ShamSports.com: Not as baseball-centric as the decor would suggest.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Summer League Time, When The Weather Is Fine.
Yeehaw!
I looooove summer league. Looooooooove it. (Note: the extra O's mean that I really looooooooooove it.) It's great. It's like training camp, only better. There's more players that you've never heard of, and more players that yu have heard of but had completely forgotten about. The best type of player, that one. Good times.
This year's summer league roster are lovingly listed on this website, and, if you're anything like me (and hopefully you aren't), you'll read them every morning. Some rosters are yet to be announced, which means there's even more hardcore excitement to come. Hooray!
Highlights this year include:
- Romeo Travis playing on Cleveland's summer league team for the second straight year, still longing to hook up with former Akron high school teammate LeBron James, but this year joined by another Akron starlet, their mutual friend Dru Joyce, as Cleveland continues to surround LeBron with the talent needed to get them over the top.
- Josh Davis adding two new teams to the ever-glorious "NBA Teams That Josh Davis Has Spent Time With In A Non Sexual Way" list, by playing for both Portland and Indiana's summer league teams.
- The surprise return of the utterly skint Robert Traylor, and the slightly less auspicious but far more welcome return of journeyman centre John Thomas, whose name still gets to me.
- The discovery that there's a player called Longar Longar.
- ShamSports.com favourite Olumide Oyedeji playing on the Milwaukee Bucks team, alongside Roderick Riley, an awesome blast from the past who is also the heaviest player in any summer league by about 45 pounds, and who also is playing alongside someone else called Roderick for probably the first time in his life.
- Knicks guard Antione Johnson single handedly raising the bar in the Antawn Jamison/Antywane Robinson "Who Can Spell Antoine In The Most Fucked-Up Way Possible" tribute game, and
Norman Richardson (196-F/G-77, college: Hofstra) will join the Bundesliga-squad of TBB Trier. Richardson receives a contract for one season. He is 30 years of age and owns a lot of experience in overseas basketball. Since starting his professional career in 2001, Richardson played in Italy, Serbia, Venezuela, France, Argentina and Poland. He also had some appearances for the Indiana Pacers and Chicago Bulls in the NBA. During this past season the native of Brooklyn, New York averaged 15.5 points, 4.7 rebounds and 3.4 assists in 26 games for SPEC Polonia Warszawa of the Polish DBE. He also attended the Polish All-Star Game.
If you, like me, track the career of former NBA afterthought Norm Richardson with a level of exuberance best described as "kinda weird", then this news will bring you great joy. But you probably already it.
Fun Norm Richardsonf act: Norm's already retired once, a few years ago, to pursue "business interests". I guess they went south.
Do you ever stop and think about that time that Mark Madsen shot seven three pointers in an overtime game, when Minnesota and Memphis had the most blatant tank-off that history has ever seen? No, nor did I. That is, not until this morning, when I woke up thinking about it.
(For those unaware of what the hell I'm talking about, here's a box score.)
It's not an entirely normal thing to wake up thinking about, even for the most hardcore Madsen fans amongst us. (For we are all Mark Madsen fans. Obviously.) But some part of this must have ruffled my feathers, stoned my crows and enraged my loins, because this was all that i could think about for about 3 minutes after waking up.
It is now a permanent blot on the NBA landscape. The situation Minnesotas found themselves in - not good enough to make the playoffs, not bad enough to suck mightily without trying to - left them deliberately trying to lose games. It needn't have done, but General Manager extraordinaire Kevin McHale had already pissed away Minnesota's first rounder that season, as it was owed to the L.A. Clippers along with Sam Cassell in exchange for the mesmeric insignificance of Lionel Chalmers, along with Marko Jaric and his bevvy of minge. The pick, however, had top ten protection, and so in order to be able to keep it, Minnesota had to lose with a bit more regularly and finesse than they were doing up until that point.
They did this with aplomb, telling Kevin Garnett to stop playing (or so we thought), playing their better players for merely token minutes, and letting their worse players do whatever the hell they want, in what then-head coach Dwane Casey called "letting them have some fun" (read: "playing really badly so that we lose".)
The fact that they met an equally tanking Memphis team, who were tanking for a different reason, was an unfortunate coincidence. Memphis had comfortably made the playoffs, but was trying to lose for a different reason - they were residing in the fifth spot, with the Clippers in sixth. Whoever finished 5th would face the 60-22 Dallas Mavericks in the first round of the playoffs, without homecourt advantage, but whoever finished 6th would face Denver with homecourt advantage. After *accidentally* losing four of their last five games, the Clippers secured the worst (and, thus, the best) seed, in spite of Memphis's valiant efforts on the final day.
