Kevin Durant Is Already Scoring 27 Points In A Game?
Jesus. Watch out, league.
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Jesus. Watch out, league.
From my basketball savvy friends…
I was reading Chris Sheridan’s article about the potential Kobe Bryant/Bulls trade and came across this nugget:
Even then, it is not clear that any trade involving Deng would be acceptable to Bryant, who is wielding the power of the NBA’s only no-trade clause by threatening to veto certain deals.
I thought that was odd, because I read in Sports Illustrated’s basketball preview that Paul Pierce had squashed a 2005 trade for Chris Paul:
Whereas Pierce once feared being traded to a losing franchise — he vetoed an attempt by Boston in 2005 to move him to the Portland Trail Blazers for a draft pick the Celtics would have used on Wake Forest guard Chris Paul — he was now willing to start fresh almost anywhere
I’m wondering: who is right? Does Kobe, in fact, have the NBA’s only no-trade clause? Does he have the only complete no-trade clause, and does Pierce have a partial no-trade clause? Did Pierce have a no-trade clause in 2005, and does he no longer have one? Or did the Celtics extend Pierce a de facto no-trade clause in good faith in exchange for his years of service? I’m comfortable with any situation except the last one (save for potentially sloppy journalism on somebody’s part). As much as a I like Paul Pierce, it’s foolish to operate outside the bonds of the contract – that’s why you sign the contract. For someone who fancies himself as ruthless as Ainge, who says in the article that he would have traded Larry Bird from the Celtics in the early 1990s, it would be a giant mistake to have pulled back a Paul-for-Pierce deal on the basis of Pierce’s feelings. If you think you’re getting the better player, you do what you have to.
Anyway, the following is completely irrelevant, if fun:
Pierce, Garnett and Allen —> possible Eastern Conference champions
Paul, Garnett and Allen —> damn likely Eastern Conference champions
This would be one of the “other stuff” posts mentioned above, but it’s hard to escape the Patriots/Colts game, even for someone who doesn’t have cable television. For what it’s worth, Gregg Easterbrook semi-retracted his Good Vs. Evil analogy from last week, but I’m as convinced by it as he is convinced by the Patriots’ contention that they are done taping their opponents. He tries to explain his column away as satire, but the best satire works because it exposes greater truths, and his failure to do that convincingly is more than his “failure as a writer” to get his ideas across. It’s his failure as a thinker. To wit, he tries to flip the situation on its head, boasting that no one called him to task when he called Belichick “perhaps the best coach ever,” thus attempting to show… well, that his audience is a bunch of Patriots fans, I guess. And again, he underestimates his audience’s intelligence. Even the most anti-Patriots fans out there — and we’ll get to them in a second — would likely agree that Bill Belichick is a great football coach. Hell, Easterbrook even thinks so. The section starts, “No one draws up a better game plan than Belichick.” So he is essentially goading his wide-ranging audience for not taking him to task for what is, at this point, an axiomatic statement – that Belichick may be the best coach ever – but FOR taking him to task for what he admits was his “failing as a writer.” He’s calling out his audience for being discerning in their criticism. To be a failure as a writer is one thing, but to attempt to explain it away, and fail, is a failure as a thinker.
That said, the Patriots were cast once again into the role of villain this week, after their shellacking of the Washington Redskins, with a large number of media members taking the Patriots to task for “running up the score.” And here’s where it gets tough for me to defend the Patriots, because I’m a Patriots fan, and it’s tough to take me seriously. But I think the facts are firmly on my side. The only people to vocally complain about the score are two Washington Redskins linebackers and a host of media personalities. Both Washington coach Joe Gibbs and Indianapolis coach Tony Dungy said nothing ill of it, with Dungy saying something to the effect of, “You never know what a team is working on.” Which gets to another point: should we be angrier at the Patriots for “disrespecting the game” by playing it well, or at the Redskins for playing it so poorly, giving up a 4th-and-20 to a backup quarterback? Or, as I read elsewhere, “Why should the Patriots give up just because the Redskins did?” And for all you Easterbrooks out there who claim that Peyton Manning was removed way before Tom Brady was in last week’s game, if you refer to that little thing with the numbers in the corner of the screen — it’s called the clock — you’ll see that they were pulled at the same point in the game, halfway through the fourth quarter. To ask that infamous prehistoric question: Next time, why don’t you do a little research?
