A Fair Share of Rudiment

Some very important corners of the web finally got around today to wondering about Jay-Z paying Dwyane Wade. The explanation has been laid out several places and now linked to where millions of eyes will catch the fever. So that's that. We all know what's up, drugs in the house and no tampering.

Howeeevs (long e), there have been radical developments since "NY State of Mind" stopped ringing in my ears. Namely, LeBron James switched his number from 23 to 6. So now, if Jeezy's paying LeBron prices, he's getting his for 6K a kilo. Not as good as Jay, but everyone knows that Hov is an old, washed-up liar, while Jeezy still occasionally shows up in court documents. Under his alias, Mr. Pickle and Fright, of course. But back to the matter at hand: So now, if the international cocaine market is, as I've always suspected, governed by NBA jersey numbers, then Jeezy is getting a really good deal himself.

That's only one layer of the mystery, as they say. Why would LeBron James go and do a favor for Jeezy, when Jay-Z has been been big brother since before Akron was more than a place from Greek mythology that someone got to visit? That's right, you guessed it: LeBron is going to the Hawks. I know that Jeezy isn't an owner yet, or officially, but how hard would it be for him to purchase a minority stake? Him going to the Hawks allows the coke price to drop for a part owner which means the financial picture for the franchise changes drastically in ways that means going way over the cap is no problem.

When it comes to the world of money and stuff, perception is stronger than reality. That's how a song, which is just a bunch of words, can actually have these real world implications. You know why? Because those lines are really memorable and "NYSOM" was a huge hit. So when deals get determined, it creeps in, insidiously. In the end, Jay's hit-making prowess may have destroyed the future of the Nets. I can't stand it anymore.

This may be tampering but it's also an NBA team funded by drug money. I don't even know where to start with that.

NOTE: THIS IS ALL FICTION.

NOTE: This is my really long and thoughtful piece about this year's tournament.

NOTE: This blog will be pumpin' out more when I'm done with book stuff, in like a week or so. Hopefully.

Talking Just For You

The season stirs. Roy Hibbert will fuck you up. Thus, get ready for more podcast, and more of it. If you catch my drift.

This week, Dan and I visit with SLAM don Lang Whitaker to discuss that seminal mag's 15th anniversary, where it fits into journalism, and what a great job it is. Then we start talking Hawks at about the same time as tiny space aliens inject me with large amounts of drugs, but whatever, Jamal Crawford is the shit and I have nothing to hide. If you want to see Lang and I in the same room, hit up BwB 2.0 in Vegas next week.



Some serious business: Visit the Disciples of Clyde so you can support Dan in the Chicago Pancreatic Cancer Research Walk on Saturday, October 17. On a more upbeat note, Ken just had a baby. Congrats!

Music from the episode:
"King of Ink" - The Birthday Party
"Slapped Up (Snap N Clap)" - Madlib
"Styles of the Times" - Yo La Tengo
"The Hawk" - The Melvins
"Dreamland Skank" - The Upsetters

For other means of obtaining this program, try iTunes and the XML feed.

News to Me

Am I the only person on the planet who didn't know that Paulette Reaves is the mother of Josh Smith? Her current site has some candids of her with Amare, Nash, and others.

Like you need FD to tell you that LeBron is almighty. Read The Baseline tomorrow for my thoughts on the game. Some other random shit will probably show up here around the same time.

UPDATE: Excuse whatever chippiness follows, because my internet connection is once again totally unreliable and it makes my increasingly professional life a total mess. Fuck writing serious emails on a phone. Anyway, I know I've been scarce around these parts. It's got a lot to do with the new gig; I'm trying to both 1) figure out the hang of it 2) divert traffic from here to there (sorry if that's a huge sinister surprise). So if anyone has advice or feedback on either of these counts, let me know. I can pretty much write whatever I want, and it's really only the recaps/previews I've gotten bogged down with, but every writer is these days (power of repetition = power + repetition. Which means no need for "experts" after a point.)

That said, from last night's Bron/Magic post, here's the FD money shot that would've fit very nicely into this site's special place:

The Magic have been better in this series than they've been at any time during the season (or playoffs, of course). That Turkoglu shot, a mirror image of Lewis's heroics from Game 1, looked like it had capped off, or kicked off, a new glory era for the Magic. No matter how unlikely it all seemed, it would be damn hard to argue with after this. I know that athletes can taste victory, but for once, I understood why that language exists.

