Dream Week: The Prisms of Our Tears

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball Historywill 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.

Jon Weinbach writes about sports business and West Coast news and hosts a video interview series for FanHouse. He recently completed producing and writing Straight Outta L.A. for ESPN's 30 for 30. Jon was previously a longtime staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

I’m no Dick Vermeil, but it doesn’t take much for me to shed a tear. Political speeches, soccer highlight videos and even (shudder) the first Sex and the City movie—they’ve all made me well up in recent years. It’s a little embarrassing.

But for all my apparent mushiness, I don’t cry over pro sports. Anymore, that is. The last time it happened was May 21, 1986. It was a Wednesday night, I wasn’t quite 10, and Ralph Sampson was responsible. The sinewy, 7-foot-4 Virginian torpedoed my beloved Lakers that evening. From our second-level seats of aisle 16 in the corner of The Forum, I had a clear view as Sampson, all socks and ’stache and Pumas, feathered a reverse set-pass into the basket as time expired to give the Rockets a 114-112 win. It was a spasm of volleyball-rific athleticism that would have made Karch Kiraly proud. And it was perfect in its awfulness: The shot beat the buzzer, it bounced tauntingly off the rim before going in, and, of course, it eliminated the Lakers—the defending champs—from the NBA playoffs on their home floor (see 4:35 mark).

Somewhere between the Forum massive men’s room (1) and my Dad’s car, the trauma overwhelmed me after the game. The order of my universe had been turned upside-down. For the past four years—or roughly half my life, at that point—the Lakers had annually advanced to the Finals, twice winning titles. It was one thing to lose to the goddamn Celtics or the Moses/Dr. J Sixers—but the Rockets? (2) All the doubts about the Lakers’ toughness, about Kareem’s age, about Worthy’s mediocre rebounding, about Scott’s shaky confidence, about Magic’s value vis-à-vis Bird (3), they all came rushing back at once. And all I could envision was Bird, his ’86 mullet, McHale, frigging Jerry Sichting, unbearable Ainge and the rest of the goddamn Celtics beating Houston in the Finals and making life miserable again. (4) (Which is exactly what happened, of course.)

Worse yet, to my fourth-grade eyes it seemed like the Lakers might never get back to the top, even in their own conference. Houston was young, they were fearless, and, of course, they had Sampson and Olajuwon, the Twin Towers who made Kareem look decidedly feeble. Even their backup center, the knee-padded and hyper-active Jim Petersen, seemed tougher than Abdul-Jabbar, and the Rockets had made the Lakers look instantly old, soft and stale.

And so I bawled. More accurately, I probably sniffled through a few tears after stammering some passionate and totally sophisticated observation like “Byron just sucks!” I’m sure my older brother was whining even louder about the Lakers in the parking lot, which only made me more depressed and my dad more irritated. All I know is, we got to the car, I was definitely crying a little, my Dad said something along the lines of “Magic doesn’t cry when he loses, you never know if he’s ten points up or ten points down, so don’t be a poor sport." (5)

Then he probably put in Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits Volume I and II—or maybe a tape from the classic rock collection Cruisin’, which my brother had ordered off of TV and which remained in my dad’s car for YEARS—and I went to sleep.



What does any of this have to do with Hakeem, or as he was known then, Akeem? One of the oft-forgotten details about the Sampson game—like Robert Reid’s game-tying three with 12 seconds left and Granville Waiters’ sideline cheering—was that Akeem was actually ejected from the game. He got tossed through the fourth quarter, at a critical juncture when the game was tight and Akeem had already scored 30 points and was obliterating the Lakers. On an otherwise innocuous play, Olajuwon squared off in a brief but memorable fight with Lakers backup center Mitch Kupchak, whiffing repeatedly before being headlocked by the Lakers’ Maurice Lucas in the ensuing skirmish.

When we think of Olajuwon, we generally envision the even-keeled, shaking-and-baking, Ramadan-observing Hakeem of the Rockets’ championship years. But I will always recall—and with some fondness—the earlier, more predatory iteration of Akeem, the untamed soccer goalie who leapt at the slightest provocation, dunked with ferocity, and swung wildly at one-legged Kupchak that night in ’86.

“I’ll never forget [Akeem] coming out of the locker room after the game, half-naked, happy like his life had been saved,” says Bill Fitch, the Rockets’ former head coach, who’s still spry at 76. “I’m sure his whole life passed before him because he probably thought I was going to kill him for getting thrown out.”

It’s easy to forget, but Akeem was by far the less-heralded Tower, and was a fairly crude player—offensively and defensively—coming out of college. As Fitch reminded me and countless reporters over the years, Olajuwon had a limited grasp of basketball terminology and fundamentals when he debuted with the Rockets in ’84.

“If I said, ‘run the backdoor,’ he’d sprint toward the exit sign,” recalls Fitch, who still lives in the Houston area and has incredible recall of individual games. “Every time someone faked, he’d go for it. He’d get two to three silly fouls a ballgame.” After one particularly frustrating practice, Fitch scolded Olajuwon and implored him to stop getting baited on defense. “I told him, ‘goddamit, if you’d just stay out of the damn popcorn machine and stay down, you could became a pretty good defensive player.’ And of all the things I said to him, that stuck.”

When Olajuwon was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2008, Fitch came full circle with his critique. He bought Hakeem a full-sized, old-fashioned popcorn machine emblazoned with the Rockets logo. “People forget how much these guys can improve,” says Fitch.

Sadly, that night was Sampson’s one shining moment. At the time, that game felt like the tipping point for Sampson and Olajuwon, the launch date for a new NBA era defined by “Twin Towers” lineups that would alter the course of basketball history. In November of ’86, in Sports Illustrated’s NBA preview issue, the magazine ran a photo spread entitled “Twin Towers on the Rise,” spotlighting the trend toward double-center frontcourts across the Association. (Who can forget Joe Barry Carroll and Chris Washburn in Golden State? Or William Bedford and Buddha Edwards in Phoenix?) The feature opened with this unforgettable image, which I particularly love for the Etonic high tops worn by Akeem:



But it was never to be. Sampson's balky left knee, which had been problematic during his college career, gave out in early 1987, and he and Fitch feuded off-the-court. “Ralph would have been a much better player had he had two good legs,” says Fitch. “When he did have ‘em, he was great.” In December of ‘87, Sampson was traded to Golden State, where he endured more injuries and disappointment. He had brief stints with Sacramento, Washington and a team in Spain before retiring before retiring in 1992.

