Kevin Love's Minnesota Timberwolves deal; LA Clippers rival the Lakers; Avril Lavigne in NBA deal
The NBA's regular season doesn't go through peaks and valleys, it just sort of abides. Even a shortened season like this one eventually settles into a comfortable groove. Sure, marquee matchups (Heat/Bulls, Spurs/Suns, Lakers/Celtics, Raptors/Bobcats? okay, strike that last one) occasionally brighten the schedule, but mostly it's just a steady stream of games that all count the same in the standings. Because of this, even a staunch NBA fan will sometimes dismissively say something like "the season doesn't start until the playoffs".
The upside of the lengthy NBA schedule is that there's always something happening: there are teams playing, GMs making moves, and media members constantly manufacturing controversy. That's both the upside and downside of the NBA Season: It just keeps going. At no point is the NBA's presence more welcome than this time of the year. While the NFL takes its pre-Super Bowl hiatus and baseball's spring training still seems so far away, the NBA is still giving us games to watch and stories to follow.
Nobody has ever been happier to be fired than Flip Saunders
After several weeks of press conferences where he all but tapped "LET ME DIE" in Morse Code with his pen during the post-game inquisitions, the Washington Wizards have mercifully let coach Flip Saunders go. Very rarely does a coach's firing result in feelings of relief for the newly unemployed, but such is the current state of the woeful Wizards. Watching Flip Saunders oversee - coach is not at all the correct term - his team's uninspired impersonation of a professional basketball team these past few weeks has been to witness one of the most brutal "dead coach walking" spectacles in recent memory.
It's hard to say what share of the blame Saunders should take for the current state of the Washington Wizards, I assume it's somewhere in-between "absolutely none of it" and "just about all of it", but by the end of his tenure it simply didn't matter if the team quit on Saunders, or in spite of him, all that mattered was that they quit. "I just wish we would've played harder," Wizards star player John Wall said, "did the right things, and it would be easier for him to stay here".
When a team is playing at its worst, management has to make a move if only to prove to their fans that they are at least trying to do something. The unspoken subtext of every manager firing is "hey, we can't fire the team". Saunders has been around the coaching business long enough to know this, one suspects that he's been coaching every game as if it were going to be his last.
Randy Wittman will take over as interim coach, and maybe the coaching change will lead the team to a long winning streak, and writers will give the new coach much of the credit and write glowing stories about "the change of culture in the locker room". Or maybe the Wizards will mostly keep losing, and nobody will write much of anything about them. Either way, one must imagine Flip Saunders as happy, or at the very least relieved.
The Golden State Warriors are still the Golden State Warriors
The Golden State Warriors are filled with talented, but streaky, offensive players who can score in waves but who also often struggle defensively. It's incredibly comforting in this chaotic, ever-changing world that some things remain constant. The Warriors, who opened their season with a last-minute collapse against the Clippers, lost two games in the last week where they had fourth quarter leads, first against the Indiana Pacers and then the Memphis Grizzlies. The 91-90 loss against the Memphis Grizzlies was particularly embarrassing as the Warriors squandered a 20 point second half lead.
Memories of the Warriors' dramatic, Nate Robinson-lead overtime win over the Miami Heat a few weeks ago are fading quickly, as the Warriors are looking more and more like a group entirely constructed out of role players misidentified as stars and bench scorers pressed into starting duty.
Traditionally the Warriors have been one of the most entertaining "bad" teams in NBA history, the product of a team philosophy that prioritizes scoring above any other aspect of the game, but this newfound specialization in late game collapses threatens to give the Warriors an almost "Bad News Bears" quality. While it may be torture for Warriors fans, there's a twisted entertainment value in watching a team devise new and more painful ways to lose winnable games late. I suggest that the Warriors create a text message alert system when the team has a lead coming into the fourth quarter, no matter how seemingly insurmountable, just to see if they manage to squander it.
Hey, if you can't win, you might as well start losing big.
The battle for Los Angeles is now officially a Thing
Unlike the Warriors, the Los Angeles Clippers seem to be successfully changing their brand identity. Even if their season hasn't quite lived up to the frankly unlivable preseason hype yet, the Clippers entered the Wednesday night inter-building matchup with the Lakers one game ahead of their opponents in the standings. Granted, some of this lies on the Lakers' mediocre start of the season, but for the Clippers, the Ugly Stepsisters of the NBA, just being legitimately in the same conversation with their sibling is a victory in itself.
The Clippers are achieving this without a healthy Chris Paul, forcing the team to occasionally run the offense through Chauncey "Mr. Big Shot" Billups, whose go to move is to blindly launch hopeless three-pointers whenever possible. In a sign of the team's changing fortunes, even Billups's iffy decisions sometimes work for them. Last Thursday, one of Billups's trademark "what the heck" threes buried the defending champion Dallas Mavericks in the game's last seconds. It seems that the Clippers are running into something they've maybe never encountered in franchise history: good luck.
