Abjection At The Speed Of Sound

Just listen to the music, man. It is kind of like Tony Conrad, but not, and also kind of like I thought Coltrane was when all I did was read about him. It's also reasonably pertinent to this quick bit of posting I have to take care of on these parts.

Because Twitter has gone altogether useless, and there's no such thing as having weighed in recently enough, or collective memory, or any kind of cleanser that doesn't involve a roof and flames, here are my weekend's Big Basketball Stories: Tracy McGrady and Derrick Rose. T-Mac, longtime FD favorite (for you, McGrady, I would throw Vince Carter under a thousand buses), and Derrick Rose, a player-in-process on a very good team. Oh, and once upon a time, I put forth a challenge to Rose, and now a city wants to burn me and throw me into brine because of it. At the Sloan Conference for Fighting Your Family, McGrady was unmasked by former GM Daryl Morey and coach Jeff Van Gundy as the equivalent of Sports Betting gone bad. You can read the low-down here, courtesy of Dan Devine, but I just had to jump in the mix (if I hadn't enough already, via more immediate forms of communication).

Dan ended his report from the panel with a WTF DUDEZ—as in, there seemed to be a certain amount of willful panel blindness to how great McGrady was when he was on. Zach Lowe also gave us a glimpse at just how advanced T-Mac could get when things were going his way. My problem? McGrady's career wasn't that of Stromile Swift or Tyrus Thomas; his injuries were of the more vague, debilitating variety; there was obviously a psychological aspect to his rise, fall, rise, fall, and fall fall again that defied an easy "he had it all and blew it" narrative. If McGrady was the NBA's Natural, we should not bemoan his lack of worth ethic or practice hours—lots of players are lazy-ish, and last I checked, Bill Russell was the king of hoops, and he hated to run around empty gyms—but acknowledge his career for what it was: an experience, for him and us, at once flawed and mystical. There was no reason for McGrady to have been as good as he was, as advanced, especially if he tried so little and failed to show the discipline of, say, Chuck Hayes or Shane Battier.

McGrady wasn't just bigger, stronger, faster, or more athletic. He felt and moved through the game like few before or since. You want to discard that because Gladwell told you to? In front of a bunch of writers? Fine, I guess. Just don't pretend that there's not a host of biases, or even limitations, brought in by the panelists, or that anyone (including McGrady) will ever be happy with how it all turned out. Malcolm Gladwell furnished a magic number, Jeff Van Gundy brought his own wildly particular views about how basketball, and basketball teams, should work to the table, and Morey also has an agenda—however secretive—that he brings to this kind of player assessment. Could McGrady have been better, played longer? Yes, but he paid dues in Toronto, and was effectively falling apart by the time he arrived in Houston. Was it all practice? I should stop asking so many questions before I get too many answers in return. To me, McGrady will remain a tragic figure, perhaps one of his own making. But to use him as a poster child for wasted potential is like lamenting ... fuck it, go see that Woodmans documentary. No, not the Kevin Bacon molesting kids one.

There's a way, though, to have both lived up to the hype while still falling victim to it. The holes are far less important than having gotten there at all; the ending seems all but inevitable, and not because there just wasn't enough elbow grease involved. For what it's worth, LeBron James seems far more worthy of these criticisms than McGrady. Already a far better player, to be sure, any way you want to measure it. And yet T-Mac always seemed fully comfortable in his own skin—that is, for those few seasons when everything was intact. LeBron still has way too many "if only" moments. That's the value of practice. McGrady? I don't know, would practice have exorcised his demons, cleaned up his injuries, and allowed him to get his head into the game again. Born to lose, I guess. Piece of shit, fabulous performer, both at once. If he need a book title, I will be spending all morning smashing those two phrases together in tight proximity.

