Who's Zoomin' Who?

(Pre-script: Every single Artest video of note from last night.)

(Pre-P.S.: If you've ever wanted to read my thoughts on liberated fandom and soccer in America...)

I can't get Rachel Zoe's "no words!" catchphrase out of my head today, and that something is Ron Artest. I said it on Twitter, which is like proposing marriage while drunk—I had misgivings about Kevin Garnett's big speech, but also misgivings about those misgivings, and the need to exhaustively backtrack and defend myself. Today, I see why the message felt so clear then. Without shitting on Garnett, whose arrival as an NBA champion was spot-on narrative brilliance, Ron Artest is the one who really bathed himself, and us, in ecstasy. Garnett had been waiting a long, long time. Artest woke up in a burning building, smacked a few timbers, and crawled out with a title. You would be excited, too, and more than a little incoherent.

By most measures of my person, I hate the word "energy". It sucks when it's someone advising me on my health and wellness, and annoying when describing some untalented smurf-monster's on-court contributions. I do, however, still cling to the phrase "energy music," which I think I owe to Amiri Baraka (anti-Semitic kook) from his free jazz days. Here, how about another music cliche to bring the room together: take "between thought and expression," pulp the whole thing, and that's what we got from Artest last night. There was relief in having that ring, that goal accomplished -- and, since Ron Ron is no fool, that sense of legitimacy. But really, this was nothing new. Only the eyes watching had changed the strings upon their fiddles of doom.

The redemption narrative is one of the most hackneyed of sports. We have learned to see through pure ring-chasing, but alas, it persists that a bad guy becomes a good guy if he makes a strong contribution to a championship team. Debates have raged over whether or not Artest-in-LA was a disappointment. Certainly, his presence was a letdown. As a player, he seemed to regress. The defense was still there, and yet still sometimes Kobe would grab the assignment. On offense, he was a mess. The toughness and erratic edge were all there, except unto themselves, they were a destabilizing influence with no ballast to keep them useful. Artest may have been at his most raw and undone, as if the component parts of Ron Artest were seeking to reconstitute a truly positive force. He meant well, but it was a mess.

We wanted so badly for Artest to catch the riding tide of redemption. It got to the point where one bad shot, or fluke-ish make, swung the verdict on his entire season. If a man stands up in the middle of surgery and goes to play a spot of polo, his triumphs and failures are at once exaggerated and trivialized. At some point, all that mattered was whether Artest would complete the story as Garnett had. And in the end, he did. Sure, we got used to praising him solely for toughness and defense, even sheer power of intimidation. To anyone who remembers Artest pre-brawl, or at his best with the Kings, this is an insult to what was once a relentless two-way threat. Whatever the opposite of poetic justice is, there's oodles of that in Ron Artest's story being salvaged by one single game, where everything came together and he played like he should have all season.



Today, everybody loves Ron Artest. All is forgiven. The man won a title, I mean, really won that thing. The Lakers got him for exactly this kind of performance, and like a multi-dimensional Robert Horry, he came through when it counted. Welcome to the club, my son. We are all ART-testians. Let the ink flow, with tales of how far he's come, what a man he is, how he's proof that second and third and fourth chances do come true. And, if you want to stretch some, that there's room for a little personality even as Artest is sized up and down. He's worthy of public support and respect because he's carried out his Zelda-like task. That's the bargain. For fans and media, it's self-serving: he made our dream come true, made himself safe. The NBA's last great hellion has been stuffed into a box and robbed of his fury. Hey, let's all go watch those interviews and have a happy giggle. It's just Ron being Ron. And Ron is a fucking champion.

Except this narrative ignores the obvious: Ron Ron ain't changed a lick. That lens exists entirely for others to change their opinions of QB's finest. You could sense the breaking point during the interviews: Ron isn't screaming with passion and pride like KG, saying all the right things and giving the oddball athlete's equivalent of an acceptance speech (strangely, how the post-game interview was labeled on YouTube). He is frothing, babbling, letting loose more than ever. His shrink? Profuse apologies to every Pacer ever? Crazy visions from the future? If you felt like a real FD fanboy, you could say that Artest has never been more Artest than he was last night. The joke was on everyone else. The man got his title, and suddenly, he got more of a platform, and more attention, than ever for his personality. If anything, this vindicated the Ron Ron that he supposedly grew out of. Dude is still nuts. He's only "new" or "different" for those who need him to be. And they're letting the optics mess with common sense.

Ron Artest is a different basketball player than he was even at the beginning of the season. He's been getting some sort of medical help—it's been unclear all along how much treatment or counseling he had sought during his career–except this time shouted about it, since it had something to do with hitting threes. Shilling for "Champion", his new single, was the same old Artest. However, there was also a sense that Artest was finally free to do him without reservations. His single was a premonition of the very day. His carnival-esque presser totally dispensed with any conventions of athlete, friends, family and press in the same room. This title didn't kill Ron Artest, or usher him into polite society. It only made him more bold. Yes, he's more mature, self-aware, and probably self-possessed than ever. But while others see redemption and a chance to welcome him into the great lobby of champions, Artest sees himself as being legitimated. This proved not that Artest could be someone normal, but that Artest in all his glory had to be taken seriously. That's the crink in the redemption. That's what everyone's missing this morning after.

I Am An Eagle

Ron: First I wanna thank everyone in my hood, all my warriors, [inaudible]. My wife kisha, my family, my kids, everybody. I definitely want to thank my doctor, Dr. [name]. My psychiatrist. She really helped me relax a lot. Thank you so much. It's so difficult to play with so much emotion on the line in the playoffs. She helped me relax. Thank you so much. I knocked down that 3, just like you told me.

Doris: That was a huge shot, your late 3, yes no question. Ron again—

Ron: And my single's coming out! No talking to me (jokingly; Doris laughs). I got a single called Champion. I got a song called Champion! I recorded it...last..June!!!!

(thanks to the Litman clan for the transcription!)

Plus, the no less colossal NBA-TV interview:



And of course:

Squishy Kernels

-This video will set you up.

-Here are my thoughts on Game 7. They just happen to have been written by Eric over at The Baseline.

-If you missed Hickory High's award-winning work on how players get going offensively, read it before it's too late.

