upright and runs out of the deli, leaving behind a confused Jalen Rose and a very large non-Kosher reuben.
Outside, he pulls out his cell phone and demands Eve come meet him back at that diner under that ugly bridge. She says yes. At the diner, the two sloppily confess their love for one another and say some stuff about remembrance. Percy blurts out a marriage proposal. Eve goes cold. She says that she can only marry someone who is Jewish. Percy says he will convert. Eve shakes her head and says that the new young Rabbi at her synagogue has strictly forbidden marriage with outsiders. To be even considered, Percy must be able to prove that he can trace his bloodline back to Moses on Mount Sinai. Percy erupts at the news and the two have a long, serious discussion about racism and religion.
Crestfallen, Percy returns to his hedonistic ways. Chris Isaak’s "Wicked Game" plays in the background. The NBA season starts and he plays terribly. TV sports personalities (SKIP BAYLESS, JIM ROME, MICHAEL WILBON) all wonder if the great David Percy might still be shell-shocked from missing that lay-up. The team's leadership begins to shift over to TONY STAPLETON (Tristan Wilds). After a particularly bad game against the Celtics, Percy gets drunk at a nightclub and calls his mother. He explains what has happened with Eve.
The next morning, he wakes to the buzzing of his phone. It is his mother. She reminds him that it is important to be yourself, but that yourself is never exactly what we think it is. Sometimes, she says, yourself is what yourself was and its important to understand that that was has never left, but has simply been sitting patiently for us to notice its absence. She says she will always love Jesus, but that she has always known that Percy has only ever been able to love Eve. Devotion and faith, she says, means doing what it takes to properly love who you love.
Percy touches his chin and purses his lips, grimly.
The next morning, Percy drives out to Long Island and meets with the new young Rabbi (TAMIR GOODMAN). He demands a chance to convert. The rabbi is hesitant, but when Percy refuses to leave his office, the rabbi sees the good in him and asks, "Why do you want to do this, my son?" Percy sets his jaw and says, "Love." The Rabbi nods and sighs. He says, "I was in love once..." and tells a story about a girl he once knew. He agrees, but under one condition-- Percy must walk the straight-and-narrow. One slip-up and the education will end.
Percy moves into a humble one-room apartment above a pickle shop. Everything smells of brine. He lays down on the short couch and takes it in.
Montage 2: Percy getting fitted for a wool suit, Percy learning the Hebrew alphabet, Percy and Eve walking in Central Park hand-not-in-hand, a laughing Percy playing pick-up hoops with a group of Hasidic kids, Percy pulling down the hair around his temples, imagining the sidelocks of his future, a shot of Jim Rome saying that Percy David's shot selection has become more economical, clips of Jay Mariotti making military metaphors about Percy's refusal to play on Saturdays, Percy at the bar with his teammates with a glass of grape juice, Percy playing chess with the Rabbi, Percy at Second Avenue Deli with Eve-- this time he opens up a corned beef sandwich to reveal the absence of cheese, Percy appreciating half-sour pickles, Percy putting the “chhhhhhuuuh” in "chutzpah." Spliced in all these scenes are short clips of Percy scoring all over the league and bonding with his teammates. We see his play progress. We see the Knicks make the finals.
Game 7 of the NBA Finals is scheduled for a Saturday. His teammates who, strangely enough, have just kind of overlooked the montaged Saturdays of the season, plead with Percy to play. He does not know what to do. In the locker room, Tony Stapleton sidles up next to Percy and tells him that when he was growing up, Percy David was his hero because he played basketball like it was a religion. The respect he showed for the game, the heart he showed on the nightly—all of it was the closest thing the young Tony had to church.
Backed by the opening bars to Ghostface's "All that I Got Is You," Stapleton says, "It's hard sometimes, man, to see God in the neighborhoods where we grew up. You look and he isn't there. At least not always and so you look harder and then you see him, man, in what you've always loved. When I was coming up, man, I saw that in your game. Take us to that next level, man. Make up for the past. Write the resurrection for your career. This is Easter, man, this is our reckoning day."
Conflicted, Percy visits the Rabbi. The Rabbi says that he agrees with young Tony Stapelton—God exposes himself in all the things we love, but devotion to what we love is always honed through discipline. He reminds Percy of all the days he spent practicing free throws, all the parties he skipped, all the sweat and blood lost in the gym. If Percy is to love G-d, the Rabbi says, he must abide by his rules. But, he says, our only freedom in this world is our freedom to point our heart in whatever direction we choose. He tells Percy that because he, the Rabbi, has chosen to point his heart towards G-d, he will not be able to tolerate Percy's decision to work on a Saturday and that if he does indeed play, his Jewish education will end.
