Superlatives in a supremely superlatively game

Best play of a this-is-everything-the-Finals-should-be Finals game: with 2:30 left and the Magic down 3, D12 sets a high pick for Hedo, who then rolls right taking two defenders with him. Hedo passes to a relatively open Rashard at the top of the key, who then in turn rifles a pass to the ridiculously fucking open JJ Reddick, allowing Mike Breen to gleefully announce to a viewing audience of thousands: “JJ Reddick ties the game with a 3 with 2:19 remaining, his first field goal of the night”– words I never imagined in my wildest dreams I’d hear in the context of a 4th quarter NBA Finals game. How Phil Jackson doesn’t respond by immediately subbing in Adam Morrison is beyond comprehension. You cannot gameplan for that.

Unbelievably, this moment was almost eclipsed when, not a minute and a half later, Breen managed to utter Hedo Turkoglu’s last name SIX TIMES in ten seconds.

All together now: Where Amaz…

No one told me to care

There’s a behemoth in the room that I’ve avoided addressing, namely because it’s old hat by now. From the quiet pre-season grumblings of concerned observers to the Bill Simmons All-Star Game NBApocalypse article, the state of the economy has loomed as large a discussion topic in NBA circles this season as any. So a lot of print has already been devoted to the topic. Also, it’s depressing. Pet dog-inspired elegies aside, that Sports Guy article was the first time Bill Simmons made me cry. And that shit’s just uncalled for. Look, is the financial viability of the NBA something to be concerned about? Sure it is, inasmuch as FSN’s penny pinching means my flatscreen is a flat waste for over half the local T’Wolves broadcasts.

For two months, I’ve been ruminating over this random-ass post on BoingBoing. Take a second and familiarize yourself, namely with the author’s notion that the Web is a self-serving exercise in mental masturbations (not to mention actual masturbation). If you get bored reading the article, try playing a word game: replace every mention of media or Web with NBA. What this little trick will hopefully reveal, and what the author and vaunted media/communications analyst most likely didn’t mean at all, is this: the NBA is in danger of becoming totally devoid of serendipity.

Now before you get yourself all in a tizzy, let me be clear—I don’t exactly mean the NBA is descending into a quagmire of boredom and irrelevance not seen since the Nets-Spurs Finals. That’s a difficult thought to entertain at this juncture in time/space, considering the multitude of buzzer beaters, emergence of new or forgotten players (Aaron Brooks, Michael Pietrus, Nuggets frontline), the fall and rise (and fall again) of Stan Van Gundy, and surprising overall level of competitiveness in these playoffs. And it’s not like NBA, where dynasties are established with alarming regularity and competitive edges seem to ebb and flow perennially with all the power of a cess-less cesspool, has ever really been the preeminent source of serendipity in the modern pro sports landscape. Both MLB and NFL provide greater randomness and variance of outcomes on a year-to-year basis (Michael Vick just said he’s taking a break from football but the Falcons are NFC contenders? The most FD-team in baseball won the AL last year? Exactly). But if we’re to follow Dan Gillmor’s definition of serendipity (“a topic you didn’t know you cared about until you saw it”), then there is no doubt in my mind that the NBA is tenuously perched on top of a slope more steep and slippery than Adam Silver’s forehead (or nose, take your pick).

In some regards, the writing has been on the wall; so a brief word on context. Despite the penchant for unqualified superlatives and clichés exhibited so shamelessly (although maybe that’s the point?) by the NBA’s hallmark Where Amazing Happens campaign, the unbound athleticism and personality so blatantly on display on pro basketball courts allows the NBA a certain credence in making such statements. It is the reason we watch, after all. But with the danger that Amazing becomes too socially blinding (Wade’s band aids, KG’s Uzis), too racially intimidating (Artest, Sprewell, early 90’s Barkley), or just too damn young and rich (you really need examples here?), regulation—apparently—becomes an issue.

Four years removed from the shakeup of ‘05, with institutionalization of dress code and age limit complete, and hand checking rules in place to still allow the stars to shine when and where it matters most, the road to individual success in the NBA has been paved and cemented. The NBA has always been a star’s league, so while I hate the underlying motives, creating a degree of uniformity for the expectations of the Kobe Bryant’s, Trevor Ariza’s, and *snicker* Adam Morrison’s alike isn’t a terrible thing. But until this season, the burden of those expectations has been carried only by the individual, the player, the person. The dress code and age limit created a nice little cushion of comfort for NBA owners and investors; no need to worry too much about our product, or come down too harshly on young buggers ourselves, Papa Stern will take care of it.

