Toughts of a showering Sports fanatic...

Basketball preview a few days late and a few paragraphs short: Before the basketball season gets too far in for credibility with predictions, I will declare my opinions quite vaguely and ambiguously, in such a way that they can be interpreted extremely loosely, so that I can pretend to be a genius at season’s end no matter what transpires (season’s end, by the way, is next June. Yeah, it is that freaking long).

San Antonio will surprise everyone this year because despite incredible success in recent years, people still do not believe in this team.

Phoenix is not going to be as good as everyone thought. Amare looks timid, and Steve Nash isn’t getting younger. And they treat defense the same way the A’s treat hitting. (For those who missed by baseball preview article—later marred by cheating pitchers, horrible managers, and fluky World Series victors—that means they treat defense like raw chicken covered in an unknown white powder wrapped in spinach).

Dallas is dang good. Too bad the conspiratorial league doesn’t like “good” teams, but rather superstars, of whom the Mavs are tastefully lacking in. (By the way, this only further proves how good the Spurs are. They manage to win even when the entire league is rooting--and conspiring--for them to lose due to their own tasteful lack of superstars).

Those three teams are the only ones that *really* matter in the West. Plenty of teams are good… but not that good. Except maybe that one team…

And in the East:

Miami will definitely not repeat. And by “definitely” I mean “maybe, pending the decision of the league’s conspiratorial council regarding the feasibility of incrasing the fouls called for Dwayne Wade while pretending to maintain some degree of believability”.

Detroit will be much worse than people realize. They weren’t as good as they looked last regular season, and now they are even worse. Losing Larry Brown finished them. Flip Saunders=not good.

Chicago is now my rooting interest. In a somewhat strange, cyclical allusion to my younger days (who didn’t root for MJ?), I am now rooting for Chicago. I like to root for a team in the NBA that has a chance to do great things, but is not there yet, plays defense, and lacks superstars. Chicago fills those qualities perfectly, much the same way Detroit did in ’03, when my rooting took them to the finals and beat the living crap out of the Lakers. I am not predicting that for Chicago (they don’t have Larry Brown) but I know you were simply dying to be aware of my rooting interests.

Lebron will not equal his statistical magnificence of last year, or, if he does, it will hurt the Cavs.

But does any team from this conference have a chance at winning anyway?

The NBA is the best place to find state-of-the-art (what does that mean anyway?) tanks: I refer, of course, to the king, King James. He is amazing, but after watching him for three years (which seems like a thousand, probably because I could recognize his high school highlights quicker than most pro players highlights), he seems to be built for the new NBA—the one where bullying and raw strength are the norm.

Call me crazy, but I remember a time when skill and speed and agility and a 15 foot jumper made you a superstar, not the brutish, troll-like strength of Lebron. You don’t expect him to blow by anyone. You expect him to blow them up. I can just imagine a conversation between Michael Jordan and Lebron.

Michael: So, you like crossing over to your right or your left?

Lebron: Crossing over? What?

Michael: You know, changing directions to get by someone.

Lebron: Get by them? Heck, that isn’t what I do! I go through them!

If you watch Lebron, he has the following attributes: amazing court vision, extremely good passing, the ability to bull-rush through the lane, a decent jump shot. Besides the passing (which he is inordinately skilled with), these are not the attributes of the star of yesteryear. In the former NBA (where running into your opponent was called charging, not blocking), I don’t know if Lebron would be as good. He doesn’t seem to have the ability to cleanly dribble the ball around someone. He just takes them out.

None of this is knocking Lebron’s talent. For one thing, he might learn to shoot someday (MJ did not have that never-miss fade-away as soon as he entered the league), for another, his passing is unmatched, and finally, he *is* built for today’s NBA, so the question of whether he would have made it years back is Platonic. Yet strangely relevant. Do you get the same satisfaction watching him blitzkrieg his way to the rim as you do when Kobe’s silky smooth moves have him dunking untouched? No, you don’t.

