NBA Overreactions Day 1

There are things bigger than sports that happen all across the world every day, and one event in particular hit a little closer to home than most. Let us take a moment to wish everyone suffering lost power, flooded homes, or property taken away by Hurricane Sandy the best of luck in coping with these losses. My fellow students at Pace and I have been extremely fortunate in terms of the damage the storm has caused, but there are plenty of those who were ravaged by the storm. You can help these people out by visiting www.redcross.org, call 800-Red-Cross or text the word “Redcross” to 90999 to make a $10 donation. 

Now on to the less depressing stuff. As many of you know, the NBA season began last night. The stars were out and the bad blood was plentiful. And of course, the sports pundits were out making their bold predictions determined to shape the outcome of the season. Now that the first round of games are done, it is time to look at the most overblown story lines for the season to date. 

Overblown story line number 1: Rajon Rondo’s Flagrant Foul on Dwyane Wade.

It was garbage time in a rivalry game and the Heat had the game well in hand at that point. So with 18 seconds left, Rondo decides to stop the Heat’s leading scorer from breaking 30 by wrapping his arm around Wade’s neck in a game that was over.

Of course the post game comments did little to stop the fire. Wade called Rondo’s foul a “punk play” Rondo didn’t say anything, LeBron said Wade was pissed, and OMG Sally said that she saw Marry kissing Jimmy behind the lockers during third period!

Give me a break. The game was well over and nobody was hurt, so the rest of this was bravado. This is the exact kind of stuff that doesn’t matter in sports, yet it seems sexy to pundits to cover, so viewers have it shoved down their throats.

This foul is far more sore loser-ish than dirty. Rondo was upset that his team lost by 13 to the team that everyone in Boston wants to beat, so he took it out on Wade. Neither of these two men are saints, and there are plenty of examples on Youtube of both players committing dirty fouls over their careers. Plus it distracts from the actual story lines of the game, which are the following

-Whether or not LeBron can guard power forwards for the whole year after reportedly leaving the game with cramps (spoiler alert: yes he can).

-The Celtics biggest acquisition in the off season may be Leandro Barbosa and not Jason Terry.

-The Celtics and Heat still don’t like each other and that’s great for basketball.

-Rajon Rondo still can’t shoot free throws or hit an open 15 foot jumper. So while he apathetically puts up near triple doubles every night, he will not be regarded as the best point guard in the NBA for these two reasons.

-The impact of the “Hybrid Lineup” the Heat will play against the rest of the NBA.

Alas, our basketball minds are muddied by the he-said, he-fouled, oh-no-he-didn’t, take-your-hands-off-my-man! moments the NBA has to offer. 

So while we get our minds out of high school for a second and look at a slightly more serious overblown story line Skip Bayless is falling in love with on First Take. 

Overblown Story line 2: The Lakers lost to the Dallas Mavericks without Dirk Nowitzki. LA is overrated! Dwight Howard is a bum! They should have kept Bynum!

The Dallas Mavericks bested the “new look Lakers” by  a final of 99-91. On a team with Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, and Dwight Howard the best player on the Lakers last night was Pau Gasol (23 points 13 boards and 6 assists, which is a fantastic line). Dwight Howard clanked 11 of his 14 free throw attempts and is being blamed with the loss and shrinking on the big stage of LA. Questions surrounding the increasingly inevitable destruction of Kobe Bryant’s body loom large. And coach Mike Brown is already on the hot seat a day into the year.

Fortunately for LA fans, I have ritalin in word form for you all: Everything is going to be fine.

The following statistics got lost in the missed free throw shots. Dwight Howard still had 19 points and ten rebounds in his first NBA game after having back surgery. Kobe had 22 points on only 14 shots. The Lakers shot 50 percent for the game.  There are still 81 games left in the season.

Unlike Bill Simmons I was not ready to hand the Lakers the Western Conference just because the Lakers got Howard for nothing. I still believe that the West still runs through Oklahoma City, even post-Harden trade. Yet there is a big concern the Lakers are facing, and will continue to face if this is not solved now.

