Lots of pearl-clutching from the usual suspects these days about the Imbalance of Power in the NBA, and how it's ruining pro buckets because if the Golden State Warriors can add Wilt Chamberlain to what is already an All-Star team, then all his lost.
Oops. Sorry. That wasn't Wilt they signed.
It was Boogie Cousins.
Easy to get confused, though, for all the caterwauling that's been going on. Yes, Boogie Cousins is probably the best low-post player in the league right now -- he averaged 25 and 10 last season -- but to hear all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, you'd have thought it was Wilt the Warriors had signed, notwithstanding the fact that he's dead and all.
Look. I get it. We all do. The Warriors signing Boogie, absent a rash of catastrophic injuries, makes next season irrelevant. There will be no reason to watch, other than to see how he fits in. It's going to be the Warriors against three or four other superteams in the West for the NBA title, and then an exhibition series against whatever sorry humps come out of the Eastern Conference.
This is not a good situation if you want to maintain the fiction that what you're giving the public is actual competition and not something perilously close to scripted. It is concerning. And it makes the Blob think the NBA should institute a best-interests-of-the-game clause that would empower commissioner Adam Silver to nix any trade he deems not good for the league as a whole.
Bowie Kuhn invoked such a clause in the mid-1970s, when Charlie Finley tried to sell his World Series champion Oakland As virtually wholesale. (David Stern did much the same thing when he nixed New Orleans trading Chris Paul to the Lakers, but the NBA held an ownership stake in the New Orleans franchise at the time, and so that was a bit different). The present-day NBA would likely have a much tougher time getting a best-interests clause past the players' union, but it seems worth the effort.
Absent that ... well, what do the pearl-clutchers suggest be done?
The hard truth is this is nothing more nor less than the free market at work, basketball players doing what doctors and lawyers and accountants and, yes, journalists have done forever. The most amusing aspect of all the pearl-clutching has been listening to sportswriters and commentators bash players for doing exactly what they've done themselves: Seek out their best employment situation. No one sneers "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" at them, after all, when they leave some lesser place to join ESPN.
That's just moving up the ladder, in their case. But when Kevin Durant or Boogie Cousins do it?
Why, how dare they! The NBA should ...
Should what?
Abolish free agency? Severely restrict player movement? Follow the mood of our current national leadership and try to turn back the clock to, oh, say the 1950s or so?
Good luck with that. Truth is, there's simply certain toothpaste you can't put back in the tube (though God knows Our Only Available President and his gang of vandals get an A for effort). If what we're seeing now is the consequence of greater control of their situation by the players ... well, it just makes up for the decades upon decades when they had no such control.
Maybe if the owners had been farsighted enough to cede some of that control when they had the power to do so, they'd never have had to cede so much of it now. Unchecked pendulums do tend to swing from one extreme to the other, after all.
As the NBA is discovering now, to its dismay. As the country is.
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
A brief musical interlude
Happy Independence Day from the Blob, which is taking the day off, as is every right-thinking American who's still fortunate enough to do so in our corporate oligarchy.
May the beer be cold, the briquettes hot and the mortar rounds from your neighbor's professional-grade fireworks show at least mildly tolerable.
Have a great day, and try not to blow off any appendages.
And now, a little something appropriate to the occasion.
May the beer be cold, the briquettes hot and the mortar rounds from your neighbor's professional-grade fireworks show at least mildly tolerable.
Have a great day, and try not to blow off any appendages.
And now, a little something appropriate to the occasion.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Oh, no, not another Civil War
The Blob usually refrains from posts that don't incorporate something from Sportsball World, or whatever mixed martial arts is. But this is too good to pass up.
We're havin' us a second Civil War, boys and girls!
Or so says Alex Jones, gibbering lunatic of the right, a sad creature whose ravings put you in mind of someone sitting in a corner fending off imaginary intergalactic spiders with an imaginary ray gun. Alex's latest hallucination involves the most evil people who ever strode the Earth (i.e., the Democrats), who he says are going to launch a Civil War on Independence Day.
Faithful Blobophiles know this is irresistible fodder for the Blob, a Civil War nerd from way back. I even dress up like an imaginary Union officer on occasion. (See photo at bottom*)
Anyway ... Alex says the imaginary intergalactic spiders tell him the Civil War is coming. Which of course has prompted the Blob to come up with the Complete Imaginary Historical Facts Of The Second Civil War, Even Though It's Not History Yet.