Which brings us, belatedly, to the precipice of Sunday’s game. I was reading an Indianapolis Colts blog this morning, 18to88.blogspot.com, and I was impressed with the output of material, and unsurprised by its vehement anti-Patriots tone. The author reiterates all the “The Colts are classy, and the Patriots are not” maxims as they relate to the game. But here’s my bigger question: what would happen if the roles were reversed? Sports fans (this one included), especially football fans, view their franchise identities’ as deterministic when things are going well, and use their success to hammer other methods of doing things. Colts fans believe the Colts are great not just because of their record, but because of the way they operate. But do they really care? I doubt it. If you swapped the franchises tomorrow, Colts fans would tell Patriots to focus on the game results, and Patriots fans would call the Colts classless. That’s why I don’t put much stock in what anyone says about the Patriots, and vice versa. The game’s the thing, and all the rest is just noise. It’s also why I believe that I’m right to defend the Patriots here, regardless of my rooting interests. As much as I dislike the Yankees for fun, I’ve never complained about their profligate spending, not because my team spends a lot of money but because any team that’s not spending money is choosing not to spend it. The rules are the rules. The Patriots’ are supposedly breaking the “unwritten rules” of football by using the Redskins as a tune-up for the Colts; I would argue that the Redskins are disrespecting the game by playing it so poorly more than the Patriots are disrespecting it by playing it well. Similarly, if the Yankees were beating up on the Royals in a meaningless August game, would I complain if Derek Jeter, Bobby Abreu, and the ghost of A-Rod stayed in the game, pounding hit after hit? Absolutely not, especially if they had a series with the Red Sox on deck. This analogy doesn’t quite work, but it’s close enough, especially if you imagine the Royals series as a playoff series. Why the playoffs? Because the Patriots/Colts game is a playoff game. If they meet again, the winner of this one will almost certainly have home field advantage, and in this case that advantage is huge. For all the bluster about the Pats’ lack of sportsmanship last week, all anyone will be talking about Monday is the game, and that’s all anyone really should be talking about.
God bless A-Rod for finally treating the Yankees exactly like the Yankees have treated the rest of Major League Baseball for the last 10 years. I have to admit, I was angry during Game 4 of the World Series, when Joe Buck, Tim McCarver and Ken Rosenthal talked about A-Rod ad nauseam during the seventh and eighth innings of a clinching World Series game, but I was angrier that A-Rod had left New York than I was at the fact they wouldn’t stop talking about it. I mean, I realize there was no way A-Rod was going to stay, but A-Rod and the Yankees were a match made in heaven.
A-Rod lit a fuse under Yankees fans before he played a single game here, providing Yankees fans with the sort of dualism they’re not used to in the “Yankees way or the highway” atmosphere that prevails in the Bronx. The Yankees and their fans were clearly pleased with themselves for stealing A-Rod from under Boston’s nose, but they immediately began with the “A-Rod’s not a real Yankee” invectives, as if being a real Yankee involves anything more than pulling on the uniform. A-Rod’s aloofness in the face of this situation only exacerbated it, and the Yankees did very little to diffuse it while dude won two MVP awards for them. The Yankees wanted a little bit more, a little bit more. This year, A-Rod blew the roof off the building, but no one man can carry a baseball team to a playoff series victory (unless that man’s name is Josh Beckett or Jack Morris), and the Yankees fell to Cleveland. A-Rod and his agent, Scott Boras, mercenaries they are, decided that they wanted a little bit more from the Yankees and dropped the bomb on them in the hour of their greatest suffering — watching the Red Sox clinch the World Series title.
As I said yesterday, there’s nothing lonelier than being a Yankees fan, and the A-Rod situation is a glaring example of this. The reaction to the news was predictable. New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro blared that it was “always about A-Rod,” as if the years of the Yankees disposing underperforming players was about anything but the Yankees, who often humiliated them on the way out of town — if they waited that long. George Steinbrenner cracked that he was going to donate cartons of Hideki Irabu T-shirts to the Little Sisters of the Blind after an Irabu loss. That’s classy. Steinbrenner’s son, Hank, blasted A-Rod yesterday for not being comfortable with their contract demands, arguing that the Yankees’ unilateral negotiating tactics were justified because of the “privilege of playing for the Yankees” that such tactics entailed. It’s a lonely world. A-Rod said thanks but no thanks, opting to go examine the high-salary market that the Yankees virtually created.