(The Clippers then beat Denver comfortably. The Grizzlies were swept by Dallas even more comfortably. Memphis were right not to want it.)
The whole exchange highlighted two key flaws in the NBA's system - the new playoff system and the protection of draft picks. The playoff system has been somewhat resolved, as the possibility of a team finishing lower down the seedings than a team with an inferior record has been decreased with the new decision to grant division winners no less than a top four seed, as opposed to a guaranteed top three seed. But the other situation remains intact, with lottery teams able to lose at will to either retain traded picks, or better their lottery chances. And it remains a travesty based around a communist idea of parity.
(The draft lottery isn't a million miles away from what Stalin was trying to do. Remember that.)
At this point, this post would benefit greatly from a well thought out and heavily critiqued suggestion for a better way of going about these things, so that such a deplorable situation won't ever happen again. (The concept of teams deliberately trying to lose is still prevalent - Miami, for example, has told Dwyane Wade to stop playing, and Memphis recently gifted away Pau Gasol just to take them out of purgatory.) However, as mentioned at the top, this post had a mere three minutes of thought, and so I haven't got one.
Any scenario in which teams are deliberately losing, though, is a gaping flaw in the otherwise well-constructed NBA machine. Therefore, it gives me something to bitch about. And so, I did. Quietly. To myself. For about three minutes.
Coincidentally (and it really was), a report came out on this very day (note: this note was not published on the day that it was written, which was the 18th) on the subject of Minnesota's recent tanking.
Responding to claims that his team tanked it down the stretch in recent years to improve draft position, Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor fired a barb at Kevin Garnett on Tuesday, as reported by Yahoo.com.
Taylor pointed out that Garnett, who was traded to the Celtics this offseason, took himself out of the lineup late last season and missed the last five games with a sore right quadriceps.
“It was more like, I’d say, K.G. tanked it,” Taylor told the Pioneer Press. “I think the other guys still wanted to play, but (the loss of Garnett) sure changed the team and didn’t make us as (good).”
While the quote may have been taken out of context, or Taylor had not necessarily said what he meant, it does sure as shit look like he is trying to pass the blame onto this entire situation onto Garnett's shoulders. This hardly seems entirely fair, given the Madsen situation that inspired this post. But it DID lead to me googling Glen Taylor's name, and thus seeing for the first time a picture of his grin.
Today is the day on which it hath been decreed by someone called Matt that NBA fans the world over are to loudly vociferate their rampant and slightly homosexual man-love for Kobe Bryant. Whether or not you like Kobe has been deemed irrelevant - today, we talk about him nicely, for today is the day that the Lakers face Toronto, the team which Bryant obfuscated and subjugated on the way to his Jalen Rose-induced 81 point outing.
(Sorry, I'm just playing with an online thesaurus. I'm also on a bet to try and get "imbibe" (to drink) in this post. And I can't shave Drew Gooden's beard off until it's done.)
You may expect at this point to be swamped with the kind of Kobe-related trivial bollocks (the unsuccessful follow-up to Trival Pursuit) that defines this website. Perhaps you would expect a list of anagrams of Kobe Bryant's name. Or perhaps you would want to see a list of Kobe Bryant lookalikes. Perhaps you would prefer to see an archive of photographs of all the women that Kobe has obfuscated over the years. (By the way, I'm trusting that that word really does mean "dominated".) Perhaps you want to see video clips of him playing, offered up in lieu of any actual written analysis. Or perhaps you just want to see pictures of him looking a bit gay.
Well, as L.A. Clippers fans used to say, you'll ne'er be disappointed if you have only pitiful expectations to begin with. So here are those things.
1) Toby Banker; Bye, rat knob; Nobby taker; Botany Berk; Try-on kebab. (Yeah, they're all crap, what do I care.)
2)
3)
4)
5) ....Oh Christ, there's millions.
Yet, in addition to all of that anti-climactic petulance, today is a day for celebrating the more basketball related facets of basketball, something rarely done around here. (And something never done without wildly overzealous amounts of parentheses.)
This does, however, present a problem. With so many people blogging about the same subject on the same day, it's going to be difficult to find anything unique enough to say. This is a problem that I struggle with a lot, as evidence by the title of this post.
