Abjection At The Speed Of Sound

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

As Weird as Finger Panes

It's not online, but you'll have to take our word for it. In today's New York Times, the following words exist:

If Milicic does decide to leave for Europe, his lasting impressions on the N.B.A. may be as a cautionary tale about raw talent from overseas and the fact that he helped to inspire a young group of bloggers who started the site Free Darko.

The site has gone on to be one of the better N.B.A.-related blogs and last year produced the book "Free Darko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Basketball Almanac."

I lead with this not only to crease my own mask (it likes it!), but also because it pertains directly to a post I'd planned to write anyway. Darko is inseparable from "raw talent", albeit in practice, less often the overseas variety. We fixate on players in part for their singularity, but also in many cases because of their ability to tickle the imagination. It's alternately laughable and pitiable to watch NBA teams wait on, and ultimately admit their folly with, the likes of Darko or Kwame Brown. It's like the change of seasons, but with less Wordsworth and more scrap heap.

How then, is that so different from what we've been through with (deep breath) Andray Blatche, Amir Johnson, Rashad McCants, Julian Wright, Donte Greene, Javaris Crittenton, Al Thornton, Alexis Ajinca, Anthony Randolph, and Bill Walker, to name a few. Asterisk as many of these as you want, especially since some are recent or facing coaching oppression, but there's a sinking feeling associated with all of them. I know GMs in businesses are supposed to eat crow, but you've got to think their investment is more personal, emotional—as ours is entirely.



We've also been right quite a few times, and in other cases been stuck waiting to see if, to name the ultra-dude, J.R. Smith will ever become whole. Or Thaddeus Young achieve stardom, Francisco Garcia get those minutes, and so on. Those may just be a question of admitting that not all ideas become flesh, or that a league full of superstars wouldn't make any sense (1965, I see you!). With someone like Amir Johnson—once posited as a stroke of luck who would make up for Darko—it's harder to know what to feel. Did we stake a franchises's future on him? No, but our enthusiasm for Amir was every bit as real and concrete as, well, ours for players real and concrete. And now, we are forced into an expressive bind: Either admit that we falsely expended energy, spewing it back forth into the cosmos, or find value in the act of love even if this love is in the end proven false.

And wait, isn't this textbook bad faith? GMs are just stupid. We are willing to let our love of the game, or at least some scrap of it, hinge on potential without a road ahead, sometimes well after potential has ceased to quiver and gone still, mocking, obdurate. We celebrate the uneasiness and blind faith, while GMs gamely wait on their investment to pan out. They made a choice, and are forced to live with the consequences. We believe more the less dreams come true. That's not to say we resent players who realize their potential, but that excitement is different than belief. Do GMs believe? Do enchiladas dream?

I would be happy to learn that the universe is one big circle made up of syllogism. So when I die, they would say "his blog ended up lending its name to the All-Star point-forward FreeDarko Greenton, as well as both encouraging and extinguishing a certain elitist strain of fandom." But I don't want to stop now. DON'T MAKE ME STOP NOW.

Scream All Day

This will totally shock all of you: The still-untitled FreeDarko Book 2 will at one point address some "could've been" players. I had called them "what if's," but not only does that encompass much more, it also overlaps with the Simmons tome—one of my great anxieties about the project. The last thing I want to do is look like I'm ripping off another colorful NBA history book that came out one year before ours.

Last night, as I inexplicably watched the World Series over Lakers/Hawks, I struggled to come up with the perfect characterization of that kind of player. Then it turned into a model, so I decided to scrap it and make it a blog post, not in the least because it could use some copious reader input. I think they call it open source, or cheating. First, though, some glimmers from the NBA I caught last night: I fear the Lakers will win it all with Bynum as rampaging dinosaur and Artest and Odom used as unimaginatively as possible. The Blazers really bum me out, especially Aldridge. Blatche is the original Anthony Randolph. Stop comparing Oscar Robertson to LeBron, Robertson was a better mid-period Kidd with scoring genes (that was all Ziller). Ozzie Guillen's pre-game commentary shows you why Kevin Garnett will never be part of a studio crew.

