Margins With a View

I sincerely apologize to all of you who have come here looking for reaction to the Cavs trade. Ferry took a crappy situation and made incremental improvements. Wally is not Larry Hughes, though I would encourage you all to remember—this man once stole a pass from teammate Kevin Garnett. And up in Seattle, he's made an art form out of freezing out Durant. Wallace's brokedown-ness is roughly equivalent to Gooden's poor judgment, but he exudes wisdom and can play center. Delonte West will break your heart—his game is nice, except it only intermittently works. He's also pretty much the streetwear Damon Jones, all the same hamminess without the Pixar aspirations.

However, I am an idealist, not a realist. I want to believe that, even if the going small is now passe, its legacy of speed can enter into an unholy Frankensteinian union with the cult of the big man. I see the West as the conference of ideas, while the East tweaks the edges and espouses pragmatism. And for these reasons, for me the signature trade of this evening is Gerald Green's return to Houston.

Right before the dunk contest, Kelly Dwyer called Gerald Green "an All-Star talent who is probably a year removed from being an NBDL benchwarmer, or hooking up with an overseas contract that doesn't have a chance of being fulfilled." As Green staggered through the wastelands of pre-boom Boston, or shivered on the bench in Minny, this seemed like the most cruel, sad, and apt description within reach.



Green's entire career had been one long downward slide, with the occasional big night or highlight hammer only furthering the joke. But right now, I see a twenty-two year-old who—stop me if you've heard this before—has all the potential in the world and no shortage of time on his side. Sounds like J.R. Smith all over again, and yet Green's not even looking for renewal. Smith had that rookie season of note; Green, on the other hand, is still hoping for his career to start.

Green's coming back to Houston, his hometown. As the Recluse awesomely observed, he'll be under the watch of Tracy McGrady, the player he was supposed to emulate. It's an ultra-hospitable situation, one that fills you with hope and seals off the wound left by the Battier/Gay trade (I know, I know). On the one hand, this could be Green's last shot. Then again, he's the age of a college senior, and has a team willing to take a chance on him. The question isn't whether or not he'll do right by others, but whether he'll finally be afforded the opportunity to develop into a professional basketball player. Because lord knows, wandering through mismanaged, scantly-coached lottery logjams is not the way to see if a talent like Green will sink or swim.

That said, I only have the patience to deal with one J.R. Smith. If it weren't for the picture-perfect DAWN, FINALLY feel of this, and if nothing good happens in the next year or so, I'll give up without guilt. However, for now, I am in the business of hope.



FOR EMPHASIS:

R.I.P. THE BIRTHDAY CAKE

Blah blah blah, Dwight Howard brought the Dunk Contest. Whatevs. For those in the know, 2/16/08 was about one man and one small baked good. Well, two men actually. Regardless, here is the official FD post-mortem on the real star(s) of the evening.

Dr. Lawyer IndianChief: As I was saying, the most miserable person in the building blew out a pink frosted cupcake.
Bethlehem Shoals: Was that dunk a metaphor for Gerald Green himself? Some "weeping clown" shit?
Tom Ziller: That makes sense. A sordid celebration of a career in the can.
Dr. LIC: There was like a glitch in the space time continuum. Harlan and Barkley said he didn't blow it out. But then replays showed he did
TZ: I never knew Kobe Bryant was such a huge fan of cupcakes. He seemed inordinately pleased, as far as Kobe Bryant goes.
BS: You obviously don't have kids. And I don't either. But I live by this cupcake place, and those things are like the Oxycontin of the grade school world.
Dr. LIC: Gerald Green and McCants are still children. Is that what you're saying?
BS: That's true too. And likely drug abusers. But I just mean that Kobe had an in-joke with himself. Kobe the dunker versus Kobe the parent, united for one special moment.

***

BS: Does this doom McCants by association?
TZ: I don't know, McCants became the star.
Dr. LIC: McCants was the only one frowning during the superman dunk. McCants had more airtime than Damon Jones.
TZ: If the Wolves stay together, McCants is like their ringleader or carnival barker
BS: If you put McCants' brain in Green's body. . . oh wait, that's what that dunk was.
TZ: Rashad took it so seriously too, like that was a dunk involving a cupcake, but he understood the heavy importance of the matter. Like Jameer Nelson would have been cracking up. Kyle Lowry would have tried to rebound the cupcake.
BS: Cupcakes are a lot like clowns. They seem happy, but they're also melancholy. Think about how severe it is. One bit of cake. One tiny candle. But made into its own lonely, finite unit.
Dr. LIC: Ironically, there was no actual cake. It was nobody's birthday. Yet it was THE BIRTHDAY CAKE.
BS: It reminds me of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. (NOTE: I meant the Kennedy Memorial).