What approach can I take? What can I say that hasn't been said? What angle article will not have been taken? Maybe I could do some comparisons. Is Kobe the best player in the game today? Is he the best thing since Michael Jordan's sliced bread? Will he win another ring without Shaq? Did he rape her? Will he ever win an MVP award?
No. I shan't. These questions have all been done to death. And they're also not very exciting. I need something insightful.
(Answers to those questions, in order: not quite, so far, probably, innocent until proven guilty, don't know or care.)
So, in place of actual thought, effort, graft or insight, I'll turn to the thing that I know best, and what appeals most to the captivated audience of 5 people: My earliest NBA memories.
For those unaware and yet interested enough to have read this far, I am an Englishman. And, like so many of my Englishman peers, I live in England. If you've never been to England, it may or may not come as a shock to you that the sport of basketball here is about as widespread and savoured as the ebola virus, and despite the NBA's unsubtle efforts to liberally daub our nation's fine capital in basketball's highest calibre custard, the sport remains a distinct afterthought, having to compete with Argentinian soccer and The World's Strongest Man for early hours TV coverage. Britain and basketball go together about as well as America with dieting, Damon Jones with humility, Gary Payton with an understanding of the ravages of time, and the French with steely resolve. And your country's basketball outlook would be the same if your national team shamefully boasted the powerhouse high/low post threat of Robert Archibald and Andy Betts.
(Mind you, if Steve Nash and Michael Olowokandi switched their allegiances, we could have one hell of a running game. Just as long as Olowokandi, Betts and Archibald weren't involved.)
In recent times, though, multi-toothed overrated starlet Luol Deng has decided that he wants to be English more than he wants to be Sudanese or American. This decision, which I would imagine to have been about as simple as deciding whether to deliberately contract rabies or not, has led to a renewed interest from all 15 basketball fans left in this country. With Deng obtaining a British passport, with the potential addition of Ben Gordon, and with the British nations combining to form the first ever British basketball team, the sport has a new zest for life over here, as evidenced by the fact that we we now get one game a week (often live, sometimes taped delayed) played at 1am on Tuesday nights/Wednesday mornings. Woohoo!
This wasn't always the case, however. As the incoherent ramblings on the profiles of Austin Croshere and Pat Garrity allude to, our NBA coverage used to be even more limited than this. A Saturday morning magazine show existed in the early to mid 90's, but then disappeared, and for a while there was nothing but tumbleweed. Then, in 1999, a different channel started runnning a half-hour Saturday afternoon magazine show, cleverly called NBA '99, and presented by the lovely Beverley Turner.
In 1999, I was 15 years old. What does a 15 year old boy does at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon, particularly when he lives in the middle of nowhere?
He sits indoors, and channel hops looking for the attractive ladies. Obviously.
This is what I did. I doubt I was alone. (Well, I was alone while I was watching it, but what I mean is I'm sure other people did this too. Maybe.)
What I didn't realise, having never played basketball in school or otherwise, was that I actually quite liked the sport. It only took about 20 minutes for me to realise that I wasn't watching the show for Beverley Turner any more, but for the sport itself. (And that's no slight on Beverley Turner, who we can clearly see is basically perfect.) From there, I became an avid watcher of the sport, recording every magazine show and imbibing (hooray!) every last morsel of NBA coverage that was thrown our way. These morsels were few and far between, but each was savoured more than the last, and I'm not ashamed of the fact that I can remember entire pieces of Kevin Harlan's commentary from the Knicks versus Pacers Eastern Conference Finals series of that season. Which explains my Marcus Camby love.
A new NBA fan was born, and a pathetically keen one at that. It took only the purchase of a copy of Total NBA '96 for the Playstaton to cement a powerful life-long lust towards the art of watching men in shorts run around sweating. (And by "purchase", I mean "borrow from an acquiaintance to whom you have no intention of ever given it back". I still have it.)
Yet only the half-hour weekend magazine show offered any actual coverage. Total NBA '96 could only teach a man so much - its rather antiquated game engine based a player's scoring ability off of their previous season's shooting percentages, which made from great fun halfcourt shootouts between Olden Polynice and Eric Mobley, both of whom went 1-1 on threes the previous season. These were also pre-internet days, if only in this household, and so my entire NBA knowledge stemmed from what I could collate from 3 minute highlight montages of games.
