Merriment In Dunk-land

Congrats to Blake Griffin! He did what we thought he would! Check out our print of the newly-crowned Dunk Contest champ, and read some quick thoughts I exchanged with Eric Freeman.

Bethlehem Shoals: I've convened this meeting under the cover of darkness because that dunk contest left me all emotionally bedraggled. Like it was far deeper than the usual "yay" or "nay". How are you holding up?

Eric Freeman: I am pretty zen about it. Griffin won, as expected, but I always assumed that he wouldn't have my favorite dunks and would carry through on name recognition. Did you know that Nate Robinson said a few weeks ago that the dunk contest is rigged? Once Griffin acquitted himself decently you knew it was over.

BS: Didn't Nate win it like 70 times himself? Here's the thing: there was very little narrative arc to it. It was more like a tableau, or an allegory with four primeval feelings each submitting their claim for your attention. That might be what was so disorienting -- and powerful -- about it. To me, at least. It was more like four different perspectives on the same event, each with its own teleology. And yet it contained all four.

EF: That sounds right to me. Even Griffin's ascent seemed preordained rather than executed within the moment. But how many dunk contests really have narrative strength in the moment? Vince in 2000, I suppose, and maybe the Nique/MJ battles. Those are rare events -- I'm perfectly happy with the contest if we see some good dunks and everyone has a good time. There were no real stinkers this year, so I'm happy.

BS: We were also spared the usual tension of dunk contest, a kind of narrative anxiety where dunkers (and the audience) fret over how they will sequence their dunks for maximum effect with the judges. That's usually what passes for the inter-activity of narrative, and again, that's more a technicality. Today was like a release from that, since every dunk was good. And we learned that, as you said, the two dunkers dunking it out with dunk-fire in their dunky eyes is, at best a rare occurrence. Otherwise, you're competing against the scoreboard, and the forces that shape it, which themselves are determined n real time. Maybe each dunk as a vignette, whose score ends up being fairly meaningless (see Ibaka), is the only way to watch it. It's only as strong as the different stories it tells, not some sort of overall coherence or unity.

EF: I certainly prefer this sort of contest to the forced narrative of the Nate Robinson/Dwight Howard competition, where seeing two "great" dunkers of different heights supposedly made it interesting. Just pick four guys with impressive abilities and a willingness to go crazy (see: JaVale) and hope for the best. It's almost a shame Griffin had to be in his team's city and the fans got to vote -- otherwise we might've had a really exciting upset. Would losing a dunk contest really make anyone think less of him as a dunker?

BS: Especially when this year, there was no sense of trying to save themselves for marriage. They came out and did their thing. It sort of underlines the silliness of judging a contest when, as with today, the dunkers are all almost coming from different planets. Yeah, Zen as hell. A showcase where some dunked more than others, but everyone made their point. That might be the enormity of it ... I don't really feel like DeRozan or Ibaka were somehow kept from making an impression on us, and helping BRING THE DUNK CONTEST BACK. There's no reconciling the four of them, and it probably doesn't matter. I find it kind of ridiculous that we judged that at all. Couldn't it just be like a Christmas display in the middle of a shopping mall? God, there I go again, threatening the integrity of the competitive spirit again. Will I never learn?

EF: Apparently not. It seems like what you're saying is that there should also be some kind of battle for third place so everyone gets to dunk as much as everyone else. Then, no matter who wins the official trophy, we'll have seen what each contestant has to offer. And then we'll know the real champion. In our hearts, where it counts.

Death by Sex

Calm down, no sex or death in here. Just a friendly note, for those of you who don't read the Works, or use Twitter, that I did in fact weigh in on the big trade.

-All sort of goodies from Eric and myself: HERE.

-My ode to Gil and Beefheart on the Awl.

-Also I am still writing regularly, and weirdly, about the Heat for Deadspin.

PLUG FOR SOMEONE ELSE'S BOOK: I like Zack Carlson a lot, even if I probably can't call him my friend because we failed to get his current address when sending out wedding invitation. But his new book, Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film is totally fucking awesome, whether or not you like movies, punk, bathrooms, or any combination of the three.