-Rumor has it that #cuppinit will soon have its own domain name. Stay tuned.

-MORE: If you missed it, don't keep missing Avi/Shoefly's post on boxing/NBA Finals comparisons.

Yoru Brain Gets Warm

In case you missed it, this Kobe-on-the-greats segment was amazing. Not just NBA amazing, like exactly what I personally want to see from Bryant.

Also, it has made me completely change course on LeBron James. Or at least lose patience with him. For the moment, I can't stand him and think he is on the path to hell. HERE IT ALL IS.

Finally, I have a message from myself. I am sorry there's not so much writing on here lately. I know some of you are loathe to venture on FanHouse. But dudes, I am doing almost exactly the same thing, minus the silly pictures and nonsense titles. I can email those to you if you want. If you only want to read me, here's my author page, along with feed. Seriously though, anyone complaining that FD has dried up should at least read the daily thousand word posts I'm writing for my paying job.

Your friend,

VILE LEGS

Bosom Warfare

This day sucks, even if this game is awesome. Nobody wants this piece, not even the people who asked for it. I apologize if it's rough in places, or sounds like it's for a different audience, but I wanted to do something with it and couldn't spend any longer on it. I went deep into the John Huston marathon on TCM last night. Probably needs an edit, but I hope it will find a home here, rough edges and all.

Tonight, the Celtics and Lakers renew one of the most hallowed rivals in pro sorts. Pro basketball's two most successful franchises are hopelessly intertwined, even if the rivalry has really been a one-sided one.The Boston Celtics have an NBA-best seventeen championships; in nine of those Finals, they beat Minny/LA. The Lakers have hoisted fifteen banners of their own, two of which came against the Celtics.

Between those 32 titles, and the parade of Hall of Famers that made them happen, the Lakers-Celtics rivalry was the lifeblood of the league's pre-Jordan history. When the Lakers won three titles from 2001-2003 as the Celtics foundered, things just didn't seem right. These Finals aren't just a rematch of 2008—it's the league going back to its source, as well as the only viable distraction from the legacy of Michael Jordan.

But these two teams don't just have a stranglehold on the game's history. They've also been cast, however inaccurately, as the great yin and yang of the sport. The Celtics, like Boston, represent teamwork, toughness, tenacity, and loyalty. The Lakers mirror Los Angeles, encouraging big stars with bigger personalities, mega-watt play, and a touch of melodrama. Celtics are selfless; Lakers have egos. Celtics respect tradition and worship the old magic; the Lakers are avant-garde assholes. And, most inimically, the Celtics are for white folks; the Lakers, African-American. Yet none of this symbolism sprung up overnight. It evolved over four decades, a streamlined, and selective, version of Lakers-Celtics tailored to fit conventional wisdom. The question is, how did we end up here? And what got lost along the way?

From 1957-1969, the Boston Celtics owned the NBA, falling short of a championship only in 1958 and 1967. Red Auerbach was repsonsible for much of basketball as we know it; Bill Russell pioneered hair-raising defense and applied athleticism; and Bob Cousy defined the point guard position with an array of no-look passes and trick dribbles. Actually, back up. Minneapolis had been the league's original powerhouse. Under John Kundla, they won five titles between 1949 and 1954. Russell may have revolutionized shot-blocking and rebounding, but it was Lakers big man George Mikan who proved that size mattered. Slater Martin was arguably the first dedicated ball-handler. In a discourse obsessed with fundamentals, and foundations, it's the Lakers who set the sport into motion.

Anyway, in the sixties, the contrast between Boston's all-for-one talent mill and the star system of Los Angeles made for a neat rhetorical trick. Auerbach had more than his share of great players. Besides Russell, Cousy, and Sam Jones, Bill Sharman, Tommy Heinsohn, K.C. Jones, and John Havleciek all earned a spot in Springfield. We can debate whether the winning made them stars, or they were stars muted for the purpose of winning. Lakers Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were better all-around players than any single Celtic. Regardless, the fact remains that the Celtics were simply better than the Lakers during these years. Wilt Chamberlain came to LA in 1968, and even then, Boston came out on top. Incidentally, Wilt is as responsible for the Laker mythos as anyone, and he only showed up in town late in his career. Certainly, the austere West—universally admired by the Celtics—or the hyper-competitive Baylor didn't fit the bill.

When a single player, Russell, retired after the 1969 title, the Celtics went into hibernation. In 1972, the Lakers got their ring, but without Baylor. He had retired early in the season when his knees had made him a liability. The Celtics veterans had hung on as long as they could, with future Hall of Famers like Sam Jones coming off the bench well into their twenties; Baylor, one of the most prolific scorers the in NBA history, retired out of a sense of duty.

The Celtics rose again in 1974, winning it all behind berserker redhead Dave Cowens, the ageless Havlecik, and feisty guard JoJo White. They took another in 1976, a mini-dynasty in the midst of the NBA's most obscure, and tumultuous, era. As much as anything the Russell/Auerbach teams, these two titles brought into focus the Celtics mystique. Cowens proved especially important; his game was the polar opposite of a Julius Erving or David Thompson. As the league became "too black," the Celtics stemmed the tide. At the same time, in the mid-seventies, Boston became the site of bitter racial conflict when an effort to desegregate through busing lead to riots. Many white Bostonians saw themselves as being imposed upon by the federal courts in the same way that Erving or Thompson defiled the NBA.

The irony is that the Celtics had perhaps done more in the name of integration than any other NBA franchise, going all the way back to the drafting of Chuck Cooper in 1950. But that was the Celtics, not Boston, a distinction Russell is quick to draw throughout Second Wind: Memoirs of an Opinionated Man. Russell pulls no punches when discussing his experience as a black man in Boston. Calling it "a flea market of racism", he describes in wrenching detail the harassment and vandalism he and his teammates were subject to. The 1974 team, though, was as much a Boston team as a Celtics team. What mattered was that its values, and star players, resonated with the fanbase. The Russell/Auerbach teams, which had trouble selling out the Garden, were strip-mined for what suited the audience.