But the Magic don't have LeBron James. And while we know stars can lose, upsets can happen, and our preconceptions can be wrong, James is the ultimate superstar. In that, he's both breathtaking and boring. We're watching a career unfold that's already HOF-bound, maybe even the best ever, and yet it all feels so inevitable. And so it was with that shot. Of course James would make it and put everything in its right place. The second -- and yeah, it was literally a second -- the ball went his way, you thought "this is how it's supposed to happen, isn't it?" You realize that "scripted" and "storybook" differ only in connotation.

It had to happen, and as shocking as it was, you could only be so surprised. But isn't that what makes LeBron so ridiculous? He's conditioned us to not only expect the impossible, but take it for granted.

See, it lives! And yes, I took out two really weird sentences that are what happens when I write too late, under some deadline of some sort. Those always make me anxious, as opposed to the sense of urgency, or competitiveness, that used to spur me on when it was totally self-imposed. Welcome to America, I guess.

-While we're on the subject of me saying shit that could potentially hurt my future interest, I find it weird that in that fat dude swimming adidas ad, KG is cast as both less (cardboard shoes) and more (world champs!) fortunate in the grand socio-economic scheme of things than Jim, or whatever his name is. It's like NBA players' former poverty has been mythologized, turned into a necessary part of how high they'll one day rise. It's teleology, and Horatio Alger, and frankly kind of gross. At best, there's a disconnect between "kid plays on dirt and goes on to dominate American sports" and "ordinary schmo loses job during recession." The former is both fantastic and in our society, totally familiar; the latter is cast as the salt-of-the-earth feat of bravery. We're all ordinary people, unless we're too poor, then we might as well be rich because we'll end up cagers or rappers.

Fuck a photo, I have to go watch a movie about Chechnya. Will be live tonight.

Like a Pancake That Lands on the Ceiling

With some words on the Hawks, their city, and their parallel progress, here's Avery Lemacorn. He's been here before, and also writes the music and lit blog DeckFight.

“The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”—Freud

Uncanny yes that the Hawks were facing another Game 7 for the second year in a row in the first round of the playoffs. Uncanny yes that they had never won a game seven and that a group of pretty much the same players were in the same predicament. Uncanny yes that Atlanta’s game 7 blunders have haunted them.

For these Hawks, this was a long road back, but one done with quiet fortitude with little fanfare from the masses or the mass media. This is a team dizzied by its own potential, a team that says Joe Johnson should be in the conversation about the top of the league, a team that says Josh Smith should not be so mercurial, a team that says Al Horford is too small to be a starting center. A team doubted because of its conference, a team overshadowed by another Atlantan in another city, even.

The fact is that Atlanta is a haunted city. Not by ghosts, not by voodoo, not by old gangsters, founding fathers, or star-struck starlets. It is haunted by the dismantling of its own success. Sherman burned Atlanta down as a symbol against the excesses of Southern pride. The former penal colony turned Confederate powerhouse turned powder. And approximately 100 years later when the city thought they had all this figured out, that they and the world had an uneasy comfort with “their” view on things, a man with famous initials moved to town to launch a national movement bringing unrecognized sins to light. Struck down again.

Not to say that those changes in the city were not for the better, but granted, there were wounded egos. Hence, the flight out. Yes, that pale-colored flight.

In a way that no court could ever order, Atlanta began to change. In 1965, the Falcons came. In 1966, the Braves moved to Atlanta. Then the Hawks. In '73, the first black mayor of the city was elected then Hank Aaron had his historic run. But not many were there to see the Hawks get ever so close. Slowly, sports began to make the majority comfortable in the skin of the city again. The Braves won first in 1991, then big in 1995 drawing those on the outside back into the city core. The Falcons made their own run with the Dirty Bird to the Super Bowl in 1998. Atlanta elected its first African-American female mayor in 2001, the same year that the great uniter for the most beloved sport in all of Georgia would come: Michael Vick. Vick would electrify crowds of any color, of any persuasion. Staid ol’ UGA never played ball this way, not since Herschel, the Walker on air. But now this was happening in Atlanta, the ATL, to all and for all.



But Vick only brought them so far before his own uncanny downfall. Now it's time for the Hawks. City streets and landscapes are changing. New downtown condos, new “refabbed” neighborhoods are guaranteed to make white people comfortable. Here comes IKEA. From 2007-2008, for the first time in forty years the city proper took in more residents than it lost. No matter what happened to Vick, the momentum has swung. The city has changed.