Reenter behemoth: Now, with the effects of a recession manifesting themselves in the empty seats from Phoenix to New Orleans, shit has blown up, but in a way that’s so predictable, routine, and unvarying that it betrays the basic properties inherent to shit when blown up. The NBA has always counted on star power first and foremost, even over general competitiveness, as its primary revenue stream. So as far as the League is concerned, 2010 can’t come fast enough. NBA teams without a charismatic, seat-stuffing superstar are so fucked right now that their owners would call the Mayans crazy, not because of their prediction that the world will end in 2012, but because the prediction might come two years too late.

The extent to which owners, GMs, and coaches have forced their star players into alpha dog role, no matter how ill-fitting the nature of said player to fulfill alpha-branded expectations or how many subordinates are sacrificed in the process, is reaching a maddening point. This is even disregarding, momentarily, the hype that surrounded the MVP race and the utter dominance of the Lebron/Kobe/Wade triumvirate for the second half of the NBA season. No team exemplifies this sadistic trend more clearly than the Portland Trailblazers. Teeming with that rarified assemblage of young, early draft picks deftly and patiently maintained on a single roster (socialist promise on the cusp of fulfillment), the Blazers’ postseason berth seemed utterly serendipitous: no other team possessed the ability to launch the careers of so many individuals at one time, even with the impending ascendance of their own cool-veined MJ-doppelganger. Travis Outlaw flying on the break and throwing down a dunk with all the ferocity we expect from a prep-to-pro baller, LaMarcus Aldridge hitting the 15-footer with a silkiness uncommon to men his height, Nicholas Batum’s Frenchness, Greg Oden’s mere existence—all sacrificed for iso after iso of Brandon Roy. It was a sad thing to watch; the diversity of a mostly young, well-balanced roster surrendered for the chance of raising the profile of The One …or the one player most capable of fitting such a profile.

Trouble has turned up with other developments as well. The inevitability of moneyball reaching the front offices of NBA organizations was just that, an inevitability. But there’s a reason why the effects and application of advanced statistics in basketball remains such an unknown quantity, or why Darryl Morey conjures images of Dick Cheney more than any other GM. It doesn’t take any sort of advanced metric to quantify the physical and commercial impact of a Lebron, Kobe, or even Dwight Howard …but finding value in Shane Battier’s headwrinkles, or Trevor Ariza’s uncanny ability to pick off inbounds passes, that’s something that only the sagely mystics of moneyball can augur. Moneyball in and of itself isn’t evil, but at the risk of sounding like Joe Morgan or even that asstwat Buzz Bissinger, the timing is concerning. The next round of CBA bargaining in a couple years will see the elimination of the MLE and a raise in Max contracts, and with that, the separation between star and role player becomes that much more distinct— a distinction made all the more complete when moneyball seems to only confirm what we already know to be true: that Mike James’s sans-Bosh Toronto-era stats do not justify a four-year, MLE-level contract; that Mike Miller’s best asset is the size of his expiring contract; or that Elton Brand is terribly miscast on the 76ers roster, let alone on the team’s cap space.

Which brings me to my main point: serendipity in today’s NBA is becoming more and more synonymous with cruelty or misfortune. Consider some of the weirdest recent plotlines, the topics you didn’t know you cared about until you saw it. Brian Scalabrine and JJ Reddick starting in the playoffs?! Oh right, KG and Courtney Lee are injured. The Timberwolves hired some dude who hasn’t been in the NBA in five years as their newest GM?! Oh right, Glen Taylor is a clueless owner snubbed by three other candidates before settling on Kahn. Even the totally unanticipated rise of the Nuggets can be traced to the fact that Joe Dumars valued Allen Iverson’s expiring contract and potential (and fully realized!) corrosiveness as more valuable than Chauncey Billups’s undeniable clutchness.

To me, this tension is what best frames the Lakers-Magic Finals. More than Kobe vs. Howard, Phil vs. Stan, or any of the typical plotlines, the subtext to this championship series is a showdown of new team construct vs. old. The Lakers, on the one hand, represent the adherence to starpower (Kobe), an impossibly well-constructed and talented roster of mega-role players (Pau, Odom, Ariza), many of whom were acquired by preying off the financial limitations of other teams. The Lakers stand for all that is to be gained from moneyball, from a rebargained CBA, from everything the NBA is hurtling towards. It’s not that the Lakers are evil, more so just complicit to an evil system where they happily exploit the fears of others.