In 1979, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came into the league, having faced each other for the NCAA championship only months before. They would restore its popularity and its relevancy; their teams were the two best in the NBA, and seemingly locked in battle from the first day of Bird and Johnson's rookie year. Bird and Magic became the face of the league, a masterstroke that allowed fans to focus on either Bird or Magic, Bird and Magic, or the dynamic between the two.

Larry Bird was perhaps the only Great White Hope, in any sport, to actually make good on his promise. For fans made uneasy by the direction the game had taken, Bird's ascent made the NBA safe again. It was the Cowens Effect, but on a national scale. Titles in 1981, 1984, and 1986 proved a point not only about the Celtics, but about what brand of basketball worked best. The Lakers, with their up-tempo, exuberant game, larger-than-life point guard, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at center, were cast as their foil. HBO's Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals devotes quite a bit of time to detailing how, during the eighties, Lakers-Celtics split NBA fans along racial lines. If anyone's keeping score, the Lakers came out on top in this round, with rings in 1980, 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1988.

The rivalry was compelling exactly because, through Bird and Magic, the sport found itself on solid ground; these two laid the groundwork for the product to move past the disjointed, dysfunctional seventies. The heart of basketball wasn't at stake; it was a testament to the strength, and unity, of Bird and Magic that allowed the illusion to flourish. They may have simulated racial strife, but it was all theater, seized upon by consumers eager to find meaning in basketball. That they turned the sport into that effective a canvas is why it makes as much sense to refer to them as one entity, rather than real rivals.

The same might very well hold for the Celtics and Lakers writ large. This year, we're expecting a Lakers-Celtics series that runs roughshod over all the old myths. The question is whether this is progress, or a failing of the rivalry.

Let History Get Smudged

Earlier today, I wrote the self-explanatory "Deconstructing Lakers-Celtics". My pal Paul Flannery shot me an email that extended that conversation and needed to be read by all. Plus I wanted an excuse to link to my column.

Paul covers the Celtics for weei.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @Pflanns.

Digging in a little deeper: Rondo is Cousy, the original weirdo point guard, who controlled the game with his speed and creativity as much as his traditional skills. It's telling that during Rondo's rookie season, when no one really knew what to make of him, the two people who called his greatness were Cooz and Tommy. They could see it. They knew.

As for Kobe, he would fit in perfectly around here. They admire his cold-blooded ambition and recognize it for what it is: no foolin' around while there's work to be done. I'm talking about the team. Let me put it this way: If you were to have a Kobe-LeBron debate in the locker room, you'd probably get more on the Kobe side. They are into results, not projections, and they're also oddly more into aesthetics than stats. It's not enough to be the best, they want it to be known. The fans would embrace Kobe once he made his first game-winner, but they wouldn't be so keen on the outward displays of frustration. That's a definite difference between the two cities, where one appreciates an emotive performance and the other just wants you to get your ass down the court. But they'd adjust and again, that's about place, not time.

On the racial component. Did you notice the C's don't have any Euros? Rather, they are basically an amalgam of black America: country, city, suburban, old heads, young bulls, Duke educated and products of public high school. They have a guy who prefers to do his networking on the golf course and another who's a holdover from the Revolution. A guy from Florida who never says anything and one from Seattle who never stops talking. Fittingly, Quis and Nate became fast friends. It's an underrated aspect of their success that they generally grant each other the space to make it all work. I'm sure the same could be said of the Lakers given their diversity.

What's curious to me is that the coaches are playing into the old stereotypes. Doc Rivers is basically saying that we're the Celtics and we're coming to take your lunch money. While Phil used the word "resilient" instead of tough and is throwing it out there that it would be cool if his team was allowed to play without getting beat up. That's certainly for effect, and there's a definite officiating component to all this, but it's also true that they're playing to their bases. To me, Doc is one of the most compelling people in this series because he has embraced his inner Celtic throughout the playoffs in ways that he hasn't done before. While not as enthralling as the FA summer, he is going to be the most sought-after coaching commodity on the market because no one here has any real idea what he's going to do after this is over. Phil has his admirers, of course, but Doc has TV and he's younger. He's not just good old Doc anymore. He's the blood and guts coach of the Celtics and that does still mean something.

The old Celtics-Lakers paradigm does make sense in one way. Doc and Paul Pierce are playing for their Celtic legacies in this series, while Kobe is playing for his Laker legend. That's where all the history is apt, but it's got little to do with what we're about to see.

When Stations Shift, You Find Your Own

Not that I think it's my God-given duty to size up the Finals and decide who's up, who's down, but you've got to admit that Lakers/Magic does present a certain number of curious proposition. For one, these two are neither mismatched nor equals. It's like they exist in parallel universes. The Lakers, as we all know, as flushed to the gills with ability, but only periodically harness it all. The Magic, well, we didn't realize it until recently, but so are they. And they bring it on the regular. Does that make Orlando overachievers, Los Angeles underachievers, and no one but the Cavs the underdogs? The Magic's has been a season of peaks and valleys, hitting their stride, then losing Nelson, then picking up steam again, then hitting a wall earlier in the playoffs when Howard's identity came into question and Turkoglu was hurt. And now, they're riding high, so high, again. The Lakers? Friday was the first time all playoffs they've looked like the Lakers we expected to see come and visiti pestilence upon the postseason. Now you tell me: Which is inconsistency, which on a voyage of self-discovery and perpetual adjustment?

What's more, while this series doesn't seem to have STAR BATTLE written all over it, it will certainly challenge the "nobody digs Goliath, ya dig?" axiom of the modern NBA. Because, simply put, Howard is love and lightness, Kobe the darkest side of Jordan, the least ecstatic aspects of his game, streamlined and boiled down to something potent, metallic, and kind of smelly. That's not to say that Kobe's still the man we love to hate, just that he'll never be easy to love—in much the same way that Chamberlain, and even Shaq, found themselves troubled by.

Here's some fragments from a piece I wrote this spring on Shaq for a certain well-known web magazine. This was from draft #3, and apparently wasn't snappy enoigh. So sorry, guys. In any case, I think it's pertinent here for describing just how far Howard is indeed with "the new Shaq," in terms of natural magnetism and ability to worm his way into our hearts without making us feel engorged or cloyed by absurdity:

O'Neal wouldn't be the first athlete always angling for the spotlight, or looking for ingenious forms of self-promotion. But compared to, say, the whip-smart expressiveness of Muhammad Ali in his prime, O'Neal is at once light-hearted and uncomfortably deliberate. He excels at spoken spectacle, assigning himself absurdist nicknames (my favorites: The Diesel, The Big Aristotle, and Shaqovic) and making off-color jokes about opponents, like his disparaging reference to rivals "the Sacramento Queens."