But back to the problem that really bugged me. We all know that there exist players we say "if only" about. For one, there's two kind: Those that drive us insane when they're around, and assume the glow of exceptionalism once they've retired. That's due in large part to the fact that 99.99999% of these players have problems with injuries, which we've learned to hate the victim for, or fuck up personally, which just gets really old really fast (at least if you're trying to argue for their hypothetical place among the game's elite). Beyond that, there's the more complicated matter of what kind of legacy we're going off of. What I haven't figure out yet is whether, in the end, we view all these types the same way—many paths to the same honorary status—or the kind of career a player manages to have in fact decides how real, extravagant, or wishful our projections for them end up being. I also really want someone to tell me if certain of these scenarios are more common to one sport, or position, than others.

After much handwringing and chatting, I arrived at the following four categories, which for now lack snappy names:

1. Guys who, when all is said and done, somehow convince us they'd had an actual career. This one is startlingly subjective: Sandy Koufax, Gale Sayers, and Bill Walton all belong here even though each had a very different arc as a player. Maybe "non-player" is more appropriate. This is kind who make the Hall of Fame without anyone making a fuss.

2. One step below that, we have players who strung together several seasons of stardom, but either not to a degree, or without enough distinction, to elevate them to the top category. Sometimes, it's just a matter of us being unable to get over how incomplete their place in history seems; they're a strange mix of conjecture and actuality that's its own kind of purgatory. I put Pete Reiser and Maurice Stokes here; Stokes is HOF but it's largely sentimental.

3. Total flashes-in-the-pan, one-year wonders who sustain nothing but suggest multitudes. Herb Score goes here, as does Mark Prior. These are the real darlings of the "could've been" fetishists, at least those with the most preposterously Romantic streaks; that because Category #2 is generally classified as "tragic."

4. Pure potential. Never really got a chance for those initial assessments to be proven wrong. Len Bias is the obvious, and most extreme, example here. Ernie Davis. Shaun Livingston probably fits, as well.

With that, I open up the floor for discussion. Add names, critique the framework, give a sport-specific analysis. It's like a Wiki with the head cut off. Or the tail, maybe.

Made Flesh

Frank Deford was on NPR this morning talking about how stupid it was to try to compare Michael Phelps to competitors from other sports, and while he obviously has a legitimate point, I can't help but think of Amare Stoudemire when I watch Usain Bolt. It's the irrepressible swagger in the starting blocks, the preternatural cool under pressure, and more than anything, the sheer physical dominance over his opponents. Like Amare, Bolt manages to look like a man among boys, while at the same time seeming himself to still be a child. It's this rawness that prompted NBC announcer Ato Bolden to proclaim that, although he had just pulled off a astonishingly commanding victory in the 100 meters, Bolt had horrible technique. Or to lament to millions of viewers before the 200 final that Bolt was "still clownin."

For anyone who thinks I'm insulting Bolt--already one of the greatest sprinters of all time--by comparing him to a mere three-time All-Star who's never advanced past the Western Conference Finals, remember back to the 2005 playoffs. At the age of 22 (the age Bolt turns tomorrow), Amare was clearly the best player in a Suns-Spurs series that featured two former MVPs still in their prime. Bolt is that Amare Stoudemire, the pre-injury Amare for whom the sky was literally the limit. He put together STAT lines like 42 points, 16 rebounds, and 4 blocks, and seemed like he was only scratching the surface of what he could be. Even Lebron has failed to exhibit that kind of almost casual supremacy, and despite his youth, King James has always seemed much older and wiser than his years (see Wednesday's tie picture).