The assemblage of players, talents, personalities, and contracts that comprise the Eastern Conference Champs, on the other, are perhaps the last vestige of serendipity as a positive factor in pro basketball. Their superstar is so much a victim of his own charming boyishness, raw physicality and freakish athleticism that he’s expected to perform acts clearly outside his skillset. Their best ballhandler in the clutch is their starting 6’10” small forward. Rashard Lewis is perhaps the preeminent example of an undeserving max contract recipient, yet he is as much to credit for their Finals appearance as anyone on the roster. The Magic are a throwback to the soon-to-be long-lost-and-forgotten years of the early Aught’s when the MLE and max salaries were thrown around casually, and rosters are assembled with regard for talent instead of financial or physical order and fit-ness. The Magic are the paramount example mismatched parts, cacophonous beauty, incongruent attractiveness—everything we didn’t know we cared about until it fell in our laps.

I hope the rest of the NBA is watching.

Sometimes I wish we were a role player

Of all the archetypes that enter into the oh-so-narrow scope of sports narratives, redemption is possibly the most recycled, overused, and misused. The recycling and overuse are easy enough to explain: redemption is just one stop in the Monomyth cycle, the hero’s journey. And what has the bland and unimaginative regurgitation machine that is the mainstream sportsmedia taught us if not that any and every athlete worth his/her salt can be forced, no matter how ill-suited, into the narrative of the hero’s quest.

Now the tricky part: misuse. The problem harkens back to the ill-suited nature of most athletes to don their best Siddhartha or Odysseus impressions, much to the disappointment of many a ninth-grader. What I mean is this: for our ill-fitted (not necessarily ill-fated) sports heroes to fully embrace the act of redemption, there must be a misdeed, a mistake, or some otherwise unspecified nadir to overcome, to be redeemed from.

Of course for this author, there is no NBA player more prone to be (mis)cast into the role of hero than Sam Cassell. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that I eulogized the death of Cassell as player/athlete by way of a particularly inglorious early retirement, lionizing Cassell’s legacy as an anti-hero in the context of the new, ultra-professional, post-dress code (it’s a bit too much to call it ‘post-autonomy’ but it sure does feel right) NBA. So considering all the fodder I’ve built up around the myth and lore of my favorite basketball player, why is it so hard to nail down exactly what’s going on in this latest turn in the Cassell Saga?

There is undoubtedly a redemptive quality to Cassell’s hiring as assistant coach to the newly Saunders-helmed Wizards; in fact, there are many. First and foremost, Cassell is saved from irrelevance: dude’s not out of work, and more importantly he’s not out of NBA work, which means professional basketball still has yet to extricate itself from the Blow of Information that continuously lingers over any area occupied by Sam Cassell’s very presence. Case in point: while the precise nature of the assistance Cassell will provide to Saunders’s coaching staff is yet to be determined, Cassell has already revealed—by way of a typically garrulous and extemporaneous interview—that he sees his new team as most in need of a litany of intangibles (general leadership, wily craftiness) and nearly devoid of a need for managing.

Dig a bit deeper and other slightly archaic but nonetheless significant and blatantly redemptive plotlines arise. Sam Cassell’s supposed squabbling, contract demands, reckless abandon for leadership and on-court freelancing provided ample scapegoating fodder for the epic failure that was the ’04-’05 MN Timberwolves—a season which saw the end to Saunders’s ten-year coaching reign, and precipitated the eventual (inevitable?) trade of the greatest franchise player in team history. That Cassell’s hiring was performed now by a man who he once purportedly helped fire is a significant fact, and one that should not be underestimated. Also, in the same announcement of Cassell’s hiring as assistant coach, we learned that Randy Whitman will be joining the Wizards staff in the same capacity. And while the move probably speaks more to Whitman’s complete lack of competence, we’ll say it means even more, both in an ironic and qualitative sense, that Cassell is now on the same career rung as a man who seven months ago coached Brian Cardinal, Kevin Ollie, and Mark Madsen. That’s moving on up.

But true redemption of the literary kind, of the variety that Odysseus travels to the underworld for, or Alex Rodriguez or Manny Ramirez stops taking steroids for—that act speaks to a kind of deeper transformation. It isn’t exactly atonement, but it isn’t far removed from that. And that’s the problem with Cassell’s move from active to passive NBA participant: if early indications prove true, this next step in Cassell’s NBA career will lack any real transformative property. Despite the various and varied transgressions that Cassell’s detractors have (unfairly) accused him of over the years, Cassell himself remains unfazed, unconvinced or even unaware that his Blow of Information, his means of navigating the planes of sports lore is in need of a transformative tune-up of any variety, redemptive or otherwise.

And thus begins again an increasingly problematic cycle for Sam Cassell so long as he continues to assert his craft in NBA realms: Cassell’s assets are a devalued currency in the post-dress code, post-recession NBA economy. Consider the sagely advice Sam delivered to his future team by way of John Thompson in his first post-hire interview: The Wiz are a strong, veteran-guided team and not in need of persistent managing, yet Cassell will impart upon Gilbert Arenas how to be a leader; Cassell will teach the players how to overcome individual limitations and “get it done,” but “doing things out of character” is why the Wiz lost last year. While truth lies at the bottom of many of Cassell’s assertions when considered individually, navigating the full meaning of these false dichotomies elicits at best a degree of philosophical inefficiency and at worst anachronistic dilemmas that today’s NBA doesn’t afford its players or coaches.