Some excerpts:
* The first shots were fired from the backyard of the guy who lives next to the White House, when one of his Silver Salutes went off course and set fire to a 12-foot tall, spot-lit portrait of Our Only Available President, Donald J. "Donny" Trump, recently installed by Trump himself on the White House lawn.
* The greatest MAGA defeat came on the Fourth, when the Democrats infiltrated turkey dogs into the traditional Fourth of July weenie roast. They also failed to burn any American flags like the spiders told Alex Jones they would, and the President once again forgot the words to God Bless America, proving himself once more to be a big jaw-flapping phony.
* The greatest rebel defeat came when Gen. George "Half-Caf" Pickett's credit card was refused at Starbucks as he tried to send the President 500 caramel macchiatos. Pickett's Charge had failed!
* Hispanic immigrants did not take part in the fighting, on account of they had families to feed and bills to pay and so they had to go to work like everyone else. This was another grievous defeat for the MAGA forces, who had been led to believe by the President that the Hispanic immigrants were all murderers, drug dealers and freeloaders who were coming here to destroy America.
* The war finally ended in a truce, when the Democrat rebels agreed to stop yelling and hollering and raising cane if the President would give them a reason to do so, like stop yelling and hollering and raising cane himself.
Also they would stop pointing out that the President had no clothes, policy-wise, if the President would agree to start wearing some.
We're havin' us a second Civil War, boys and girls!
Or so says Alex Jones, gibbering lunatic of the right, a sad creature whose ravings put you in mind of someone sitting in a corner fending off imaginary intergalactic spiders with an imaginary ray gun. Alex's latest hallucination involves the most evil people who ever strode the Earth (i.e., the Democrats), who he says are going to launch a Civil War on Independence Day.
Faithful Blobophiles know this is irresistible fodder for the Blob, a Civil War nerd from way back. I even dress up like an imaginary Union officer on occasion. (See photo at bottom*)
Anyway ... Alex says the imaginary intergalactic spiders tell him the Civil War is coming. Which of course has prompted the Blob to come up with the Complete Imaginary Historical Facts Of The Second Civil War, Even Though It's Not History Yet.
Some excerpts:
* The first shots were fired from the backyard of the guy who lives next to the White House, when one of his Silver Salutes went off course and set fire to a 12-foot tall, spot-lit portrait of Our Only Available President, Donald J. "Donny" Trump, recently installed by Trump himself on the White House lawn.
* The greatest MAGA defeat came on the Fourth, when the Democrats infiltrated turkey dogs into the traditional Fourth of July weenie roast. They also failed to burn any American flags like the spiders told Alex Jones they would, and the President once again forgot the words to God Bless America, proving himself once more to be a big jaw-flapping phony.
* The greatest rebel defeat came when Gen. George "Half-Caf" Pickett's credit card was refused at Starbucks as he tried to send the President 500 caramel macchiatos. Pickett's Charge had failed!
* Hispanic immigrants did not take part in the fighting, on account of they had families to feed and bills to pay and so they had to go to work like everyone else. This was another grievous defeat for the MAGA forces, who had been led to believe by the President that the Hispanic immigrants were all murderers, drug dealers and freeloaders who were coming here to destroy America.
* The war finally ended in a truce, when the Democrat rebels agreed to stop yelling and hollering and raising cane if the President would give them a reason to do so, like stop yelling and hollering and raising cane himself.
Also they would stop pointing out that the President had no clothes, policy-wise, if the President would agree to start wearing some.
 |
| *Imaginary Civil War officer Lt. Benjamin "Flight Risk" Smith |
The NBA is hereby banned
Well, OK. So it's banned from this post on this Blob.
This is because it's the day before the Fourth of July, and sports-blab radio is still talking about the NBA to the virtual exclusion of all else. This is because sports-blab radio is BS. It's also because the NBA is a property of the No. 1 sports-blab outlet, ESPN, whose sports blabbers are apparently contractually obligated to talk about the NBA 95 percent of the time.
No truth to the rumor that you can win valuable cash prizes if you're lucky enough to tune in at the precise nanosecond to hear this:
"Hey, look it's baseball!"
"Wimbledon ... Roger Federer ... Serena ..."
"Tiger!"
"That soccer tournament!"
And then: "But back to that one basketball player, and that other basketball player."
If you tune in to hear the last, darn, you juuust missed out.