That’s the irony here: the aloof, highly-paid, franchise-unbeholden star
is a New York Yankees creation, the weapon the Yankees have unsuccessfully tried to parlay into championships in the last seven years. When Jason Giambi came to the Yankees, the franchise invented some cockameemie back story about how it was his lifelong dream to play here, even while they were dumping loads of cash onto his front door. I have no problem with money in baseball, as it obviously cannot buy you a championship (though it can go a long way), and that’s why I loved A-Rod on the Yankees: you couldn’t have drafted a better script. The best player ever can’t get it done for the best team ever, and instead of that being a tribute to the dynamism of baseball, it becomes a pissing contest among brats who both just want a little bit more, a little bit more. It’s too bad the fun had to end. It was a perfect match.
As recently as the spring and summer of 2004, I would daydream about what it would be like when the Red Sox finally won the World Series. Most of this happened every day as I walked from the subway station to my newspaper’s office in Queens, but this had been going on more or less constantly for 10 years. Would they win by holding a lead, with a Red Sox pitcher retiring the last three opposing batters in front of a raucous crowd at Fenway Park? Would they win on an unlikely but dramatic home run in front of the Fenway faithful? What would the radio announcers say, and what would the TV announcers say? More importantly, where would I be? And most importantly, how would I feel?
Here is how I felt: hung over. Not from booze, but from the Red Sox’ exhilarating run to the finish after 86 years of disappointment, the final 26 years overlapping with my life. I drank some beers, to be sure, but the real hangover was from the fusion of reality and unreality. Was I different? Well, a change had taken place both inside of me and outside, but most of the rest of the world kept plugging along as if nothing was different, so I tried to plug alongside it. And then, the next spring, things seemed so promising: there were so many Red Sox fans everywhere! They wore the hats and shirts and everything! A Red Sox utopia!
Of course, it was far from a Red Sox utopia. I love that so many new fans are interested in the Red Sox — the Sox are, after all, my team. But it seemed like a lot of these new fans had skipped a critical stage of becoming a sports fan, that of watching the game by yourself and internalizing the goings-on. That’s what I did for countless hours as a child, either alone or with my brothers and extremely close friends, and it’s how I learned to love sports. I love thinking that I can affect the game with what I say or do, even though it’s not even irrational, it’s insane. One day when I was in junior high and watching the varsity basketball game, waiting for my junior varsity game to start when Carly Simon, whose son was on the varsity team, came and sat next to me. It must have been a close game, because our team had two important free throws toward the end of the it, and just before the shooter let them fly, she looked at me and said: “Now is the time where you just close your eyes, and imagine the ball going in.” I sort of nodded in approval, and the ball floated through the hoop. I told my mom about it, and we both thought it sounded kooky, but what I was really flummoxed about was how she succeeded. What was I doing wrong? If I couldn’t get dates, and I couldn’t, I needed the Red Sox.
And so, when the summer of 2005 rolled around and I received many invitations to watch games with friends all over the city and elsewhere, I began to get the feeling that these people were not like me. Most of them wanted to watch the Red Sox in large groups, as a social event at Red Sox bars throughout the city, but I felt really disconnected from them and even some of the older fans who had undergone a smooth metamorphosis in October 2004. It seemed to me like a lot of the newer fans had actually missed most of the 2004 season, jumped on the bandwagon (again, with my blessing) during the playoffs, and rode the bandwagon into 2005 with one goal: ultimate victory. Even after the wonderful 2004 season, I was not so foolhardy to conflate the Red Sox’ success with an ethos of dominance; baseball is far too dynamic a game to do that. It’s hard enough for the best team to win in a given year, and the Yankees are the exception that proves the rule. They’re the de facto favorite every year, and for this Red Sox fans should be ultimately grateful. There’s nothing lonelier than a real Yankees fan, burdened with all the weight that comes along with the pinstripes, and that’s why they’re so hard to find these days. (The last place to look is Yankee Stadium. Trust me.) It’s easier for them to hide behind the bluster, to use success as a hammer, and to treat failures as aberrations.
That’s the attitude I’ve gotten from Sox fans recently, especially at sports bars and such, and even from my Red Sox fan friend who lives nearby and with whom I have watched too many games to count, both in Yankee Stadium and at his house. When at a Red Sox bar, the fans seem quite upset when the Red Sox lose, but I sense it’s because they are consciously trying to invest time in a winner, and the three hours at the bar represents time wasted. They’ll go home, have dinner, go to sleep and wake up happy. Or at least, not despondent. The opposite was always true with me: as long as the game was going on, I willed a world of possibilities — The Red Sox score 10 in the ninth to win! Pedro throws a perfect game! — and when the game is over, the crushing sense of a loss would come upon me. It was my own personal failure. I was invested in the game beyond the game, not trying to re-create 2004, to complete the dream season in reverse for those who only tuned in for the playoffs.