Sure, that Arenas, Butler, Nick Young or anyone on the Wizards breaks out the Big Balls dance after a buzzer beater next season is inevitable. But there’s a reason the move to the bench has been kind to the likes of Aaron McKie, Brian Shaw, Scott Brooks, Vinny del Negro, and other bit-players turned coach. These blue collar laborers, who asked for and were asked of little during their time on the court, they suit the media-addled redemption narrative in a way that still fits the needs of the NBA’s personality police, by furthering the dutiful professionalism demanded of today’s pro basketball player. These are the men who can be said to have embarked upon a journey from modest, unassuming role player to head honcho (transformation with all the force of an anvil made of feathers), where they will of course preach the same rule of order, role, and function that they unquestioningly embraced on the rare instances that the ball was in their hand.

Not surprisingly, Sam Cassell’s got a different kind of redemption in mind. May the first Big Balls dance in the DC area be his.

Kindred spirits

Arenas On NCAA Players: ‘I Don’t Pay Attention To JV’

My man.

Amateurism knows no age limit

I received only two invites to compete in NCAA bracket pools this year, down from the half-dozen or so last year. Word’s getting out. It’s not that I hate college basketball; it’s fine. But every year the calls about the farce of competition (not exploitation) that is college basketball get louder and louder, and I for one hope to do my part to turn the volume up.

Obviously not surprising, though, that those mad money cats who benefit from the NCAA’s big lights moments are doing their part to shout back. The image hounds at adidas, a year after three adidas-sponsored teams appeared in the Final Four, have come up with the ingenious idea of getting adidas-sponsored NBA stars to hawk adidas-sponsored NCAA fables. What’s even more remarkable about the March is a Brotherhood campaign is the fact that the pros getting paid for these spots, are—irony of all ironies—the same all-stars who saw no point in going college in the first place. [KG enters stage right]:

The irony here has little to do with the specific schools being hawked in these spots. (The level of unintended comedy is off the charts when it comes to TMac’s Pitino pandering as justification for his choice of Louisville. There was a period, fueled mainly by my intense hatred of anything Brad Miller-related, when I refused to pity Rick Adelman and his charmin-esque coaching techniques. TMac has made it clear even those with no backbone deserve a break.) However, what’s so incredibly mystifying about this ad campaign is that it exists at all, that some ad exec thought this kind of wacknutt revisionist spin can fly in modern sports-entertainment capitalist machines when it’s proven so disastrous in so many other facets of American culture (wait, that actually makes perfect sense).

I understand that talents/personalities like KG, Josh Smith, Dwight Howard et al are marketable commodities; I mean, unlike their matriculating brotherhood, they actually get paid for wearing adidas sneaks. But the appeal of those players (KG in particular as the modern forefather of the phenomenon) is that they co-opted cultural norms/conventions because they knew they were talented enough to legitimately do so. Some have (probably mistakenly) called that “street cred” or some other such cliché– and apparently now enough history has passed that the connection between the “cred” and the cause of it has been forgotten and/or blurred.

It’s not surprising that Brandon Jennings means nothing now because a move halfway across the world and an global economic disaster has made his trend setting utterly distant and inapplicable to the American basketball culture. So in those blurred lines, adidas by way of amateur-cum-pro baller has cleverly found the space to re-cop and recoup the imagined and constructed cred by hyping the what was once shunned. It’s almost that much worse that the choice of schools is seemingly random (minus the adidas sponsorship, of course), because then it’s that much more obvious they’re just pimping out hype for the NCAA.

This is straight up current-day Paul McCartney esque bullshit. It’s like if Roman Polanski were to return to the U.S., go to jail, and THEN film a movie about firefighters on 9/11. Or something.

Fourth walls be damned

Pressed by the unspoken, unquestioned and now furtively veteran status of the dress code, along with one of the best rookie classes in recent history, uniformity of purpose has become the new style of pro basketball. It’s not that personal identity no longer exists. It’s just that the punishment for a DUI now amounts to irrelevance instead of incarceration (Barkley), and the worth of a player is predicated more upon serendipitous and arbitrary financial implications than sophisticated analytical metrics like, say, winning (Iverson, Marion, Sczcerbiak, LaFrentz, Gooden, Collins, any worthless vet making more than $5mil in the last year of their contract).