Pinata Tied and Golden

I wrote a thing for FanHouse this week about the very, very serious man Ron Artest has become. You should read out, but here's the gist: Ron Ron was once taken seriously in a bad way, then became a harmless joke, and now, through his advocacy of mental health issues, has once again turned his persona into something that matters. Reading yesterday's Marc Spears column on Gilbert Arenas, these days, I had a similar thought.

I've been understanding this season's Arenas as sad, sunken epilogue. The quotes he gives are, for someone who had so much invested in his days of might, heart-rending. Even his description of himself as "controlled chaos" from the beginning of last season -- which at the time, seemed forced and unhappy, and soon thereafter, the worst kind of irony -- now makes me smile. That's what Gil did at his peak: he made us smile. When he describes himself as an entertainer, it's not in performative, WWE-sort of way. Rather, he was a play who, through basketball, could remind us of that part of brains that's there to be tickled and confounded. "Enigmas" in sports are troubling if the game is an equation to be solved. We know it's much more than that, though, and so the 2002-2007 Arenas can never be erased.

Wipe that tear away. We had a while with him, and while it would have been great for Gil to keep it up forever, at least he gave us (and got) that five-year joy ride. The more I read of him these days, the less I think he needs our pity. Sympathy, maybe, but we should take note not only of the fact that he's changed, but that -- unlike in other comebacks -- he's fairly comfortable in what he's become. Maybe it's resignation, and yet there's no question that Arenas has assumed a new role in the grand scheme of the league. Not necessarily wise, or entirely disinterested, he has the perspective that comes only with losing it all and then piecing yourself back together again. No question, ruminative Gil is a function of circumstance. But there's something Sheed-like about statements like:

“When a young guy is coming in, the older guy never wants to move over,” Arenas said. “But I know my time here is over [as the face of the franchise]. I messed up my legacy here"

“It’s still basketball. The rules don’t change for the bench players. I learned a lot from the whole Iverson experience. Not get a job because I can’t adapt to my environment? I’m sure I can adapt to any environment.

“In this league there is no such thing as long-term anymore. Players are getting shipped out and shipped out. I’m looking at the Kings like, when I first came [into the league], none of those players were here. The Lakers team, the only person that was there was Kobe [Bryant], and Derek Fisher came back."

Arenas is resigned to what he's become. In that, though, there's also resolve -- resolve to not only make sense of his situation and find a realistic path forward. More importantly, these are hard truths about the league, ones we could stand to here. They're certainly useful to have out there in public, probably even for younger players to hear.

Sports radio loves to talk about players who "get it". In that universe, Arenas never did "get it". Now, he "gets it", except "it" isn't about killer instinct or locker room chemistry. He never really did play by those rules -- he was "an assassin" to the point of absurdity, and we all know what his idea of a lively locker room led to. That doesn't mean, though, that others can't learn from him, whether or not they brought a Desert Eagle to the Verizon Center. Gilbert Arenas says these things not because he could give a fuck less, or in hopes of making us all weepy on his behalf. He does it because he doesn't have any choice. He's always been incapable of self-censoring, and perhaps was a bit too honest at times. The difference is, these days there's real substance to what he's selling.

It All Falls Somewhere

Spectacle has no angle, no perspective. It is horror without intent, intent without horror; it fuses the two poles of aesthetics and outcome as if there had never been an need to reconcile them. There is now a complete circle where before we had long chains of dialectics, writhing between extremes more friendly than they knew. Gone is the case-by-case nature, which required the utmost level of devotion -- either an intuitive crackle, or monastic grind. War's finery and brutality were historically used in the West to mask and enrich one another. Then in the modern age, war-as-spectacle turned power into art, and art into an expression of power. It's fascism, but it's also every single terrorist organization that garnered street cred with kids in the latest digs.

And yes, spectacle is the place where war bleeds into sport without the least bit of room for resistance.