Scrap the Princeton offense. It’s killing Steve Nash.

For those who don’t know, the Princeton offense is basically four players outside the 3 point line and one guy at the top of the key. The four guys at the top of the key make backdoor cuts to try and get themselves open while the guy at the top of the key either shoots the ball or passes.

The guy in the key with the ball last night for LA was Pau Gasol. While Gasol is a good passing big man, Nash has far superior court vision and has won two MVPs with his passing.

Nash had a resounding seven points and four assists last night on three of nine shooting with no free throw attempts. Yet everyone is too worried about Howard missing free throws to notice. Nash told ESPN’s J.A. Adande that he was caught trying to move the ball in the Princeton offense instead of using his vision and passing skills that got him two MVP awards.

You don’t put great NBA players in a box and limit them based on what you want them to do. The same way you don’t tell Miguel Cabrera, triple crown winner, to hit the ball to just one side of the field. The same way you don’t tell Aaron Rodgers to not audible if he sees something in the defense. The longer the Lakers have this power struggle between Nash and the Princeton offense, the longer they will look like they have struggles on offense.

So bravado and overrating players are the kings on opening night rather than a good game between two heated rivals and the struggle between Nash and the Princeton offense. 

Welcome to the NBA.

I Was Wrong About...

           With every right there is a wrong, and many of these wrongs come from pundits across all four major sports. I am about to do something exceedingly rare in the internet age, I am going to write about the instances in which I was wrong.

Why am I taking time out of my day to admit to the things I got wrong you ask? Well it is because nobody is perfect and there are plenty of instances that I just missed completely. Also I am underneath the weight of a Kaaba (that giant cube in the heart of Mecca, Saudi Arabia for those of you who don’t know) sized writers block and this is a stopgap until I think of something better. There have been plenty of things for sure, yet I am going to make sure that everyone knows that it is quite possible to be a journalist, and still be wrong about your particular opinions.

I am lacking an award show theme idea for this one, so I’ll just say it on a scale of one to ten; one being I got an outcome of a game wrong and ten being Paul Ryan and Joe Biden incorrect when it comes to major political facts.

            This first one comes from a while ago. Remember when everybody wrote off Dwyane Wade after he tanked and pouted against the Indiana Pacers? Well, unfortunately I was part of the Wade-is-washed-up-bandwagon.

“The spark that drives Wade’s game appears to have burned out. The quickness that was synonymous with Wade’s cuts to the basket has slowed to the pace of a slug shooting jumpers. Wade has gone from a fiery competitor to a sour shooter looking for a foul call after every shot he takes..”

            Well, that bandwagon immediately steered into a puddle of kerosene and was lit on fire by the fan base of South Beach. Wade and the Heatles rolled on to the NBA Finals and right through the Oklahoma City Thunder. Wade’s final stat line from the Finals read a little something like this: 22.6 points per game, six rebounds per game, and five assists per game.

           

            Fortunately LeBron James dominance throughout the playoffs prevented this from being a seven or higher on the wrong scale. Few had a more dominant postseason than LeBron’s 2012 run, and it was because of his dominance that served as a moderate ointment for the burn Wade gave me.

            Still Wade and the Heat singed me pretty badly. Thanks to LeBron’s incredible postseason I don’t have to go to the burn ward, but it is still bad.

            I give my wrongness regarding Wade’s effectiveness a….

            6 out of 10: Getting a giant sunburn on the back of your neck because you saw the sun behind one cloud and thought ‘oh, it’s not going to be that bright out today, so I don’t need sunscreen.’

            Next up we have The Trade Deadline/Archer Award Show. This was easily one of my worst columns of the year for two reasons.

1: The fact that I pre-determined the fate of one team in the most unpredictable sport in the history of human kind. Seriously, this is the last time I write a ‘winners and losers after the MLB trade deadline’ piece. The rest of the regular season is too long for me, or anyone else, to be right about everything over a long period of time.

2: I couldn’t use any of the best quotes from Archer for obvious reasons to anyone who has ever watched the show. Unfortunately I had to settle for the Donnie Wahlberg level quotes from Archer because all of the Marky-Mark quality quotes are too offensive. Naturally Archer is my favorite animated show for these very reasons but I digress.