Akeem, of course, continued to improve, found Islam, added an H to his first name, and after several middling years in the late ’80s and early ’90s, became the NBA’s most valuable player after Michael Jordan retired for the first time.

For what it’s worth, the fight in ’86 was the last moment of Kupchak’s playing career. It was a feisty end for the former North Carolina star, who unluckily shredded his knee in the days before ACL operations and “micro-fracture” surgeries became routine procedures. Kupchak, who came to the Lakers as a controversial and high-priced free agent from the Washington Bullets, insists he didn’t try to agitate Akeem in an attempt to get Olajuwon ejected. “Did I go into the game looking for trouble? No. It was a skirmish like many others.”

Kupchak, who now has presided over four titles since taking over as the Lakers’ GM in 2000, says it occurred to him on the drive home from the Forum that the tussle with Akeem would be his final NBA play. But he was more bitter about the way the season ended. “We did not have the chemistry, something was amiss, we were not firing on all cylinders, and I’m not sure there was anything that could have changed the outcome of that series—we were going to lose,” says Kupchak. “Then again, I retired and [the Lakers] won back-to-back titles, so maybe the problem was me.”



(1) It’s unthinkable now, but the Forum had ONE men’s room on each side of the arena to accommodate the urinary/defecatory needs of most of the fans. And you had to trek down a scarily steep set of stairs to get to the stalls and urinals. It’s amazing there weren’t more accidents/fights/chaos.

(2) I’m not sure if I knew then that the ’81 Rockets, led by Moses, beat the Lakers in one of the bizarre three-game “mini-series” the NBA used to have. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I don’t think the memory of that loss would have made the ’86 defeat any easier to take.

(3) This was before Magic’s first MVP in the ’86-’87 season, when the prevailing wisdom among most NBA observers—and the few really fucking annoying Celtics fans at my Jewish summer camp in SoCal—was that Bird was by far the more valuable and clutch player.

(4) It really is incredible, and more than a little disturbing, to realize in retrospect how ALL of my venom of the Celtics was focused on their white guys. I think the white-on-white hatred of the ’80s Celtics by Caucasian NBA fans laid the groundwork for the Duke phenomenon in college hoops during the ’90s and 2000s.

(5) Contrary to my Dad’s assumed wisdom, Magic did cry after big defeats. After the Lakers lost Game 7 of the ’84 Finals against the Celtics, he cried in the shower alongside Michael Cooper and spent the night being consoled in his Boston hotel room by Mark Aguire and Isiah Thomas.

THE TRIOLOGY: He Never Loved You

When Craggs did Durant, (my response, if you're interested) he asked us to acknowledge that no athlete is without ego. The nature of competition practically demands it, even if you're on an offensive line -- one big chain reaction where credit, and blame, ping-pong back and forth with only minimal concern for the point of origin. A point guard runs his team; leadership like that practically demands self-assurance and charisma. Durant, supreme scorer who holds the entire Thunder squad together, has more than quiet confidence going for him. When Durant says he wants to be remembered as the greatest ever, it may be more about process than entitlement. He's motivating himself through the belief that the goal is within reach.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: there's a modesty and restraint to Durant that sets him apart from other superstars. Yet there's simply no way to look on Durant mid-game and not see something vicious, even tormented, in his eyes. Sometimes, Tim Duncan gets riled in the playoffs; otherwise, he glides along the pathways to victory with a detachment often mistaken for disinterest. That in no way describes what it's like to watch Kevin Durant play. He possesses all the swagger of his peers, it's just been sublimated, or shoved deep down inside so it's even more combustible. Durant isn't a throwback to some genteel sporting past. But, it should be noted, that past never really existed the way people want it to today.

We can all safely assume that Durant doesn't stroll through the OKC mall thinking he's the baddest. In a twist that must intrigue David Stern, this NBA backwater has turned into an incubator, or haven, for players not overly interested in the glamorous life or the other distractions their job brings. Yet the intensity of his play can be unnerving, turning a smooth, thoughtful game into something downright spooky. Folks sometimes dare to call Durant the heir to Jordan's demeanor, but it make more sense triangulate him with MJ and Kobe (once he found his own voice). Kobe said he was "chasing perfection"; he never said that he had achieved it. To be the player he wanted to be, he had to always be peering over that next horizon. For Durant, those horizons are a successions of MJ-like carnage.

FreeDrafto #56893: One Pant at a Time

By now, everyone reading this website knows the stories reputed as the biggest to come from the Draft, and almost all of them are driven by free agency and salary capism. (If there is a job called "capologist," I would assume that person is an expert in "capism." Unless the word applies to restaurants that won't serve Batman.) Look no further than the Wizards, a team that drafted John Wall but likely eclipsed its actual draft news by acquiring Kirk Hinrich and the seventeenth pick. In New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, and almost everywhere else, the Hinrich transaction remains a far more pressing affair. Today's mathematics is Hinrich = LeBron + Wade + Bosh + Amare + et al. Yes, Wall's ascent was inevitable, a foregone conclusion that mitigated the news value of the moment. He had been the presumptive top pick since he laid siege to the AAU circuit as a teenager. But he was not the first high-school sensation to attend his own coronation, no matter how circuitous the route there. Nor will he be the last: BRE has likely already begun planning the melancholy farewell to Harrison Barnes that will be staged in Chapel Hill next April. Wall may be divinity bound, but those already godbody have not yet yielded their time.

Rather than contribute to all of this white noise, though, why not take a few moments to reflect on some actual Draft happenings? In many ways, some of which defy conventional measurement, last night was plenty consequential.