And so my great hope for the 2007 season is that Red Sox fans calm down. We won again, and no one can say this one took us by surprise: if you saw the whole thing, congratulations. I would say it doesn’t get any better, but it does. For the players, it’s about winning, but for the fans, sports is often about learning to deal with a whole host of crap outside of your control, and accepting it. Don’t love the Red Sox because they’re winners. Love them because they’re the Red Sox. The games will continue. They always will.
Let us take a brief break from our Sox to watch the preview for American Gangster. If you’re making a trailer, this is how you do it: this is straight out of Trailer 101. The movie even looks pretty good, but this is just wild.
(The following is a letter I wrote to ESPN.com ombudswoman Le Anne Schreiber after reading this week’s TMQ column by Gregg Easterbrook; while the letter has, at second glance, some factual errors, they are trivial compared to Easterbrook’s unbelievable intellectual dishonesty. It’s not that I’m upset that someone would classify the Colts/Patriots game as good vs. evil — frankly, I don’t care — but Easterbrook’s ad hominem attacks against the team represent unbelievably bad journalism. I really only started reading him this year after the scandal of years past, and I quickly got bored of his long-winded columns, until he started using almost entirely anecdotal evidence to rip on the Patriots. Yes, I own a Tom Brady jersey, but no, I would have no problem turning on Belichick et al. if they turned out to have done something wrong for which they have not been punished. Easterbrook has turned his suspicions that the Patriots did more wrong than has been suggested and has twisted them into facts, and it’s embarrassing to him and espn.com. He may yet produce facts, but he’s undermining his intellectual integrity in the meantime on a weekly basis. This week, I couldn’t stand it anymore. This letter was copied to him.)
Dear Ms. Schreiber,
First off, I would like to say that I love your column. As a longtime reader of espn.com, there are many things I love about the site but also a great many things I do not like; yours is the first voice from the inside that has resonated with my own on the issue, and needless to say you’ve done it with a breadth and depth unprecedented among level-headed ESPN skeptics.
I say “level-headed” because, on espn.com and elsewhere, there’s a constant reductionism going on: people either love ESPN or hate it; they love the Yankees or Patriots, or hate them; they love Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, and the other is scary and dangerous. Such thinking itself is dangerous, if commonplace, and it’s the reason I’m writing you instead of Gregg Easterbrook with respect to his most recent column about the Patriots (and, frankly, all of those from the past month): I feel that, by virtue of being born in Boston, Mr. Easterbrook would dismiss my challenges to his outlandishly irresponsible and reductive journalism.
Mr. Easterbrook’s latest column weighs the purported “evil” values of the Patriots versus the “good” values of the Indianapolis Colts, judging that a Colts victory on November 4th bodes well for the future of the league, while a Patriots victory portends doom for the NFL. It’s rare you see such a striking example of irresponsible reductionist thought from someone of the purported intelligence of Mr. Easterbrook, but it is becoming commonplace with him. He dismisses the Patriots’ organization — all of the 55 players on the team, plus the coaches and administration — as “evil” based on the attitude of its head coach, the “smirk” of its star quarterback, an admittedly embarrassing scandal for which it has been punished, and its tendency to “run up the score.” The Colts are “good” because of the public persona and level-headedness of their coach, the vocation of their quarterback’s wife, and the fact that the team’s players do not complain about playing in Indianapolis. Based largely on these six factors, Easterbrook indicts one entire team and lauds another. By reducing each team to a simple thought — I like this about one team, and dislike this about another — he exhibits the sort of intellectual blindness one would expect from the most provincial fan instead of the observations of a supposedly impartial observer. He creates a narrative based on his feelings, instead of creating a document based on football observations: only one of the above sentiments — running up the score — has to do with actual game-play, and if Mr. Easterbrook was to do the most cursory research he would find that virtually every player or coach asked about the Patriots’ bloated scoring tendencies has said that it is within their right to do as they please. No one has complained, but Mr. Easterbrook has been personally aggrieved enough to conflate a single coach’s decision to score an extra touchdown with a franchise-wide ethos of evil.