From the beginning Shaq saw himself as an entertainer, which explains 1993's platinum rap album Shaq Diesel and film roles ranging from the 1996's Kazaam, in which Shaq played a genie, to 1994's Blue Chips, an underrated look at corruption in college sports that starred Nick Nolte. The more he does, the more control he exerts over his image. And with good reason. In the fraternity of superlative NBA big men, O'Neal stands alone in his non-stop levity. Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, Patrick Ewing, and peer Tim Duncan, to name a few, were pensive and aloof—and often criticized for it. O'Neal has seemingly spent his entire career trying to break the mold, replacing the towering, faceless Goliath with a hip-hop Paul Bunyan. Shaquille O'Neal may have been Joe Frazier or (young) George Foreman on the court, but preferred the garrulous, daft Ali role off of it.



However, this disconnect comes with a price. Shaq's behavior can get downright ugly when his ego, image, or brand are threatened, since this could send him plummeting into in the annals of large, bitter, awkward freaks. For evidence of this, look no further than the litany of "sidekick" guards who have proved essential to his success: Penny Hardaway in Orlando, Kobe in Los Angeles, and Dwyane Wade in Miami. In the post-Jordan NBA, smaller, more dynamic players are the unquestioned center of attention. Style-wise, they're the Ali's, with inventive games that suggest a richness of personality. Shaq, always the talker in these relationships, always casts himself as the alpha dog, a font of charisma whose dominant play was a matter of fact. At the same time, in each case the other guy was emerging as one of the most exciting, inventive players in the league, leading O'Neal to turn cold and toward them, and however incidentally, move on to another team. [I think you all know how Shaq fell over, and then turned on, Penny, Kobe, and Wade].

Nothing sums up this paradox more than the mural on the bus Shaq brought to an LSU game in 2007: some sort of gangster super-summit, where Shaq presides over Scarface, Tony Soprano, and Vito Corlene, among others. Hilarious, but also quite sinister. Not coincidentally, during his time with the Heat, Shaq was fond of an analogy that cast his Hardaway as Fredo, Kobe as Sonny, and Wade as Michael. Coppola's films and The Sopranos have been defanged by their absorption into pop culture. But watch those movies from start to finish, and you'll realize just how unsettling they really are.

Heavy, huh? Man, been waiting for a while to get that out. I have to say, though, that this series might explode this paradigm, and perhaps summarily frustrate Shaq's grand mission in life. Despite O'Neal's attempt to undermine Howard, or Howard's obvious inferiority as a pure center—perhaps one of the reasons this slippage is possible—Dwight, with his boyish good looks and effortless acrobatics, is that lovable big men Shaq never could be. Yes, we can debate for days when he is in fact a big man, or just a bigger Amare. But the Superman has stuck there without any sense that we're being forced into embracing his might (like how Superman really could have destroyed the world whenever he wanted). On the other hand, Kobe, while he remains the epitomal post-Jordan off-guard, we all know that this trappings of his game have become so methodical, his aura so admirably bleak, that it's transformed the dream-like "as an explosive shooting guard, I will get rings" of Jordan into a optimization of the position so that it embraces as much of the big man rigor as is possible. LeBron is unstoppable, quasi-religious. Kobe is so professional that he's always adjusting, a character who is about as Terminator-like as guards can possibly get. Like when they made the evil robot a hot lady for T3.

That's not to say that Kobe lacks charisma. He has kind of reached that rare, glare-laden apex where, no matter what his game has evolved into over the years, or what its finer points are, fans respond to him as a showman. You and I know, though, that the man is probably replacing his blood, or grafting metal onto his spine, in hopes of turning this positional role into something with the certainty, and even the purposeful vacancy, of the big man. Howrad is so young, it's hard to gauge where he's really headed. But for now, he's a hunk of muscle unstoppable down low who is also so easy to love. And it's Kobe whose human drives and expressions of self seem more of a technicality or, even to supporters like myself, an afterthought in his grand pursuit of basketball perfection. That's not to say he's totally inhuman, on or off the court, but the personality of his position (and by extension, the Good Kobe that has so many fans) is no longer a restriction on how he looks to put together grade-A efforts.



And to turn briefly to one more WTF about this series: Does this tell us shit about the future of the game? The Lakers are by no means a reasonable template for success. Top to bottom, that team is loaded. In ways new and old. What other team can boast one of the league's most promising pure centers, as well as its second-best Euro, and a post-Garnett weirdo—all who may or may not figure prominently into the game-plan on any given night? It's almost like a brief history of the last eight years of the NBA, all on one team. Except that participation by all is optional, or maybe selectively minimal. Put simply, other teams have no chance at copying this one, and that's without even getting into Kobe's embattled, but persistent, standing among the league's elite.

The Magic offer a far more interesting case. They have this big man who is both more and less than the past. There's a chance they stumbled into it, and that the tandem of Lewis and Turkoglu are both essential and came as a surprise. And when healthy, they have an All-Star point guard. This is old worship of height, plus the age of the point guard, plus a kind of post-Euro Sudoku puzzle that only master coach SVG could make sense of in such a non-obvious fashion (and, as Kevin Pelton has pointed out, this team would suck if deployed in obvious fashion). I also pick up a distinctly Pistons-meets-Suns vine int he way Lee, Pietrus, and even Reddick are used, though maybe now I'm just laying it on thick. In short, this team has everything but a Kobe or LeBron, which is a really fortuitous spot to be in. And chances are, any other squad with this roster would screw it up. So we might be looking at an utter singularity here that both bridges and invalidates the entire ferment of conventional basketball wisdom, past and present. In the end, it comes down to the twist you put on it. Traditions and trends, new and old, can tell you some basics, but past that, you're on your own. The question is, what does it take for a team like the Magic to be absorbed, as the Suns were? The Warriors certainly weren't . .