Percy returns to the apartment above the pickle shop and lies back down on the couch. He calls Eve. She tells him about the moment when she first fell in love with him—it was their sophomore year at Tech U. Her boyfriend-at-the-time had dragged her to see a game. In front of the adoring crowd, Percy dropped 45 points against Duke and even though ESPN was there and the cameras were on and the game was close throughout, he played the entire game with a C-Webb smile on his face. She had never seen a man so blessed-- who else, but basketball players, bring so much joy to people through a beautiful act? How could that ever be called work?
A look of great, epiphanic relief falls over Percy's face. He calls Tony Stapelton and tells him he'll be playing in Game 7. He then calls his COACH (Chad Coleman) and tells him that he will not be collecting a check for the game.
The Garden is packed for Game 7. Percy, smiling the entire time, drops 50 on the Lakers, but he is matched by an equally spry and thinly disguised Kobe Bryant-type named SEAN FLASH (Sean Combs). With time running out, the Knicks find themselves down by 2. The Coach draws up a play for Percy. In the huddle, Tony Stapleton says, "we got one shot, we got one chance here, let's go one time!" He turns to Percy and says, "One love, one love." Percy shakes his head, smiles, and holds up three fingers. He says, "Three loves."
The ball is inbounded, Percy, in super-slow motion, catches it, fakes twice, steps behind the three point line and drains a three. The Garden erupts.
His teammates mob him. He holds up three fingers as he is carried off the court.
EPILOGUE: As the credits roll, under the watchful eye of the Rabbi, Eve and Percy stomp on the glass and everyone yells Mazel Tov!
Then, the horah.
MESHUGGAH Feature Film Treatment Robert Levertis-Bell
ACT ONE:
The film opens on a basketball game in progress, the St. Louis Canucks at the New York Knights. MARK JACKSON, STAN VAN GUNDY, and MIKE BREEN are announcing. It's in the fourth quarter with only a minute to go. The Canucks are up 97-72. DON NELSON is standing the Canucks sideline, he's yelling at the court, hammering with roll of paper. One might think he was overdoing the pantomime as a manner of contradicting reports that this was, indeed, his final game as an NBF coach. MESHUGGAH SMITH (Mehcad Brooks) is playing for the Canucks, the camera follows him as the announcers wrap up the game:
BREEN: The clock is winding down in this final regular season game for these two middle-of-the-pack teams. Neither will make the playoffs and the game is completely meaningless…
VAN GUNDY (interrupting): But what about Meshugga Smith?! Nobody told him this game was meaningless.
JACKSON: 55 points?! Are you kidding me? Mama there goes that man!
BREEN: Yes, a phenomenal night, but still a disappointing season by Meshuggah Smith—whose off-court issues are very well-known. And, even despite this great performance here in New York, you have to wonder if Meshuggah will find a team this summer in free agency.
VAN GUNDY: Absolutely, a player of his calib...
Zap. We pull out from a television inside a luxury box in the same arena. Inside, the Russian oligarch SERGEI BAZAROV (Vladimir Cuk) and PAUL MCCARTNEY (Ricky Gervais) are sitting with the Knights' current majority owner DANIEL GREEN (Paul Lieberstein) and his financial advisor DIPESH CHATTERJEE (Aasif Mandvi). The foreigners have offered Green a staggering $2 Billion to purchase the New York Knights, one of the most storied franchises in professional basketball history, in order to relocate the team to London. They wish to create, in the British Knights, the Old Country’s sole representative in the National Basketball Federation, and a singular magnet for European talent from Ljubljana to Buenos Aires. Green and Chatterjee are very receptive to the offer as they have recently lost their shirts building an as yet unoccupied office park with money embezzled from the Knights.
They are especially skittish as Knights employee, MINDY ROSEN (Bar Refaeli), has started to ask questions about missing funds and Green and Chatterjee are eager to cover up their crime. However, they inform Bazarov and McCartney that, though they wish to sell, the team is far too beloved by the people of New York — especially the black and Jewish fans — and by the league’s commissioner to ever allow such an important team to leave the city. Bazarov replies that he has already witnessed, over the years, that Green has a knack for mismanagement and squandering the good will of Knights fans. He and McCartney can wait a year. McCartney asks Dipesh and Green: “Do you think you can turn the city and the commissioner against the team enough to allow the sale in a single year?” “Yes,” they reply in unison.
Meshuggah in street clothes visiting his MOTHER (Khandi Alexander, with a green wig) at the hospital. She is dying of breast cancer and is lying on the bed while Meshuggah and his fiancé ASHA (Kat Stacks) argue over the remote. She wants to watch the playoffs, he wants to watch Life is Beautiful. They switch back and forth between the NBF Finals and the film and they don’t notice at first that his mother is calling him to her side. They finally hear her summons just as the television switches for the last time to the NBA Finals. He rushes to her bed.
“I have to tell you something, Meshuggah…” “What is it mom?” “It’s about who you are, who we are, something I’ve never told you before and that you’ve never guessed…” “OK?” “Something that will change everything about the way you live from now on…” “Mama, what is it?” He leans in and listens. His eyes widen. “You’re Jewish!”