***

If you would like me to compare Derrick Rose and T-Mac, do so yourself. Rose works his ass off, I will say this, and when a team forces him to show that aspect of his game—resourceful, indomitable, and fearless without sacrificing a bit of dynamism—all my previous criticisms fall away. I don't like it when the game is too easy for anyone. Otherwise, for the viewer without a particular-colored bit of cloth wrapped round his face, the game can stagnate. You may be familiar with that time I bemoaned, in order 1) the classification of Rose as a true point guard by the national media; 2) the unreasonable example he set for more limited scoring guards like [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and some other thing that I probably didn't say but made people angry anyway. Oh, I said that I wanted Rose to turn into Dwyane Wade. Sunday's game made me happy, and sorry, I'm not jumping on the bandwagon. It was brilliant basketball, where a player was substantially challenged and thus had to fight for his comfort zone, or pull off nearly impossible feats of toughness and flight to get the two that usually comes so easy to him. Even that playmaking stuff ... Rose showed that, somewhere between trying to run an offense and dishing at the last-second, he can set the table for others without leaving them on pins and needles.

The "Fuck You Bethlehem Shoals" game against the Spurs was fun, but Chicago's win over those pussy-dicked Heat weasels was everything I had ever hoped to see from Rose. I could care less whether you think I'm back-pedaling, or should have been here all along. Players met with obstacles are either spurred to new heights or fall flat. Practice hours aside, and for now, ignoring the "loser" tag, what made McGrady great and infuriating is that he was either in that zone, or practically moribund. For Rose, it's a next gear, or a plateau, or some other cliche having to do with man-sports and engines. Given the way this season, and his career, are going, I fully expect Rose to look much different in 2011-12 than in this MVP candidate campaign. That's a wowzer, isn't it?

Really, what I want someone to do is bury me for viewing Rose through a lens of pure aesthetics. Why no attack, or at least conclusions about, his personality, motivations, etc? The Rose-as-robot trope is nothing new in Chicago, nor is it particularly interesting. It doesn't seem to have warped him like it did Kobe, in large part because Kobe was a stormy individual who decided that inhumanity was the way to go, like Buddhist retreats for pill heads. Maybe I'm just not ready to read deeper, or between the lines, with Rose. But with that, though, comes an understanding that I'm still expecting him to go higher and higher as a basketball player. Is that grouchy and mean to a city in need? I guess. But I remember Tracy McGrady. It's the very least that this young Bulls guard, and a team seemingly built for long-term success, could do for us all.

FD Bigger Than Life

For All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, the folks at UNDEFEATED commissioned our very own Jacob Weinstein to do an artistic interpretation of the Blake Griffin Experience. Look for it above the Undefeated store on La Brea if you're in LA. If not, cop the print, in one of three colorways, at the newly re-opened FreeDarko Imperial Outlet. Buy some other stuff, too!

A few links:

-If you haven't already, take a look at GQ's Guide to the New NBA Golden Age. Yours truly files a feature on the Thunder, the result of a ten-day stay in OKC; there are also contributions from Eric Freeman, Billups, and oh yeah, more Jacob art. That Thunder illo should be available for sale down the line.

-Maybe you heard, I wrote a little something about why I don't enjoy watching Derrick Rose. Yes, I saw last night's game, and yes, a lot of it was awesome to me. So we're making progress. Really, it's comes down to whether we have to jock every good basketball player just because they're good, or whether we're allowed to have preferences and ... taste!

-Check out Yago Colas's piece from yesterday on teaching the seventies Knicks to the kids.

-Eric and I with some mind-altering predictions regarding this weekend.

Dream Week: Over the Mansion of Knowledge

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will be officially released on October 26, but the celebration is beginning early. Inspired, and curated, by Brian Phillips of Run of Play, DREAM WEEK features some of your fastest and most favorite writers trying to crack the mystery of Hakeem Olajuwon and his Rockets.

Bomani Jones is the host of "The Morning Jones" on The Score on Sirius Channel 98, a contributor to ESPN.com's Page 2, and occasional talking head. After years of writing on sports, music, culture and politics, Bomani has served as an on-air personality since January 2008 and joined The Score in 2010. You can follow him on Twitter.

Before I start, let me stipulate that Michael Jordan is the best. Any time you talk about '80s and '90s basketball, you've got to say that first, like saying you're saved in front of a church. Otherwise, they'll think you're a heathen.

Especially when you plan to say something that maybe, just maybe, will come across as blasphemous.



Here it goes: forgive me, but can we please stop saying the Bulls would have won eight championships in a row had Jordan not retired in 1993?

For one, it discounts the tenuous nature of the basketball universe, how one change can throw everything out of whack. And, how after three full postseasons in a row and an Olympic run, even a superhero might get hurt.