Did you hear the one about last night's TNT line-up. Coming into this season -- as far back as Hoop Summit 2009, actually -- I had expected Wall to not only wow us all with highlights, but rip through the fabric of the game. Some players expand possibilities; others leave categories in liquid ruin. Wall struck me as the kind who lashes out at what we know as if each play were his opening salvo. LeBron James is his own canon; the young Kevin Garnett had a gate-crashing spirit fit for the maddest explorer or most abstract scientist. Wall, though, would make his mark through spectacle, aggressive gestures that left you stunned, and altered the game, while leaving little trace of where they came from or how they might happen again. I still have that hope for Wall, but the newfound importance of the NBA point guard is, in some ways, a burden. The quarterback analogy, along with the learning curve that position demands, is relevant like never before. Structure isn't orthodoxy -- if anything, it's a chance for grander subversion. And yet it's a different kind of engagement.

Wall can still disrupt our basketball brains, and yet to really come into his own, he must expand this sensibility to an entire unit. Impossible? Who knows. Paul is a mastermind, Rondo an eccentric, Nash a trickster. Jazz fans, stick your Deron Williams line here. None of them had Wall's smoldering message, and yet each has consistently found a way to lead their troops not only toward the basket, but to send them scurrying with style -- an extension of themselves. There simply is no other position that offers this possibility, to transmute the quirks of one's game into something resembling a community. There is something cult-ish about it. These things don't end well in the real world. Especially when, in the thick of it, you find a player like Wall -- who, by definition, is at his best when he overrides what we thought we knew. I have no idea what a team premised on this kind of gesture means, and if "prophetic" is even the right word. Do prophets cause problems, or do they teach us anew? Saying "both" seems both unreasonable, presumptuous, and something only yours truly on the sidelines of both basketball and belief would ever tell you. I do know, though, that JaVale McGee figures prominently is that as-of-yet unknown future.



Blake Griffin doesn't have these problems. In part, it's because a vaguely-defined "big man", a giant entrusted merely with making life difficult, even harrowing, for other tall people or smaller ones who would come near the basket. The center has dissolved, and we are left with the "big man". Garnett may have started it, but don't disregard Tim Duncan's unwillingness to play, or be defined as, a five. Or everyone's refusal to be listed as 7'. What's left for Griffin, then, is a space blank, raw, and undefined. He has answered with the ultimate in basketball-as-spectacle. We can attempt to talk about him rationally -- how his combination of power, skill, strength, precision, speed, athleticism, and zeal is fairly unprecedented (LeBron doesn't use his size like this, nor is he as big). I could post some videos to remind you of his greatest hits. Yet Griffin's every move contains within it a shard of his genius. That's the definition of style, and yet in this case, the way that dominance is etched. When we lose this distinction, totalizing occur and spectacle overtakes us. Nothing is frivolous, or entertaining without suggesting a trail of wreckage and damnation left huddled in the corner. The chills Griffin gives us may be degree of difficulty, or because he makes it look so easy. Technology and culture hate each other most when they stare out from the same eyes.

From a fan's perspective, Blake Griffin is one of the most amazing athletes I have ever watched, as well as one of the most frightening. It is these same qualities that also likely make him one of the best. I said last night that Griffin is this NBA season's sole must-watch. Why? Pumped-up excerpts don't do him justice, and neither does the removed act of "having the game on". Griffin plays a different sport than everyone else. Wall would swoop in and scramble expectations. Griffin simply ignores that there was anything there before or since, or that showmanship and brute effectiveness need, for practical purposes, go their separate ways in a blink. His method isn't expert chaos, but a space-aged roar that makes you shout out in joy and pain at once -- at both the "how" and the "what".

This is the heart of spectacle, and when you're sucked in, you can't tell which way is up and which is down. It is the end and the beginning, for the game and for the way we parse it. Sometimes, I'm not even sure whether I'm supposed to love or hate him. Once upon a time, man discovered fire. According to the Greeks, Prometheus paid a price, but for an adjective like that, I would give my liver to a buzzard who knew more than I did.