This is also what makes Rip Hamilton all the more of a pioneer. It’s of course ironic that the sum-larger-than-parts Pistons championship assemblage of which Rip was such an integral, um, part, were initially regarded as revolutionary vanguards of the same quiet, dutiful dedication and athletically-honed professional (or professionally honed athleticism, your choice) now institutionalized across the whole league.

Rip’s lasting legacy, however, is found in his ability to harness individuality from necessity/technicality, e.g. the facemask. The narratives that underlie Rip’s perpetually be-facemasked face are of course wholly positive: Pygmalion/She’s All That transformation from dorky to chic (or at the very least dorky-chic); finding excitement out of the mundane / life gives you lemonade bs; finding strength out of vulnerability. In the process, Rip’s facemask has transformed his liabilities into assets: lack of size is now excess of speed, swiftness; inadequate playmaking ability become dervish off-the-ball movement; mercurial-like bad attitude becomes mercurial-like good attitude. So the Bruce Waynification (Chris Nolan version, obvs) of the facemask-adorned Rip Hamilton belies not only the subtle and delicate nature in which individuality is formed, honed, and refined, but also the fringes of league culture in which it exists.

(Side note: watched the Cavs-Hawks game on Sunday and saw a facemasked Wally Sczcerbiak for the first time, which even deepened my awe of the facemask’s uncanny transformative properties. Just as the facemask turns Rip’s weaknesses into strengths, it turns Wally’s vanilla existence into ultra-vanilla. His assets (soft shooting touch; boyish enthusiasm often expressed in the form of excessive butt slapping; gel-hardened, movement-resistant haircut) have never seemed more benign and frivolously beneficial. Wally Sczcerbiak, more than ever, is the sprinkles on the cupcake that is the Cleveland Cavs.)

The fringes, of course, are an area of league culture for which Dwayne Wade has no concern. Which is why it’s both odd that Wade borrowed a page out of the Rip Hamilton book on self-promotion, and also predictable that the Wade band-aids saga has ended the way it has. The parallels between Wade’s bandages and Rip’s facemask are notable: injury-related necessity as inspiration/excuse for self-embellishment; transformative on-court redemption (Wade’s averages over the last 5 games: 37.8 points, 5.8 rebounds, 10 assists, 3 steals, 1.8 blocks, 54.8 FG%, 1.6 3ptss, 91.5 FT%, SICK). Yet the sleight of hand that Wade clearly doesn’t see is how, in the process of naming and literally branding his weakness, Wade has confused process and execution, subject and object. What started as a curious exercise in symbolism (American flag band-aid, Flash band-aid) became a crude hack of self-aggrandizement. Rip’s facemask has power in that its meanings can alternate between both the obvious and the unstated. Subtlety is not one of Stern’s strong suits.

An alien dirge of the heart

Two. years.

Damn.

Let’s not speak of it again.

Anyway, what compels me to write is not the vacillations of NBA cultural mores over the duration of my, um, sabbatical. Those have been covered extensively, shrewdly, and encyclopedically elsewhere.

Yet the NBA’s cultural economy, much like its financial economy (or any economy, for that matter), if not a zero-sum game, yields winners and losers. And for all of its New Worldly professional sheen, efficiency (more on that next time) and equilibrium—all post-Madoff superlatives deserving of intellectual/rhetorical acknowledgment, appreciation, or at the very least introspection—the losers are as deserving of at least a few words.

In particular, I speak of one such man: the namesake of this blog; he is Sam Cassell, and, redundancy aside, I love him.

Foremost, Sam Cassell stands as a statue of sanctity to the old form of NBA craft, ruling from the midrange. In the post-millennial NBA, the midrange has veered closer and closer to a no man’s land—a mysterious stretch of space which rewards neither the brute athleticism of those plays existing above the rim, nor an extra point for its relative distance. Naturally, this misunderstood and neglected strip of land is the space in which Cassell thrives; Cassel’s ability to bury midrange Js with stunning consistency has been viewed by league observers alternately as both a wonder and witchcraft.

Cassell’s narrative has frequently paralleled the tired brains-over-brawn cliché, a story which inevitably ends when age denigrates the point to which savvy and smarts are able to compensate for the meager physical contributions said player brings to the court. But to lay blame for the demise of Sam Cassell solely on the staid outcome of an age old truism sells Cassell’s legacy short… despite his contributions from the midrange, in the clutch, and relating to the excess of the size of his testicles.

So how can a player of Cassell’s pedigree be so easily dealt, shelved, and forgotten—traded last week for not even another player but an empty roster spot?

Simply put, the currency that Cassell possesses has been invalidated by the equilibrium of the NBA in ’09.