For some bizarre reason, such highlight montages seemed to focus on the usually white bench players. Or at least, that's how I remember them. Despite hiring former Olympic sprinter Derek Redmond as Beverley's co-presenter, purely to meet an ethnic minorities quota, the coverage then focused on the flair plays of not particularly good white guys, such as Croshere and Garrity, or Jason Williams and Vlade Divac. (Except those two were brilliant, obviously.) This trend continued to see out the whole of the 1999 NBA season, and was odd and yet brilliant. (Oh and for all doubters out there, you know Pat Garrity's got flair.)
In 2000, however, the show underwent a couple of changes. Gone was the original title, as the show was now called NBA 2000, the producers mercifully refusing to go for the 2K abbreviation. Also gone was Derek Redmond, as he was no longer needed to fill a black person quota due to the show's inclusion of Michael Olowokandi as a presenter. (I'm not making this up.) While Beverley Turner would hold down all the in-studio work, the three players in the league at that time with English connections - however tenuous - would host their own little pieces to camera, with varying degrees of success. Steve Nash (before he was good) would have a brief segment on record holders throughout the history of the game, Olowokandi (before he was crap) would have a little slot describing some of the rules of the game for those who did not understand, and John Amaechi (before he was gay) had short interviews with Beverley about multiple uninteresting subjects.
If you're wondering why all this is relevant to Kobe Bryant, you'll now find out.
Kobe started getting his own little airtime toward the end of the series, too, in which he chose his own personal favourite starting 5, one per week, and then talked about them to camera for a bit. It was, to those of us whose NBA knowledge was limited to Polynice's three point range and White Chocolate's inevitable superstardom, our first introduction to Kobe Bryant. Kobe chose himself as a sixth man for his list, seemingly leaned on by producers to do so, and immediately following this were some highlights of Kobe's play and highlights of a recent Lakers game.
I liked him.
And there, over 1700 convoluted words in, we finally arrive at my point - I like Kobe Bryant.
I don't need to fake liking him for today, for I already do like him. I know that, as a non-Laker NBA fan, I should dislike him for so many reasons. I know that he's an arrogant little git. I know that I should dislike him for being outrageously good. I know that I should dislike him because of all his endless dick-riders who talk about how fantastic he is at all times, despite this not being his fault. As a Bulls fan, I know that I should dislike him for that whole anti-climactic trade talk surrounding him to open this season, despite that also not being his fault. I should hate him for the fact that he's a massive bastard, and for his constant overexposure to which we are subjected every minute of every day. (Assuming you have dull days, that is.) And, if I were to be as stubbornly intolerant as some of my peers, I'd hate him for the consensual sex outside of marriage that led to an unsubstantiated rape accusation. (Seriously. Some people are still powerfully into that thing. Gotta let that go, you know?)
But I don't hate him. I kind of like him. And I can't explain that.
As an Englishman, you are trained from a young age that supporting the underdog is an enjoyable and infinitely more worthwhile experience. It is a mindset first installed into young minds during Second World War lessons at secondary school, and one that is carried over to the world of tennis, where we turn up at Wimbledon in all our pomp and regalia and then we lose.
This is the reason why I support the Chicago Bulls - having gotten into the NBA in 1999, when Chicago was staple gunned to the foot of the Eastern Conference standings, they seemed like the logical team to support. For those not aware of how this logic works; if you support a team that isn't any good, it's hard to be upset when they lose, because they're supposed to lose anyway. But, if they win, bonus! False hope rules! (Note: The L.A. Clippers were actually worse that year. But, unlike the Bulls, I'd never heard of them. Nor was I entirely sure what haircare products had to do with basketball team names.)
So where does my liking of Bryant stem from, given that it flies in the face of my national identity as a futility chaser? I couldn't say.
Maybe it stems from a lifelong desire to be deliberately obtuse and contrarian.
Maybe I'm totally lusting and gay after him. (NOTE - unlikely, because I'm straight. Thought I should clarify this.)
Maybe his eloquence and surprisingly good humour during his guest spots on NBA 2000 sold him to me.
Maybe I'm just won over by how extremely good the man is.
To be honest, I don't know.
Whatever reason it is, Kobe Bryant has achieved something in this country that has only previously been achieved by Shaquille O'Neal and Michael Jordan. Non-NBA fans - of which there are about 55 million - have heard of Kobe Bryant. (The rape trial helps with this, but play along anyway.) They might not know anything about him, and most of them may spell his name like Kobe Karl's by mistake. Yet they have heard of him. When discussing today's Kobe Celebration Day with a female friend not even remotely interested in basketball, she re-affirmed this point by telling me that she knew who Kobe Bryant was before I'd even asked if she knew of him.