            Anyway here is the biggest thing I got wrong.

                                                                                               

            “By landing (Ryan) Dempster, the Rangers reminded the American League that teams still have to go through Texas to get to the World Series.”

            If I could get my hands on the delorean that only lets me go back and alter sports related predictions go back and change three events in the past I would..

• Kill Hitler because that is always the first rule of any form of time travel.
• Make sure my much younger self stayed up all night on October 27, 2004.
• And tell myself in July that the Texas Rangers were going to loose the AL West on the last day of the season, and then get bounced in the inaugural American League one game playoff; so for the love of all that is holy don’t write a column about it.

    Sadly the Delorean is in the shop so I have to live with being wrong about the Texas Rangers. Seriously, I did not think that the team with the second best batting average in the AL, a pretty good rotation, and that much postseason experience could lose to an Oakland A’s team made up mostly of unwanted Boston Red Sox who banded together for a great season.

    Also, I didn’t know that Skoal had the ability to create a Dallas sized riff, but again I digress.

    Still, I am going to give myself a bit of a break on this one. The Rangers went to the past two World Series, it was only a matter of time before someone else came and took their AL title away from them. I just did not expect it to happen in the way that it did. Oh and Dempster being a bust in the deal didn’t exactly help me.

     I give my wrongness on this one…..

     5 out of 10: Waking up early only slightly hung over from an above average night of drinking the previous evening. You know that you shouldn’t have had that much to drink, but you stopped before getting morning sickness. I could have said that the L.A. Dodgers got the better of the Beckett-Crawford-Gonzalez deal.

    I can actually make a solid segue here. The Rangers lost to the Baltimore Orioles in the wild card game (sadly which is another point I have to get to), and I effectively ended theAL manager of the year race in September.

   “The AL manager of the year race is over. Buck Showalter has guided his Orioles to meaningful September baseball for the first time in 15 years….”

    Pretty much the only portion of that statement that you need to read is the first eight words. This was when the Orioles were tailgating the Yankees division lead for the entire month. Unfortunately I made an enormous gaffe that would make Rombama  look good.

    In that column, I didn’t even mention the job done by Bob Melvin of the California Fighting Adjectives…err…I mean the Oakland Athletics.

    Seriously, I Bill Bucknered that one. Not only did the A’s win a division, but they even had a more improbable run than the fighting Showalters. The A’s had a season team batting average of .238 compared to Baltimore’s .247. The A’s were sixth in the AL in home runs when Baltimore was second, and they had a better team ERA than Baltimoredid.

   Now both teams are still in the playoffs for the time being and the harshness on this one comes from calling the manager of the year race over in September with an entire pennant race still to play. It is not that Showalter is undeserving, but I didn’t even mention Melvin once in the column, so I should take a well deserved beating on that one.

    I give my wrongness for calling the AL manager of the year race over in September….

    9 out of 10: You forget to study for a major exam and you try to cheat off of the person sitting next to you; even though you know they aren’t as smart as you. However, not only are all of their answers wrong on the exam, but you get caught cheating. You fail the class and you are put on quadruple secret probation. And you try to lessen the already bad situation by making a light hearted joke at the expense of the Dean’s maternal figure during the meeting that decides your fate.

Sidebar: This will go down to an 7 out of 10 if the O’s advance to the next round andOakland doesn’t.

    Let us turn our attention back to the O’s beating Texas in the first wild card game of the postseason. The one game playoff was supposed to make the baseball playoffs more drama packed and they succeeded like the Real Housewives of wherever succeed in fabricating drama.

    If you want to know more about why this great idea was ruined. Read this.

   The system was fine, it just became indefensible after one horrid call. I give my wrongness about the One-game-playoff….

   3 out of 10: You are walking around a big city late at night and your friend is going to make out with some dude selling Marijuana Lollipops; leaving you to wonder how you got yourself in this situation in the first place. This situation is very bad, but it was not your fault. Still, you should have accounted for something like Marijuana Lollipop man happening.