Orlando Magic, just keep being yourselves. History will sort out the rest. As will the results of this series, incidentally.

Lunchtime Dialectic

Note from the title, I'm not even disguising this one. . .

I am not quite sure why this Finals is leading to such an eruption of FD soul-searching. Maybe because I need to understand my feelings about this series, especially when I acknowledge that they're conflicted. Maybe I'm just bored and want to hide from the truth.

But I did have another bright thought today about this whole "you do not love winning" accusation. A friend of mine who doesn't follow sports much read the post and asked if "winning" was the quality of a game, or just the final outcome. Of course, the two aren't mutually exclusive, but I think we can all agree that there's something very unsatisfying about a victory in name alone. Case in point, game five of this series. I know that sports are all results and bottom line, and that traditional fandom demands first and foremost that we look for our jersey to be raised above all others. I can't help but wonder, though, if a Lakers fan wouldn't feel better about game five if it had come in remotely convincing fashion. Aside from that one Kobe play.

This also seems to hold with the question of "dominating," and the two are actually, to me, quite related. Can a team or individual dominate and fail—that is, lose? Win the game despite never evincing dominance? That depends on whether we interpret "dominance" as a quality—you can call it aesthetic if you want—or a question of what shows up in the box score. Dare I say, I'd rather watch a player/team dominate and lose then whatever the opposite of that is. Great men, amazing feats, drama in the air, and going down in a cloud of gunsmoke. What bugs people about the Spurs, however unfairly, is the perception that their dominance is quiet and elusive. Effective, but deceptive.



All of this, and the problem of style, come back to process. You can exude dominance along the way without that being the end result. The same even goes for winning—do we wait till the buzzer to utter the phrase "heart of a champion?" No, since these are qualitative assessments of how someone's play strikes us, what effect or influence it appears to have on the course of the game's outcome. The same thing can be said, on the other end of the spectrum, of style. Style has a use, and can be applied—usually toward some version of dominance, in fact. However, that application is no less simplistic than working backward from a final score to a game worth watching again.

It's the challenge of not just winning but WINNING, of style taken into the trenches and made into the language of competition, that I want. A product that doesn't lend itself to a dominant/dominance illusion. Is that idealistic, unnecessary, and a disaster waiting to happen? Sure, but don't go saying that this position misses the point of sports. I'm just not willing to settle.

If We Stop Talking. . .

Not sure why I feel the urge to put an open thread up for this game. Especially since it means burying A TOTALLY OVERARCHING, THOUGHT-PROVOKING, AND ESSENTIAL PIECE ON THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF THIS SITE. Must be because I did a link dump already this weekend, or spent way too much time qualifying my take on this series. We have sold out, so buy the book as a relic from when we still had integrity. Tomorrow, exclusive photos of Jeff McInnis putting a clock radio down his pants.

Scoff and File

First, feel the rage of Dr. LIC's nightlife. And before this post gets any further, know that I don't agree with him that Garnett is "secretly boring", but am proceeding from his "KG has become hardened and humorless" line.

Last night's game changed many people's lives. I was not one of them, and as such feel like I should recuse myself from these Finals. Not because I'm some abject Lakers homer, or even blinded by my allegiance to Kobe Bryant (a purely invented one, right?). It's just become clear to me that the swirl of emotions I'm dealing with here have little or no relationship to ways and means of the 2008 Finals. So allow me to air these grievances one last time, take my lumps, and then disappear unless we end up going seven (we won't).

-My better half and I were supposed to go to some hot film festival ticket about Indians and human trafficking. Then she remembered grad school, and I was left driving downtown with a choice to make. The series wouldn't come back to life unless the Lakers one, but I didn't want to miss something important. So I drove to Jamal Crawford's bar, where I got to hear a bunch of Boston fans shout "Jesus" (Spanish pronunciation), "HAAAAAAUS", and not much else, and the Lakers contingent exhort LA to "shut 'em down," as if that were the reason for the collapse. I don't drink, and in a bar, really all there is to latch onto is the broad, basic endeavor of watching the scoreboard and bitching about fouls. It's hard to take in the game on any more subtle, informed, or non-hysterical level. That's why I kept nodding off during the third.



-Kobe Bryant is fascinating and supremely talented, but I wish there would be a gag order on him. Like Iverson once was, he gets people talking at length, which I guess is good. But it's always so tense, tendentious, and boring that I just don't care. Face it people, arguing about Kobe is like arguing about religion. It's never going to be a friendly, rational conversation. It's the grown folks equivalent of boo/yay, or Republican/Dem (circa when that mattered). I am beginning to realize that the Celtics are like this too, and the Lakers in general. I guess hatred is a solid emotion, but that's message board shit. And at the risk of sounding like an out-of-touch sports snob, I'm simply not that interested in that thick, poison air.

-I've been strangely oblivious to how hard it is to talk about the Lakers without falling into those tarpits. People, Kobe is a weird human being. As athletes go, try and find who better fits the old Greek stories. Lamar Odom is as close as this site gets to a patron saint, assuming that the expensive ones are all taken. Gasol/Odom is truly a thing of beauty. Farmar is an athletic Jew. I could care less about Los Angeles; I've never even been there. And it's not even like I relished every moment of the Shaq/Kobe dynasty—fine, I liked seeing Kobe win, because I selfishly like feeling like I'm witnessing greatness. But if anyone thinks for a second that I had more emotion invested in them than I did those Kings teams they vanquished, they need to check the archives. Webber belong in the same class as Odom and pre-Boston Garnett, the players whose plight fueled this blog for years.

-About Boston, again: It's true, I've spent a lot of time there and don't like it. And the Celtics endless history lesson annoys me, as I'm sure the Los Angeles one does, too. But admit it, that's not played up, exploited, even, in quite the same way. Here, though, I really just don't like this team. The defense is absolutely freaking amazing; what they did during the comeback proved that it doesn't take Josh Smith to land on the right side of my creative/destructive binary. That was like the anti-matter triangle, a system so forceful that it made the Lakers into scavengers.