Better you should visit the Blob, which today is a defiantly NBA-Free Zone. We will discuss more important questions, like the proper way to garnish a Fourth of July hotdog (mustard, definitely; onions, OK; chili, sure; melted cheese. acceptable; and I don't care what you say, if you want to add some ketchup, the Blob will not cast you into outer darkness). We will launch our latest contest, When Will Triple Crown Winner Justify Start Making Babies. We will talk about how the one thing the Blob didn't get to cover in 38 years as a sportswriter, but always wanted to, was Wimbledon.
World Cup?
Sure, since outside the ESPN bubble, it's the biggest sporting event going right now. Yesterday indicated Brazil might not be a total fraud. And how about Belgium? No one in World Cup soccer ever erases a 2-nil deficit in 20 minutes, but the Belgians did it against Japan. Which of course provoked the exact same reaction in both Brussels and Tokyo.
In Brussels: "What the hell!"
In Tokyo: "What the hell?"
What else?
Oh, yeah, baseball is still a bunch of guys swinging and missing and a bunch of guys hitting home runs. Other than that, it's become even more a lot of standing around than usual, which is not going to capture the imagination of the Instagram generation.
Other than that, today is given over to the hotdog debate, and whether or not your neighbor who insists on artillery-barrage-at-midnight fireworks should get 25 to life, and why they still can't call the traditional Fourth of July NASCAR race the Firecracker 400 instead of the numbingly corporate Coke Zero Sugar 400, which is what they're actually calling it now if you can believe that.
That is all. Now back to the NBA.
Sorry. That was cruel.
This is because it's the day before the Fourth of July, and sports-blab radio is still talking about the NBA to the virtual exclusion of all else. This is because sports-blab radio is BS. It's also because the NBA is a property of the No. 1 sports-blab outlet, ESPN, whose sports blabbers are apparently contractually obligated to talk about the NBA 95 percent of the time.
No truth to the rumor that you can win valuable cash prizes if you're lucky enough to tune in at the precise nanosecond to hear this:
"Hey, look it's baseball!"
"Wimbledon ... Roger Federer ... Serena ..."
"Tiger!"
"That soccer tournament!"
And then: "But back to that one basketball player, and that other basketball player."
If you tune in to hear the last, darn, you juuust missed out.
Better you should visit the Blob, which today is a defiantly NBA-Free Zone. We will discuss more important questions, like the proper way to garnish a Fourth of July hotdog (mustard, definitely; onions, OK; chili, sure; melted cheese. acceptable; and I don't care what you say, if you want to add some ketchup, the Blob will not cast you into outer darkness). We will launch our latest contest, When Will Triple Crown Winner Justify Start Making Babies. We will talk about how the one thing the Blob didn't get to cover in 38 years as a sportswriter, but always wanted to, was Wimbledon.
World Cup?
Sure, since outside the ESPN bubble, it's the biggest sporting event going right now. Yesterday indicated Brazil might not be a total fraud. And how about Belgium? No one in World Cup soccer ever erases a 2-nil deficit in 20 minutes, but the Belgians did it against Japan. Which of course provoked the exact same reaction in both Brussels and Tokyo.
In Brussels: "What the hell!"
In Tokyo: "What the hell?"
What else?
Oh, yeah, baseball is still a bunch of guys swinging and missing and a bunch of guys hitting home runs. Other than that, it's become even more a lot of standing around than usual, which is not going to capture the imagination of the Instagram generation.
Other than that, today is given over to the hotdog debate, and whether or not your neighbor who insists on artillery-barrage-at-midnight fireworks should get 25 to life, and why they still can't call the traditional Fourth of July NASCAR race the Firecracker 400 instead of the numbingly corporate Coke Zero Sugar 400, which is what they're actually calling it now if you can believe that.
That is all. Now back to the NBA.
Sorry. That was cruel.
Monday, July 2, 2018
LeBron saves America
Well. At least now Magic Johnson won't have to quit.
And so here's a decorative fruit basket for you, LeBron James, from Earvin Johnson himself. He said he'd step down if he didn't land a splashy free agent, and you were the splashiest there was. I know this because I'm still soaking wet from all the splashing that went on over the weekend from every 24/7 sports outlet in America, which insisted on repeating the same speculation over and over and over ... and over.
The story hadn't advanced, but that didn't stop the yapping poodles on ESPN and everywhere else. It was all LeBron, all the damn time.
In which case, here's another decorative fruit basket from America, LeBron, for being so considerate as to take just two days to decide you were hitching your wagon to the Lakers. You could have dragged this out and compelled us to insert knitting needles in our eyeballs. But you made Decision II (III?) in a most timely fashion, sparing us that unhappy occurrence.