(She then followed up this statement with the seminal sentence, "oh there's that other one, isn't there? Shawn O'Shearer?". Good times. Sorry, Shaq.)
So when you watch Kobe be his brilliant self, and whether this makes your heart a-flutter or your anger arise, remember that you are arguably watching the best basketball player that you will ever watch. Even when he annoys you, be grateful that he makes you care enough to be annoyed by him. Where you want to place him in the all-time hierarchy is an unwinnable debate, so choose your own stance on the issue. But, wherever you place him, you know he's up there. So savour it.
Not just today, but every time he plays, and every play he makes. Because he really is special.
And for the love of God, can someone PLEASE show me where to watch the 81 point game? I still haven't seen it.
As Wordsworth once observed, "the child is the father of the man". I am now a man, but was once a child. However, while I am now a man, I am still a child inside. So maybe that sneaky bastard was onto something when he said this.
As a childish man, I play childish games. I have childish dreams, and childish tendencies. And one thing I've always wanted to childishly do is send a scrub to the All Star game.
I'd like to now make this a reality. In the NBA's overzealous attempts for parity, they tend to include some crap players on the ballot to give fans of all teams someone to vote for.
They've toned it down a bit from how it used to be, when the ballots were bigger. But still, some mediocre (or bad) players creep up onto the ballot every year. And we should capitalise on this.
You can also submit write-in votes for players not on it.
The online voting doesn't exist yet, but when it does, each person is allowed to vote multiple times for whoever they want. This easily abusable system got Yao Ming voted in as a starter in 2002 when he didn't even nearly deserve it, because the whole of China voted for him.
It's the right time for that system to be abused again.
Antoine Walker would be best for this, because he is the worst player on the ballot by a mile. Currently nailed to Minnesota's bench, and never any good anyway, Walker is a stand out name on there. He's also fat, funny, and would believe in his own heart that he was there on merit, not as the result of a joke. He's also listed as a guard, which improves the probability of Tony Parker not making the team, And that's another positive side effect.
If we were to choose a real scrub like Thomas Gardner or somebody, we'd all have to submit write-in votes, and most people are too lazy for that. If it involves merely clicking, then we can make it happen. That's why a name that is on the ballot has to be chosen.
So what we need to do, when online voting comes around, is to vote for Walker many millions of times so that he is voted in as a starter. And I mean maaaaaaany times. As often as you can. Tell your friends, get them to do it.
In 2006, San Antonio drafted the radiant Damir Markota 59th overall. It was a pick that, to the uninformed such as myself, just oozed of being another one of those late second rounders foreigners that the Spurs draft with no intention of signing them for a while, following in the footsteps of Sergei Karaulov, "Jive Talking" Robertas Javtokas, Manu Ginobili, Luis Scola and Viktor Sanikidze (sorta) before them. It's a hit-and-miss process, with a disproportinate amount of hits when compared to the rest of the league. And besides, is it possible to miss with the 59th pick in the draft?
(Well, yes, but we'll come to that.)
Larry Harris, General Manager of the similarly adept Milwaukee Bucks - and by "similarly adept", I mean "completely incomparable" - decided to find out, trading his teams 2007 second rounder to San Antonio for Markota's rights, and then brought in Damir straight away on a three year contract.
Markota, in turn, decided to blow massive chunks of ass for the entire season, and show that far from being a poor man's Toni Kukoc, he was more like a tramp's version of Robert Archibald.
Showing little to no ability at any facet of the game of basketball, Markota spent a helluva lot of time sitting on the bench. Even when his team became riddled with a spate of injuries, severe enough to make them pull the plug on the season and subtlely (or not) attempt to lose out, Damir still did not see much of the court, because he was not very good. And when he did see the court, he didn't stay on it long, due to the terminal double whammy of being both rather shit at basketball, and having a bit of a minor foul problem (which would have been far worse had he played any defense whatsoever).
