Thursday, May 20, 2010
-- Dwight Howard, please remove your Superman tattoo. Superman was no bully. When the Magic center MMA'd the Celtics' Paul Pierce on Tuesday night, one TV commentator crowed, "Playoff basketball!" Wrong. That's prison basketball.
-- Howard, off the court, can be a delightful guy. But so much of his game is based on blunt-force trauma that it's hard to send him a lot of love. Finesse-wise, Howard makes Shaq O'Neal look like Curly Neal.
-- No sports officials protect the game's superstars like NBA refs do. Even so, Howard is the one superstar constantly in danger of being taken out of a game with foul trouble.
-- Ref Joe DeRosa, for his next trick, will hurl a bucket of water on courtside fans, only the "water" will be confetti. Hilarious!
-- Hi, I'm Amar'e Stoudemire. Monday against the Lakers, I played 35 minutes and amassed three rebounds! Then I said Lamar Odom (19 rebounds, 19 points) was "lucky." Hey, when I read my own quotes in print, I laughed at myself.
-- Then I changed my first name to A-mere'three.
-- Stoudemire is hard and tough; Pau Gasol is squishy and wimpy. Which guy would you rather have on your team? Stoudemire, over the last three quarters of Game 1 and the first two quarters of Game 2 combined, grabbed one rebound more than Wilt Chamberlain.
-- Coach Alvin Gentry to the Suns at halftime Wednesday: "If we're going to go down, let's go down fighting!" So the Suns charge out of the locker room saying, "Dammit, let's get our butts kicked with dignity!"?
-- What a weird trio hugging toward the end of Wednesday's game: Kobe Bryant, Ron Artest, Gasol.
-- Odom, Mr. Lucky again Wednesday. Eleven rebounds, 17 points. Good time to play the lottery, bro.
-- Stoudemire also said of Odom, "I'm not giving him no hype." Thus Stoudemire barely missed recording his first playoffs triple-negative.
-- "Pride comes before a fall," quoth Howard, after hearing that Pierce twittered, "Anybody got a broom?" Tweet! Foul on Howard for misquoting the Bible. It's, "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall," in the Bible's King James version.
-- No, LeBron did not write that version of the Bible.
-- In the NBA, pride often goeth before a series sweepeth.
-- The Celtics claim that wasn't really Pierce's tweet. They say someone hacked into Pierce's Twitter account. Really? Someone went to the trouble to hack into Pierce's account to tweet, "Anybody got a broom?"?
-- Twitter-hacking looms as a crime that could erode the integrity of the NBA. David Stern has no choice but to mobilize an NBA Tweet Police.
-- Saw Jerry West interviewed on TV. The Warriors could have had West as general manager in 2002, when he went to Memphis, but the Warriors' organization showed zero interest. West is a free agent again. He likes the West Coast. He is a genius-level judge of basketball talent. Chris Cohan doesn't know who West is, but a new team owner might.
-- Rajon Rondo, during Tuesday's Boston win, changed his shoes twice. Three pair of shoes in one game - does that count as a triple double?
-- Is it ray-zhon or rah-zhon? Or rah-john? Because Rondo has become a cosmic weapon, let's just call him Ray-Gun.
-- The fan Joe DeRosa flipped the ball at is Franz Hanning, the CEO of Wyndham Vacation Ownership. Acting like a guy who might have just enjoyed a three-mai-tai half.
-- I can't tell from watching on TV if Howard is still spitting on the ball. When the Magic played in Oakland this season, whenever a Warriors player was shooting two free throws, after the first, Howard would ask the ref for the ball, hold it in both hands and spit on it. Seriously. Pa-tooey! I asked him about it after the game, he looked sheepish, said, "I was just blowing on it." Weird.
-- These playoffs are merely the NBA's opening act. The big show is the LeBron James Sweepstakes. Many insiders seem convinced James will take his royal self to the New York Knicks. Why? Because it's New York. Great choice by LeBron, because New York fans support and love their hoops stars unconditionally ... as long as their names are Bradley, Reed, Frazier and Monroe. If not, just make sure you're perfect every game. Every quarter. Otherwise, as the tabloid headlines should scream when James signs, "START SPREADING THE BOOS."