The Year Glass Broke

Whopper of a Works today, in which I tackle Vick/Gil; Kevin Pelton and TZ tell you what teams are worth watching; and the Works continues its team previews. I learned that Donte Greene is a lost cause (despite what I had believed) and Francisco Garcia is about to blow up (which I had long ago given up on). Glad I could provide the springboard!

Bonus: An earlier FD post about Vick, from last week.

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Zac Crain is a senior editor at D Magazine and author of the Dimebag Darrell bio, Black Tooth Grin. Follow him at @zaccrain.

Josh Howard didn’t stop being a Dallas Maverick because he loves weed or hates the national anthem. That was cover fire. Josh Howard stopped being a Dallas Maverick because he became conventional.

When he entered the league as part of (but not really) the fabled draft class of 2003, he was wholly unpredictable, something the Dallas Mavericks lacked at the time. Don Nelson gave that squad the illusion of unpredictability, but that team (and pretty much all others Nellie has coached) was incredibly predictable within his framework. He’s like Wes Anderson or any other director that has been called quirky, or similar. If you walk in halfway through one of their films, it might seem so, but not if you have seen all of them from the beginning. Then the quirks are rote and easy to anticipate. Nellie has been Nellie for long enough that every ace up his sleeve is, by now, a two of clubs.

But Howard was genuinely wild, in his way. He was part of the team but apart from it at the same time. That isn’t to say he broke plays, or was a problem in any way. He had a game that seemed concocted on the fly. It was all impulse. He, more than any Mav at that time, could leave the crowd gasping. Dirk Nowitzki was the inevitable. Josh was the possible.

And then he turned into Michael Finley. Worse, he turned into late-career Michael Finley.

When it comes to Howard, I’ve always thought of Michael Finley as secondhand smoke. He is a power plant behind the back fence. He is a microwave tower hovering over a quiet neighborhood. I could (probably) make a scientific case that Finley gave Howard’s career cancer. But more than that, I simply believe it’s true, maybe because I want to and maybe because I can’t explain it otherwise. I don’t want to blame chance. It has to be the fault of someone or something.



So I always think of Mike Finley.

Specifically, I think of the Finley that I grew to despise during the last few years of his time in Dallas, which coincided with Howard’s first few seasons in the league. Even more specifically, I think of one play. It’s not a single moment, exactly. It’s a sequence that seemed to happen every game.

It is the end of a quarter, or a half, or a game. The shot clock is off but there is plenty of time left on the clock. Let’s say 17 seconds. Finley gets the ball near the three-point line on one side or the other. And then he turns into a bad Michael Jordan impersonator. Let’s say Harold Miner. He palms the ball, arm extended, holding it away from his defender. You’ve seen this. Yes. Finley keeps holding it, and holding it. You reach, I teach, and, man, fuck Jordan, too. He made this happen.

Ten seconds. Jab step. Jab step. Five seconds. Finley takes a dribble than in no way could be considered as progress toward the basket. Two seconds. And here we are again: a heavily contested, step-back, fall-away jumper that only succeeds in drawing a groan from the crowd and maybe a bit of rim. It is a single shot, but it means everything. This is the signature move of someone who has put pride above all else. It was Finley’s move, and it became Howard’s.

Howard is sort of the son and grandson of this—affected by Jordan through Finley, and affected by Jordan directly. (That they were both handpicked by Jordan to be part of his Jumpman 23 roster and therefore under his wing is, I guess, my smoking gun.) A good enough player can handle it. For a time, Finley was good enough. With tons of qualifiers, yes—The Man, but on a terrible team, etc. But still: good enough. Howard never was. He was close. But he didn’t have the right make-up or the right situation.

The off-court PR problems? Those were maybe symptoms of his newfound pride. But I don’t believe that. Those made him more of a real person. He said the shit he wasn’t supposed to say but wasn’t alone in thinking or doing. He was maybe wrong in his choice of venue for one of those statements, but that didn’t make him wrong, or at least not wrong to speak his mind.