And don't even think about mentioning the name Jordan. For today's sports fan, Michael Jordan is the standard to which we hold all other athletes. Tiger Woods is the "Michael Jordan of golf" or Roger Federer is the "Michael Jordan of tennis." It's gotten ridiculous. Deford is tearing his hair out. And, anyway, the "Michael Jordan of track" is clearly Carl Lewis: the greatest of his generation, transcendent all-around talent, loved by all, but who hung around a little too long. While he may yet scale the same heights as Jordan, Usain Bolt is something different.

Bolt, like Amare before the microfracture, has the kind of talent and presence that make a non-believer like me want to get religion. I'm reluctant to suggest in any way that Bolt doesn't train as hard as Phelps or anyone else, but there is something about him that makes me want to use words like "blessed" or "predestined." Or, better still, Bolt is beatific.

A Pulse Calls for More

FIRST, SOME FUN!

Definitely late to the party on this one but fuck it, I'll weigh in with bushels of joy.

Channing Frye has taken up the banner of "Keep Portland Weird," which I guess is cool for an athlete to do.
But for real, he needs to talk to his boy LaMarcus Aldridge, who no doubt had run-ins with the legacy of "Keep Austin Weird."

Like LaMarcus could say "Channing, ease up. You're going to do nothing but undermine and displace everything that makes Portland's weirdness worthwhile."

"To wit, here's what makes Portland Portland: Vegan strippers, green roofs everywhere, those fucked-up donuts with Tums on them, warehouse parties, and a bunch of bands that have attractive followings."

"Here's what Austin got out of their campaign: A legacy of stupid clown hats, ice cream places where they won't stop singing, bad public art and well-meaning but lazy artists, homeless dudes who think they hold some sort of public office, a bunch of crowded swimming holes where dogs abound."

"Be careful about spreading this movement, or else you might be this town's undoing."



MORE AGE LIMIT STUFF

Brandon Hoffman has a great column up on RealGM that breaks down the success rate of HS draftees. None of this is new information, but it's good to have it all in one place.

The only thing I'd take issue with here is the 76% "success rate." Now, everything is rosy. But for some of them, it's been a long, bumpy road. Monta wouldn't have rather gone in the first round? J.R. Smith couldn't have used a year at UNC? I know that this pool is largely self-selected, so it's not unexpected that most turned out well. And in terms of their money, leaving early was smarter; hell, in some ways, being a second-rounder who makes an impression puts you in an excellent earning position (though I really have no idea what the post-Arenas rules say).

For every player who can enter free agency with that POTENTIAL tag intact, there's the flipside: Wouldn't they be better off if they'd already been christened real starz? Josh Smith would be a max player if anyone was convinced of his intelligibility as a pro. J.R., well, he could be an All-Star free agent right now. That so many of these guys enter their second contract as partly unknown may enhance their appeal, but it's also fucked up negotiations for Josh Smith, Iguodala, and everyone else who was in talks last summer.

MY LATEST SPORTING NEWS COLUMN

Is anyone for real in the West?

Henry Chinaski is not Spider-Man

The NBA All-Star Weekend is, as much as anything else, a sort of Topsy-Turvy celebration, where traditional roles are set aside and the hierarchy of the league is put in reverse for one glorious weekend. In the three-point contest, specialists dominate MVPs in a supposedly objective contest. (I don't really acknowledge the presence of the other two All-Star Saturday events, but if you wanted to stick with the theory, the skills contest is a measure of the individual abilities of those whose best attribute is making their teammates better, and the Shooting Stars Competition is basketball as a boring and miserable exercise.) The dunk contest has come to celebrate something wholly different from what it claims to be, celebrating style and creativity rather than showcasing the pure awe that MJ, Dominique, and Vince were able to instill during their reigns over the contest. Consider the post-Carter dunk contest champions: Jason Richardson now leads the league in threes made. Fred Jones, Desmond Mason and Gerald Green are in various stages of irrelevance. 0% of Nate Robinson's shots in games are dunks. (I'll get to Josh Smith later.)

