French Furniture

Sportsfans,

I feel so old media, the way every time I pick up my pointer finger to start typing, it’s already been covered, re-covered, and thoroughly digested. Nonetheless, allow me to ponder some recent events.

Richard Jefferson.

Amazing deal for the Spurs. AND they got DeJuan Blair (whose name my brother and I were calling every time Stern stepped to the podium for picks 19 through 30). Now, this comment may bring Brickowski out of retirement, but I have to wonder how much of the Spurs’ “genius” is simply taking advantage of other teams’ stupidity. Like,

1) You don’t NOT take a chance on DeJuan Blair’s knees if you’re a non-lottery team in a pretty weak draft.

2) If you are John Hammond, don't you at least have to throw in Charlie Bell's contract or get a draft pick or SOMETHING to let your fans know you are asleep at the wheel? I'm so f'ing sick of the 'alluring 2010 offseason 'I could vomit up fishbones. Beyond the top three 2010 FAs on this list (Bosh, LBJ, Wade--the former of which are not going anywhere anyway), is there ANY body that you would want your team to throw Rashard Lewis money at? Most of these guys have are gonna be old or have a history of injuries. And any now-monetarily satiated star who is slightly appealing (e.g. Dirk) isn't going to be looking to play in Milwaukee or Minnesota...they're gonna be looking to go somewhere to get a ring.

In sum, the Spurs are now better than the Nuggets and a hair worse than the Lakers, who are right now the best team in the West.

Blake Griffin

Not much to say here, just wanted to make the prediction that he will be better than Durant and Beasley. Probably Carmelo too. Seems to be the first forward since LeBron to come into the league with a legit NBA frame. I'm sure B-Diddy will break out his good legs for this season. Am excited.

Ricky Rubio

First off, as a Wolves fan, I'm angry. This is personal-not-business. The draft has left me with a clawed-at scalp, and a head full of worries, one of which is that Ty Lawson will haunt us for years to come. On Rubio, I want to give sincere thanks to Canis Hoopus for writing this so I don't have to. Everyone take a second to go read it. No, seriously, take a look at it...Now that that's over with, let's talk about another angle on how this story is being covered/manufactured/facilitated. You know it's bad when you have to rely on Jay Mariotti to land the few big punches and point to what is the critical issue here. It's race. In his essential FCKYOU to the dream of so many inner city kids and farm boy hayseeds, Ricky Rubio is being coddled, practically ENCOURAGED by ESPN to seek a trade, to make demands, to act like he has played one goddam nanosecond of American ball.

Mariotti brings up Eli Manning and John Elway. Good start, but they (a) had college resumes to back up their trade demands, and (b) ended up talking the talk. What about Jamarcus Russell, Cedric Benson...how about Steve Francis? You think they got this sort of treatment when they made their childish demands? Hell no. And they were already proven commodities in the US!

I mean, Rubio skipped out on the Wolves first press conference. Can you imagine if TO skipped out on the Bills voluntary workouts! That would have been news! Oh wait, it was! What Rubio is doing with his passive/aggressive trade angling and failure to commit to the Wolves is as bad as Kobe/Shaq/Marbury/Cassell/etc. trade demands...except it's WORSE. He is an unproven commodity and he is shitting on the American Dream.

Thanks ESPN/athletes for keeping mid-market teams hostage!

Shaquille O’Neal

...which brings me to Shaq, or instead LeBron. Talk about keeping mid-market teams hostage, and that is LeBron's daily operation. Instead of committing to Cleveland once and for all, he forces Danny Ferry's shaky hand to getting the Big Situation Room, who at this point is simply a coach-killing token that allows Ferry to say, "Look Bron! Look how much we want to keep you around! We got a top 50 player for you!" Getting Shaq is about as good as any other Danny Ferry move: admirable on paper, questionable during playoff time, always the scapegoat after the Cavs are ousted.

I am also pissed (on behalf of Cavs fans) for how much this is a gut reaction to losing out to Dwight Howard in particular (with Shaq, oddly, poised to be playing the role of Dwight-Howard-stopper). Did they forget that the reason they lost was because Turkoglu and Lewis got ridiculously hot, and Mo Williams forgot to show up every other game?

A logical response would be to attain more shooters because in this day and age, LeBron effectively IS Shaq. Nah, eff that. He is a better Shaq than Shaq. He occupies space in the lane and can attract double teams (which Shaq no longer can), and is a better passer than Shaq. How about Ferry gives Milwaukee a call and see if Hammond wants to complete that rebuilding project by dumping Michael Redd?

Too much blood has been spilled on this topic already, but I had to say my piece.