Consider some of Cassell’s (to refer to them politely) intangibles. Cassell’s veteran savvy has already been mentioned here, but it’s not just that Sam relishes the role of teacher so much, it’s how he applies that relish. As you might expect, these identities all fall under the Blow of Information realm, as former teammate and current ogre Chris Kaman called it:

• Sam directs his team as a preacher guides his flock; he is the fiery pulpit preacher, the entirety of the court is his soapbox.
• Sam soothsays his opponents and the refs (is there a difference?); he is the loquacious gossip and the court is his barbershop.
• Sam speaks clearly yet forcefully to the new (and pathetic) school of shockjock assclown journalist; he is the consummate diplomat

It’s abundantly clear, on this celebrated 10th-Day-After-President’s-Day Day, that Sam Cassell is more like Abraham Lincoln than any other man to have ever played in the NBA.  The propensity for garrulousness; the urge to talk, to express; the need to find motivation and inspiration through the process of conferring, articulating–these Lincolnian values have been reproduced in no basketball player more faithfully than Sam Cassell.  [O]nce he began speaking, got a smile on his face and told stories, this whole vitality came to his face. You forgot he wasn’t so good looking. I mean, what other NBA player could this Doris Kearns Goodwin quote possibly be applied to?  For what other athlete, past or present, could the description “sexy-ugly” be more apt (especially considering Kearns Goodwin’s scholarly definition)?

Yet if the NBA of today is increasingly becoming a place where the brightest stars are characterized by “a strong aversion to inner turmoil,” a place where “the rhythms of craft tamp down man and his problems, instead of the latter animating the former,” (see: here) then this is a business in which Sam Cassell—savvy veteran, Lincoln scholar, fiery preacher, barbershop gossip—can no longer ply his trade. Despite an insatiable competitiveness and significant personal turmoil, there is nothing “inner” about Sam Cassell or his game. And in the process of constantly exposing himself on the court as exactly the type of person he is in real life, Sam Cassell has also exposed his most significant vulnerabilities in the fast changing economy of the NBA. Despite Cassell’s best efforts to diversify his investments (here I’m speaking of Cassell’s continued lobbying to venture to the sidelines, a campaign which began five years ago after his first full season in Minnesota and has continued at every one of his teams since), Cassell’s personal/professional identity has come off as too personal, too dated, too Sam I Am.

For all of the fully appreciable aspects of the New NBA which are proving the strength and appeal of this new culture on a nightly basis, it makes total sense that the inverse equally strengthens the existence of the equilibrium-writ-large. But couldn’t David Stern have sacrificed Marbury instead?

Your hide is on my balls, your balls are on my hide

Listen, I know it’s been an ass-long time since I’ve updated this blog, which I can blame on a multitude of factors (the holidays, new year’s, friends entering and leaving town, me entering and leaving town), but really, as the post-less days start to stack up, my own guilt on account of not updating follows a similar course. Naturally, it’s much easier to avoid the issue all together, and long story short: it’s been three weeks since my last update. Yeesh.

Of course, a modicum of interesting events or mini-phenomena have occured in that timeframe. Off the top of my head, I’d say the New Year’s probably takes the cake as the most momentous of those occasions. And while I have never been much for the ole resolutions myself, I’m not so cold-hearted as to not recognize the more encouraging and generous of resolutions that others devise. So with that in mind, I say kudos to you, David Stern and NBA Commissioner on High, for after what certainly must have been minutes and minutes of deep thought and deliberation, you decided to give back the old leather NBA ball to those beaten and down-trodden players who work and toil on NBA courts night after night across the country (and continent) under your oppressive rule. Whether or not it was intended as such, I’m considering this to be the first move in honoring your New Year’s Resolution of not being such a blowhard. Because, really, it only stands to make the NBA more fun again. And shouldn’t fun be the ultimate goal of any good resolution?

While plenty of commentators and analysts have already talked this topic to death, and even though the NBA has been using the old leather ball for 10+ days now, I will leave you, (surprisingly) devoted reader, with a link to a blog entry and accompanying official letter of complaint by PETA to the NBA for switching back to old pigskin (it’s actually cows’ skin, but you get the point). NBA players get publicly slandered and knocked around on a constant basis, from the press, from fans, etc etc. But I’m sure nothing zings quite as much as these malicious barbs from those nasty, vitriolic sheep-huggers over at PETA. Well let me tell you, sticks and stones can hurt an NBA player’s bones, but from what I’ve been told, cowskin is actually markedly more soft on the fingertips–which makes, say, picking your nose, looking through filing cabinets, using touchscreens at the ATM, or even running the fast break much, much easier. So there.