This year, of course, was the exception. Dwight Howard is the most functional dunker of my lifetime, and while I was 7 years old when proto-Shaq left the Magic, I can't really imagine making more impact by dunking the ball than Howard is now-he's a legitimate top-10 player in the league and a full third of his shots are dunks, and even when he doesn't dunk he changes the defense, as they must keep someone between him and the basket at all possible times in fear of the alley-oop. When he plays, the court pulsates with the power of dunk. And yet his dunk contest was marked by triumphs of style rather than substance, with his signature dunk being a show of smoke and mirrors while THE BIRTHDAY CAKE was, like Howard's tragically futile sticker dunk, a demonstration of substance-as-style, and the contest ended with Green doing a ridiculously difficult dunk that didn't photograph well (seriously, try jumping off a hardwood floor in socks), while Howard did a two-handed windmill using a toy hoop.

When a guy who just got waived rides for degree of difficulty while an MVP candidate goes for style points, it just tells you that All-Star weekend is a distorted time. (Disclaimer: In no way did that paragraph mean to deprecate Howard's deservingness, mainly due to the Inverted Windmill and the Ambitastic Tappy-Oop, it's just saying that Howard based his claim on style while Green dealt more in degree of difficulty, which is odd considering their relative ability.)

Of course, the game itself is the greatest example of All-Star Weekend's spirit of casting aside the shackles of team roles, as players, especially for the first three quarters, govern their games by what they feel they should be instead of what they are told to be. Watching the All-Star game often reminds me of the story in The Blind Side where Michael Oher, the 6-7, 280-pound future offensive tackle, showed up to play basketball for his tiny high school not with the game of a banger who lived in the paint, but as a shooting guard who preferred to gracefully handle the ball and rip threes off the dribble, because he'd learned the game by practicing alone on the street and had never even seen himself in the mirror.

In other words, he played like a guard because nobody had ever told him that he was a big man. This is reflected by The All-Star Game's freeing nature; we get to see Dwight Howard only taking dunks, Rasheed Wallace popping left-handed threes, Yao launching threes himself, Jason Kidd getting 10 assists but only shooting twice, AI dishing out 6 assists and only shooting 7 times, 'Melo shamelessly gunning, VC treating basketball as aesthetic exhibition as opposed to athletic competition, and the like.

But look at the MVP of the contest. He went for 27/8/9 on 12-22 from the floor and 2-7 from deep. His season averages are 31/8/7 on 22 shots and 5 threes. In other words, for LeBron, the All-Star Game, when players can do as they feel, was exactly like any other game. Even his signature play, the game-sealing dunk, was a slashing dunk through traffic instead of a VC/T-Mac show, the kind of highlight he generally provides within the context of a game.

It's not even that LeBron is the least inhibited superstar we've seen since, like, ever: it's that it makes sense. At the highest level of basketball LeBron played before the big show, he took the tip, brought the ball up, hit the boards, slung dimes, just generally did the whole thing up, and now he's more or less doing what he feels in the pros. Some will tell you that some Coach K in LeBron would have done him right; footwork down low, form in the mid-range game, etc. This is untrue. Sure, he might have some fundamentals, but would they have come at the cost of the freedom that makes him as he is? That's a rhetorical question.

Several folk have noted that the best players in the league are from the high school cloth; according to Race For the MVP, the best player in the L has been McGrady, Howard, LBJ, Kobe, or KG for all but one week, and Amare remains the unsung MVP candidate. What stands out about these players is not just how good they are but how unique they are, with the possible exception of Kobe, who didn't go to college but did intern at the Zen Academy.

LeBron is a dominant big man who plays de facto point guard on the perimeter. Howard eschews traditional big-man offense and instead just finds creative ways to use the power of dunk. KG has struck the elusive balance between "little-big" and "big-big" skills. Amare makes his office not on the blocks but by catching passes at he top of the circle and thundering downward. T-Mac works the point forward. (Even before the class of '95, the guys blazing the trails were from the closest thing to high school ball, the land of the small college, which gave us Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman in their unconventional glory.)