But here's what really gets me, as articulated by someone who has seen only a few Celtics games this years: Except for the truly transcendent stretches of defense, this isn't a "greater than the sum of the parts deal" team. It's everyone involved, slightly muted, pieced together like a puzzle. Really, does this team scream "chemistry" to anyone? That's my team/individual beef. Teams should be about chemistry from beginning to end, not functionality. Again, I get that from the defense when it's really on, but the rest of the time, this team just does nothing for me.

And then there's the most flimsy, and maybe pathetic, reason: As I've said a zillion times already, three players I once really liked seem changed to me. Maybe it's the above stuff about the style, and what it's done to their games. Maybe it's the all-business attitude, or the corporate sheen that the 21st century Celtics were born to emit. I just know, however puerile this may sound, that Garnett's about to get a ring and I feel nothing. Actually, last night when he hit that wise-intelligent floater over Gasol down the stretch, I looked up and realized I was sitting under a signed KG Wolves jersey, with a photo of the younger, more vital Garnett bending and flexing all limbs at once mid-air. No shit that sounds like an objectification of the black body, except I could care less about him getting to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the honor of Hondo.

At this point, I really don't give a fuck who laughs at this, dismisses me as only liking obscure players, or claims it's all in my mind. Also I find it fascinating that I had no interest in Paul Pierce when he sunk into utter infamy, or now when he's riding totally high. Go take that one apart. But please, for the sake of my sanity, take a look at these videos from The Big Three before they existed, and tell me if you don't think some of that personality is gone. Sacrificed in the name of teleology, when I really wish they could've survived, on and off the court, with style intact. There is nothing wrong with a little frivolity or excess, right?

Also, fuck everyone.





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It Feels Like Home

Another Finals game, another night of abuse. For what's it worth, all of us in the FD email cabal enjoyed that one, and not just because the Lakers won. But like anyone cares about THE GREATEST FINALS EVER when Donaghy's making noise again. Sayeth I, there's a good reason why the theme of conspiracy just won't let the NBA alone. And why, in truth, it just might be a good thing.

As I said on The Sporting Blog, this kind of thing is all or nothing. We can all agree that stars get the benefit of the doubt. After that, though, there's no way of knowing where to draw the line, especially with no evidence but the word of a thief. Hell, either corroboration or plausible deniability would but add fuel to the fire. You should still click on that link before, but it's much the same with historical sticking points like JFK and Roswell—the real hell of paranoia is not knowing what's left of the shore you've departed from. For all of you who wear grad school like a badge, consider yourself knighted if you pick the just-right theorist for that sentiment.

So in that sense, Donaghy will yet again prove harmless, a crank who inspires only the most dogged and detached of ax-grinders. And yet, the whiff of it, the casual interest in conspiracy, tells us a lot about the NBA's standing in American society. It's a fun, and loaded, aside, that's more about the significance of the game than whether or not it was compromised on such and such day. In the midst of this debate—or by inserting itself into wider debate—the league ends up being, well, relevant, even as the sports media pronounces this a moment of doom.



To begin this inquest, let's turn to some other scandals. Namely, PEDs, Clemens, horses on cocaine, offensive tackles on 'roids, and other shit that really is a hall-of-mirrors style meltdown. Fine, crooked refereeing is about the integrity of the game, but not in the same way that altered athletes is. This seems more a fragment left over from the eighties, when the entire white collar community was fueled by cocaine, and Wall Street performance, while part of the general business drift of the nation, became a competitive sport unto itself. On the flip side of that (FEEL MY SLANG), there's the entire NFL in jail, which should really only be of marginal interest to football fans. It's boring, and just tells you that, duh, sports aggravates anti-social tendencies as often as they reverse them through structures and solvency. Oh, and racism is bad.

But the conspiracy is uniquely expansive and American. For one, it's a motif that unites the league's disparate constituencies. Scratch that—in the abstract, it does so for the whole damn political spectrum. At the risk of offending someone, there's a long tradition of conspiracy theories in the Black community. Yes, it's most evident on mixtapes, in Nation of Islam leaflets, and Jeremiah Wright, but it's not to be ignored. Nor is it that tough to account for. Of course, these suspicions are all about the system winning, and the NBA supposedly favors the system. Still, isn't adding this to the texture of the league—even if only in passing—play right into the hands of this particular core audience? Fuck a nested model of ref bias; if Iverson ever suggested that the league was out to get him, then you'd have a real rallying cry.

On the other hand, conspiracy theories are popular among the same kind of people who supposedly hate the NBA. You know, slightly wacko right-wingers who, if amplified across a generation or two, will have seed who start libertarian militias. Never mind the repulsion the league may cause in them. The added intrigue of corruption, the sense that special interests and wealthy celebrities might be pulling the strings, turns this tiny little sport into political theater. It's not just an imperfect form of competition, it's a metaphor for a world falling apart before their eyes. A team that suffers at the hands of Stern, especially a hard-working one who wrote the book on meritocracy, damn well better trump marketing concerns. If you think that said fan, who longs for the better days on and off the court, who hates affirmative action but isn't really racist, this stuff provides the perfect fuel in this particular basketball/cultural war.



And then, there's the time we live in. Say what you will about the NFL capturing the values moment, or NASCAR representing the rising up of the silent majority, or baseball once embodying the American Dream. I'm not sure if you've checked the news lately—I keep it on 24/7, even when there is a Law and Order on—but in the dying days of this administration, we are wading through a living, breathing backlog of scandal and secrets.

At this point, nothing will shock us. All is so believable, and there's so little we could do—or so little we want to tell ourselves about what we could've done—that the net effect is nil. But still, conspiracy is the fabric of U.S. government. Even if we want Obama, the First Basketball President, to sweep it all away, he's going to have to spend a hell of a lot of time clearing out all the brush that this administration has left behind—most of which smacks of collusion and secrecy.

So welcome to this country. Tim Donaghy's not a shock, he's confirmation that basketball's like everything else. And if we've learned to cope with that, or at least suppress it and try and make modest gains (or keep Bush in office as an easy target, yet another level of cynicism), then we should be able to sit the fuck back and enjoy these Finals. You're right, innocence is lost. It might never have been there. But what's the alternative? Throwing yourself off into the rapids and hoping no one points out you're in the de facto deep end?