Start in Orlando. The institutional skepticism with which this website approaches college basketball has left it mostly bereft of Stanley Robinson coverage. There was yesterday, when Robinson was pegged as the man most likely to blow up the summer league, and there was the time I said that by this November, Sticks would lead the NBA in hopeless athletism. That is, he will be the most hopeless athlete, not the most hopelessly athletic. Those two sentences are the authoritative FreeDarko history of Stanley Robinson. It's pathetic, and it needs to change. Thankfully, the Magic drafted him with the fifty-ninth pick.

Stanley Robinson is the sort of athlete who renews the wonderment of sports. Even in basketball, where the aerial exploits of a high-flying legion have conditioned many fans to take skywalking for granted, Robinson stands out. YouTube does not fully capture his essence, but consider a few moments that should restore your faith in excitement:









Watching Robinson leap is a true spectacle. Though the NBA is already filled with LeBron's muscular drives and Josh Smith's impossible, glowering air show, Stanley is his own man. His form helps to create the distinction. Though he can seamlessly transition from running to flying all the same, Robinson is most effective when jumping off of two feet. When James swoops in from behind or Smith drives and finishes on a man, each does so while already in motion. Robinson, however, will often launch himself with unintended theatrics. Watch the first video closely. Before dunking on the entire Spartan team, Robinson pauses for a half second to elevate off of both feet. He launches himself like a rocket exploding into the air. It happens the entire game against Chattanooga, too. See the pattern? He does this all the time. Pausing to jump off of both feet surely diminishes his effectiveness, but combined with the results, it creates a stylistic signature.

The results, too, are stylish in their own bizarre, enchanting way. Bred by the contrast between reality and potential, Robinson's game seeps volatility and mania. For the entire duration of his UConn career, he was criticized for his bouts of indifference and his intermittent absenteeism. There were times when his way literally forced the hard way. And, to be frank, he can't really play ball so well: his handle is weak, his jumper is spotty. Throughout entire games, he will seem distracted, a step slow and an idea short. But he is a glorious physical force whose laconic demeanor can be replaced easily by authentic enthusiasm, and who talks a good game. Stanley Robinson knows the path, he just doesn't always walk it. Perhaps he just can't.

When he is on, though, in those moments when he forgets his limitations, or remembers what he can be, Robinson is gorgeous. He elevates for a jumper as though the ground were boring him and he needed an extended break. He throws the ball through the rim as though he has done them both a favor. It looks easy for him, not because he's so good at basketball, but because he's such an anomaly that basketball happens to be a sport he can play well. Stanley's long arms, lithe body, and active legs turn him into a defensive wrecking crew, the sort of guy who always seems to overwhelm his man during a pickup game, taking the ball or swallowing the other dude whole. The dunks and blocks are self-evident. The power is awesome, but so, too, is the sense that Robinson has temporarily achieved a tenuous grasp on his raging basketball universe. This calm amid chaos, the leveling of the vicissitudes, is transmitted by the desperate way with which he redirects the ball toward the rim when finishing an alley-oop. He needs to finish the play, lest he surrender his home. It is reflected in blocks that seem less like basketball strategy and more like an outward manifestation of some internal struggle for control. Sticks has a game of yearning...except for the moments when he doesn't. When he is airborne, he finds a pacific competency not always available terrestrially. It's fascinating.



All too perfectly, Robinson's struggle for efficacy and identity will now play out in the gloaming of Vince Carter's career. (Hopefully--Sticks must make the team.) Vince, of course, was a Robinson-like figure at one time, a man whose daring and uncommon acrobatics were startling and exciting. Entering the Draft, Carter had a fuller game than that which Robinson brings with him to Orlando, but each left college for the NBA across a bridge built by outsized athleticism.

Since arriving as the fantastically gifted and fatally flawed mantle bearer of a post-Jordan generation, Vince has fought demons similar to those which confront Robinson. We can disagree, but I always found that the central conflict in Vince Carter's career was whether he actually wanted to play basketball. Was he a basketball player with tremendous athleticism, or was he a tremendous athlete who happened to play basketball because that was the best way to maximize his body? In Vince's mean-mugging, in his self-conscious fadeaways, in his dramatic injuries, in his conflicted persona, I always saw ambivalence. The hollow, insincere manner with which he would attempt to portray hero and villain at various times betrayed his disaffection. Vince Carter is a likeable, thoughtful, fairly serene guy whose most productive years were spent acting as just the opposite, and I always got the sense that basketball was merely something to do.

Vince's career narrative has the tinge of tragedy because he hasn't achieved the basketball success to which his natural talent would perhaps entitle him. However, that gloomy feeling quickly recedes if Carter is cast not as a basketball lifer who bleeds orange, but instead as a more passive observer who inadvertently came to star in a serendipitous story. For Vince, it was always easy, a path of least resistance. That is a gross oversimplification that enjoys a liberal creative license, but there is an underlying truth. A truth illustrated by Carter's steady decline into irrelevance and horrible playoff campaign this past season. The coda of his career does not sound as though Vince's heart were ever in it. As a result, memories of the visceral excitement which VC once encouraged are tempered by the contemporary suspicion that it was a charade to some extent. He stuffed his arm through that rim and he did those reverse 360s, but none of that was ever really in the service of the game. It was in the service of his own athleticism; dunking was masturbatory in some way. Whether we begrudge Vince his indulgences is another topic, but recognizing them does alter his basketball legacy.

We don't yet know who Stanley Robinson will be, but it is impossible to not root for him. His fantastic leaping is a rare gift (to say nothing of its intrinsic FD qualities). Seeing him jump, alone, can be breathtaking. We just need to hope that he turns out to be either more of a basketball player than Vince ever was or someone who can act at least half as well. Perversely, he will be working with an ideal mentor.