Then there's the big part--have you ever heard of Hakeem Olajuwon?

It was he that was drafted No. 1 in the 1984 Draft and, unlike Sam Bowie, he didn't come with the lingering regret of passing on Jordan. It was Olajuwon that got his team to the NBA Finals in his second season, five seasons before Jordan finally conquered the Pistons.

And more importantly, he was the dominant center of his era, the best in an era that featured five Hall of Fame (or soon-to-be Hall of Fame) centers in or entering their primes. Of of them, he was the most singular. He was a power forward with quickness wings would kill for and a presence traditional pivots couldn't match. He controlled the lane at a shade under 6-10, and his repertoire of post moves made him just as unstoppable as Jordan (either you're unstoppable or you're not; there are no degrees).

Jordan vs. Olajuwon is the forgotten “what if.” What if the Bulls had to deal with a top notch center in the NBA Finals, which they never had to do in their six runs? What if Bill Cartwright and Horace Grant had to deal with a dynamic center, rather than a top-notch yeoman like Patrick Ewing? What if Olajuwon, as prideful and vindictive as Jordan, had a chance to exact a series worth of revenge against the team that broke his orbital bone three years prior?



We don't ask those because Michael Jordan would never lose a series. Maybe he wouldn't, but if any team could have slain the juggernaut, it was the nondescript outfit that won the '94 championship in Jordan's absence. I could point to the Rockets' record against the Bulls in the '90s, better than any other team's. Or I could point to the mercurial insanity of Vernon Maxwell, which assured that at least one person in the building wasn't scared, a stark contrast to the perpetual echo of Dan Majerle calling for help in the '93 Finals while Jordan put up over 40 points per game.

But the real answer stood in the middle. Olajuwon was just as averse to losing as Jordan and, more importantly, just as intense and singular on the floor. Undersized centers don't lead the NBA in rebounding twice or put up 12 consecutive 20-10 seasons without those qualities. The same fuel that pushed Jordan to carry the Bulls to immortality helped turn Dream from the league's biggest hothead--notorious for telling referees to “suck his d*ck” when he didn't like a call in his early days--to an unstoppable force. As no team had an answer for Jordan, the Bulls had none for Dream, other than the point of Cartwright's elbows.

For all his greatness, the only thing Jordan could do to help stop Olajuwon would be to leave a shooter wide open for 3. That was the trade team after team made against the Rockets, and it didn't work out well enough for any of them. What could a 6-6 guard do to counteract the Dream Shake? What could he do to bring out the man in Grant, who was too scared to consider shooting on the Bulls' last possession in the '93 Finals (he threw that hot potato to John Paxson)?

Is this convincing? It probably won't be. I could break out a computer simulation, and you wouldn't believe that, either, and that's the difficulty of playing the “what if” game on something like this. However, considering no one has won four straight NBA titles since 1966, the presumption of another ring for Chicago doesn't make sense. The '93 title team wasn't as good as the previous two, and it couldn't win home-court advantage in the East, let alone the NBA Finals (which they did not have in the '98 NBA Finals, either). The wear and tear of playing over 100 basketball games per season was enough to creep up on any team.



The end result of that conclusion, however, is a devaluation of Olajuwon. He was the second-best player of his time, behind Jordan. But Jordan sucks so much air out of the room that few even bother to think about who comes behind him. There's His Airness, then there's everything else, and those things that happened without Jordan in the house didn't matter.

Including two championships.

I've never been able to figure out exactly how that works. Does the Sixers' fo-fo-fo title count because Jordan was still in Chapel Hill? Do Tim Duncan's first and the first two Shaq/Kobe titles count since Jordan was taking a break? Hell, what about Kobe's fifth?

From what I can tell, only Dream's rings lack that luster. Only they come with an asterisk, even more so than the Spurs' lockout league title. As a result, Dream loses luster. Who gets less credit for back-to-back titles with matching Finals MVPs? What other center was the best of his time and somehow gets forgotten when listing the best of the best of his time, let alone all-time? And what player ever had that damn Shake, a junkballer's arsenal coming at 95 miles per hour?