Be he was wrong on the court. That was more unforgivable. He fell in love with a jumper that, at best, wanted to be friends, maybe make out a little every once in awhile if they both had too much to drink. He decided he was 1B to Dirk Nowitzki’s 1A based on an injury-replacement All-Star selection and little else. He made superstar mistakes (picking up bad T’s at worse times) without superstar production.

It could have been different. He could have actually earned that 1B status. He could have been—and generally was, early on—a great defender, but he stopped trying on that end around 2005. Somehow, he was a much better defender under Don Nelson.

(Aside: You could sort of see where this was headed during the 2004 Rookie Challenge. That he was there was victory enough, given his draft position and everything else. He was a footnote to an afterthought, in a game dominated (on court) by Amar’e Stoudamire and (media-wise) by LeBron and Melo. Nelson told him to just do what he’d been doing to earn rotation minutes: rebound and play defense. Instead, and I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I feel as though he went something like 0-12 from three-point range in about eight minutes of playing time. I know, I know—wrong to judge ANYTHING in a glorified pickup game. But still. Omens are omens.)

He should have flourished playing with Jason Kidd, but the opposite happened. The Josh Howard that would have flourished in that situation—the one who always seemed to appear out of nowhere somewhere around the rim and, less relevant, regularly shut down clubs with Marquis Daniels—was long gone. He didn’t need (or want) a point guard, or anyone else, really. He had a fat man’s game: nothing but jogging and fadeaways.



In a way, Howard was still unpredictable, because I never expected that.

And so he is in Washington now, trying to come back from a knee injury and various other psychic damage from the six-month period where his status was fired on from pretty much every angle. This could come full circle. He is, more or less, forgotten now. It’s the perfect time for him to fly in from out of nowhere again.

There Is No Scrap Impartial

Don't miss the Morning News roundtable on sports and writing, with Pasha Malla, Will Leitch, Katie Baker, Chad Harbach, Nic Brown, and me.

I think we finally have our Psychological Man. His name, much to my utter surprise and possible chagrin, is DeMarcus Cousins.

As long as this site's been live, we've harped on player psychology. Not "what is a point guard thinking in the clutch", but as best we can, tried to determine what makes these dudes tick. Especially when, as it so very not the case in other sports, uniform execution simply won't do, and the decisions players make—their respective styles, if you will—can't help but reveal something about them as people. It may be only a thin breach here and there, through which little light is admitted, or gaping blast of individuality, but either way there's humanity in them there ball players.

Somewhere out there, a unified theory of FreeDarko presents itself in the heavens. For now, I'd go so far as to say that style and personality are the strong and weak force of our NBA cosmology, which is why no amount of boring-ass critiques will make me lose interest in Kobe Bryant. It's also why Gilbert Arenas was for so very long our patron saint. His entire public existence depended on either riding or struggling against that interpretive undercurrent "quirk". With the locker room incident and FINGER GUNZ, it went so far as to suggest that, in fact, he had been (figuratively, duh) swept out to sea. At some point, the joke ceases to be on the rest of the world, and out-there behavior becomes either sad or self-destructive.

That's also what happened with Michael Beasley, whatever happened with Beasley. He entered the draft speaking with uncommon candor—which in retrospect, turned out to be a "don't let me do this" cry for someone to keep him in school. At the time, though, it really seemed as if teams were being forced to confront the possibility that players could be weird, and yet still thrive. Arenas was a high-wire act, someone who played up his shtick for commercial gains and then found himself seemingly fall victim to his own act. Beasley entered the league not playing pranks and committing absurd gestures, but simply refusing to make sense. Again, at the moment it's hard to say he was taking a stand for anything but his own immaturity. And I mean that in the most light, sympathetic way possible.