The other bit of overlooked manifest destiny from the Draft was Devin Ebanks arriving in Los Angeles. In the FD mock, we had Ebanks in Minnesota so that Rambis could reclaim OG Laker status by replicating the formula which Los Angeles has used to conjure two straight titles. Fate one-upped this prognostication by delivering a mercurial, itinerant Queens man whose offense comes and goes to the team that already has two of them. Or, if you'd prefer a story that replaces fate with something approaching irony, what about this: Ebanks, a rangy collection of knees and elbows who plays effective wing defense and has a variety of skills but no one exceptional ability, arrives in Los Angeles to back up Ron Artest, the man who replaced Trevor Ariza. Ariza, of course, was the rangy collection of knees and elbows who played effective wing defense and had a variety of skills but no one exceptional ability. In 2011, the Lakers will likely draft a bear and let Ebanks become a Rocket.

One also should likely see fate in Boston drafting Luke Harangody, college basketball's reigning Great White Hype. After a postseason in which the all-black Celtics gave Scalabrine limited burn and lost once it ran out of big men, drafting a burly white guy from Notre Dame made sense. Luck of the Irish, right?

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.

Sainthood, Knighthood, Standing Still

Pau Gasol and international player style and identity and other stuff you should like. Wish you were here.

Can't Find No Comfort, Don't Need No Relief

Some great talk in the comments about the contrast between the steeped-in-history Celtics-Lakers (at least as the league's trying to construct it) and the looming LeBron-lead master plan from without (within? no idea.) I know, the history thing isn't working so well with this year's teams, and James himself isn't explicitly leading the charge. But it's hard not to notice: on the one hand, we have the past glomming onto the now in ways reactionary and haunting (role of the Simmons book?). And on the other, the future that, even if you're cool with it, still stands to put players on top and give them their choice of colors.

Is it too much to suggest that the NBA/ESPN/ABC are in fact trying to push back against whatever radicalism comes to pass this summer? They have spent so long trying to get out from under Jordan's shadow, and now a new crop of stars seemed poised to do so. Except then they went and decided to undermine the very notion of tradition-through-sublimation. It had been coming for some time, post-Jordan, and been the popular fear, post-Jordan. Here's the thing, though: Jordan didn't do it, and no one else before the Class of 2003-based crew had the relevance to make it happen. They seemed headed in the right direction, whatever that means, and now they've really gone and realized exactly what the league always feared Allen Iverson would spread. It's apt, if accidental, that we're being treated to LeBron James's all-out blitz during the Finals. These Finals, and that players, of all things.

Let's face it, James doesn't need history like Kobe Bryant does. Kobe sits with film, and has become—in his age and relative wholesomeness—a reliable lodestar for old-meets-new. I've joked that LeBron should hire Kobe for reasons of growth. The difference between them, though, continues to grow this summer. Bryant is not only visibly older, he's also more readily absorbed now into not the post-Jordan morass, but a broader picture of How They Played the Game. His Nike ad involves siphoning in images from the last twenty years, including past campaigns that weren't about him (in the sense that Kobe is a single historical fact), plus a collapsing of Andre 3000/The Beatles that suggests not just cross-generational dialogue, but the importance of rejecting that rift. James, thought, reveals in his Larry King interview that he's a Jordan guy, which makes no sense considering his body and skills. However, while others have sought to imitate MJ (including Young Kobe), James simply adopts him in spirit, as the world-shatterer he entered the league as. This is the end of history.

In 2008, Lakers-Celtics screamed "bring the past back", except there was one kink. Both of those squads had been assembled that season. The Celtics invented the template for mercenary action that will be referenced many times this summer; the Lakers saw Andrew Bynum come into his own, then falter, and then soared only because of Pau Gasol's arrival—still incomplete at the time of the Finals. Maybe these two fit the Lakers-Celtics stereotypes well, in some rudimentary sense. However, this wasn't embracing the possibility of history, of an unbroken link to the past. That was all equivocation. Really, 2008 set the stage for what's coming after the Finals wind down. The Celtics now much more resemble a classic, categorized unit of the Russell years, maybe Bird's time if you think Paul Pierce is that ace. Lakers flow and spire, even as Ron Artest remains so key to altering the complexion of all that happens on the court without even making a sound (I'll say it again: NEW BATTIER).



James is not as crass as, say, so-and-so jumping teams for cash in the nineties. There are sound business reasons to work the mini-max, the Super Summit, and the shadowy plan to customize his destination as much as makes sense. This isn't pure self-interest. While it affects a limited number of players, this is somewhat earth-shaking, changing the way that not only the team and individual sync up when it comes to loyalty and such, but also the very question of who owns who. Who is accountable. Earning the right to a star, as opposed to simply danging cash in front of his face and expecting him to jump, alone, on to the next one. But—and here's the problematic one—history in sports has always been the history of institutions, or at least individuals against the backdrop of institutions (i.e. franchises). After Jordan, we worried it might devolve into Mad Max. Instead, though, we've gotten something more rational and, if done with tact, hard to argue with. In James, we have a player who has positioned himself against all history.

That raises another odd detail of this series. As I highlighted in an earlier post, and was also raised in the comments, Rajon Rondo aggressively rejects the past. He claims to have sprung, fully-formed, from some combination of other sports and Rondo's natural aptitude. Hence, an idiosyncrasy wholly distinct from LeBron's all-consuming template. Except, oddly, he's the one on this throwback Celtics. Would have made more sense if he'd been dominant in 2008, as opposed to playing a role. The recurring theory is that he's Cousy reborn, but even Cousy was referencing other styles. Rondo might be lying through his teeth or at least bending those teeth a little. Though doesn't seem self-conscious like that. Regardless, look at his game ... does this strike you as a man useful to anyone's agenda?

It all comes down to intention, and who struck first. LeBron as jerk, I cannot abide. LeBron as smasher of worlds, I have to acknowledge. If the twain meet, I'm not so pompous as to deny #1 if #2 does end up shaping the future—with results, and regardless of whether or not the past is ignore and the present defiled. For now, the past is pushing back hard. Whether this is a deliberate strategy, or just dope scripting, I have no idea. I can say, though, that is makes the present wild, incoherent, fresh, stressful, and subject to hourly reports. And that's ignoring the fact that there's an actual NBA Finals going on.

