Big Huge Labs has a fun program where you can make your own "Motivational" poster. You know, the one that your cheesy boss has of a rock climber that says something like "Endurance: Having the grit to hang tough"? So I thought, there are certainly some posters that could be made involving athletes in the news.
| Kobe Bryant: |
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| Javon Walker: |
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| Tiger Woods: |
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| Michael Wilbon: |
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Not to burst the bubble of my esteemed colleague, who seems to think that his daughter personally jinxed the Lakers and doomed them to a collapse similar to a Jenga tower built by Michael J. Fox (Editor's note: too soon?), but she was not responsible for what happened. No, the blame squarely rests on the shoulders of an organization known to be so corrupt, evil and Machiavellian that it's obvious that they would be responsible for this.
I'm, of course, talking about the New York Yankees.
Think back to before Game 4, when Curt Schilling blogged about sitting behind the Lakers bench for Game 2, and how Kobe wouldn't stop yelling at his teammates. First, let's concede that Schilling is an idiot and a lout - the fact that he is an athlete that is universally hated by bloggers despite being a blogger himself (usually an instant path to Blog Crush City) is proof enough of how transparent his self-promoting, blowhard ways are.
The problem came from Kobe's response when asked about Schilling's comments: "Go Yankees." Now, at first blush, that's a fun, innocuous comment that's good for a chuckle. But you have to be in Los Angeles and know the history to know that Kobe saying "Go Yankees" was not just tempting fate, but basically was A Hot, Blonde, Teenaged Hotel Worker in Vail for fate. (Editor's note: too so...never mind.)
I know Kobe spent most of his time in Italy, or Bulgaria, or wherever the hell he grew up, so his idea of a rivalry is his ego vs. Shaq's ego AC Milan vs. Juventes, but for people with any sense of history, the leading figure in the Los Angeles sports scene saying "Go Yankees" is the equivalent of Abraham Lincoln waving a Rebel flag while singing Dixie and beating a slave. (Maybe not quite that bad, but you get the point.)
The Yankees and the Dodgers have always hated each other, as long as there has been baseball, and the Dodgers moving from Brooklyn in the 1950s did little to change that. Things really were bad in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series back to back in 1977 and 1978 before Los Angeles was able to extract some revenge in 1981. Tommy Lasorda would be spinning in his grave if he knew that the Lakers' star player was saying "Go Yankees."
(I've been told that Tommy Lasorda is still alive. Please substitute "his grave" for "the bed of a high-class call girl". Thanks.)
Frankly, Kobe's lucky that he wasn't struck by lightening, or that a plague of locusts didn't invade the Staples Center. At least he has booze to ease the pain.
Congratulations to the Los Angeles Lakers, for re-enacting the last scene from "Old Yeller" last night, only in this case the dog was the San Antonio Spurs and there was a lot less crying. I know that Kobe Bryant is a polarizing figure, and he's done everything to deserve any bad feelings anyone might have about him. But that being said...I can't imagine how any fan without a rooting interest would rather have seen the Spurs play in the Finals versus the Lakers. The Lakers were clearly the better team, and certainly the more entertaining to watch.
And, Kobe's "we're used to playing in the Finals" comment after the game, they are a new face in the Finals. Which they accomplished by specifically NOT BEING THE SAN ANTONIO SPURS. We've seen Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobli, etc., for long enough to know what to expect from them: solid, "fundamentally sound" basketball that leaves you about as impressed an excited as a WNBA game. The Lakers are always a wild card: Kobe might score two points in the first half and then 30 in the second. Lamar Odom might dominate, or disappear. Phil Jackson might have a shit-eating grin on his face while saying something snide and sarcastic to Michelle Tafoya at halftime (OK, that's pretty much a guarantee).
Here's my confession about basketball: I don't have an NBA team. I used to be a huge fan of the Showtime Lakers when I was growing up. I mean, seriously, if you were a kid in California in the 1980s, there was no team that was cooler or that you would have wanted to be on more - in any sport - than the Lakers. The 49ers might have been just as if not more successful, but they were about as "exciting" as their leader. While Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and company were all about hard work and that bullshit your parents tried to teach you, the Lakers were glitz and glamour and more than anything else, about style. The 49ers would get you to the top, but the Lakers would get you laid, so to speak.