All of which brings us to DeMarcus Cousins. You all know the story by now. Cousins was, all the way back to his high school days, branded "a problem". He didn't have Arenas's charm or Beasley's enigmatic qualities. DeMarcus Cousins had, as they say, an attitude. He was not a high-character guy. Supposedly, he fought with coaches, loafed, and wouldn't stay in shape. Whatever had happened at Kentucky, where he proved so dominant that John Wall was often relegated to a supporting role, was fool's gold compared to the monster he would become as a pro. It didn't help that, in many ways, the most apt comparisons the pros offered were Zach Randolph, Eddy Curry, and reaching back a ways, Derrick Coleman (that one more than ever after Vegas, but I'm getting ahead here).

I was staunchly anti-Cousins, though mostly owing to the fact that I thought his college career was a mirage and his height not what it turned out to be. When the whole thing got all weird and paternalistic, I realized which side justice smiled upon. Cousins was trapped in a strange rhetorical bind best described as "worst available". He was the bad seed of the draft, the high-risk, high-reward guy who got all the ink, and of course. Not every draft class is so lucky as to have one. But once anyone can be stuck in the "bad kid" or "problem" category, they will catch hell up until they prove otherwise.



Beasley, incidentally, saw his stock of evil rise (fall?) as the draft approach. Draw your own cause and effect conclusions here, but Cousins loomed larger and larger as a talent and became more and more of a potential thug creature. Don't blame FreeDarko; we dispatched Joey Litman to meet Cousins and observe him acting like the kid he was. Beasley had said "I'm a kid", but for him that opened the door out onto all sorts of weirdness. Cousins really just came off as sweet, likable, and hardly the kind of ass who would warrant such premature nay-saying.

Fast forward to the Vegas league, where Cousins's debut was awaited almost as eagerly as Wall's. When he proved even more of a force (granted, Wall had very little to prove), and flashed skills and awareness that had once been mere fluff in the mouths of his biggest supporters, Cousins instantly became the second-biggest star among the rookies. That attitude we heard so much about? Damn right it's there. But it's fire, intensity, and the desire to flat-out destroy his opponent, especially other big men. It's exactly what so many other bigs are lacking, and why they end up a very different kind of bust. Cousins rages because he cares. It's that simple. To say that his personality can be rough or stubborn at times is to say that he's a gamer. Attitude on the court, if it's this kind of edge and determination, is the exact opposite of what off-court attitude will sow.

And it's not like Cousins is lacking in self-awareness, something we can debate all day about Arenas or Beasley. The Timberwolves, of course, tried to throw him off by antagonizing and harassing him, expecting him to crack and show the lunatic no one wanted to draft (including them). Except as soon as Cousins caught on, he disengaged himself and opened scoffed at the tactic. Does this sound like a wayward brat to you?

All of which brings us back to psychology. Cousins did, indeed, possess many of qualities NBA scouts feared in him. Except he possessed them in a way that manifested itself primarily on the court, where they were a decidedly good thing. Differentiating between on and off-court personality, as well as mapping out their intersection, has never been more important than now. What's more, the "good kid"/"problem" binary has revealed itself to be, if not a farce, at least utterly simplistic, the kind of clap-trap that no journalist—much less a scout—should bother to hang his hat on.

Cousins might seem to call into question whatever it is that Arenas and Beasley represented. On the contrary, in his contradictions, he make more urgent than ever the need to develop a more psychologically sophisticated approach to assessing prospects. Arenas asserted the right to be kooky, unpredictable, and obsessive; Beasley, incoherent, compelling and loud. That was a fair description of each at their best, and if their stories ended today, each would serve as a cautionary tale against this kind of player. Cousins, though, makes the case for the development of something new, something that might actually better equip a team for an Arenas or Beasley—that is, anyone other than an outright bust.

Earlier today, Ziller wrote about Rashad McCants. McCants, it seems, was Cousins before Cousins, and had the bad luck to not be born very tall. No one has yet been able to tell me exactly what it is that makes McCants so horrible and unemployable. Maybe he's not the best defender, and there have been some confounding incidents with scheduling and contracts (like TZ's post today). But McCants himself believes he had been blacklisted, and I'm inclined to believe he's not far off. McCants deserves a chance to succeed based on his abilities, not some shit-poor conception of what makes for good and bad soldiers in a mechanized world that never really existed in the first place.