But just as Jordan never won a title over a great big man, the great big man never even got a chance against the greatest on the biggest stage. Had he, perhaps these questions go away. Maybe a weary Bulls team would fall to the Rockets (or maybe even the Knicks), leaving Dream to give high-fives under confetti as Jordan walked off with his head down for the first time since 1990.



But as long as these questions linger, Olajuwon remains underrated. His accomplishments look great on his resume, but mean nothing in our memories. The title is the holy grail, and his are the only ones widely believed to not count because that other guy was Michael Jordan.

Well, this guy was Hakeem Olajuwon, and that meant more than any foe Jordan faced. And no matter what your memory says, that counted for a helluva lot.

This Radio is On Fire

To start this episode, Ken and Dan provide some suggestions on how NBA fans can pass the month of March, and talk about Michael Jordan buying the Bobcats.

They are then joined by the new lead blogger at Yahoo!'s Ball Don't Lie, Trey Kerby. They talk a bit about his new job, and how he plans to keep the awesomeness rolling there at BDL.

They also talk about the Bulls, the greatness of Michael Jordan as a player, and come up with a new movie idea starring some unexpected NBA stars. In the process, they come up with a new phrase that they hope you'll all use from now on.

Really, it's your perfect post-trade-deadline, pre-playoffs, 20-games-left-in-the-season, early March NBA podcast. You can't not go wrong!

Be careful, it's hot:

Songs from the episode:

"I Got A Thing, You Got A Thing, Everybody Got A Thing" - Funkadelic
"The New" - J Dilla
"I'm New Here" - Gil-Scott Heron
"Greatest Man Alive (Man's Game Mix)" -Steinski
"One Two" - Cool Kids
"New Frontier" - Antipop Consortium
"Take A Rest" - Gang Starr

Noisy Grabbers

Okay, we know the segment last episode with Josh Levin had some audio issues. We decided that the best thing to do was have him back on the show, in our first ever Make-Up Call. Ken joins in this time. New Orleans and the Hornets are discussed.



Ken and Dan also talk amongst themselves in regards to various excellent things other people wrote, such as this piece by Howard Beck in the NY Times, this post by Seth at Posting and Toasting, this one by Kelly Dwyer at Ball Don’t Lie, and this from Shoals at Fanhouse. Plus, a new twist on one of our segments, using the Pro Basketball Prospectus.

It all sounds normal. The audio part, if not the topics of conversation or the participants in said conversation.

Songs from the episode:

“Re-Ignition” - Bad Brains
“Once Again (Here To Kick One For You)” - Handsome Boy Modeling School
“Whatever” - Husker Du
“If You Don’t Get It The First Time, Back Up and Try It Again, Party” - Fred Wesley and the J.B.’s
“Another Batch (Play It Again)” - Madlib
“Never See Me Again” - Vivian Girls
“Try Again” - Big Star

Subscribe via iTunes, whydontya?

How Dew U Wan Tit?

Seriously, fuck Lost. Go to the doctor. Read my ultimate Gil outpouring.

The Gift of Metric Tons

I'm trying to think about comparatively huge moments in NBA history since FD's inception. For Kobe's 81, we went with a visual pun; there may or may not have been paeans to offer, or perhaps that was just the easiest way to avoid some bullshit "did it matter" debate. LeBron's murder of Detroit prompted a treatise on divinity's arrival. The Warriors upset of the Mavs had all sorts of ideological implications, at least for this site. I would provide links for all of this, but I barely have the wherewithal to type this much. Because at the end of the day, that game last night wasn't about one team vs. another, or individual players defining themselves. It was a long, varied, contradictory, increasingly strange and improbable, and then at the end, almost aimlessly miraculous series of basketball tableaux.

Early on, I was wrestling with my inability to criticize Rondo, from the wild foul at the end of Game Five right through the Hinrich assault. By the end, I'd forgotten all about him, and what seemed to matter most was Tyrus Thomas and Joakim Noah lighting the way to the future as much, if not more, than Derrick Rose had since the first half. And then there was Rose with that block, as iconic a play (and call) as I've ever seen (and heard)—an instant snapshot that set up his rivalry with Rondo way more than dueling stats ever could. In between, you had a stretch of Ray Allen, king, and then John Salmons, the possessed. This was the kind of game that defied narrative, at least the linear kind that works best with sports. What are the talking points? The conclusions to draw? All I know is that, when Rose sent that ball back at Rondo, the dynamic between the two was about so much more, and less, then their respective stories. Or even one team refusing to lose, as Rose put it. That, my friends, is basketball refusing to die, which leads it to contort, exploit, and transcend itself like the history of life on Earth.