TZ: Isn't the single birthday cupcake a romantic movie cliche?
Dr. LIC: There were homo-erotic overtones during the whole contest. I hate to get all "Mobley likes Francis bwahahahahaha"
TZ: Jameer and Dwight were off the charts
Dr. LIC: But yeah, exactly.
BS: Dwight Howard is totally homo-erotic. Clarification: I'm not saying he's gay.
Dr. LIC: Everyone kept talking about Dwight's body. Kenny Smith. . .
BS: Exactly
Dr. LIC: And later Mark Jones.
BS: Nice guys who work out and wear costumes. Sorry, that's the stereotype right there. Was that dunk contest a topography of today's gay scene? Cupcakes=twinks?
Dr LIC: Green kept throwing up the Hawaiian aloha sign. But I couldn't tell if that's just because he has four fingers. I think it was his good hand.
BS: Were they in Hawaii?
Dr. LIC: Green thought it was the Pro Bowl.

***

Dr. LIC: Green's Houston tattoo is off the chain. I just randomly found this while web-searching for it:

"Shawn Marion has a fantastic belt buckle. It’s big, it’s probably silver, and it sports a stylized skyline of the Windy City. Above the buildings, it reads “Chicago.” Below it: "S. Marion." It’s sort of urban cowboy, which is kind of how we’ve always pictured Shawn Marion in his daily, non-basketball life." (via CityPages)

BS: Is he from Chicago?
Dr. LIC: Dude is from Waukegan
BS: I'd always assumed he sprang up in the desert amd marched to UNLV (NOTE: I know that, in real life, he stopped off for JUCO in Indiana first).
Dr. LIC: Exactly.



TZ: Dawkins should be a permanent dunk contest judge.
BS: The dunk contest is really white i've decided. Or just very stoner, maybe. Case in point, Dawkins. Or maybe just like that scene in "Waiting to Exhale" where they drink a bunch of wine. How many players do you think smoke before coming to watch the dunk contest?
TZ: Everyone but Kobe. Caron's moment of realization on what Gerald was going to do was incredible. His eyes light up and then he pre-enacts it.
Dr. LIC: Kobe kidnapped all star weekend and tried to make up for it by looking really happy during the dunk contest. My brother pointed out a key moment in the Dwight Howard superman video: When he chest bumps Kobe after the dunk, Howard totally gets kneed in the balls.
BS: We should get back to THE BIRTHDAY CAKE. Was that the underground king of the evening?
TZ: Absolutely. No one will forget it.

Mr. Liver's Sunday Memo

One thing I've learned while working on this book: I like memories. I prefer players as I remember them from day-to-day than the fussy business of paying attention. So sue me.

I also cannot overstate the importance of the purely outrageous in my view of basketball. Writing about Josh Smith and Gerald Wallace over the weekend was like a spiritual experience, exactly because I took off the shackles and restored them to their rightful place beyond the sun. I'm sorry, I can't fake it—my skin shrivels when I hear NPR commentators dip their feet in the "poetry of this Super Bowl match-up" waters, but I'm always going to tend toward basketball as transcendent spectacle.

That's why I'm totally stoked about this year's Dunk Contest, which is beginning to take on surreal features. Green, Howard, and Gay are currently debating, McLaughlin Group-style, over just how high the hoops will be raised. Are you stealing my silver? This is outright mutiny, taking all the pageantry of the post-Vince artifice and pretending it's just not there. The judges, the system, fucked up by wronging Dwight. Time to take matters into their own hands, and do so with grand, public, possibly insane bragging that the NBA is powerless to guard against.



Gerald Green is like the NBA's verison of a suicide bomber right about now. I still don't get how his scoring and flash can't help some long-suffering franchise, but whatever, he's fast slipping away. So he stakes it all on the impossible, and just dares the league to calm him down, or his foes to back down first. I was bummed about trading Rudy Gay in my fantasy league, until I found out that John Salmons has been spending time with his wife's tricky pregnancy, which is TOTALLY KINGS, going all the way back to Webber. Plus I now have every single Atlanta Hawk on my team.

What really rips this all to shreds is if Howard gets some small-man mobility and flexibility going. Say he duplicates J.R. Smith's around-the-back dunk from 2005—most criminally-unheralded entry in the ritual's whole history. That would indeed, as the gophers state, change the game.

Things that would make the Super Bowl: If Google bought Tom Brady and Plaxico Burress accidentally sat on his mixtape collection. Other than that, I'll be busy making the perfect salad.

Damn people don't respect the Dunk Contest enough. There is most definitely a trickle-down effect from what happens out there to a players' on-court juice. Another reason why J.R. got robbed.