From the Mailbag, Heavy with Sighs

This came to me via an anonymous reader, and I am very thankful for it. Other update: Enter our KGF contest—you can drop the "obscure" and "seventies" from the prompt now—and read me on Melo's contract and GM class struggle. Now, enjoy.

"I recently wrote and produced on a Canadian TV show for tweens called Wingin' It and Randy Foye was a guest star. We wanted someone recognizable to a Canadian audience so the producers got us Randy Foye?! The theory among the writers is that some agent or manager swindled the exec-producers into thinking Randy was a real score."



"The series also features a talking raccoon named Dennis, who is a hokey-looking puppet. Perhaps the funniest moment not caught on tape was when my show-runner introduced Randy (sipping on a smoothie) to Dennis. Not the puppeteer, he introduced Randy to Dennis the talking raccoon and they had a little chat."

I have it on good authority that Foye wouldn't do anything more than that lay-up, and that the sparkle that envelopes him at the end was the Smoke Monster's Ivy League-educated ballerina cousin who shall seed with world with even more malice. Anyway, thanks reader. We did, together.

Update: I work hard for this. Column on LeBron and coaches with theory buried in it, I think.

Google Reader Will Outlive Us All

READ ME. Twilight of the gods, more Gil, some loose ends, and an x-ray of my face.

There's a Dark Hand Over My Heart

I am really not going to look back over everything I've written this past week and apologize, or tweak, according to the latest revelations. Head to TMZ if you really want to feel like the sky is falling. It pains the fuck out of me to acknowledge that, somehow, Vecsey did sort of have the story all along, perhaps the only real reporting of his career. How he got it pre-Gil/Critt cover-up will hopefully come to light soon, and I'm sure will make this ten times craziers. BECAUSE PETER VECSEY DOES NOT GET STORIES THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY. He doesn't know how to.

It's "Armageddnon Week" on the History Channel, and my listening for the day has moved onto this:



But this is really still about Gil. I said on Dan Levy's podcast last night that this was Gil at his most Gil ever. One friend said he's never been more proud of, or at least fascinated, by Arenas. However, Lang's got the most sobering angle on it: Arenas just doesn't seem to recognize that sometimes you can't plow through the world on sheer whim alone. You have to do shit you don't want to, follow orders, and go by the logic of something other than your own bonkers mental activity. Why would Gil have ever learned that lesson? He's a self-made superstar, defying the ban on combo guards, the expectations that he'd fail as a pro, and the post-Jordan belief that personality doesn't sell anymore. He wouldn't sit down and shut up, or play by the rules, not because he's a rebel, but because he's just completely out-there and independent.

He did his whole career his way. And he carried that over into a crisis that could very well end it. The Twitter, the FINGER GUNZ, they flew in the face of everything he was supposed to do—that Stern wanted him to do for the good of the league—to such an extent that it's hard to see this as, in the most grave way possible, Gil being Gil. To the bitter fucking end, I guess. Plus, that he is the lovable goofball works against him. At least a hardened thug-like dude has it expected of him, and is easy damage control for the league to run. In a way, Artest's history of violence allows him to get away with darn near anything now, even if he's at bottom just as fundamentally weird as Gil. Arenas, though, doesn't have that buffer. Nor does he have Delonte West's diagnosis. Gilbert Arenas is what he is, always has been, and he insists on being accepted for that. That's stubborn, arrogant, and misguided, but just as often refreshing, charming, and exhilarating. But here, Arenas knew the truth all along, and Stern's likely known for a minute. That Gil couldn't for once take a break from fighting for acceptance, or noticed that to survive you sometimes have to roll over and play possum, is everyone's loss.

Leo Durocher Sent Me

All I've ever really wanted to say all along about Gil, in column form: sports aren't morality. If you look to them for that, you're shallow and confused.

Now, go listen to the podcast.