You also proved, by signing with the Lakers, that what you'd been saying about your decision wasn't just the usual flapping of the gums.
When asked, after all, LeBron said this wouldn't entirely be a basketball decision, and clearly it wasn't. This is no juggernaut he's joining. It's a young team with some nice pieces, but it won only 35 games last year, and even with LeBron -- and absent the Lakers reeling in Kawhi Leonard, too -- it figures to be no better than third in the West right now. And maybe not even that.
And so no real uproar about betrayal (please) and lack of loyalty (double "please") and ring-chasing this time around, from Cleveland or anywhere else. LeBron, after all, did what no one does -- come back to Cleveland -- and did what he pledged to do, which is bring a title to his quasi-hometown. He took the Cavaliers to four NBA Finals in four years and, this last time, did it largely on his own. Not much was going to change about that -- except with his kids, who were getting older, and in particular his son, a rising basketball star in his own right who was going to be entering high school.
If you're going to make a move, and it's not just about basketball, that's when you make a move. And so he did.
Simple as that. And blessedly quick.
And so here's a decorative fruit basket for you, LeBron James, from Earvin Johnson himself. He said he'd step down if he didn't land a splashy free agent, and you were the splashiest there was. I know this because I'm still soaking wet from all the splashing that went on over the weekend from every 24/7 sports outlet in America, which insisted on repeating the same speculation over and over and over ... and over.
The story hadn't advanced, but that didn't stop the yapping poodles on ESPN and everywhere else. It was all LeBron, all the damn time.
In which case, here's another decorative fruit basket from America, LeBron, for being so considerate as to take just two days to decide you were hitching your wagon to the Lakers. You could have dragged this out and compelled us to insert knitting needles in our eyeballs. But you made Decision II (III?) in a most timely fashion, sparing us that unhappy occurrence.
You also proved, by signing with the Lakers, that what you'd been saying about your decision wasn't just the usual flapping of the gums.
When asked, after all, LeBron said this wouldn't entirely be a basketball decision, and clearly it wasn't. This is no juggernaut he's joining. It's a young team with some nice pieces, but it won only 35 games last year, and even with LeBron -- and absent the Lakers reeling in Kawhi Leonard, too -- it figures to be no better than third in the West right now. And maybe not even that.
And so no real uproar about betrayal (please) and lack of loyalty (double "please") and ring-chasing this time around, from Cleveland or anywhere else. LeBron, after all, did what no one does -- come back to Cleveland -- and did what he pledged to do, which is bring a title to his quasi-hometown. He took the Cavaliers to four NBA Finals in four years and, this last time, did it largely on his own. Not much was going to change about that -- except with his kids, who were getting older, and in particular his son, a rising basketball star in his own right who was going to be entering high school.
If you're going to make a move, and it's not just about basketball, that's when you make a move. And so he did.
Simple as that. And blessedly quick.
The Cup runneth over
The truth is out there, and sometimes it's uncomfortable. Fair warning from the Blob, which is about to say something a certain segment of the American sportsball audience is never going to accept.
Soccer is never going to be one of our major sports. It just isn't.
Oh, lots of people love it, lots and lots, but it is never going to be the blood-and-bone thing it is everywhere else in the world. Football is. Basketball is. Baseball still is, kinda, at least if you're old enough to draw Social Security.
But soccer is not. We've been hearing since the days of Pele and the New York Cosmos that it was going to be the next major sport in America, and periodically someone will say it again. But we're still waiting. And we're pretty much always going to.
And that's too bad. Because if you watched the two World Cup games yesterday, and were not absolutely riveted, you are never going to be.
Both round of 16 matches went to PKs. Russia knocked out Spain -- a monumental upset -- when this guy did this on Spain's last attempt. Croatia knocked out Denmark, also on PKs, because Croatia's keeper was just slightly more amazing than Denmark's keeper, who not only stopped two of five PKs but had to stop another in extra time just to get it to the PK stage.
You don't often see goalkeeping like that in World Cup soccer. OK, so you never see it.
A lot of us here in the USA did, yesterday. But a lot more did not, preferring to watch Tiger Woods again play well but not nearly well enough, or stock cars drive in circles, or the Greatest Spectacle In Drying Paint, aka another interminable Yankees-Red Sox game.
It's a safe bet no one in Zagreb or Copenhagen was watching any of that. Advantage, them.
Soccer is never going to be one of our major sports. It just isn't.