Atlanta was ready for this, ready to win a Game 7. Ready to show how everything has changed. With their past, Atlanta was simultaneously ahead and behind the nation in racial politics. The success of the Hawks is directly related to this moment in time, a Southern city being comfortable on a large scale with its president of color, its own nuances of color, its music, its game. A place where the Cartoon Network and crunk can reside side by side.

Think all of this is too much? The players don’t think so.
From Mark Bradley at the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

“It feels good,” said Josh Smith, the Atlantan who scored 21 points and took nine rebounds in Game 7. “It feels like the monkey’s off Atlanta’s back, not just this team’s.”
Said Al Horford, who worked 32 1/2 minutes on a sprained right ankle: “It’s big. People are really starting to look at Atlanta and consider us a basketball city.

Despite all of the missteps in years past by the Hawks' management, Joe Johnson and the Hawks are still playing while the Suns, the Jazz, the Hornets and the Blazers are at home.. Their moment is easily calculable--going past this point will be truly unexpected. They made it to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro only to discover that Mt. Everest exists. But no one expects them to climb Everest, only to show that they can climb at all.

But there can be dreams of what may have been. Maybe it's the constant "lack" of the point guard that has plagued this team. Pete Maravich and Dominique then Steve Smith and Jason Terry and Joe Johnson—all more reliable wing scorers than anything else. Though I appreciate the Hornets, I firmly believe that Chris Paul was supposed to be in Atlanta, with Josh Smith the perfect receiver for anything and everything Chris Paul could launch. Instead, everything we are seeing is something played out in an alternate universe, and the rest of us are the Oceanic 6 trying to figure out just how this time travel thing works to somehow correct it. And as New Orleans threatens to dismantle, isn’t there a way to spin the wheel in the proper direction to make these annoying flashes of frustration stop?

Mike Bibby and David West are the same. Both are serviceable like Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate": not what you would openly wish for, but exactly what you need. But who are we kidding? Paul "needs" a Josh Smith, like the Hawks "need" a Chris Paul for fulfillment. Though both are satisfied, neither are exactly ecstatic. This will always be the Achilles Heel for both.



In a lot of ways, the Hawks are a parody and lesser version of the Cavs. The point guards complete, but there is still an over-reliance on the wings for stability. LeBron by himself is essentially the ultimate culmination of Josh Smith/Joe Johnson. Cunning with his ballhandling and creative with his shot, LeBron is Joe Johnson while also being explosive, dynamic, competitive, expressive in style and action like Josh Smith. This series then is the battle of the two-headed monster of the Hawks against the monstrous leviathan of the Cavs with Bibby and Mo feeding and reeling the beasts.

Is the transformation of the city of Atlanta or the Hawks to champions fully complete? No, not yet. Not by any means. But maybe they have escaped that which has always been old and long familiar.

He Was Born in Hell

Everyone I talk to is worried about a anti-climactic contest tonight. Of course, after Thursday, Lazarus making hot chocolate at halftime would be an anti-climax. But even if all we get in a few hours is epilogue, and even if that epilogue is the (expected) Boston win, the convoluted history of this series tells tells us that there's no way it won't be eventful.

Before we all get completely consumed by pre-game hysteria, I wanted to briefly touch on the weird, weird Josh Smith scandal. Smith goes for the showtime dunk, on the break, during a blowout, and fails. He's lambasted for trying to show up or disrespect the Heat, personally apologizes to Coach Spoelstra (who publicly made many of these accusations) and explains that it was just to thank the fans. Confused? You also have Smith saying he'd do it again, and basically agreeing with Jalen Rose's analysis that the problem was the miss, not the attempt itself. Which is to say, he embarassed himself—had he made it, Smith would've had the whole world entranced. The Heat would've come off as petty whiners, or at very least, the dunk would've been so awesome as to insulate itself against criticism.