But I gave up on the Lakers a few years ago. Mainly it was the Kobe/Shaq/Phil drama - there had always been some drama with the Lakers (hello Magic "Coach Killer" Johnson), but never had it seemed so venal and petty. And the fans...oh Lord, the fans. Maybe growing up several hundred miles away insulated me from the mass of Laker fans. Maybe we didn't have talk radio 24/7 lime we do now. Or maybe Chick Hearn being around to cut off an idiot caller on Post Game Laker Talk was enough to keep people in line, but the endless rounds of "Kobe is the best" followed by "Kobe needs to go" followed by "Shaq should have stayed" and on and on...it just drove me past the breaking point.
(Actually, the breaking point is the thousands of Lakers flags that mysteriously appear on car windows during the playoffs when the Lakers were doing well byt suddenly disappeared as soon as they were knocked out.)
So, will I be rooting for the Lakers? Yeah, I guess. I sure as hell can't root for Boston or Detroit, that's for sure. But will I be that broken up if they get swept? Not really.
The NBA would like you to get very excited about the Lenovo Stat. They would like you to understand the Lenovo Stat as often as possible, and treat it with the same level of importance that you treat points, rebounds or assists. That's why they've created a whole special section on their Web site just for it, and are promoting the hell out of it at every opportunity.
Which would be fine, if it was a stat that meant anything, and not just some made up, BS stat with the same name as "The Official PC Partner of the NBA". Because when commerce and sports collide, the result is usually riveting statistical analysis.
So what is this "Lenovo Stat" that's going to revolutionize the concept of basketball statistics? If you guessed "a warmed-over version of the plus/minus stat that they've been using in hockey for years", you guessed right. Essentially, it's the total amount of points that your team scores while you are on the court, minus the number of points your team gives up during that time.
I don't think I need to tell you how useless this is. First off, there is no way to compare players from different teams - players on winning teams are almost always going to have higher rankings than players on losing teams, just because their teams are scoring more points than their opponents regardless of what they do. If you were comparing how many points a team scored/gave up while a certain player was on the court versus how they did when he was on the bench, or versus their overall performance, maybe you would have something.
Actually, no, you wouldn't. It would still be absolutely pointless, but at least it would be slightly more useful.
Want an example? Guess who the "Lenovo Stat" leader is for the Los Angeles Lakers? It's obvious, right - Vladimir Radmanovic. He of the 9.7 points and 2.9 rebounds per game. As for Kobe Bryant - you know, the most feared player in the game? Of course - he's fourth on the team on the Lenovo Stat, behind not only Radmanovic but Andrew Bynum and Luke Walton.
Any stat where Luke Walton is ahead of Kobe Bryant is pretty much inherently flawed and worthless.
"But," you might counter if you were a marketing person with Lenovo reading off a list of talking points proponent of the Lenovo Stat, "it isn't an individual stat - The Lenovo Stat shows the power of teamwork. It's a way of showing the best-engineered, best combination of players on the court."
"Really?," I would counter."Because it still seems like a crock of crap to me. Take at look at the Lenovo Stat for the best two-person combinations on the team. No. 1 is Radmanovic and Bynum. Kobe isn't on there until No. 4, and he's only part of five of the Top 20. Now, you want me to believe that Vladimir Radmanovic and Jordan Farmar are a better combination than Kobe Bryant and...well, anyone?"
And you would not answer, because you would run screaming and in tears back to Lenovo world headquarters rather than admit defeat. And then I would treat myself to a two-piece chicken plank basket at Long John Silver's, but really reward myself by ADDING A THIRD PLANK! And then my official LJS Stat count would be a +3 for the season.
(Note: in the time it took me to finish this post, the Lenovo Stat section on NBA.com appears to have imploded. I'll take the credit for it - I'm sure they were so scared about the power of my upcoming post that they panicked and removed the site entirely.)