   Speaking of officials, I did not write a column about this because of time constraints. Although this one is going to be particularly hard to admit.

    I thought….I thought that the Replacement Refs weren’t going to be that bad.

    I knew that the NFL was being arrogant and stupid by not paying the real officials, yet I felt that the “experience” of the replacements were solid enough to tie us over. I also expected the NFL to hold out on paying the real refs for as long as possible because people were still going to watch the games regardless.

    Then the regular season started. Games became un-watch able and both players and coaches were blatantly ignoring the refs. Then of course the “interdown” happened on Monday Night Football.

    It was the second biggest swelling of sports related hatred from fans that has happened in recent memory; trailing only Jerry Sandusky for the top spot. 70,000 phone calls were made to Roger Goodell’s office by everyone. A senator from Wisconsin put Goodell’s number on the internet. The refs became an internet meme. And most surprisingly, a casino in Vegas gave everyone who bet on the Packers their money back after that game.

    I give my wrongness on the replacement refs…

    15 out of 10: Sounding like Skip Bayless animatedly defending one of the following organizations: The KKK, people who believe the Holocaust never happened, any Neo-Nazi organization, and anybody who defends what Jerry Sandusky did.

    There it is, my politician like gaffes in writing. I may not always get it right, but hopefully I will get it wrong a lot less in the future. 

Kill the Umpire

           The introduction of the one game playoff to Major League Baseball was supposed to infuse drama into a bland playoff structure. This change had the potential to add another angle to the umpteenth number of dimensions that exist in baseball to date. The one game playoff was supposed to enhance the integrity of competition.

            Instead, the illustrious career of Chipper Jones ended in an explosion of profanities and hurricane of empty aluminum cans. Replacement official….correction left field umpire Sam Holbrook single-handedly killed the Braves season with one of the worst calls in recent memory.

            In the eighth inning, a popup by Andrelton Simmons listed lazily to left field and dropped between two Cardinals. Yet Holbrook ruled that the play was a product of the infield fly rule and Simmons was out.

            Again, an umpire whose job it is to patrol the outfield called the infield fly rule when the ball was at least 50 feet from the dirt.

            Thanks to Holbrook, defending this one-game-winner-goes-to-play-Washington scenario is virtually indefensible. The one game playoff now looks like a moronic idea right up there with calling the 2002 All-Star Game a tie and canceling the 1994 World Series. There was a fair amount of criticism of the one game playoff entering the day, yet this horrid call ending a team’s season will ignite the fiery anger of social media users.

            Holbrook will now go down in umpire infamy reserved for Jim Joyce, Tim McClelland, and Don Denkinger. Although Holbrook did not take away a perfect game, forget the rules of safe and out in the middle of a game, or rob a team of a World Series title, he ended a team’s pursuit of the Commissioner’s Trophy. Holbrook can’t show his face in Georgia after this game, and it was his own doing.

            Nobody should be more upset about this call than Chipper Jones. There could not have been a worse ending for one of the classiest Atlanta Braves in recent memory. This may have been Jones’ last postseason regardless of the outcome, yet the Hall Of Fame career of Larry should not have ended as a result of a politician-like gaffe from Holbrook.

Sure Jones got an infield hit in his final at-bat as a Brave, yet that was rendered useless thanks to a ground out by Dan Uggla to cement the tragedy.

Normally the prevailing argument can be made that the Braves had other chances to win the game. Yes the call incorrectly produced a second out in the eighth inning, yet the Braves could have gotten three runs in four outs. After all, it is baseball, crazier things have happened in the postseason.

Not this time. Atlanta got shafted by whatever unpleasantly large object you choose to picture. Baseball is a game where momentum overrides stardom in the postseason, and Holbrook gutted the Braves run like a baby pig before a roast.

Jones did not deserve to have his career end this way. The Braves fans did not deserve to have their season end this way. And the team certainly did not deserve to lose this way.

But this is baseball, and anything can happen. Including NFL replacement refs wearing MLB umpire clothes and ruining what could have been a fantastic idea for everyone.