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.

The Mailblog Starts Flying Around the Room

This afternoon, I get the following email (and images) from Kevin Blackistone:

"So a friend of mine, Darrell (O-Dog from The Wire), was checking out T-shirts at his local American Apparel and he noticed a shirt with this image from the 1960's on it. He thinks the one black face is Kobe, and everyone he showed it to in the store thinks the same."





Kevin compared this to "Jesus on a french fry", but to me it's way bigger. I'm thinking Zapruder.

Please also take the time to read the earlier, Randy Foye-themed mailbag, or my column from today about LeBron and coaches.

The Phantom Menace

You're welcome for the totally unrelated but awesome videos that someone else excavated. Read me exulting in the Celtics and calling John Wall the first major 2010 piece. Here are some other ideas I've had to deal with:

Okay, so my suggestion about a year ago that max players be given stock options was a silly one. I can't even find it today. The larger point, though, was that the mini-max could be the beginning of players truly starting to control teams—something they have been accused of for years. This summer, when all the marquee free agents will sit down and carve up the territories, or partner up, or whatever analogy puts the funniest hats on their heads in your head, we'll see the next step. Like the Celtics before them, LeBron and company will be renting franchises as staging areas for their championship dreams. Power to the people.

Now, if I can step out of my cloak of self-seriousness for a second, here's the absolutely silly aspect of this all: I blame USA Basketball. Colangelo initially wanted a college-like team where role players and pliant superstars would come together in the service of this great land. Instead, he ended up with the best of the fucking best overcoming the universe with the sheer awesomeness of their aggressive, up-tempo play and bonding over it like a bunches of kids at summer camp. It was their show, not Coach K's, and Kobe teaching Bron about shooting is symbolic player self-determination on every level imaginable.

Team USA was meant to return basketball to America, snatching it from the hands of thugs with big salaries. Instead, it created a tight-knit community of NBA A-listers, including most of this summer's big free agents. In a way, what's resulted is the worst nightmare of this original Colangelo vision of basketball. Plenty of these guys were already friends, but this made it official. If you don't see a direct line from Beijing to the conversations expected to take place between the Class of 2010, you're a fucking idiot. It's a cabal whose internal deliberations will have a huge effect on the alignment of power in the NBA for the next decade or so.

Eric Freeman said of all this "It's just like government. Those with the most money conspire to shape the league under the guise of patriotism." Except in this case, the "guise of patriotism" was at first a means to put players in line. Instead, LeBron and friends ended up overthrowing the damn thing. What they're left with is collusion forged in the crucible of intense love-for-country. To me, that sounds even more like the fundamentals of government.

Fields of Garnish

Check out "Lamar Modem," my first foray—along with some help from my FanHouse comrades—into NBA video art. "Stop, Or LeBron Will Shoot" was going to be next, but after last night, who knows? Really though, I did say at the time, and forever, that Rondo was taking too little money.

Speaking of me writing else, this column on the Suns and the nature of revolution will appeal to readers here.

You Get What You Pay With

Read this first. It's all about structural change and Los Suns and brings you up-to-date on me on this.

However, sometimes, you write a line that's embarrassing, and then your friend writes something more thoughtful about it, and then you have to correct for the heat of the moment. "Fuck Phil Jackson" should have been "Phil Jackson is being cranky, dismissive, rude, and very predictably Boomer-ish." Eric Freeman had another stance: Phil is a hypocrite, since those books he gives everyone couldn't just be taken as lessons in basketball.

Upon further reflection, I've hit on The Secret of Phil Jackson: the secret is that Phil Jackson is only about basketball. We generally assume, as Eric did, that once sports get abstracted or intellectualized enough, it transcends itself and enters into dialogue with all other spheres of human knowledge. However, just as there are smart people who like sports because they provide refuge from figuring out the universe, there are figures like Phil who are, in effect, meaningful only as basketball thinkers. They may draw on other perspectives or methods, but that's not the same as equating sports with Zen or Bolano. Sports will not save you or society; they can just be approached with similar rigor.

It's not so different from applying the scientific method to being a chef, which I believe is called molecular gastronomy, or philosophy PhDs going to work for corporations. To presume a bleeding between all things is almost laughably modern. Get with the century.

The biggest proof I have here that Phil is being flippant or uninterested, not taking some kind of principled stance? He's outright dismissive of the question, even the issue. He hasn't done his research, and takes the same tone he always does when he feels like being a dick. If Jackson was really as deep, thoughtful, or political (pick your imagined compliment) about the non-basketball world as we suppose him to be, he would presumably have a better response. Instead, there's no difference between him and a commenter on AOL or Yahoo!.

Adande asked him about, and many have pointed to—if nothing else, as Eric did, as proof of hypocrisy—his sideline support for Bill Bradley. Guess what? Bradley was an old friend who, while liberal, was a mainstream candidate for President. It wasn't any great feat of will or imagination. It wasn't the world basketball gave him.

A Dinner of Onions

You may also know me as Eric Freeman. Check out more of my writing at The Baseline.

Shoals has a new column on the psychology behind the LeBron/Kobe debate. And make sure to check out the latest podcast.

One of Phil Jackson's most notable tactics as Zen Master is his yearly tradition of selecting books for each of his players to read. He considers the player's personality and needs, and makes a decision based on all available factors. It's one of the clearest reminders that he's a coach who respects and values his players as people, not just basketball players.

Most years, we hear a few of the selections through the grapevine. But last night, Phil's girlfriend and Lakers Executive VP of Business Operations Jeanie Buss put all of this year's picks on Twitter. Let us analyze some of the most notable choices and figure out what Phil sees in his team.

