Turn That Frown Upside Down

It is my intent that you will come to view this site as a valuable resource. Between the character issues thing, the NBA salaries section, the tracking of endless former and/or fringe NBA players, the general abundance of boring trivia, the occasional bad jokes and the hugely lengthy player database that no one really looks at, I serve to bring you information that you either can't get elsewhere on the internet, or to bring it better than other people do. I do this for reasons of self-gratification and (hopefully) career advancement, and even if you think I'm annoying and a bit of a twat, I hope you can at least respect the information that I collate on this website. That is my aim.

For now, though, we'll take a slight detour.

Yesterday afternoon, I was a bit bored, and decided to find out what Mike Bibby looked like if you turned his eyes back to front and his mouth upside down. We've all wondered that, of course, and yet yesterday was the day that I could wait no longer. I had to know. The results were as follows.



I quickly realised that this was my new favourite hobby. So here are some more NBA players with their smiles turned upside down.



























Contribute your own. It's kind of fun.

Player profiles known to be in existence

Sometimes people ask me if there's a way to find out which player profiles have been written and which have not, as about 75% of them aren't complete as we speak.

Well, there isn't. Or rather, there wasn't. For I'm now going to tell you.

The following have been done:

Josh Childress, Jason Collier, Tony Delk, John Edwards, Al Harrington, Royal Ivey, Joe Johnson, Tyronn Lue, Zaza Pachulia, Donta Smith, Josh Smith, Salim Stoudamire, Marvin Williams, Tony Allen, Marcus Banks, Mark Blount, Curtis Borchardt, Will Bynum, Ricky Davis, Dan Dickau, Ryan Gomes, Gerald Green, Orien Greene, Al Jefferson, Raef LaFrentz, Kendrick Perkins, Paul Pierce, Justin Reed, Brian Scalabrine, Delonte West, Qyntel Woods, Alan Anderson, Keith Bogans, Primoz Brezec, Kevin Burleson, Matt Carroll, Melvin Ely, Raymond Felton, Jason Kapono, Brevin Knight, Sean May, Antonio Meeking, Emeka Okafor, Bernard Robinson Jr, Cream Rush, Jake Voskuhl, Gerald Wallace, Malik Allen, Eddie Basden, Tyson Chandler, Eddy Curry, Antonio Davis, Luol Deng, Chris Duhon, Ben Gordon, Othella Harrington, Kirk Hinrich, Andres Nocioni, Jannero Pargo, Eric Piatkowski, Drew Gooden, LeBron James, Ira Newble, Erick Dampier, Jerry Stackhouse, Earl Boykins, Marcus Camby, Julius Hodge, Andre Miller, Luke Schenscher, Darko Milicic, Adonal Foyle, Jason Richardson, Chris Taft, Jon Barry, Bob Sura, Austin Croshere, Sarunas Jasikevicius, Scot Pollard, Zeljko Rebraca, Stanislav Medvedenko, Smush Parker, Eddie Jones, Jake Tsakalidis, Lorenzen Wright, Dwyane Wade, Dorell Wright, Andrew Bogut, Desmond Mason, Bobby Simmons, Joe Smith, Kevin Garnett, Troy Hudson, Michael Olowokandi, Vince Carter, Jason Collins, Zoran Planinic, P.J. Brown, Jamaal Magloire, Krik Snyder, Jamal Crawford, Penny Hardaway, Jerome James, David Lee, Michael Sweetney, Steve Francis, Pat Garrity, Raja Bell, Kurt Thomas, Dijon Thompson, Juan Dixon, Khryapa the Rapper, Darius Miles, Travis Outlaw, Ruben Patterson, Joel Przybilla, Zach Randolph, Theo Ratliff, Ha Seung-Jin, Sebastian Telfair, Kevin Martin, Ronnie Price, Brian Skinner, Bruce Bowen, Tony Parker, Rick Brunson, Vitaly Potapenko, Rafer Alston, Eric Williams, Loren Woods, Carlos Boozer, Devin Brown, Keith McLeod, Antonio Daniels, Dan Dickau, Jared Jefferies, Peter John Ramos, Gary Payton, Eddie House, Jay Williams, Rodney Buford, Adrian Griffin, Darvin Ham, Glenn Robinson, Michael Curry, Christian Laettner, James Thomas, Marcus Fizer, Paul Shirley, Matt Freedgy, Keon Clark, Ben Handlogten, Obinna Ekezie, Jared Reiner, Don Reid, Albert Miralles, Andreas Glyniadakis, Cenk Akyol, Darius Songaila, Marcus Douthit, Roger Mason Jr, Shawn Bradley, Slavko Vranes, Szyzmon Szewcyk, Tamar Slay, Ronny Turiaf, Martynas Andriuskevicius, Horace Jenkins, Vlade Divac, Jerome Williams, Andrew DeClercq, David Andersen, Esteban Batista, Josip Sesar, Roberto Duenas, Frederic Weis, Luis Scola, Cezary Trybanski, Norm Richardson, Corey Williams, Kennedy Winston, Ime Udoka, Herve Lamizana, Stephen Graham, Noel Felix, whoever Omar Thomas is, Chris Alexander, Steven Barber, Adam Chubb, Anthony Grundy, Nigel Dixon, Darius Rice, Andrei Fetisov, Aurelijius Zukauskas, Tyrus Thomas, Joakim Noah, Brandon Roy, Sheldon Williams, Marcus Williams, Solomon Jones, Leon Powe, Cheikh Samb, Damir Markota, Allan Ray, Walter Herrmann, Alain Digbeu, Ben Pepper, Ivan McFarlin, Jefferson Sobral, Joe Shipp, Tyler Smith, Aaron Gray, Wilson Chandler, Jermareo Davidson, Coby Karl, Rashid Byrd, Brent Petway, Roderick Wilmont, Jared Homan, Joseph Blair, Alvin Jones and Brad Stricker.