Oh, lots of people love it, lots and lots, but it is never going to be the blood-and-bone thing it is everywhere else in the world. Football is. Basketball is. Baseball still is, kinda, at least if you're old enough to draw Social Security.
But soccer is not. We've been hearing since the days of Pele and the New York Cosmos that it was going to be the next major sport in America, and periodically someone will say it again. But we're still waiting. And we're pretty much always going to.
And that's too bad. Because if you watched the two World Cup games yesterday, and were not absolutely riveted, you are never going to be.
Both round of 16 matches went to PKs. Russia knocked out Spain -- a monumental upset -- when this guy did this on Spain's last attempt. Croatia knocked out Denmark, also on PKs, because Croatia's keeper was just slightly more amazing than Denmark's keeper, who not only stopped two of five PKs but had to stop another in extra time just to get it to the PK stage.
You don't often see goalkeeping like that in World Cup soccer. OK, so you never see it.
A lot of us here in the USA did, yesterday. But a lot more did not, preferring to watch Tiger Woods again play well but not nearly well enough, or stock cars drive in circles, or the Greatest Spectacle In Drying Paint, aka another interminable Yankees-Red Sox game.
It's a safe bet no one in Zagreb or Copenhagen was watching any of that. Advantage, them.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
PG, LBJ and the rest
And now, our latest episode of Magic Shouldn'ta Oughta Said That, in which Paul George kicks all the wise guys in their revealed knowledge by signing a four-year deal to stay in Oklahoma City.
PG, remember, was supposed to go to the Lakers. Everyone said so. Everyone said so a year ago, when he signed with the Thunder for what looked like a one-season rest stop on his journey to L.A.
Well ... guess not, wise guys. And here Magic had the pullout couch ready for him and everything.
Now he has go to looking for another big-name free agent, because he said that thing he said, which is that he'd step down if he didn't sign a big-name free agent this summer. And there's still a pile of them out there, led of course by the Notorious LBJ, aka, LeBron James, who the Blob has it on good authority was in Minnesota yesterday, talking to the Timberwolves.
OK, so he wasn't. He was actually in Boston, talking to the Celtics.
OK, OK! So he wasn't there, either! But you see how easy this is, messing with people's heads?
I could tell you I have a friend of a friend of the cousin of a friend who says LeBron is staying in Cleveland, because the cousin knows one of LeBron's second cousins twice removed and that's what he said. I could tell you he's going to Philly because he used the words "cheese" and "steak" in a sentence one too many times. I could tell you he's a lock for the Lakers, because why else would Magic say what he said --- crawling out on a limb with a handsaw, in essence -- unless he knew he had LeBron locked up, and so the chances of Magic having to actually step down were nil?
All we really know at this point is more and more Americans wish he'd hurry up and make a decision, because they're sick of hearing about LeBron and they just want to watch the World Cup in peace (Uruguay! You go!). Which seems reasonable to me.
Not that reason, in a 24/7 news cycle on networks already married to All LeBron All The Time, has very much to do with much. Or anything.
PG, remember, was supposed to go to the Lakers. Everyone said so. Everyone said so a year ago, when he signed with the Thunder for what looked like a one-season rest stop on his journey to L.A.
Well ... guess not, wise guys. And here Magic had the pullout couch ready for him and everything.
Now he has go to looking for another big-name free agent, because he said that thing he said, which is that he'd step down if he didn't sign a big-name free agent this summer. And there's still a pile of them out there, led of course by the Notorious LBJ, aka, LeBron James, who the Blob has it on good authority was in Minnesota yesterday, talking to the Timberwolves.
OK, so he wasn't. He was actually in Boston, talking to the Celtics.
OK, OK! So he wasn't there, either! But you see how easy this is, messing with people's heads?
I could tell you I have a friend of a friend of the cousin of a friend who says LeBron is staying in Cleveland, because the cousin knows one of LeBron's second cousins twice removed and that's what he said. I could tell you he's going to Philly because he used the words "cheese" and "steak" in a sentence one too many times. I could tell you he's a lock for the Lakers, because why else would Magic say what he said --- crawling out on a limb with a handsaw, in essence -- unless he knew he had LeBron locked up, and so the chances of Magic having to actually step down were nil?
All we really know at this point is more and more Americans wish he'd hurry up and make a decision, because they're sick of hearing about LeBron and they just want to watch the World Cup in peace (Uruguay! You go!). Which seems reasonable to me.
Not that reason, in a 24/7 news cycle on networks already married to All LeBron All The Time, has very much to do with much. Or anything.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)