His mother flatlines… “Beeeeeeep.” His mom expires and when he looks up, he sees his arch nemesis PRINCE HALL (Carlos Boozer) score the championship winning shot over RON ARTEST in order to lead the San Diego Wolverines to the championship. Hall’s teammates mob him. Green and Chatterjee in their office brainstorming what they can do to alienate their fans and the commissioner so they can sell the team. They could field successively worse basketball teams. Tried it and the fans still show up. They could engineer an embarrassing sex scandal that affects both players and management. Tried it and the fans still show up. Something will come up, surely, Green announces and turns on his television, on which is Meshugga at a press conference on ESPN, wearing a yarmulke. He’s announcing that his mother told him that he’s a Jew on her deathbed and that he would from now on be living a Jewish life. “I think I got it,” Dipesh announces.
ACT TWO:
Green forces his GM, FRANK FRANCIS (Idris Elba, with an American accent) to sign Meshuggah Smith to a max one year contract. Posey is beside himself — Meshuggah is a notoriously bad teammate, won’t fit the offense, and is a known “headcase” — “remember that time he was arrested for using a Colt .45 on the Whack-a-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese?” — and is in the midst of a bunch of bad press for the bizarre claim that he’s Jewish. “Sign him or resign,” Green says. “Fine.”
Believing Meshuggah to be a member of one of the problematic Black Hebrew sects, who believe that blacks are "the real Jews," the plan is to encourage Meshuggah incite New York’s racial hostilities by making a public show of his “Jewish” identity while alienating the city’s “real” Jews. In the beginning, the whole thing works, Meshuggah makes a host of disastrous public comments, including one on the eve of his visit to the Western Wall. Asha is very skeptical of the whole enterprise and leaves him. The season starts and soon the team is attracting heat from the JDL and from an anti-Semitic black group headed by FAROUK SHAHAD (Wyatt Cenac) as Meshuggah very publicly “learns to be Jewish,” under Green’s tutorship.
On ESPN, with JIM ROME, Meshuggah announces that he’s been “learning Hebrew… making bagels…. doing standup comedy… and learning to balance his checkbook,” all things Green has told him to say. After this, the Post and Daily News let him have it. The Knights Arena has hordes of protesters outside but hardly anyone inside. Meshuggah, for his part is distraught over the whole thing but Green reminds him of the noble truths of Judaism: “life is suffering and that suffering comes from attachment — you have to let go, Meshuggah and walk your own path, who cares what the fans say, shake them Nazis off. Shalom!” Meshuggah gives another interview to ESPN, this time very stridently denouncing any and all critics as haters including the girl who he thought loved him, but left him because she was jealous of his faith.
After hearing this, Asha returns to confront Meshuggah. She tells him that she’s done some background checks and Green isn’t even himself Jewish — turns out that there are people with that name that aren’t Jewish — and he’s been getting a fake Jewish education all along. Meshuggah is distraught but it only makes his faith stronger, and he’s glad to have Asha back. He feels guilty for falling victim to the ruse but he can now focus on basketball.
ACT THREE:
The Knights begin to win games and the whole plan begins to backfire. Meshuggah’s conversion continues, in good faith now with Asha (a Catholic who clutches rosary beads during close ball games) and his new buddies JASON SCHWARTZMAN and OMRI CASSPI at his side. The Knights make the playoffs and Meshuggah-fever sweeps New York City. Fans leave the picket lines to enter the arena. When they return, the fans sport celebratory clip-on payos and hats and chant for the team in Yiddish. Black-Jewish relations (cf. Jeffrey Melnick) are at an all-time high in New York. Reconciliation montage: There’s a sign on the door of Sylvia’s that says “now 100% kosher!” The Post and Daily News are back on their side.
Meanwhile, the old and potential ownership groups get desperate and start trying, and failing, to astroturf a race war, even going so far as to anonymously funnel money and guns to Farouk Shahad, who stays in front of the arena with rifles and a megaphone denouncing Meshuggah as an affront to the black race. But when the Knights make the Finals, Shahad switches his tune “Meshuggah Smith should be at THE FRONT of the black race. Mazel Tov, my brother!” Frank, the GM, asks Mindy, the Knights employee, whether she’s sure she did the right thing; she says yes and they kiss. “I support you always,” Frank says to Mindy. “I support you always,” Asha says to Meshuggah.
The Finals come and Meshuggah ends up with a perfectly balanced stat sheet—“Just like his checkbook!” Jeff Van Gundy jokes. When he scores the series winning shot, over Prince Hall, the arena erupts into a round of “Hava Nagila.” As everyone is celebrating, the FBI show up to Green’s luxury box and haul off Dipesh and Green in cuffs. Paul McCartney looks at Bazarov, who’s looking down, and says “Oy Vey!”
Final scene: Meshuggah and Asha get married in a Jewish ceremony at Rucker Park. Those in attendance include Tamir Goodman, Larry Brown, and Jordan Farmar.
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