Seemingly, this rubbed Damir the wrong way. Per this DraftExpress article, Markota voiced his displeasure at the time, his role on it, and how they had forced him to hitting the bottle hard to drown his sorrows:
' "If I had a chance to play, I would not go to the night clubs. In some way it was the team’s fault. When you know that you’re not getting any playing time, you’re not motivated. One or two nights out won't hurt…There is no pressure, nobody is harsh on you if you lose the game, if you play bad. You’re still getting the money. There is no pressure from fans. Hopefully I’ll play more next season. No more fooling around." '
A week later, Markota was waived, while still being owed some guaranteed money and with Milwaukee in no roster spot crunch. Whoops!
Due to the previously mentioned tank job Milwaukee pulled last season, the second rounder that they gave away finished up as being pick number 33. So San Antonio managed to turn a number 59 pick in a weak draft - and the subsequent awful player - into a number 33 pick in a far stronger draft. And that seems like a pretty good piece of business from a team that quite often makes pretty good pieces of business. Whether they used that number 33 pick correctly is another matter, but time will tell. Maybe they could trade it to Milwaukee again.
Personally, I've got to say that I enjoyed every minute of it of the Damir Markota experiment. Milwaukee fans could - nay, they should - disagree with that sentiment, but it's great fun for the neutral when things go amusingly badly.
I will now stop putting down the Bucks. Promise. Well, for a bit at least.
For those amongst you who, like me, have a strange fascination with transactions, both those finalized and those possible, this is a bad time of year for you. This is late August, the draft is long since gone, and most of the juicy bits of free agency have passed us by. Of the remaining free agents, only a select few are good enough to be starters in this league - Ruben Patterson to name......one - and merely the journeyman remain. This is the NBA's equivalent of what it's like to try and completely scrape clean an almost-empty pot of jam - you can try and try and try to clean every last morsel out of the jar, and occasionally struck it lucky with a decent sized chunk. But most of the residual jam offers up stubborn resistance, and is not even worth your time - even if there was a practical way of getting it off there, you wouldn't garner anything useful from it anyway.
Additionally, when writing these new player profiles for the site, I have had a very tough time trying to keep them interesting. How, for example, do you make the profile of JamesOn Curry read wildly different to that of Jannero Pargo or Salim Stoudamire, when they are very similar players? It's a quandry that has cropped up all too often. Too many players are too alike too many other players, and too many players conform to stereotypes.
So, let's look at those stereotypes and give them broad definitions based around the pioneer - the trendsetter, if you will - of that particular stereotype. Every team needs their role players, after all.
1 - The Jerome Williams: The athletic forward whose only real skill is the fact that they are an athletic forward. They're too small to play power forward unless against others such as themselves, yet they have not the dribbling skills, jumpshot or defensive footwork to play much small forward. They compensate by running around a lot. A classic player-without-a-position situation.
3 - The Esteban Batista: They're tall. They're strong. They're far from athletic. They're often foreign. They're often white. They don't do much else. This also perks your interest. It's also rarely worth it.
4 - The Zoran Planinic: Dedicated to those taller guards - often European - who are touted as being tall point guards, yet who are basically shooting guards (or, occasionally, small forwards) with slightly above average dribbling skills. These players are generally exposed during any subsequent attempts to play point guard due to their lack of foot speed, and also aren't exactly primed for the two guard position due to their decidedly temperamental jumpshots. The old saying goes that your position in the NBA is defined by the position that you are best at defending, yet it wouldn't go amiss for these players to get themselves a defined position on offense. For the "bit of one, bit of another" thing isn't really working.
5 - The Eddie House: Small guards who come into a game solely for the purposes of putting up lots of long jumpshots and running around enthusiastically. The genre is named after Eddie House himself, a man so perfectly awesome at this role that it defies any attempt of mine to explain it. If you're short (or tall by normal human standards) and want to make it in the world of basketball, this is probably your best bet.
6 - The Eric Piatkowski: A logical extension of the Jannero Pargo type. Decent sized perimeter players whose offense is limited to an extremely good outside jumpshot, and whose defense is just plain limited. Something of a retro position that I cannot ever say enough good things about.
7 - The Pat Garrity: A further extension of the Jannero Pargo genre, this role has similarities to the Jerome Wiliams genre above, in that the player concerned has no defined defensive position. They're power forwards with no power to their game, forced to play the position due to their lack of speed. The other slightly massive difference between this group and group one is that this group of extremely unathletic players also happen to have fantastic outside strokes. These players tend to share other common traits - they are usually absolutely abhorrent defensive players, and piss weak rebounders. They also seem to nearly always be white. This group compromises the most one trick ponyness of all the groups listed here. And yet, every year, one or two fresh faces pop up, despite the continued failure of all those to have previously trodden this path. It's dumbfounding, but it's faaaan-tastic.