(Now that I've written this, I fully expect Blake Griffin to shatter a foot during the late Lakers-Clippers game by the time this article arrives on your computer.)
(Lakers won 96-91 last night, due in no small part to a chest-beatingly brilliant fourth quarter from Metta. World. Peace. Clearly meant a lot to them. Quite ill-tempered. No obvious injury to Griffin - ed).
Kevin Love just was made for these times
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Tuesday night Kevin Love agreed to a four year, $62 million deal with the Minnesota Timberwolves, keeping the reigning Most Improved Player as well as its (unofficial) Most Dangerous Rebounder from bolting to a bigger market for a few more years. That's the good news for Timberwolves fans, the bad news is that the contract contains an opt out after three years, leading to speculation that the occasionally disgruntled forward might not be there for long. The fans have a reason to be pessimistic, they've already had to deal with the heartbreak of losing a franchise icon named Kevin.
Kevin Love's rapid ascent from promising young rebounder to All-Star, has been so impressive it does it a disservice to discuss it in typical terms. The fact that Kevin Love is Beach Boy Mike Love's nephew made me wonder how cultural critic, basketball junkie and Grantland co-founder Chuck Klosterman would compare Kevin Love's career so far to that of his uncle's band. Unfortunately, Klosterman didn't respond to this writer's requests to guest write this entry, but if he had, I would imagine that it would have gone something like this:
"2008-2009 Season: Kevin Love's rookie season was much like very early Beach Boys singles that were basically well-done novelties that suggested talent but didn't necessarily promise a long, sustained career. True, Love lead the league in offensive rebound percentage but was that really an achievement any more special than how the Beach Boys lead the pop charts in surf-centric Chuck Berry rips?
2009-2010 Season: As NBA's best rebounder per 48 minutes, Kevin Love was proving that he was going to be a lasting presence, showing that he could keep up production over a longer period along with glimpses of a more well-rounded skill set. Clearly this was similar to how the Beach Boys were becoming consistent hitmakers, producing songs about more subjects than surfboards and hot rods.
2010-2011 Season: Kevin Love emerges as the face of the Timberwolves and proves that he's more than just a one dimensional player by becoming a premiere scorer as well as a rebounding threat. This corresponds with the Beach Boys mid-'60s peak as they expanded their sound to include heartfelt ballads like "Don't Worry Baby", experimental sound collages like the opening to "California Girls" and the sheer joyful tomfoolery of an album like "The Beach Boys Party!" . Much like Brian Wilson's breakthrough was somewhat overshadowed by the Beatles, Kevin Love's season gets overlooked in part because of the Miami "Heatles".
2011-2012 Season: Kevin Love is getting even better, which suggests that this season might be his "Pet Sounds", where he raises his game to a level that we may not have seen before. I temper this observation with the historical fact that Kevin's uncle Mike was against "Pet Sounds", with the idea that Brian Wilson's evolutionary growth could have detrimental effects to the group as a whole. Which is, of course, true."
(My apologies to the real Chuck Klosterman, one of my personal favorite writers.)
Other Things We've Learned
? On Monday, a shorthanded Boston Celtics team ran a defensive clinic against the Orlando Magic, holding the team to a franchise low 56 points, partly thanks to Avery Bradley, or as he is known in the Felt household "my guy", providing suffocating defense on Magic point guard Jameer Nelson.
? Carmelo Anthony apparently believes "we need you to spread the ball around" translates into "only score one point".
? Russell Westbrook signed a five year extension with the Oklahoma Thunder, a move which reduces trade talk chatter while dramatically increasing the potential of more "conflict with Kevin Durant" storylines. Overall this deal is a plus for Oklahoma and basically a wash for drama-hungry beat writers.
? The New York Knicks season, hobbled by the lack of solid point guard play, has reached a point where their fans are hoping that the presence of Baron Davis, of all people, stabilizes the team.
? Clipper point guard Chris Paul is about to buy Avril Lavigne's $8.5 mansion in a transaction that this blog is only mentioning in a desperate attempt to get a minor Google Search bump.
? Veteran Chicago benchwarmer, and noted Caucasian, Brian Scalabrine is now apparently answering to the White Mamba, a new low in his career of only being appreciated ironically.
? Okay, it happened after the last blog installment's deadline, but if you didn't think that I was going to mention Glen "Big Baby" Davis drawing a foul for dropping his pants on the court, you clearly overestimated this writer's maturity.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/jan/26/la-clippers-lakers-avril-lavigne-mansion
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