The Rent Party Incident

First off, an exclusive. Thurl is dead, but you know FD is still the place to find the NBA related jams. Thanks to Brickowski, we had the Tony Parker rap joint before ANYONE else. Today, we bring you Charlie Wilson, with "Laker Train," the first finals-related theme song of the season. Download and/or listen here.

From this song, Uncle Charlie really sounds like he's counting on Derek Fisher and Kobe...

On the heels of Shoals' master-dissection yesterday, I want to ask, does anyone else get the sense that they are watching the game tonight out of sheer obligation? Sure feels like that to me. If the Lakers win, then, for crying out loud, they were sposed to. If the Celtics win, the series is over.

On the other hand, with gratitude to Charlie Wilson, Curt Schilling, Phil Jackson, Bill Simmons, Lamar Odom, and a very special thanks to the ball-busting stylings of Bill Plaschke, what has started to develop is somewhat of a turf war that might make this series interesting. B'ray sheet, I complained about the lack of any true city rivalry between the 2008 incarnations of these teams. At 2-0, we have some rumblings...

More important than any BOSTON SUCKSiness in the thick LA air, one might say that the reputation of Los Angeles as a city is on the line tonight. The Boston fans, whether donning pink red sox hats or Spike Owen throwbacks, came correct. It's Los Angeles' turn now and tonight may decide the mettle of what those people stand for.

Quick diversion: I feel I need to say my piece on this article, and my piece is that my assumption is that the secret to Garnett's secrecy is not some mysterious shrouded soul, but rather, Garnett is private person because he's actually boring. He doesn't really have much to say and given all of the interpersonal adversity he's been through having been betrayed by so many (Marbury, Anthony Peeler, Glen Taylor, even Sam Cassell to a certain degree), he has become hardened and humorless. He's been this way for a few years, always forcing the media to wait and wait and wait for his stoic soundbytes while he took his long showers and took his sweet time getting dressed. Garnett is boring might be the new Wade is boring. We'll see if winning a finals unwinds him a little bit.


As a final question, does anyone know how to watch the game on a computer? I have to miss the first half tonight but will have internet access. F.

On the Hunt for Super Pasture

First, apologies to the commenter who resents our lack of proofreading and goofy "ebonics." Do the former yourself, ignore the latter because it's a bad joke that happens every 1000th word. Unless this is a passive aggressive way of pining for Billups.

I can't say I hate that game, but it wasn't much fun. I've exhausted all of my wellsprings of far-reaching, Celtics church hatred, and now it's down to this: This team plays hellish defense, no doubt the product of a certain JVG protege whom everyone admires.

They score just enough to elide their absence of a smooth-clicking offense, which is exactly the brute opposite of what I'd hoped this team would do. I'm totally done wrestling with KG, Pierce is just doing his thing and clunking toward local immortality, which is just. I don't want Ray Allen to come out of this labeled a bitch, which he won't.

Rondo remains so high on my personal rankings it's not even cheeky, though I wish I could see his philosophy of basketball expanded a little. Now, it seems like so many little crazed inklings that are immediately stuffed into a safety valve.



Last night's game just left me kind of a cold. I'd almost have rather the Lakers not made that run at the end. True, it allowed me to rebuff a few taunting text messages (sort of), and gives Los Angeles a bit of added confidence as they head home. Though from a viewer's perspective, it was a tad maddening. I slogged through all that other basketball rot, only to see the larval smudge leave the mark of the butterfly with two minutes left. False hope, and very nearly a slap in the face of anyone whose attention waned, or who shut off the set. At least when the immortal Celtics/Nets game went down (SORRY FRIEND!!!!!!!), I was young, spry, hungry, and able to sit in front of set throughout despite women sulking to the contrary. Now, I lack that resolve and bravery.

But at least one good thing did come out of it. And I'm not talking about a certain absolute breaking point of the Mark Jackson/JVG on-air tension (if Jackson realizes there is any). No, it happened in my brain, and it had everything to do with a very basic binary: The practical versus the visionary, or idealist, basketball.

The main basketball point I've taken away from these two games has been the clash in philosophies. Boston is perfectly at home in the muck, confusion and chaos. Broken plays, or dumping it off to P.J. Brown because something has to happen (and does), are its bread and butter on offense. On defense, they dig in and stir up more and more of a mess for Los Angeles by utterly preventing them from getting in position. No position, no triangle; no triangle, no Lakers hell-oil machine that so much astounded us for the first three rounds.



Granted, the Celtics do target these "pressure points" in the Los Angeles offense, but they also just keep grinding away. These are the point of fortification, and from, the goal is to ensure that Kobe can't to the lane to distract from this overall strategy, or find anyone remotely suited to faciliate in his place. It is war at its most strong and viral. Joey points out that duh, Coach T for the Celtics would bring some of the classic Knicks' philosophy to bear. Protect the lane at all costs. Against the Lakers, though, this takes on a dramatic new meaning. If I had to draw a basic distinction between East and West, it would be this pragmatism vs. idealism divide.

We're used to thinking of idealism, or perfectionism, in basketball as Larry Brown fretting over slightly incorrect execution. But on a more cosmic scale, it's teams who subscribe to a system, ideal, or vision, and aspire always to erect this utopia on hardwood, and those who desire to run head-on into battle with a handful of directives and a strong taste for disorder.

For those of you keeping score, or looking for me to say such things, that's an important FD line in the sand. Watching the Lakers struggle to find their spots on the floor, to sit up in my seat whenever they did manage to do so, was like watching someone's dream throttled and reborn in rapid succession. On some level, "systems" are totalitarian, which explains why the isolation flourished in the East, alongside the gritty defensive teams that preached a descent into controlled mayhem. It's the five-man, organic answer to one dude's improv-ed attacks.

Oh, my bad, "one player of undeniable individual offensive gifts, prone to hold the ball, put on a show, and go for delf. . . I mean, the basket." RELIEF.

Anyway, on the other hand, you've got all these team that aspire to some higher sense of purpose or identity. Sometimes, as with the Lakers, it's remarkably concrete. But still, the triangle is a concept, a recasting of basketball that doesn't proceed from traditional notions of execution and roles. For it to work, it has to get set up correctly on earth, and basic human impulses must be suppressed.