Player: Kobe Bryant
Book: Montana 1948 by Larry Watson
Synopsis: A small-town sheriff finds out that his brother has raped and murdered numerous Native-American women. He finds himself torn between his dual loyalties to family and the law.
Meaning: Wow, Phil doesn't screw around, eh? Forget for a minute the connections to Kobe's legal troubles and consider that the reader is meant to identify with the sheriff. The common perception of Kobe is that he's torn between his need to score and his desire to win as part of the larger team. Often, he appears to toggle between each pole, unable to find a happy medium. What Montana 1948 teaches us is that no matter which option you choose, you must live with the consequences and emotions of forgoing the other choice. It's about living in the gray area, something Kobe must embrace to realize his full potential as a teammate and star.



Player: Pau Gasol
Book: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Synopsis: A five-part, nearly 900-page novel following a disparate group of characters, with many plot threads, including serial murders and the possible end of the world, connected only by the most tenuous of threads.
Meaning: This choice is more about what it represents than the actual content of the novel. 2666 is notoriously difficult, a full-on experience that rewards patience, creative interpretation, and the reader putting as much as he can into reading. In short, Phil wants Pau to push himself, to put forth so much effort that he'll push his critical abilities to new heights. Just like on the court, he needs to stop being content and get the most out of his considerable natural talent.

Player: Ron Artest
Book: Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson
Synopsis: A coaching legend details his philosophy of basketball as the ultimate in spiritual communication among teammates.
Meaning: This is one of the few choices Buss explained: apparently Phil likes to give new players an introduction to his approach to basketball. Sorry, but I don't buy it. The more likely explanation is that Phil knows Artest is borderline insane, tried to think of a suitable book, couldn't come up with anything, and just picked up one of the copies of Sacred Hoops he had around the house. The good news is that Ron-Ron is so sincere that he'll undoubtedly take every message in the book to heart. It's just unclear what it'll all mean to him.



Player: Shannon Brown
Book: Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
Synopsis: Our president reflects on growing up as a mixed-race child in America.
Meaning: Yeah, Brown is light-skinned, but this isn't about race. Brown was an athletic dynamo of a star at Michigan State, was drafted by Cleveland in the hope that he could be a sidekick for LeBron, and seemed like a bust before he made it to LA. In other words, he grew up with one identity, found that it didn't entirely suit him, and now must adjust to a new life as a role player. Dreams from My Father can help him realize that his past identity doesn't need to be cast away, that it can constitute his adult self just as much as the new role he must take on.

Player: Luke Walton
Book: The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Synopsis: Four ecologically-conscious misfits rage against the machinery of pollution.
Meaning: As the son of Bill, Luke probably likes to get high in nature. But that's a passive activity, and sometimes complacent appreciation isn't enough. You must rise up and take what's needed for Mother Earth. (Note: Phil gave this book to Luc Longley during the Bulls years, with disastrous results.)



Player: Lamar Odom
Book: The Right Mistake by Walter Mosley
Synopsis: An ex-con gets out of prison after 27 years and becomes a fount of wisdom. He shares his story and advises others.
Meaning: The most inspired choice of all. Lamar has been through a lot in his life, and he's come out on the other side better for it. Phil knows this, and wants him to become an agent of change. Lamar has the power -- it's up to him to make the next step and reach out to others.

Player: Derek Fisher
Book: Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
Synopsis: A collection of political essays by a then-incarcerated leader of the Black Panther Party.
Meaning: Fisher is basically the definition of a veteran, a dependable, serious soul on which the rest of the team can rely. But he's also safe, so maybe it's time to inject a little fire into his system.

Player: Adam Morrison
Book: Che: A Graphic Biography by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon
Synopsis: The life of the revolutionary Che Guevara in comic book form.
Meaning: Look, Phil, we all know AmMo has no future with the Lakers, but that doesn't mean you have to slap him in the face. Morrison is a noted fan of Guevara, so it's clear his coach put little thought into this choice. And if you're going with a Che-related work, why not pick something with a little more heft, like the 800-page Jon Lee Anderson bio, or even the Criterion Collection version of Soderbergh's four-hour biopic? You might as well have given him Con Air for its heartfelt portrayal of a man struggling with diabetes.

Ring Out Loud

Ken and Dan check with each other, and with the league as it is at this particular and exact time.



In summary: the Lakers and Celtics are good. The Timberwolves aren't. We're not sure who the second-best team in the West is. Everyone should probably make a trade, especially with Golden State.

Along the way we contemplate time and object permanence. Plus, Ken makes a special announcement.

It's as FreeDarko Presents: The Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast as FreeDarko Presents: The Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast gets. Dig it.

Songs from the episode:

"It's So Obvious" - Wire
"Things I Did When I Was Dead" - No Age
"Love Will Tear Us Apart (Live)" - Joy Division
"Boys, You Won't" - The Wrens
"20 Minutes/40 Years" - Isis

Exhuming Pizarro

Hello all, and welcome to another FD Guest Lecture. This one comes to you courtesy of Brendan K. O'Grady, author of 2nd Round Reach.

When you start to win as many championships as the Los Angeles Lakers have, it’s not good enough to just talk about how nice it is to win. So, starting sometime in May, the narrative of LA’s playoffs became an extreme program of self-reflective mythmaking in the name of one Kobe Bryant, administered to us for the better part of two months by Nike, Gatorade, and the World Wide Leader in Sports.

But now, weeks removed from the din of pomp and ceremony, let us take a moment to consider the championship as it presents an equally significant legacy statement for not merely one man, nor his teammates, nor even the storied franchise for whom they won it, but rather for an aggregation of oft-impugned ballers who have now been gifted with their ultimate rebuttal: The Euro.

For the better part of two decades, the term “Euro” immediately evoked something resembling one of two primary archetypes: Either men with floppy hair and too-slight builds for their height, or men with high-cheek beards and good passing skills from the post. The pioneering Euros- men like Sabonis, Petrovic, Divac, Smits, and Kukoc- had influential careers, in some cases earning the respect of league-wide accolades and even winning a little. But the modest successes they presented immediately lead to over-eagerness from NBA teams for still greater returns. These mysterious figures from distant lands represented possibilities unknown but unconstrained, a Myth Of The Next bonanza promising to make “once-in-a-generation” talents a “two-or-three-times-in-a-draft” reality.

