In his debutant Olympic appearance, Davis wowed, wetting 50 percent of his shots from the field (1-2). His three points helped secure a victory for the Red, White and Blue, in a game that France never had any chance of winning whatsoever.
Former Laker, Warrior, Knick, Wizard, Heat—and current Clipper—Ronny Turiaf dazzled London with his sick nine rebounds. He also started for a French team that boasted Pietrus Jr., a goggle-wearing Tony Parker and some other pretty cool guys.
However, it would be Davis who would have the last laugh for the Stars and Stripes. AD gobbled three rebounds and was a critical piece during his eight minutes of spectacular work. Without his effort, America still would have definitely won by a considerable margin.
We know this about Coach K's next opponent: They are definitely a country that will put five guys out there.
One Game We Didn't Watch: Spain vs. China
As a live viewer of the first half, I got to hear a brief analysis of each team in the tournament by Doug Collins. When it was time to talk about China, he paused a bit and stammered, "Well, China, they aren't good," and then quickly moved onto the next team. Solid stuff from DC.
We at No Regard used to collect basketball cards. Convincing a parent to shuttle us and our friends to the local collector's shop was a consistently important victory. When we found out KMart was selling entire boxes for $20, we almost wore out our bike tires pedaling back and forth.
Now we've unearthed the cache, and the results are stunning. We've been reminded that players named Dino Radja and Wesley Person briefly and forcefully carved out steady roles for themselves in the league. We've been straight tickled by the goofy casual pics. And we've been touched and inspired by the relentless optimism of the copywriters. We hope you enjoy this odd time capsule, a Utopian angle from which to view the league, where everyone is the next somebody and context is pointless.
Three years ago I watched the NBA draft—as I always do—with one player at the top of my radar, one guy who got me so excited that I knew I'd have reached as much as necessary to get him if I were a GM. This year, that player was Royce White. In 2011, it was Kemba Walker. 2010, Xavier Henry (my bad). And in 2009, it was Brandon Jennings. I didn't know a ton about Jennings—I had heard his name come up a bit during his senior year of high school and I had seen him in Gunnin' For That #1 Spot—but I knew more than most friends I talked to. A few months before the draft, someone tipped me off to one of his YouTube mixes, and I would end up watching that video (below) and other similar ones dozens of times before the big night rolled around.
Dude had the kind of game that I drool over. The dunks, the crossover, the Spidey Sense passing, and the style. Oh the style. That kind of fade-plus-shades combination doesn't swagger its way across your computer screen every day. I also read about his decision to get around the NBA's college-encouraging eligibility rules by going to play in Italy for a year, and despite the hardships he faced, I admired his choice to take a draft position risk in order to get professional experience and make a little money. I was, it's fair to say, all in on Brandon Jennings.
On that draft night, when the Milwaukee Bucks selected him with the 10th pick (too late, if you had asked me), I jumped out of my chair and declared to everyone I was with that he was going to be one of the best and most exciting players in the league. I saw him as the future of point guards in the league, and I insisted that he was going to enter the stratus of elite playmakers who would change the way offenses were run. I expected that by 2012, we would all be talking about Brandon Jennings, all the time.
But we're not. In fact, we barely ever talk about him, do we? We don't pick him for All-Star teams. We don't mention his name as part of the Westbrook-Rose-Wall point guard revolution conversation. And we sure as shit don't consider him for an Olympic spot. It seems that many of us have forgotten about Brandon Jennings altogether.
This, despite his 55-point game during his rookie season
(perhaps the one moment in the past three years when the basketball world has
focused on him for an evening). This, despite continued flashy, rewind-worthy plays. Most egregiously, this, despite a 2011-2012 season in which he put up
19.1 points, 5.5 assists and 1.6 steals per game (and improved his previously sub-40% field goal percentage to a moderately more respectable .418). Jennings was thiiiiiis close to being a top 20 scorer this past
season, but you’d never know it from his ghost status in water cooler
conversations and his lack of any major accolades.
Recently came news that Jennings, who had previously
indicated that he would like to explore major-market teams when he becomes a
free agent after the 2012-2013 season, would now be entirely open to staying in
Milwaukee if they put together the right offer. Many will see this as the good
guy move, the thing that a player like Jennings—young, with sometimes questionable on-court decisions—should say as he tries
to become a better player and more marketable star. But based on the numbers
and the eyeballs, Jennings is already a very, very good player who should be counting
endorsement stacks all offseason long. He’s not though, and along with his
occasional sloppiness and his team’s injury woes, you have to acknowledge that
playing in the city of Milwaukee has something to do with that. The Bucks are
not only a small market team, they are a small market team that has been pretty
much middling for as long as I can remember. They are not an old team in a new,
sports-starved city with several fantastic management decisions, draft picks and coaching assignments. No, they are not the Oklahoma City Thunder.
This is not me stating, a year in advance, that Jennings
should jump ship on The Deer for a more cosmopolitan climate. This is me
absolutely understanding some frustration on the part of a young man who has done
pretty incredible work, but has lived in the shadows of other uber-athletic
point guards who have entered the league in the past five years. This is me
reminding all of us—you, me and everyone we know—that there’s a talent up in
the North Midwest who deserves our attention during the upcoming season. Let’s
all remember not to forget Brandon Jennings, and come this time next year,
hopefully whatever we say and write about him—whatever he decides—will be on
the tail of many previous words and much previous ink.