If you don't think this is one of those great American debates, one that mirrors the likes of pragmatism vs. transcendentalism or capitalism vs. socialism, you're darn right even if I'd never been born. Until the very end of last night, the Lakers proved why Communism failed in the face of Nixon and Reagan. Or maybe just in the face of humanity itself, which is not so well-tuned to retain precise doctrine when the shit hits the fan and the earth's surface starts to churn.

Granted, the triangle is the most extreme version of a "system," one that is at once hyper-concrete and profoundly transformative. At this point, it's darn hard to separate from Jackson's whole guru-like ways. But it also fits so many teams we've relentlessly advocated in the past. The Suns, early, untrammeled incarnation, and the 2006 Warriors, were ideas even if their five-man fluid rage was held together only by the most loose sense of chemistry, even shared faith.

That's a far cry from the nihilism expressed by the isolation (if not in the intersection of that play and its audience). I mean, shit, all these teams of principle, who would prefer to do their thing and match it up than actively undermine their opponents' identity, those are FD. I guess they're pussies, too, but it's what I like.

So do I hate the Celtics? No, I'm tapped out. It's more that what's made the Lakers so unearthly up to this point has been their ability to gleefully impose their new rules upon the game. Whatever the opposite of reactive is, they're it. All that shit about controlling the tempo and setting the tone, they were that. The Celtics, they strike first but do so preemptively, and then push the spiral downward from there. I wonder if they really hold the game in the palm of their hand, or have simply deemed it best to let it ride out on a wave of very, very smart destruction.

Molars of Soil

[Freedrafto is HERE]

From the high hills of South Dakota, to the shores of Montauck, we have heard all of the dripping nostalgia for the Lakers/Celtics final. So too have we heard elegant backlash, about how little the current Lakers/Celtics series has to do with the one of the golden age. I can't remember who made the joke, but I heard someone on ESPN note that if McHale's clothesline on Rambis happened today, he would be suspended for a week. That's not to mention the fact that the McHale/Rambis incident brings us back to a time when white guys were tough guy enforcers (see also Laimbeer) instead of softies and savvy shooters. And has anyone mentioned the shorts yet? The short-shorts of the 80s were emblematic of a time when guys were so comfortable with their masculinity, they would rock whatever was the status quo. The view toward short shorts today is one of discomfort and homophobia. The Lakers couldn't even wear them for more than a half when they gave em a try earlier this year.

And for all the differences that folks have brought up regarding the Lakers/Celtics of ought eight versus the Lakers/Celts of the 80s, I believe one remarkably important difference has failed to come to light. That is the fact that the teams of today have relatively little lineage, allegiance, or resemblance to the cities they play for. Key guys from Boston Garnett, Ray Allen, James Posey, Sam Cassell, and PJ Brown have all arrived in the past year. Rondo, Powe Perkins, and Big Baby are far too young to have any deep connection to the city. And the only guy who is a true franchise face, Paul Pierce, is from LA!!! On Los Angeles, you have the recently arrived Pau Gasol (see: The Onion), Radmanovic and Odom, who the city has never really embraced, and of course Kobe, who is probably the best example of a "lifer" in the series, even though he threatened to leave the Lakers twice in the past four years! D-Fish is establishment too, but he's taken a whirlwind trip of the Western conference over the past few years.

Bottom line, screw history, because neither of the squads in their current incarnation HAVE any history with these teams. Magic/Kareem/Worthy/Scott/Rambis and Bird/Parish/Ainge/DJ/McHale were like the Han Dynasty for their respective cities. This year, you could imagine Ariza coming into guard Pierce, and Lakers fans saying, "Who???" I'm pretty sure that Celtics fans just learned who PJ Brown was last week.



THAT is why the Lakers/Celtics of the 80s were important, because they came to embody the cities that they played for (full disclosure, I started watching basketball seriously in 1989, but trust me, I know this). The narrative of course was the glitzy, flashy "showtime" team of Los Angeles versus the hard-working, blue-collar, Eurocentric team of Boston. These days, I don't see anything close to these teams manifesting the characteristics of their respective hometowns in any way (unless you consider that a bunch of beardy looking white dudes with bangs are attempting to gain the validation of the only cool black guy in the room pretty much resembles Steve Aoki/Cobrasnake's LA).



Ray Allen is basketball's Poitier. KG is a mixture of contrived countryness + traces of goofy Midwestern charm, and Pierce is throwing up LA gang signs for chrissakes. Does any of this look like the baseball capped Masshole stereotype of Boston we've come to know and hate? What about the hyperacademified intellectual character of Cambridge, or the suburban semitic-ness of Belmont and Brookline? These guys are doing their own thing. These Celtics are decidedly un-Boston. I almost had to cringe watching these guys do the staged "Beat LA" chant after they won the ECF.


And on the Lakers' side, well I don't even know what LA is anymore. I haven't been there since 2004, but I know that the glamorous allure of "Hollywood" has faded as the definition of "celebrity" has come to encompass everyone from Nicolas Sarkozy to (soon) that possibly fake dude who lost his shit in his office the other day. So even the Kobe = star = Hollywood analogy doesn't really work these days.



There's also the fact that LA in my mind is inextricably linked with its Asian and Mexican population, neither of which are likely to be represented in full by any NBA team. There is the sprawl of LA that will never really change, its embrace of the 1950s, and (hyuk hyuk) it's overcast of smog. But none of these things have to do with the current Lakers, who are more space age than anything else. Radmanovic has been called a "martian" by the ultimate space cowboy himself, Phil Jackson. Kobe is glowing in the dark right now, and the never-before-seen inspired play of guys like Vujacic, Gasol, and Odom, seems somewhat supernatural. Whatever is going on with that team is far too alien to really capture the Dyan-Cannon's-jowls-as-Americana that Los Angeles curates for all to see.

The moral of all of this is that it makes a true rivalry incredibly difficult to have. There are no legit reasons for LA residents or Boston-ites to hate each other any more nor for them to see the other as its polar opposite. The two cities are orthogonal in their character. Perhaps then this series has a more universal appeal than the NBA/ESPN is trying to pitch to us with their constant stream of "historical" clips. The Lakers/Celtics series of 2008 is about everyone in the entire world. And I think that's a good thing.