Leave the tall tales to mankind. This was about a kind of gnashing, terrible, and magical story that's best explained by Darwin or a particle accelerator. For one day, FreeDarko respectfully, and necessarily, will pass the buck to men less tawdry than ourselves. If such a student of basketball does exist.



A couple other things:

-If you want to catch our most raw (pure?) live-blog ever, visit the Twitter record from last night.

-Another epic looms on the sports horizon: Boxiana has been exhaustively surveying this weekend's Pacquiao/Hatten fight. Here's part three; you are also advised to check out its predecessors. Seriously, I only know about three boxers, and this stuff has me considering dropping coin for this fight.

-Not to scare or shock you, but this might be the end of FD as we know it. I can't get into details quite yet, but in the very near future I will be getting a whole lot more busy. Also, this is my fifth season, and playoffs, writing about the NBA on FreeDarko. That's not to say that I'm out of ideas, or that new reasons to blurt out don't regularly present themselves. But I've got my favorites, my preferences, my blind spots, my theories. Intellectually, I would like to open up this space a little more—and keep a high level of content going, since I don't want to either spread myself thin or too often turn into a pale imitation of myself. In the past, we've had some remarkable guest lectures, from the likes of Dan Hopper, Matthew Yglesias, Brian Phillips, and The Dugout. That's also where we first convinced Tom Ziller and Joey Litman to become recurring members of the team.



What I'm envisoning—and maybe this is hopelessly naive—is an incarnation of FD that is less a blog written by yours truly, more a venue for a new kind of sports writing loosely connected to whatever it is that this site has come to stand for. We're already moving in that direction with the podcast, which as you can see, is only partially me or other familiar names talking into the mic. I do occasionally try and reach out to people for guest posts, with mixed results. Here, though, I'd like to officially open up the floor for submissions. If you have an idea, pitch it. You don't have to have a track record, but it helps. It doesn't even necessarily have to be about the NBA—witness Ufford's ode to Adrian Peterson. But if one of the greatest strengths of FreeDarko has always been its lengthy comments, and our community seems to include an unusually high percentage of good writers . . . well, don't be a stranger.

-Finally, the Rockets. Artest might be the real story of these playoffs, and that makes me happy, but get ready for months upon months of T-Mac bashing. I have given up on defending the man, not because it's impossible, but because I obviously want to end up with a sympathetic view of the man. So instead of embarrassing myself, I'll close with a video of McGrady as I like to remember him. Like Sebadoh said, remember the good times.

The Day They All Changed

Make sure you ready Joey's post on the trajectory of the league, and get used to seeing him here regularly. Also, I've updated the Amazon widget, but am not going to beat over the head with the reasoning behind the recommendations.

I mentioned this point already on my TSB weekend review, but it's so important it deserves its own post. On the last FDPDOCNBAPC (the podcast), Dan, Shoefly, and myself decided that the "putting it all together for the playoff run" cliche is largely specious. It's almost always the result of injured players coming back and getting into the swing of things at the right time, or the team trading for someone huge at the deadline. It just doesn't make sense that the onset of "real" basketball would suddenly cause a mediocre team to transform into something mighty. Yes, it happens in some other sports; this just proves how random and unconvincing their postseasons are.

Well, I'm here this morning to tell you that we were wrong. Sort of. I'd assumed, like most people, that the KG-less Garnett would be just that: the Celtics, minus their best player, plus everyone else trying to pick up the slack in slightly embarrassing (or at least paltry) fashion. What I certainly didn't count on was seeing a team in the playoffs that, while maybe not as good as the team that equation yielded, is fresh and exciting in new ways. Quite simply, this is a very different Celtics team. For one, the unquestioned star and center of attention is Rajon Rondo, a longtime FD favorite who in these playoffs has asserted himself as part of the "point guards now win games" movement (even if it took the media a few days, and Mark Jackson till overtime on Sunday, to figure this out). I've written at length about the strangeness of Rondo's game, even if I neglected to really break his signature move/nervous tic—the behind-the-back fake that, in effect, feigns the element of surprise in an attempt to gain the element of surprise (a double-negative? net result, zero? the key to Rondo's everywhere/nowhere style?). Suffice it to say that in this series, Rondo's used the playoffs as a platform to expose his most potent essence.