Crank It Up, Feel the Health

I never thought I'd get a chance to experience Tiger Woods, or Brett Favre, but here I am. As best as I can tell, NBA blogging exists at this point to type, all drivel-like, about whatever someone told someone else in the last hour. Good thing I am busy with the book. However, one thing's clear: There's a lot of bullshit in the air, of the worst, inflammatory kind. And once that stuff is said, there's no going back. No correction ever really repairs things. The process by which a celebrity beats back initial false reports is almost as fascinating as it is sickening. And as I've said, some public figures simply lack the clout to move past it.

I come here not to blindly defend Arenas, or offer explanations as I did when Delonte rolled around strapped. I still don't know, any better than you or the constantly updated news stories do, what happened and how it interfaces with the law. But a lot of the reporting here, and blog dissemination of it, is straight out of last summer's campaign. I know, Sharpton's contrasting the arena Obama watches games at with steel in the locker room. And yet isn't this "where there's smoke, there's outrage" b/w "there's always next hour's web update to clean things up" approach to news exactly what allowed the right to get traction with stupid shit throughout the campaign?

But in a lot of ways, this is even worse. Dear everyone, do you remember who broke the John Woo-ready version of the story? Peter Vecsey. Along with Sam Smith, he's pretty much the one reporter whose rumors you might as well write the opposite of and go from there. Now in this case, he did have a kernel of truth in what he wrote. Yet he wrapped it up in every conceivable layer of sensationalism, and continues to even in the thrice-scrubbed-over version of the story that sits on the Post's site now.

(Lang reminded me that Gil pointed out that one of Vecsey's original sources was a street ball player. Appropriate, seeing as Vecsey's the And1 of NBA reportage.)

Vecsey unleashed a scene right out of the old cowboy Pacers, Yahoo! actually came first, but theirs was much more solidly on the back of previous reports about the investigation. And from there, all hell broke loose. We built this city on Peter Vecsey; Yahoo!'s far more responsible report inadvertently added fuel to the fire. It was a classic example of going for broke with the news micro-cycle—and, if anyone cares, setting up readers of print dailies to be completely misinformed for days on end.

Have I brought up Vecsey enough? Anyone remember when he claimed Josh Smith and Zaza were fightin' with fists in their locker room, and then had Smith attacking bouncers? These were major blows against a young player teetering between "future star" and "head case." Then, lo and behold, AJC beat writer supreme Sekou Smith—who was there—set the record straight. Read the whole link, but the gist: Peter Vecsey is a snake who makes shit up for tabloid reasons. Anyone who doesn't conduct themselves with this fact in mind is no better than him.



Now I'm just getting angry, which is when I'm at my least beautiful. Suffice it to say that I also find it odd how conveniently Gil's "moral turpitude" fits in with the Wizards long-term business interests. As was Monta's with the Warriors. So in conclusion, this would be a good moment for us all to learn to take a deep breath, not listen to false prophets, and realize that like it or not, sometimes these things take time. Otherwise, you might as well believe message boards. Those shits get updates like every five seconds!

Boff-o

The Mavs traded Harris and Diop for J-Kidd. So, if you didn’t know, now you know.

Moving on. The basketblogosphere gets itself in a tizzy whenever Gilbert calls in a new blog post, and this latest one contains multitudes, including some discussion of the recent trades, more on his chemical burned nutsack, and how he got the nickname Puff the Magic Dragon for reasons unrelated to smoking herb. But, the real insights come when he muses on the nature of stardom. Most people have focused on the Calderon diss and Gil’s continued obsession with his past All-Star snubs, but over here at FreeDarko, our ears perked up when he started talking about sports stardom from a fan’s perspective, in particular the line: "I’m not a Patriots fan, I’m a Randy Moss fan. I’m a player fan." Does this sound suspiciously like liberated fandom to anyone else?

Granted, being an LA native, there’s no NFL team for Gil to be geographically bound to, and he was talking about the Super Bowl, when most fans use some arbitrary reason to pick which team to root for. But, viewed alongside Lebron’s brazen display of Yankee fandom in Cleveland last year, this seems like something worth keeping an eye on.