Kevin Love

Now I'm as much of a hater on Twitter's media coverage as there. I hate the Time cover, the slacktivism behind thinking we're doing anything on Twitter to aid the Iran situation, the smug "look at our bourgeoise generation talking about talking about talking about" angle to every trend piece on the topic of Twitter, but I have to be real: K-Love’s Twitter is changing my life, or at least the way I follow sports. I swore I would never “follow” a celebrity, but when he aired the McHale news, I gave it a shot. And now... well, given my Wolves’ allegiance, I mean this is like watching Twin Peaks and being able to get a phone call from Dale Cooper every now and then to see what he’s thinking. Incredible stuff.

O Darkest Night

Below please find some amazing links, and the latest podcast.

-Earlier posts here, on draft fashion psychoanalysis and important details culled from past telecasts.

-My virulent, FD-friendly, reaction to the Shaq trade.

-Joey, after being crucified for his NY-centrism, has decided to change horses and look to the Wolves that could be.

-On the latest FD Presents: The Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast, Dan, The Recluse, Eric (Ty Keenan), and myself attempt to talk about the draft, and instead spend almost 20 minutes trying to say something about the Bucks. Performance at its finest.



Songs:

Soundgarden - “Outshined”
What Made Milwaukee Famous - “Resistance St.”
Gang Starr - “Just to Get a Rep”
Deerhoof - “Whither the Invisible Birds?”
Man or Astroman? - “Principles Unknown”
Peanut Butter Wolf and Charizma - “Devotion ‘92″

If you want to settle down and make a serious commitment, try iTunes and the XML feed.

When Stations Shift, You Find Your Own

Not that I think it's my God-given duty to size up the Finals and decide who's up, who's down, but you've got to admit that Lakers/Magic does present a certain number of curious proposition. For one, these two are neither mismatched nor equals. It's like they exist in parallel universes. The Lakers, as we all know, as flushed to the gills with ability, but only periodically harness it all. The Magic, well, we didn't realize it until recently, but so are they. And they bring it on the regular. Does that make Orlando overachievers, Los Angeles underachievers, and no one but the Cavs the underdogs? The Magic's has been a season of peaks and valleys, hitting their stride, then losing Nelson, then picking up steam again, then hitting a wall earlier in the playoffs when Howard's identity came into question and Turkoglu was hurt. And now, they're riding high, so high, again. The Lakers? Friday was the first time all playoffs they've looked like the Lakers we expected to see come and visiti pestilence upon the postseason. Now you tell me: Which is inconsistency, which on a voyage of self-discovery and perpetual adjustment?

What's more, while this series doesn't seem to have STAR BATTLE written all over it, it will certainly challenge the "nobody digs Goliath, ya dig?" axiom of the modern NBA. Because, simply put, Howard is love and lightness, Kobe the darkest side of Jordan, the least ecstatic aspects of his game, streamlined and boiled down to something potent, metallic, and kind of smelly. That's not to say that Kobe's still the man we love to hate, just that he'll never be easy to love—in much the same way that Chamberlain, and even Shaq, found themselves troubled by.

Here's some fragments from a piece I wrote this spring on Shaq for a certain well-known web magazine. This was from draft #3, and apparently wasn't snappy enoigh. So sorry, guys. In any case, I think it's pertinent here for describing just how far Howard is indeed with "the new Shaq," in terms of natural magnetism and ability to worm his way into our hearts without making us feel engorged or cloyed by absurdity:

O'Neal wouldn't be the first athlete always angling for the spotlight, or looking for ingenious forms of self-promotion. But compared to, say, the whip-smart expressiveness of Muhammad Ali in his prime, O'Neal is at once light-hearted and uncomfortably deliberate. He excels at spoken spectacle, assigning himself absurdist nicknames (my favorites: The Diesel, The Big Aristotle, and Shaqovic) and making off-color jokes about opponents, like his disparaging reference to rivals "the Sacramento Queens."

From the beginning Shaq saw himself as an entertainer, which explains 1993's platinum rap album Shaq Diesel and film roles ranging from the 1996's Kazaam, in which Shaq played a genie, to 1994's Blue Chips, an underrated look at corruption in college sports that starred Nick Nolte. The more he does, the more control he exerts over his image. And with good reason. In the fraternity of superlative NBA big men, O'Neal stands alone in his non-stop levity. Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, Patrick Ewing, and peer Tim Duncan, to name a few, were pensive and aloof—and often criticized for it. O'Neal has seemingly spent his entire career trying to break the mold, replacing the towering, faceless Goliath with a hip-hop Paul Bunyan. Shaquille O'Neal may have been Joe Frazier or (young) George Foreman on the court, but preferred the garrulous, daft Ali role off of it.