When Pau Gasol entered the league in 2001, he was the perfect player at the perfect time to further feed the league’s enthusiasm for Euros. A super-skilled ROY in waiting, his intercontinental qualities were never as apparent as those seasons he spent at work on the blocks, maneuvering his still-skinny frame around defenses and stuffing stats across the box score. He was hailed as a cornerstone, savior of a team that could never attract talent that wasn’t shipped in from overseas and didn’t know any better that Memphis was among everybody’s least favorite cities on an NBA road trip. Before too long, Pau grew his beard and his grit, and soon he lead the lowly Grizzlies to their first playoffs, all the while colored with nouns like “finesse” and “gracefulness.”

But Gasol would prove to be more the exception than the rule. Sometime around the mid 2000s, after committing untold millions to prospects not long for NBA rosters, the word “Euro” started to become a stigma, synonymous with “longshot” when spoken of a teenagers born internationally, and a near-pejorative when describing domestic products who possess a solid stroke and no defensive ability.

By the mid-2000s, speculation on Euro futures had come to a head, but the continent had yielded fewer successes than the time, money and draft picks invested might have otherwise dictated. The reputation of the Euro as an under-performer might well have been cemented then, as the first Euro Decade had almost entirely proven itself a litany of outright failure.



The most obvious point of redress here is the obvious question of the Dynasty Spurs, from whom a vocal minority of NBA fans will claim as many as three era-defining Euros with as many championships between them. But a cursory glance reveals that the effect of their supposedly heightened Euro presence has been greatly exaggerated.

First of all, quick guards might be the most borderline of all Euro postionalities- a higher-percentage version of the American “combo guard” counterparts. Scorer/distributors of this mold are rarely tagged as “soft”, even if they come with funny accents. But much more importantly, neither Parker nor Ginobili were ever anything less than wholly sublimated to the collective cause of winning in a system driven by the supreme force of the Popavich/Duncan spirit tandem. And while Timmy was neither born nor raised a continental, by now he’s surely been recognized as definitively less an “international” player than, say, a Kobe Bryant (or hell, even a Carlos Boozer.) Oh, and Ime Udoka is from Oregon. Seriously. Look that shit up.

With so many mitigators at play, San Antonio remains, at best, a heavily-qualified case for the Euro’s redemption.

Then there were those magical Suns teams of recent memory, which flirted revolution on many fronts, most of which were imported from other countries. Mike D’Antoni was a star as a player in Italy, and critics initially dismissed the run n’ gun offense as a charming curio, carried over from less competitive leagues across the pond. The Steve Nash/Leandro Barbosa tandem possessed such seemingly preternatural packages of ability, vision, speediness and control that a logical path of least resistance immediately (and stupidly) attributed them to exotic heritage, and the therefore-inescapable influence of soccer on their play. And then there was the positional enigma-cum-puzzle-box that is Boris Diaw. At their philosophical foundations, those teams were as radically “European” a phenomenon as anything since the Frankfurt School.

But the fact of all the “7 seconds or less” rhapsodizing now really just betrays that smug condescension toward those squads that we knew was always there. The mainstream of basketball tradition can afford look back fondly on memories of the entertaining desert upstarts because, well, conventional wisdom was right all along, wasn’t it?

“That stuff may be fun, but it doesn’t win championships.”

Inevitably, expectations lowered. Franchises would still scout Europe, but rarely for anything more than a quality rotation player. And just when it started to look like the Euro would never cast off the stereotypes thrust upon them by years of ridicule and flopping, what might have been the penultimate blow to their collective reputation was dealt...

As the best player of the 2006-2007 season, Dirk Nowitzki was poised to become the greatest Euro in history. His Mavericks were a confluence of players with complementary and very American styles (as presented by Stackhouse, Jason Terry, and especially Josh Howard) yet all were molded around Dirk’s singular, distinctly foreign presence. He brought an alien skill set, and altered the course of the NBA’s season with the effect that only a 7-foot white shooting guard masquerading as a power forward could have on the game.

Their collapse against Miami the previous year was brutal, to be sure, but the edges were softened a bit by the world’s realization of Wade’s ascendance and the knowledge that they would endure and come back nothing but hungrier. The loss may well have fueled Dallas as they navigated an absurdly competitive field to achieve a league-best regular season campaign, and the catalyst for a return trip to the Finals (stop me if this sounds familiar.)

And for prolonged stretches in that year, Dirk’s Euroness was synonymous with the strength of granite mountains, and no longer spoken of with the superficial novelty that once would have come in the same breath as the words “Nikoloz Tskitishvili.” After the first such sustained period of brilliance from the caste’s greatest hero, no more demoralizing a moment could have existed for the Euro than when a shattered Dirk, all sunken-eyes and vacant smile, shook hands and posed with Stern as he accepted his MVP trophy, just a week after being eliminated from contention during the anarchic Warriors’ impossible paroxysm against reality.



By the start of the next season, Pau Gasol had repeatedly vocalized his annoyance with a franchise that refused to grow with him into an entity worthy of much more than a first round bounce come the postseason. When Chris Wallace caved and sent Pau to the coast, an already better-than-expected Lakers team started looking scary good. And the praise for Pau’s play lasted all the way until the Finals, when he ran smack up against a green wall of shouting, grunting, pushing, elbowing ferocity that quickly put him on his heels.

After being decimated by Boston, Gasol was among the readiest scapegoats on the roster (along with fellow Euros Ronny Turiaf and Sasha Vujacic) and it immediately became common knowledge that the 7 foot Spaniard’s “softness” is what made him anathema to proper, homegrown big men. Even as the Lakers rolled through the west this season, it felt at times that praise for Gasol, while consistent, was somewhat muted as if nobody wanted to be the first to declare Pau a legitimate stud playing for what many portended the soon-to-be champion Lakers.