Even the non-all star HS guys work in powerful and mysterious ways; Josh Smith might be one of the best defensive players in the league as a shot-blocking shooting guard. The Warriors, the league's most unconventionally fantastic team, employ only two rotation players who have ever set foot in college, and one of them is demi-god Baron Davis, who played to his own beat even at the Church of Wooden. (Unrelated note on the Warriors, prompted by the Mavericks losing Nowitzki and still yet to beat a winning team after their panic trade: not only are the Warriors capable of beating anyone, at any time, essentially based on the health of their spirit animals, they are perfectly capable of claiming a team's soul as part of the transaction.)

Last time I talked about college basketball, I advocated for the value of a good role player coming out of college, as many of the guys laden with "upside" and expectations end up falling short, while guys who know how to do their jobs are overlooked and cause chagrin among all when they continue to do their jobs well in the NBA. Upon further review, I've pretty much decided that college basketball's system of assigning roles is purely and simply evil no matter what. Players like J. Smith would be shackled to the confinements of being a traditional shooting guard, robbing us of his high-flying exploits at power forward. Monta Ellis would be told to run the point. Amare and Dwight would have been told to quit their flights of fancy and stick their butts on the blocks. THIS WAS DAVID LEE. Josh Smith is not effective despite his rawness: He is effective because he is allowed to be raw.

Even those given absolute freedom in college end up shackled by their role as savior: Instead of being allowed the key to unlocking his talents at his own place and find his game, Durant was thrown into the role of savior and is now being forced to suffer by a team whose only move to develop him in any sort of positive way was to trade for Donyell Marshall, who shall serve as a vivid and horrifying reminder to Durant of what he could someday become. Hell, look at AI; every time he's had talent around him, in the Olympics or the All-Star game, and to a lesser degree with Denver, he practically aches to show the world he is not a ball-hog at his core, but has been shoehorned into being one by the likes of Kevin Ollie. (If you want my take on B-Easy; I fear for him as well. A fast power forward who can take big guys off the dribble from the free throw line and become a bigger David West, a faster Carlos Boozer, or Super-Bonzi? Good Policy. A guy who's slow for an elite NBA perimeter player and favors fadeaways from 21 feet and turns the ball over twice as much as he gets assists given 20 shots a game and told to make it work? Bad Policy.)

For all the noise about HS guys being thrust into the limelight too quickly, coming into the NBA incomplete and mercurial will always be better than having to shoulder the burden of perceived completion; by being allowed to find the music of their own games, the HS guys eventually found an off-beat form of truth as yet unrivaled by any other category of player. Even LeBron, who came in wearing savior white, was allowed to find his way in Cleveland, who experimented with him at the point but eventually stuck him on the wing, took Ricky Davis and D-Miles out back and shot them, and allowed him to run things as he always had and shall continue to do.

The age limit is an affront to what makes basketball great; basketball-as-jazz is something we refer to as little as possible here, but the age limit puts Coltrane in a symphony. But it's not going away, and it might even get raised soon, so we should make the most of our chance to appreciate the rare and off-center diamond that is the High School player while we still can, who base their games on what they are rather than what they were told to be, and find greatness where they could not be shown to look. And if the age limit applied to sports bloggers, you'd be reading this in The Daily Trojan. The age limit sucks.

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:

State of Fiery Heaven Address

You might still be upset about Shaq to Phoenix, but I'm not. I'm loving the Diaw/Amare combo, and have to figure that Shaq will mostly just contribute in the personality department. And while I kind of miss Marion's melancholy, that's not really an emotion I associate 2004-05, my favorite Suns team. I'm still convinced that Odom/Bynum/Gasol will warrant a stamp of approval, even if it's not exactly visionary. It's Kidd's to the Mavs that has me really feeling like this season has shifted into high-gear, and it's one I'm not so pleased with. Everyone wants a championship, and they want it now. And they want insurance on that.