As I watched the USA Men's Basketball team "play" the Dominican Republic, my ears perked a bit when I heard Scottie Pippen's bellowing vocals enter my living room. Pippen was asked by the announcing crew how his '92 Dream Team would fare in a game against the current version representing the United States. "We would probably win by 25," Pippen suggested, citing that they would be able to work the ball inside with their superior bigs and really "get up on them defensively."
MJ laughed when he heard Kobe Bryant make the comparison between the two teams. Barkley had a similar reaction, stating that only LeBron, Durant and Kobe would even make their squad.
Although I completely disagree with these assertions, my purpose here is not to debate that point. (But for the record, I am so convinced that the current generation of NBA superstars would demolish the group that won in Barcelona, I would bet my mortgage on it.)
I am baffled as why these former greats are so reluctant to even consider the possibility that the game has changed and that maybe the competition they were up against in the '90s is not in the same breath as the current crop professional athletes.
Last I checked, Pippen was slinging chicken for Buffalo Wild Wings; MJ was knee-deep in both the underwear game and owning bad NBA teams game; and Chuck was pushing Taco Bell Five Buck Boxes and/or Weight Watchers—all worthwhile ventures.
So why taint such groundbreaking post-basketball lives by sounding bitter and unappealing, showing little interest in acknowledging that, yes, maybe there might be a group of people better than them at basketball?
We at No Regard spend a lot of time in our NBA knitting circles trying to figure out the human side of these players. Whether it's musing about their commutes to work, how much "Call of Duty" they play, or what their favorite snack food is, we like to remind ourselves that NBA players are nothing more than young men with enviable jobs. What better way to humanize our heroes than look up their middle names?
People say that the worst thing an NBA team can be is mediocre. You want to be fighting for either a title or a high draft pick, and being in the middle gets you neither. But that’s not right at all. The worst thing for an NBA team to be—at least from a fan perspective—is awful. I fully understand that GMs have responsibilities that stretch further than winning a few games in the short-term, but I'm not a GM. I'm a fan.
In particular, I'm a Nets fan who watches every game. During the past few years, the Nets have touted their flexibility, touted how promising the future was, all while losing almost every game. I know that savvy fans are supposed recognize and appreciate when a team is better positioning itself for the future. We're supposed to applaud freeing up cap space and shedding bad contracts. We're supposed to covet draft picks, no matter their placement. We're supposed to accept losing seasons because we understand that the middle is no place to be. We're supposed to operate on logic and be content waiting for the future.
Well, then I guess I'm done being a savvy fan. Because I'm not sure the future exists. An expiring contract can’t hedge more on a pick and lottery protection never helped Johan Petro’s brain relay signals to his hands any faster. Cap room can't knock down 15-footers. The worst thing a team can be is 12-70. Give me mediocrity right now, thank you. In an ESPN chat the other day, Chad Ford ended a paragraph that disparaged the Nets by sarcastically saying, "Enjoy your 42-40 Nets everyone!" Thanks, Chad! I sincerely will enjoy if my Nets go 42-40. That would be really fun to watch.
By trading for Joe Johnson, that's exactly what the Nets are locking in for the next few years—a decent team that has a chance to win every game, will make the playoffs every year, then exit the playoffs before the Finals. They are becoming the Hawks and there's nothing wrong with that.
I’ve been mildly obsessed with the Johnson-Smith-Horford-Williams Atlanta squad for some time now. I often wondered aloud if there was anything wrong with always striving for the middle. By seeming satisfied with winning the majority of their games and just making the playoffs every year, the team's management appeared to have accepted a truth that most teams choose to ignore: Essentially, no teams win the title. To be exact, just one team wins each year. And—in the past 20 years at least—it's most often either the Lakers, Spurs or Bulls. But by signing Joe Johnson in 2007 to a monstrous contract (one that many smart NBA heads bemoaned as instantly the worst contract in the league) they cemented their commitment to mediocrity. It was clearly a strategy—to continually be very decent, nothing more—that management was behind. They recognized how slim their chances of ever winning it all were, and decided to give their fans instant gratification (albeit of a lesser variety) instead of promising them the moon at some future date. A hamburger today and all that.
And now the Nets are striving to become the Hawks and I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, as a Nets fan, I much prefer this route to the highway of despair and losing that the team has been barreling down for the past four years or so. Simply put, the team I root for is better today than they were last week. That's really the only thing I can worry about and hope for as a fan of the team. Sure, Joe Johnson is owed $89.3 million over the next three seasons (when his value on the basketball court will most certainly be worth less than that) and that will kind of debilitate the Nets. But, Joe Johnson is also very good at basketball, better than probably (definitely) 95 percent of Nets player in the last five years. What do you want for nothing? A rubber biscuit? The Nets probably won't win a championship with the core of Deron, Gerald, Joe and Brook. But they probably won't a championship with any core. They probably won't win a championship. No one does. (Well, LeBron and Dirk and Kobe do.) But I'd rather see good, fun, competitive basketball while they're not winning a championship than a horror show of blood and empty seats.
We all settle for mediocrity at some point, in some regard. Sometimes you eat at The Cheesecake Factory. Sometimes you watch "Storage Wars." Sometimes you trade for Joe Johnson.