Then, as the playoffs unfolded, the moral of Dirk’s story was periodically invoked to invalidate Gasol’s role with the eventual champs. Failing to stand up to the interior toughness of Houston/Denver/Orlando (just as his was supposedly the failing versus the Celtics), Pau would have earned a place right beside Dirk in the lamentable lineage of the Euro. And even in winning, his role beside an All-Universe shooting guard who already had three rings of his own would prove their collective curse. Just as Dirk collapsed under the weight of the expectations placed upon him, Gasol would serve as further proof that a Euro could never lead a team to victory himself.

But really, there’s no shame in being the unquestioned second best player on your team when playing beside one of only a handful of men with legitimate claim to the GOAT. And winning a title as a minor role player is something wholly different than what Gasol accomplished going toe-to-toe with Howard. Pau made good on the nearly-abandoned concept of the Euro as an inside presence par excellence, a true Power Forward tested in battle against a DPOY man-child/beast.

Even if Dwight’s nature as a big is of an indeterminate nature in the greater FD ethos, there’s no denying that he’s cast of the immense physicality dreamed of by GMs in a traditionally (read: American) dominant big, nor is there that Pau roundly outplayed him in 5 games. Much more than a learned forward with a fluid game and soft touch, Gasol was reborn in the Finals as a bona-fide force. He out-banged everybody for just about any rebound that mattered, carried LA through long stretches of the games that were close enough to contest, and ran up the score to ensure that the others weren’t.



Still, now and forever, some will say Dirk’s failure should invalidate Gasol’s success and his redemption of the Euro’s name. And the fact is, no- he didn’t do it as the #1 guy. But the naysayers are on the wrong side of a canonical divide. A Finals legacy is benevolence unknown to all but the select few who achieve what Gasol did and Dirk didn’t. History really is written by the victors, and winning softens even the harshest criticism with the patina of time.

The Lore of championships elevated a career second banana to a place in the 50 Greatest list’s golden glow, and begat the yang-adage of popular wisdom that, no, Michael never won without Scottie either. Pau’s playoffs will stand in a similar light, enduring the trials of retrospect, pride in the knowing that although he might never have been first on his team, his was the first Euro title.

Playing With House Pancakes

You want to know why I didn't flinch when Shaqobronix, or whatever it's called, came to pass? Why I was lukewarm on the Celtics, and to this day think my premonition was right? It's because this is what a real meeting of the minds should feel like.

Let's stop momentarily and honor Trevor Ariza, who will have a bright career elsewhere, starting with Houston, where he will either make okay to like Shane Battier, displace him the way we thought James White might do Bowen, or both. I know how important he was to that championship run. But that's in the past. They got the ring; these things are filled with singularities, contingencies, and rarely start-to-finish mandates. He was part of one crazy summer, and now instead, Ron Artest will be a Laker.

What makes Artest such a magical beast is that he's exactly the opposite of a championship. That place in history was a flux that ends in certainty. Artest is forever bold statements and stands, all adding up to bouquet of question marks. He can do nothing to surprise is, partly due to our numbness, but also because of how damn earnest he is about everything. It's a testament to Ron Ron that he can fall back on the force of his spoken and implicit convictions, no matter how ever-shifting and contradictory they may be. Artest will always have, for lack of a better word, his realness. Not his authenticity—he's not the only athlete from the projects who's seen shit—but the ability to make us watch not out of horror or honor, but from a place of love.

Like it or not, there is something admirable about Artest. Otherwise, he'd be a garden-variety sociopath. He's no longer a symbol of instability or risk, but of the enduring quality that could redeem such a blood-blender of a career: the fact that, at the time, he sure did mean it.



You might also say he's the opposite of Kobe Bryant, who by the least charitable reading, is the form of conviction without any of its substance. That would of course be totally wrong and unfair (though I expect to hear it echoed in the comments section), and yet it gets at something of Kobe's, well, dullness. Artest is complicated in the literal sense, of things fucking each other up and getting in each other's way. Kobe's complicated like a watch or schematic, and it's only us on the outside who don't see the internal logic. Ron Artest is inconvenienced by logic, Kobe redeemed by it. That's partly why you never hear "why doesn't Ron Artest win a championship?" It just doesn't seem right to bring him into the world of criteria. He has one of those careers that, when it's over, we'll all know whether it left a mark or not.

That's why it's so perfectly glib, and hilarious, that he's being attached to a team looking for a second championship. I caught some criticism for suggesting that, even if the Shaq-jection was successful, LeBron would only have one ring. I know that city and franchise can't like that, and noted as much, but James needs to be thinking dynasty. It's in his nature, the scope of what he does in the sport. Kobe, on the other hand, needed that single Shaq-less ring. Right, there's the three-peat, and the dynasty he got to help author. This last one, though, was all about the technicality. Ironic as all get-out, then, that this kind of thinking barely enters Artest's mind, or those who would judge him. Sometimes you wonder if he even thinks in terms of seasons, or even final scores. Each nanosecond is a war.

Ron Artest doesn't need a ring. Kobe doesn't anymore, either. There's zero pathos or desperation to this, not even with Lamar Odom presumably back on board (more on that in a second). I'm not saying the Lakers won't have desire, just that there won't be pressure beyond the pressure to play basketball. LA is great at disappearing; I think that having no weight on their shoulders will make for less, not more, of that. Artest, paradoxical as this may sound, will also only heighten this new outlook.

To close out this journey to the heavens and back again, the reason I am bouncing off the walls tonight is because of the Artest/Odom reunion. I know people have a problem with Knicks exceptionalism, and maybe even New York exceptionalism. But fuck it: I am sick of Mark Jackson having a monopoly on the New York Basketball brand. How long has it been since we heard any other announcer describe a player as NY, except in passing? Do not so quickly forget what our Attorney General said at his Senate confirmation hearings! Not bullshit street ball, these two; they're the stuff lore is made of. Artest is all grit and aggression, Odom beauty and otherworldliness. Sometimes I don't know who between them has more anguish in their game; they probably share a sack. However, as much as it will sicken some to hear this, seeing the two of them on one team is, in a sense, a triumph for whatever it is that city means to the sport.

It may be Los Angeles hanging a banner in a year, but if you want to talk style and stories, you couldn't make a team more New York if you wanted to. Just from these two.