Same old song and dance

My dad called me yesterday about an interview he heard recently on TPT’s weekly public affairs program, Almanac, with some Minnesota sports writer who had written a new book about the culture of fighting in the NHL. TPT, the television-version of Minnesota Public Radio, is Minneapolis-St. Paul’s largest and most popular public access TV network, meaning not very large and not very popular, so you can imagine the frank and serious, yet light and politely-inquisitive way in which this interview was most likely conducted. The fact that my dad called me about an interview on Almanac, a show I couldn’t care less about, is not unusual; my dad calls me all the time (and I mean, all the time, it’s out of control), often about nothing in particular, just looking to make some conversation and say hello. What is unusual is that my dad called me about hockey, or even sports at all. My dad is decidedly not whom I received my affection and obsession for all things sports from. That distinction belongs to my mother, a self-proclaimed tomboy while growing up and a still rabid baseball fan (she still loves basketball and football, don’t worry). So the fact that a Minnesotan sports writer (”And a Jew too!”) was on Almanac talking about sports, hockey nonetheless, yet about a subject and in a way that still intrigued by dad, well, that’s something he thought I needed to hear about. This book (The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL by Ross Bernstein) apparently discusses the “rules of engagement” for fighting in an increasingly violent NHL. “I didn’t even know there could be a code behind that stuff,” said my dad. “Isn’t that interesting?” Yes, Dad, it is interesting, but for reasons that have very little to do with the NHL.

As most of the living, breathing American populace knows, a fight broke out last Saturday night between the New York Knicks and Denver Nuggets in the last two minutes of the game at New York’s famed Madison Square Garden. I commented on the fight in a post last Sunday, but didn’t see much point in discussing the fight itself. Instead, I spent most of my time lamenting the inevitable dip Carmelo Anthony, a rising star in the NBA and a prominent member of my fanasty NBA team, would take to his fantasy value and his public image as a result of his actions in said fight. Why didn’t I discuss the actual fight itself? It seems obvious to me: the fight wasn’t anything particularly newsworthy, physically no larger than your average bench-clearing brawl in MLB (a large handful of which seem to occur every season), and certainly no more violent than your average tooth-popping fistfight in the NHL (a large handful of which seem to occur every night). Unfortunately, much of the sports media, indeed much of the broader American mainstream, doesn’t seem to see it that way.

So what has the media said about the fight? Well a lot of things have been said, some good, some bad, some with nothing worthwhile to contribute at all. But for every Kelly Dwyer of CNNSI.com who asks us not to make too much of the actions of some NBA players who aren’t thugs but really just a bunch of “eccentric millionaires” and “bratty kids, full of themselves,” there are five times more journalists willing to grant upon themselves the role of judge and jury, brandishing these rogue NBA players as the morally-irredeemable hooligans they believe them to be, unfit for the public spotlight that goes along with sports stardom and potential role model positions. Consider, for example, Dwyer’s colleague at CNNSI.com, Chris Mannix, who emphatically believes that the fight committed the ludicrous sin of putting fans at physical risk (”make no mistake, that is exactly what several players did Saturday night”). Additionally, today ESPN ran a headline article on its site about Northwest Airlines pulling a magazine from its flights which featured Carmelo Anthony. In a column on his site Edgeofsports.com, liberal sportswriter Dave Ziren (and fellow Macalester grad!) lists multiple other examples of sportswriters who over-zealously cried foul in response to the fight:

Instead, we are deluged with articles about how, as a Yahoo Sports headline described it, this is really “a black eye” for the entire league. The Baltimore Sun’s Childs Walker wrote that the brawl should spark a discussion “about the sociology of the NBA.” MSNBC’s Michael Ventre opined that “the terms ‘NBA’ and ‘thuggery’ have become inextricably linked in the minds of basketball fans the world over.” The piece also calls the incident another example of “The NBA Vs. Idiots.”

I keep coming back to that Chris Mannix article, though. What shocks me more than anything is the vindictive and self-righteous attitude Mannix readily employs on behalf of the cowering masses, the NBA and sports fans across the country, who Mannix apparently believes remain in fear of events like those in the Garden on Saturday night. Mannix writes: “[The fight's participants] deserve to be struck down with an iron first, their punishment so severe that the mere thought of doing something like that again makes them cringe.” What’s even more unfortunate is that on this point, David Stern, the NBA’s commissioner and ruler-on-high, completely agrees.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Stern’s remonstrative punishment went way overboard. For engaging in the NBA’s first fight since Ray Allen and Kenyon Dooling went at it nearly a year ago, mid-January of last year to be more precise, Stern suspended Carmelo Anthony for 15 games, J.R. Smith and Nate Robinson 10 games, and a combined 12 games amongst four other suspended players. In contrast, Allen and Dooling received a suspension of 8 combined games for a fight that also apparently put fans at physical risk, if we’re to follow Mannix’s criteria, by spilling over into the front row of courtside spectators (you can watch a clip of that fight here). When Stern enacted an official age limit and dress code a couple of years ago, I welcomed the moves as subersive, smart and creative measures meant to address the NBA’s falling public image. Stern correctly recognized the negative powers of the NBA that were affecting the broader American basketball culture–obviously, violent and disturbing scenes like the “Malice at the Palace” Pistons-Pacers incident, but also capitalistic forces like shoe companies and other opportunistic, profit-obsessed businesses that were increasingly exploiting (perhaps more importantly, increasingly able to exploit) the younger generations of American basketball players–and passed new rules which tackled not just the physical, but the cultural and social aspects of the NBA in dire need of a tune-up.