This list took 45 minutes to compile so you'd better use it, or else.

That's an idle threat since I have no way of punishing you if you don't do so, so just ignore it.

What I'd like to do is rig up a comments system where each profile has its own comments section like these blogs posts do. But I don't know how to do that. If you do know, and you wish to tell me, and if you wish to help me accepting that you won't get paid in any way, why not write in and tell me?

The Celtics compared to the Bucks

Consider what recent fortunes have been like for the Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks.

Last year, both of these teams pulled the incredibly-unsubtle-tank-job routine, rivalled only in blatantness by that of the Minnesota Timberwolves. So obvious was it that then-Celtic Ryan Gomes essentially admitted to the tank job in an interview, saying, and I quote:

"I probably (would have played), but since we were in the hunt for a high draft pick, of course things are different," Gomes said. "I understand that. Hopefully things get better. Now that we clinched at least having the second-most balls in the lottery, the last three games we'll see what happens. We'll see if we can go out and finish some games."

Say what you really feel, Ry.


Both teams put most of their eggs in one basket, trying their best to lose out, hoping for one of the top two spots in this year's draft, and thus a chance at Greg Oden or Kevin Durant.

Both were the victims of bad karma, and failed to move up, ending up with the 5th and 6th picks respectively.


From there, Boston has gone on to trade for two All-Stars, one of whom is arguably the most talented player of his generation still in the back end of his prime. They are left with plenty of work to do, yet they have become instantly vaulted towards the top of the Eastern conference and into title contention.

Whereas Milwaukee is mired in the middle of a soap opera.

Enough has been said about Boston and what they've done, but Milwaukee and GM Larry Harris seem to have been overlooked somewhat. After a poor 2004-05 season in which they finished with a disappointing 30-52 record, the Bucks beat long odds to win the lottery, and also had maximum cap room available to them. This offseason, they once again had potentially maximum cap room, and a high pick (number 6) in a supposedly powerhouse draft.

And once again, they have not taken advantage.

2005's offseason yielded Andrew Bogut with the number 1 overall pick, one of the better players of a weak draft but far from the best. The cap space was spent on re-signing Michael Redd to a maximum contract (decide amongst yourselves whether it was worth it, but the correct answer is "no"), signing the Most Improved player of the previous season (Bobby Simmons) to a $46.4 million contract only to then see him miss one season and disappoint in the other, and re-signing Dan Gadzuric to a considerably overpriced deal, all while letting the considerably younger, considerably cheaper and considerably better Zaza Pachulia sign with Atlanta, unchallenged.

This offseason brought much of the same: they signed another starting small forward in Desmond Mason, who figures to not only make the Simmons signing look that much worse, but who should also be roughly the equal of the man he is replacing - Ruben Patterson - and signed Jake Voskuhl to compete with/replace Gadzuric at the backup center spot. Voskuhl, too, figures to be the mere equal of the guy he has replaced, the unheralded Brian Skinner. (OK, so "unheralded" is a blatant embellishment. But you know what I mean.)

In addition to the disappointments in free agency, the Bucks also have an ongoing saga with their draft choice at number 6, Yi Jianlian, whose agents and 'people' warned Milwaukee that their client did not want to play there, going as far as refusing to let Bucks personel watch a private workout conducted by Yi. The Bucks took the risk and drafted him anyway, and now Yi is refusing to sign for Milwaukee.

All in all, something of a cock-up.

In between these two mismanaged offseasons, the Bucks traded T.J. Ford to Toronto for Charlie Villanueva, a can't-miss trade that they somehow managed to miss on. They also made an extremely poor trade, dealing Desmond Mason and a first round draft pick to New Orleans for Jamaal Magloire, a man not only coming off of serious injury but who also played the same position as Bogut, whom they had drafted only 4 months previously (Magloire then went on to disappoint mightily and was shipped out for spare parts at the start of last season). And Milwaukee also managed to compound their problems at the 2006 draft by needlessly trading their 2007 second round pick to San Antonio for the utterly useless Damir Markota - due to last year's tank job, that pick went on to become as high as number 33, meaning that Milwaukee missed out on Glen Davis and Jermareo Davidson, amongst others.

And they had Terry Stotts as head coach. Come on now.

The result of all this as things stand is a Bucks team that figures to be mired once again in mediocrity (or, at best, decency), and its place as a team that has more than ample opportunity to improve considerably more than it has done. Can anybody really see them as being anything more than a low seed/late lottery team, even if things begin to go their way for a change?

Larry Harris has made some good under-the-radar finds in his tenure as GM (Pachulia, Charlie Bell, Ersan Ilyasova), but perhaps he would do best to let someone else manage the financial side of things. For he and his team just got outmanoeuvred by Danny Ainge.

Danny Ainge, for Pete's sake.