All this presumes that Smith needs to apologize for wanting to humilate the Heat, or that an insane dunk is purely self-indulgent. Last I checked, intimidation and making statements were really important in basketball, especially in the playoffs. Why, then, is Smith all of a sudden in "unsportsman-like" territory for trying to use a dunk to do just that? It was gratuitous when the Celtics ran up the score, and put on a show, to cap off last year's Finals victory, because in that case the series was over. But this one is still very much alive. Breakaway dunks can be momentum-changers in a game; why not think of this in the context of the series? While games have throat-slash moments, these events can pile up and carry over to the next one, too. The Heat had every right to take Smith's attempted dunk personally, and use it as motivation. That's because he was trying to punk them, put them in their place. That's about basketball, pride, and ego; there's absolutely no need for the finger-wagging and commenters dissecting the ethics of the situation.

It all comes back to this idea of there being "good" and "bad" forms of intimidation, or rather, "acceptable" and "tacky." Tough defense and physical play can throw off an opponent. As can talking. Or throwing down in traffic. Those are fair game in the pressure-cooker of the playoffs. But if Josh Smith goes for the showpiece dunk, it's him, not the Heat, who have some explaining to do? Isn't a long three in transition always outrageous and uncalled for? If I had a penny for every time someone old insisted that teams need to send a message with their defense, I'd be crushed to death. Why then, can't Josh Smith try and say to the Heat "fuck you, I can do whaetver I want against you." Isn't that his whole game? It's up to the other team to keep his one-man momentum bomb under wraps; as one of the studio guys observed in the pre-game last night, Miami immediately let Johnson get away with an uncontested dunk. Are there rules and regulations about when you're allowed to intimidate . . . or does that only apply to individual acts of offense? Because clearly, no one makes a fuss if a team lets up on defense once the outcome's decided. And running up the score can certainly be deployed selectively.

Smith's right—the problem is that he missed. That turned it into something frivolous, a sideshow subject to all sorts of bullshit moral high ground-grabbing. Smith is clueless, spoiled, disorganized, a disgrace to the game because he resorted to absurdity. Why was it absurd and excessive? It failed. If he'd pulled it off, it would be the Heat who would be feeling shame, no matter what the media decided to say about it.

If anyone wants to give him hell, they just focus on what a half-assed effort that was.The angle of approach was all wrong and Smith barely got off the ground. What a dick.

Take Your Sunday

Now I am really fucking snowed in, and Lady Shoals has gone mute from illness. So here are some notes/thoughts of a basketball nature that came to me this morning. Consider them the survivalist version of yesterday's post.

-Have I ever said, somewhere, that the Suns did win in the end, at least in spirit? Every team in the world plays small and fast sometimes now. Does that mean that, had the 2004-05 team remained intact, they would've gotten a title, or were they the extremists who sparked mainstream change? Logic says no. Besides, the 2006-07 team was more moderate, better on paper, and could easily have ended up in the Finals had it not been for some serious bullshit. Yet for some reason, I feel like it's the 2004-05 squad that would've been the most dangerous in the climate they've now brought about.

-I'm really taking seriously the possibility that LeBron does sign this summer. Cavs look great, Williams and West are low-key Positional Revolution, a poor man's Arenas/Hughes (oh, the irony), and with Wally and Wallace expiriing, the team will have cap space to sign Bosh or Amare, both of whom will be looking to change teams for sure in 2010. Doesn't that spell multiple rings to you? Where exactly would Bron have a better shot at championships?

-Haven't quite figured this one out yet, but Josh Smith needs to stay in motion constantly. Which is sort of the same thing as saying he needs to just study Amare's game intensely. He's not a PF, can't post up conventionally, and especially with Horford so important, is just getting in the way/wasting his talents when he meanders around the paint trying to get position. Smith needs to always be on his way toward the hoop to be effective. That can involve taking a few dribbles himself, or being hit with a less-than-perfect pass. But what doesn't work is his starting from a stand-still up top or trying to get his bearings down low, with the ball.

-For better or worse, he's not the new Sheed.



-Still thinking about the scoring leaders. I guess I'm just surprised to see Harris, Granger, and Roy near the top, because I never considered them dominant scorers. Don't Paul or Howard seem a tier higher than them? I mean based on presence alone. It's not only a change, it's one we didn't see coming, and I think that FD favors prophecies that come true, not change trumping the narrative.

-Though maybe I need to look further down, spot Ben Gordon on there, and once and for all view this list worth a grain of salt.

-I can't decide if this Pistons thing—combined with the end in Denver—is badly fucking with Iverson's legacy, or has just made him irrelevant. And then, the walking dead or an OG everyone opens the door for? Yes, I'm writing this as they cut to him on the bench in the fourth.