With his reaction to this incident, however, it’s clear to me that Stern has lost that vision and aim, and overstepped a very delicate line from culturally-minded to culturally-reactive. In the press release announcing the NBA’s verdict, Stern cited the justification that the NBA “has set up the goal of eliminating fighting from our game.” I don’t doubt Stern’s motives, however misguided his methods may be. But it’s equally clear to me that such methods have had a markedly negative impact on the perception of this event, and perhaps similar events in the future; namely, such heavy punishments give credence to all the haters who condemn the NBA as ultimate champion in public displays of thuggery in modern America, further strengthening the allegedly “inextricable” link between the terms ‘NBA’ and ‘thuggery’ for narrow-minded analysts like the aforementioned Michael Ventre of MSNBC. It files down the scope of the NBA’s public image to a needle-thin trajectory where the players themselves are the only ones bearing responsibility, and dumbs down the league’s reputation to the barest, most fundamental of stereotypes. 

And why does this all happen? How can such a marginalization occur so easily in this democratic, civilized society? Steve Francis–of all people!–may have some idea. In an interview with the New York Post–of all newspapers!–Francis put it more bluntly than I ever could (or could dare):

“In other sports, there are incidents that are way worse than basketball,” the Knicks guard said. “So many worse things happen every game or four or five times a year, but because there are more black players in the NBA, it’s under the microscope more than baseball or hockey.”

Of course there are tons of stupid details surrounding the fight (which have been turned into excuses and half-hearted justifications): Denver coach George Karl was running up the score against the Knicks in support of his friend, former Knicks head coach, and Isiah Thomas’ archrival, Larry Brown; Isiah Thomas in response ordered a hard foul for any player that dared go into the paint for the rest of the game. But petty crap like that happens in every sport; at the worst, such moves are on par with Ozzie Guillen ordering a young relief pitcher to bean an opponent’s batter (not to mentioned Guillen’s reactionary demotion of said pitcher when the pitcher failed to carry out the ordered beaning). And the fight itself was certainly no less a spectacle than the myriad other physical altercations which occur in every major American sport (except maybe golf). Yet the NBA gets a bum wrap because its players aren’t predominantly white, because those same players are insanely rich, because its fans can get closer to the action than in any sport, because of many other reasons which Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith, Mardy Collins and Nate Robinson don’t deserve to be taking the full brunt of, no matter how embarassing or ridiculous their actions were last Saturday night. It’s unfortunate and reprehensible (yet still predictable) that a couple years after the cataclysmic Pacers-Pistons brawl the sports media hype machine has learned so little and seems just as incapable of recognizing such facts. But it’s an outright tragedy that the NBA’s own commissioner can’t recognize it either.

Semantics

Like any self-respecting (not to be confused with self-obsessed… I hope) blogger, I check my blog stats pretty regularly.  And lately, my blog stats have been pretty damn good, if I do say so myself– which unfortunately doesn’t do much to dispell the self-obsessed line there.  See, it seems my blog is one of the first results one gets when conducting a google search along the lines of “isiah thomas bruce bowen” or “Bruce Bowen Isiah Thomas” or “isiah thomas bruce bowen comments” or “isiah thomas dirty player” or, well you get the idea.

ANYWAY, you may or may not have noticed the name of this blog has changed in the past day from “Dime-a-Day” to the more obvious “Sam Cassell is an Alien and I Love Him,” thus matching the blog’s actual URL. Despite choosing that absurdly long and, well, just absurd URL, I initially decided to title my blog with something a little more… respectable, something more formal, if you will.  Dime-a-Day seemed like a solid little title at first, but seeing as how I’m getting a fair amount of completely random and probably unearned traffic to the ole blog, and seeing as how that blog title is so obviously similar to ESPN’s Daily Dime column, and seeing as how plaigirism is never a practice I would endorse or condone, I’ve decided to throw out all semblances of formality and respectability.  That’s right, this blog will from this point on be known only as Sam Cassell is an Alien and I Love Him.

In other news, I really, really hate Kevin McHale.  (More on that later.)