The main problem here is that Mr. Easterbrook, for all his academic credentials, does not respect the intelligence of his audience. I would argue that the majority of espn.com’s readers recognize that the NFL, based on several business models, has a different value structure as that of a Pop Warner football game, where the rules and mores therein are important not only as facets of the game but as teaching tools for later in life. This distinction seems to be obvious, but Mr. Easterbrook conflates the two as if they are the same in the service of his argument, and expects his audience to follow as he uses this as a backbone for an equally simplistic and child-like argument: this group of guys is good, and this one is bad. Not only is Mr. Easterbrook’s argument reductive and pourous, it’s not even convincing. It presents no new evidence about the Patriots’s cheating scandal (which you had suggested he provide before another broadside), and claims a Patriots Super Bowl victory would tarnish the NFL, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that all the fans care about is the game: the 2002 Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl amid the Ray Lewis scandal — one with far worse real-life consequences than anything the Patriots have done within the confines of the football field — and it is almost never mentioned on ESPN’s networks or on espn.com. Last year’s Cincinnati Bengals were beset by 10 arrests; this year, the only talk about their team is about their struggles on the field. The game’s the thing, but Mr. Easterbrook cannot see the game for his likely copious game-day notes. He’s a fan masquerading as a journalist, and is as heavy-handed on the pro-Colts side as a Bill Simmons column is on the pro-Patriots side. The difference, of course, is that Simmons’s columns are presented as entertainment, and Simmons makes his allegiances clear. Mr. Easterbrook presents his columns as serious football analysis, when in fact his personal opinions have become the driving force of his Colts/Patriots analysis and thus his irresponsible lede. It’s damaging to the reader, it’s damaging to espn.com and it’s damaging to ESPN as a whole to regularly print treatises that would be eviscerated in high school English class for lack of evidence.
Finally, there is the issue of Mr. Easterbrook’s previous firing from espn.com. The issue was unpleasant enough that I do not care to bring the up the specifics again, but between his previous (admitted) carelessness and his current factually-unfounded demagoguery, it would serve ESPN greatly to dismiss him permanently. ESPN would be better served by a football column that stuck to the facts.
Bryan Joiner
Astoria, NY
Here are the Globe’s captions from the Red Sox celebration photo gallery on Boston.com:
Red Sox players joined the celebration on the mound.
Red Sox players celebrated on the field.
Red Sox players celebrated the win in Game 7 of the ALCS on the field at Fenway Park.
Red Sox players celebrated on the field after the win in Game 7 of the ALCS.
The Sox rushed the field after the final out of Game 7.
The rush was on after the final out of the game.
Red Sox players hugged on the field during celebrations.
Red Sox players celebrated on the field after their Game 7 win over the Indians.
While I am usually a Sports Guy defender, I didn’t make it past this paragraph in his “running diary” of last night’s shenanigans. Bolded part is all me.
8:23: Paul Byrd strikes out David Ortiz for a 1-2-3 first inning as the Cleveland fans explode and wave their white towels in delight. Remember the days when the 2007 Red Sox bled pitch counts? They ended about three days ago without any real explanation. I don’t get it. I continue to be mystified by this sudden collapse-in-progress, as well as the manager’s abject unwillingness to shake things up in any way. Bizarre.
Um, how about right about that time the Indians pitchers started throwing strikes? Kind of makes it tough to bleed pitch counts. Also making it tough are guys who occasionally can’t hit and have decided that now is that occasion: JD, Coco and Lugo. And maybe Dusty too, but I feel bad lumping him in there. And Varitek, despite the home run.
Then again, that is Simmons (and no, this post is not an allowance for the haters to expand on their Simmons hate – let’s stay on subject). But over at Baseball Prospectus, supposedly a level-headed site, there was a blog entry that began:
Terry Francona certainly has Josh Beckett’s best interests in heart, not wanting to overtax his best pitcher. However, the Boston Red Sox manager might have cost his team a shot at the World Series by not pitching his ace on short rest in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series on Tuesday night.
Wait… does anyone blame Wakefield for last night’s loss? I sure don’t. He pitched wonderfully. If anything, one could get on Francona for taking Wakefield out after one botched DP ball and one ree-diculous hit by Victor Martinez, but it would be tough to predict Manny D’s complete implosion. Starting Wakefield was obviously the right move (says me, anyway).
The bright side is that the people who are hitting are hitting it hard even when they make outs. Outside of the homers, Cleveland has been finding the holes. It’s bound to reverse at some point. Isn’t it?
Bryan Joiner 