But this isn't only about Rondo's welcome-here parade. It's fascinating to watch the overall dynamic of the team develop, as something quite different from the previous (incarnation of) The Big Three (minus one) gives way to, well, a team for the future. Pierce has been far less conspicious, functioning not as someone who would brag he could take Kobe, but a wily veteran whose scoring is deployed selectively and attracts a lot of defensive attention. Allen has been thus pigeon-holed the whole time he's been in Boston—disastrously the first season, to far better effect this year. These playoffs, Ray Ray's not being asked to hit too many stand-still jumpers (he hates those, I've realized) or create for himself (not clear he can do that these days). Instead, he's coming off of screens like a champ, staying in motion so he gets the kind of shot he thrives on: An eye-blink clear look, for a split-second, from an absolutely exact spot on the floor.



In short, the older dudes, while still key producers—ironically, Allen more so than Pierce—are beginning to gracefully recede from the foreground, or at least play in a way that's not going to fall off a cliff one day. At the same time, Big Baby and Perkins, while hardly anyone's idea of a formidable front court, are playing solid, well-rounded basketball that makes it possible to imagine life without Garnett. The Celtics are, for lack of a better word, pulling a Dumars without even meaning to (by the logic of a TSB post last week, would this make Rondo into Bias?). The team's different, but they have less rigid, more malleable identity that serves them well going forward. Damn you, Danny Ainge!

The Bulls, I feel even worse for maligning going into the playoffs. Maybe that's because they've tried to rebuild three times in a row now, and have a roster that reads like a geological cross-section of failed recent history. There's also just something really unseemly about this year's additions: Pull the ROY out of a hat, and then tack on two vets way late just for the hell of it. This team seemed like glimpses at several different philosophies, held together with glue and mud, with a non-coach coaching it all. And then somehow, everyone (and what they stand for) ended up facing the same direction. We need not speak much of Derrick Rose, except to say that as a 20 year-old, he's solidified his standing as somewhere between that Game One juggernaut and the off-nights we saw throughout the season (and elsewhere in this series).

Now, as if by miracle, suddenly this patchwork team makes perfect sense. Ben Gordon, possibly the most boring enigma in basketball history, was perfect as the fearless scorer who, for the most part, realizes there's a time and place for his would-be heroic. Hinrich, too, is a role player extraordinaire: Expert defender, long-range option, scraggly grit monster, can handle the ball. Tyrus Thomas and Joakim Noah are far more mercurial than Davis and Perkins, but they can finally take the floor together as a big man tandemn of tomorrow. Noah's all hustle (real, these days) and elegant effort, Thomas has that jumper to go with his arsenal of general havoc-wreaking. Backed up by Miller and Salmons, vets perfectly content to occasionally remind us that they were once capable of star-caliber play, insurance policies willing to come in to steady or bring order to this tenuous assemblage. The Bulls, rather than looking like the unrelated wreckage of front office chicanery, are instead a real team. If just for this series.

I don't see this like last year's Hawks, or the Warriors of 2007. There's not the sense that these teams are living on the edge, or betting the farm on something outlandish. And maybe this does fall under my original rubric of players discovering their limits, for better or worse, in the playoffs (I would say that last year, Iguodala experienced the latter; this year, the former). I think we can say, however, that we're seeing off-season concerns seamlessly dealt with at the most high-pressure part of the season. Maybe you could call it a fluke, except these teams just keep honing these new models, and the whole things just makes too much sense. The individual/team key might be thus: When one or two key guys outstrip themselves, all of a sudden it's contagious. Boston's was brought about by necessity; Chicago's, on the other hand, is almost inexplicable, especially in the way it caps off an entire season of muddle. It begins with Derrick Rose, but you've got to give everyone on the team credit, one-by-one. And that's how a team puts it all together: By everyone involved catching some individual inspiration.