I've never felt that winning didn't matter, just that it wasn't the only thing. I also try and stay rational about the relative values of victory, but there is something to be said for quantity. Like fine, people make fun of 50-win teams that can't make it in the playoffs. I find it just as fatuous to praise the "well, they won when it mattered" team.

Which brings me to this evening, when the Suns and Warriors went buckwild and reminded me exactly why this site exists. Fine, so the Warriors aren't going to win a title, and the Suns might look very different in two weeks. Still, they can play a game of basketball, play it hard, and transfix me doing so. They can do that any number of times during the season, and maybe even a few times during the playoffs. And you know what, I don't really care if the basketball I like can't go all the way. It's successful sometimes, on more modest scales, and that justifies it in my books. It's kind of arbitrary which teams get branded boom-or-bust, win-it-all or lose all legitimacy. For whatever reason, small-ball, up-tempo, or just plain fun teams get it more often than others.



I also want to add a note on potential, because I think it's gotten too confused with our ultimate mission. Potential is funny, and intriguing, and in keeping with what underground, imaginative ethos this site has. But it doesn't justify shit. It's a sideshow I happen to like a lot, and I'll take it over staid vets. That doesn't mean, though, that I think it's part and parcel with THIS IS OUR BASKETBALL. While the Hawks are funny, I'd much rather see them become who they are. It's on-deck, who's next shit, not what I'd stake this site's integrity on. And it's a rare case indeed that someone like LeBron can embody both at the same time.

Proof: Last night, I went with Seth Kolloen to see Tony Wroten play. I spent forever trying to write about it, and somewhere along the way typed this:

A decent amount of the butts in the stands were there to support the halftime show: a troupe of jugglers and unicyclists from some elementary school. It didn't seem to go with the experience of seeing greatness in the making. Nor did the Garrison Keeler-sounding PA guy and his adjective-laden player intros. Or the cheerleaders who kept snickering mid-routine . . . . Watching Kevin Durant find himself in an empty Key Arena makes you wonder why his progress matters, and hearing the crowd react more vigorously to a break-dancing five year-old is just plain depressing. By contrast, it made a lot of sense to watch Wroten in a less real, or maybe more surreal, context. There's something innocent, or at least honest, about a player working through who he is that's fundamentally at odds with the finished product, bottom line setting of the pros. And, as surprised as I was to realize it, this jibes perfectly with what the most "pure" forms of amateur basketball are supposed to be.

Yes, that's in me. I kept it on ice because I couldn't explain it anyway, but now I see: It's proof that I don't take potential all that seriously, and that it has very little to do with FD's style + substance credo—which, I firmly believe, can be credible without having to answer to the absolute authority of the sports mainstream.



I realized the other night that, Liberated Fandom aside, I see the game in a weird way. When most people turn on a game they have no particular interest in, they watch to see who wins. That's the tension that draws them in, the drama that makes sports worth watching. It's the same way that people can't help but sing along with a catchy hook. All I'm saying is that, before I give a fuck if anyone lives or dies, I'm going to take stock of whether the game has style. If it does, I'll get sucked in, just as I was at that high school game the other night. If not, though, it might as well not even be basketball to me. Is that irresponsible? Should I spend all nine months preoccupied with the outcome of the NBA Finals? That seems tedious, and implausible. And that I reserve the right to enjoy a basketball game, no matter how unimportant it may be—and dismiss them even if there's a ton of invested value in the outcome.

ALSO: Matt at Detroit Bad Boys developed this beauty of a shirt, with my blessings. Cop that, and tell him I sent you so I can get mine free.

Learn As You Go

I don't read much, so it's odd that I'm kicking off Ballhype's books/sports series. But I did. It's all about baseball, I've meant to write it for a while, and I like it a lot. I hope you enjoy it.