Lebron is amazing, and he will likely only get better. But the legacy of the NBA is dead, if Lebron carries it. He does not continue on in Michael’s tradition, or Magic’s tradition, or Larry’s tradition. He is his own breed, a new type of NBA tank, where you either get out of his way or get called for a block while he moves you out of his way. Watching him is watching greatness, but it is not particularly enjoyable.

You see, that pass is like this lateral incision, and…: In a recent article on ESPN.com, John Clayton gave his usual preview of the week’s ten best NFL games. In his musing regarding the Indy/NE game, he mentioned that “watching Peyton Manning (carve up the Denver defense) was like watching a surgeon operate”.

This is a phrase used constantly by ESPN analysts and writers; TheSportsRant wants to know why. Why does anyone ever use this phrase? John Clayton is by far the best NFL writer that ESPN has. His articles are always informative, well written, and yet not so stodgy as to drain all enjoyment from the pages. They are quick yet have depth. Still, what is he doing using this line?

The big question here is: Who the heck has ever seen a surgeon operate? The only people who are in the room while surgery is being undertaken are the surgeon (plus assistants) and patients. The patients sure as heck are not analyzing the surgery while overdosing on novocaine, and the surgeons perform surgeries because it is their job. They are hardly going to be impressed by simply yet another operation. So why is it “impressive” that Peyton Manning operates like a surgeon? How does a surgeon even operate? Precisely, I assume, and that is where the phrase comes from. But even ignoring the total over-usage of the phrase, it never really belonged in the first place. We use metaphors to help explain things, usually. They aren’t meant to cloud things in doubt. Yet, I would be far more educated by this phrase:

“Watching a surgeon operate is like watching Peyton Manning carve up defenses”.

Wouldn’t you?

The name is Bond. Ian Fleming's Bond: James Bond was never meant to be, at least in the form he appears to us today. The author of the original 007 novels intended for Bond to be a somewhat roughly edged, alcoholic killer with an ironic distaste for killing. The super suave, in-control Bond we know is a movie creation, not Ian Fleming’s creation. Apparently, the upcoming "Casino Royale" is returning Bond to his creator’s imagination.

This is not entirely horrible. The movie looks promising, if somewhat strange in the liberties it assumes with the timeline (the car, the gun, the M are all wrong). What is odd is that they decided to move Bond in an entirely new direction, when he really only needed a good kick in the pants to get back to normal.

It is no secret that Die Another Day was the Arizona Cardinals of the Bond franchise. That movie was horrible. The plot stunk, the acting was not very good, the special effects were mediocre…

Yet Bond films have survived such before (One word: Moonraker). The real problem with Die Another Day was the car. It cloaked. Yes. It cloaked. The moment I saw that car cloak, I knew the movie was done. Finished. Over. Useless. Playing out the string. As Newsweek noted in its recent article on prequels, there are moments in a franchise when you know it is in trouble, and the cloaking car was it.

Yet did one evanescent car ruin the entire series? Of course not. Get a better script, better acting, make the movie a bit grislier, and throw in some classic Bondism where he makes fun of an enemy installation by saying something like “what’s it going to do, disappear?” in order to acknowledge to fan and critic alike that everyone knows the stupid car was a big mistake. Problem solved.

I hold out hope for a terrific Bond flick. Still, it seems an overreaction to say the least.

And this is why North Carolina wants him?: Rich Rodriguez, head football coach of WVU, is purportedly being pursed for the head coaching position at UNC. Now beyond the obvious “why would he want to go there” question (he has a team that will contend for BCS bowls for at least one more season, and UNC is in the dumpster), the other question is: why would they want him? As evidenced by WVU’s loss to Louisville, Rodriguez is not a good coach. He had the best team on the field, without question, yet his team was hardly in the game.

He refused to pass. Pat White was easily capable of picking apart the Lousiville defense (which threw 8 or 9 men into the box consistently), yet Rich did not pass. He didn’t have to go pass whacky, but maintaining some type of balance would, if nothing else, make the running lanes open a bit more.
Not to mention their horrible defense, and copious amount of turnovers, both of which are extremely coaching related. Hopefully for WVU, he takes the UNC job.