However, this disconnect comes with a price. Shaq's behavior can get downright ugly when his ego, image, or brand are threatened, since this could send him plummeting into in the annals of large, bitter, awkward freaks. For evidence of this, look no further than the litany of "sidekick" guards who have proved essential to his success: Penny Hardaway in Orlando, Kobe in Los Angeles, and Dwyane Wade in Miami. In the post-Jordan NBA, smaller, more dynamic players are the unquestioned center of attention. Style-wise, they're the Ali's, with inventive games that suggest a richness of personality. Shaq, always the talker in these relationships, always casts himself as the alpha dog, a font of charisma whose dominant play was a matter of fact. At the same time, in each case the other guy was emerging as one of the most exciting, inventive players in the league, leading O'Neal to turn cold and toward them, and however incidentally, move on to another team. [I think you all know how Shaq fell over, and then turned on, Penny, Kobe, and Wade].

Nothing sums up this paradox more than the mural on the bus Shaq brought to an LSU game in 2007: some sort of gangster super-summit, where Shaq presides over Scarface, Tony Soprano, and Vito Corlene, among others. Hilarious, but also quite sinister. Not coincidentally, during his time with the Heat, Shaq was fond of an analogy that cast his Hardaway as Fredo, Kobe as Sonny, and Wade as Michael. Coppola's films and The Sopranos have been defanged by their absorption into pop culture. But watch those movies from start to finish, and you'll realize just how unsettling they really are.

Heavy, huh? Man, been waiting for a while to get that out. I have to say, though, that this series might explode this paradigm, and perhaps summarily frustrate Shaq's grand mission in life. Despite O'Neal's attempt to undermine Howard, or Howard's obvious inferiority as a pure center—perhaps one of the reasons this slippage is possible—Dwight, with his boyish good looks and effortless acrobatics, is that lovable big men Shaq never could be. Yes, we can debate for days when he is in fact a big man, or just a bigger Amare. But the Superman has stuck there without any sense that we're being forced into embracing his might (like how Superman really could have destroyed the world whenever he wanted). On the other hand, Kobe, while he remains the epitomal post-Jordan off-guard, we all know that this trappings of his game have become so methodical, his aura so admirably bleak, that it's transformed the dream-like "as an explosive shooting guard, I will get rings" of Jordan into a optimization of the position so that it embraces as much of the big man rigor as is possible. LeBron is unstoppable, quasi-religious. Kobe is so professional that he's always adjusting, a character who is about as Terminator-like as guards can possibly get. Like when they made the evil robot a hot lady for T3.

That's not to say that Kobe lacks charisma. He has kind of reached that rare, glare-laden apex where, no matter what his game has evolved into over the years, or what its finer points are, fans respond to him as a showman. You and I know, though, that the man is probably replacing his blood, or grafting metal onto his spine, in hopes of turning this positional role into something with the certainty, and even the purposeful vacancy, of the big man. Howrad is so young, it's hard to gauge where he's really headed. But for now, he's a hunk of muscle unstoppable down low who is also so easy to love. And it's Kobe whose human drives and expressions of self seem more of a technicality or, even to supporters like myself, an afterthought in his grand pursuit of basketball perfection. That's not to say he's totally inhuman, on or off the court, but the personality of his position (and by extension, the Good Kobe that has so many fans) is no longer a restriction on how he looks to put together grade-A efforts.



And to turn briefly to one more WTF about this series: Does this tell us shit about the future of the game? The Lakers are by no means a reasonable template for success. Top to bottom, that team is loaded. In ways new and old. What other team can boast one of the league's most promising pure centers, as well as its second-best Euro, and a post-Garnett weirdo—all who may or may not figure prominently into the game-plan on any given night? It's almost like a brief history of the last eight years of the NBA, all on one team. Except that participation by all is optional, or maybe selectively minimal. Put simply, other teams have no chance at copying this one, and that's without even getting into Kobe's embattled, but persistent, standing among the league's elite.

The Magic offer a far more interesting case. They have this big man who is both more and less than the past. There's a chance they stumbled into it, and that the tandem of Lewis and Turkoglu are both essential and came as a surprise. And when healthy, they have an All-Star point guard. This is old worship of height, plus the age of the point guard, plus a kind of post-Euro Sudoku puzzle that only master coach SVG could make sense of in such a non-obvious fashion (and, as Kevin Pelton has pointed out, this team would suck if deployed in obvious fashion). I also pick up a distinctly Pistons-meets-Suns vine int he way Lee, Pietrus, and even Reddick are used, though maybe now I'm just laying it on thick. In short, this team has everything but a Kobe or LeBron, which is a really fortuitous spot to be in. And chances are, any other squad with this roster would screw it up. So we might be looking at an utter singularity here that both bridges and invalidates the entire ferment of conventional basketball wisdom, past and present. In the end, it comes down to the twist you put on it. Traditions and trends, new and old, can tell you some basics, but past that, you're on your own. The question is, what does it take for a team like the Magic to be absorbed, as the Suns were? The Warriors certainly weren't . .

Orlando Magic, just keep being yourselves. History will sort out the rest. As will the results of this series, incidentally.