8 - The Malik Allen: One final twist to the one dimension shooter saga. These guys are tall, with centers size. And they can shoot. Yet they also all suck at every other facer of the game. But, then again, it landed Troy Murphy a $58 million contract.
9 - The Chuck Hayes: They may be undersized, but by God, that doesn't mean that their rebound is not theirs. Not tall enough for traditional power forward/center size in this league, and without the eye popping vertical to overcome this, these players choose to go the other way - they beef up, and work harder than the other guy for the rebound. Try and take it off them, and they'll kill you, no questions asked. This is especially true for Lonny Baxter, who has a thing for guns and shooting - if the White House doesn't scare him, then neither will you.
10 - The Bruce Bowen: Decent sized reasonably athletic small forwards who play good defense on the perimeter, but who are contractually mandated on offense to stand in the corner and wait for an open three point attempt. To attempt to do anything else would result in asyphixiation, death, or worse.
11 - The Ibrahim Kutluay: Disenfranchised European player who was pretty good back on home soil but who is not good enough in the NBA to crack a rotation. Rather than accept this, though, they opt to play off of their misguided sense of entitlement, sulk, and invariably wind up being bought out for a minimal amount so that they can return to Europe and vent. A relatively modern genre that I'm truly enjoying.
12 - The Mateen Cleaves: If you're not good enough to get into the game, you may as well act like you're happy to have been given such good tickets to see it. This genre is for those players who like nothing more than to come flying enthusiastically off of the bench after a good play, smacking arse and waving towels, and acting like nothing could be more right with their life. And why shouldn't they be happy? They get paid to sit down. I wish I did.
13 - The Kelvin Cato: "Why does no one want me? I'm tall, I used to be good, what gives? Come on, just give me a minimum salary, I'll make it worth your while".
14 - The Gary Payton: The former star who still wants the ring really, really badly. They'll forego their pride, their legacy and their reputation to sign for pittance just to try and get it. Named after Gary Payton, a man who has done this twice - once with the Los Angeles Lakers and once with the Miami Heat. Strangely, having won the ring, Payton still did not then retire, and eked out one more season of poor player for the minimum salary in a bid to win a second. He did not do so. Now, hopefully, that will be it.
15 - The Jacque Vaughn: The "heady veteran" point guard who doesn't run nearly as well as he used to, yet who continues to look for (and sometimes get) NBA work as an old timer whose "experience" will help the team's younger point guards, and also provide a calming influence on the court. But basically they just aren't very good any more and are out for what they can get.
These people are not to be overlooked, though. Not in any way. The defending champion San Antonio Spurs, for example, have two number 10's including the poster child himself, a number 4, a number 6, a number 7, recently traded away a number 2, recently traded for a number 11 to go along with the one they already had, have THE number 15, and have themselves an extremely successful number 14 in Robert Horry.
Of course, they also have Tim Duncan, which counts for a lot. But do they really win their three recent titles without checking off a good half of the criteria thrown up by this list?
Additionally, when buying the book, be sure to mention that you heard about it from here first. If you do this, you're entitled to absolutely no refund at all, but it'd pacify me.
Sham is a miserable and self-effacing little bastard, whose basketball opinions are often riddled with bias, insecurity, and rank immaturity. He has also never played the sport, and the only game he has ever been to see was a Ware Rebels game back in 2001. The night bus didn't show up and he had to walk the 9 miles home. It was after this that his passion for basketball really took off.
He considers himself to be Britain's foremost NBA expert, an arbitrary title that carries with it no basis in fact, or any worldly significance. He also wrote this section of the website in third person narrative, purely for reasons of arrogance.
Hello, and welcome to this website, the
best NBA website made by an English person, ever.
The point of this website is to
fill the gap in the NBA fansite market that combines accurate
data with an irreverent, humorous and frankly rather rude take
on the league and its people, something that's only really been
explored in blog form. Of course, the fact that we're now exploring this in blog form too is a little hypocritical, but never mind. There's more than just that.
Copyright ShamSports.com, 2005-2008. Every single published word on this website is copyrighted to the website's owner and proprietor (namely me), including (bot not limited to) the really stupid ones that I wish I'd never written. All rights reserved. Whatever that means. ShamSports.com
can, but might not, take legal action against anyone who steals our
content without permission. So I wouldn't risk it.
