basketball and other stuff

Hello guys

Hope all has been well. I'm doing okay over here. I'll be in NY until about August, and then San Diego for a bit, and then before anyone knows it Summer is kaput! and we're wearing jackets and long underwear again. Things seem to be moving so quickly now.

Frankly I find it a bit deceptive to be posting so sporadically (even if it is the summer) because it suggests that I've been off the internet this whole time, hanging out on the beach, partying, playing video games, finishing all the books and movies I've bought but haven't read/seen, eating mexican food, etc.

doodle, june

If only this was the truth. No, in reality I've been all up in the internet as of late, and in a bad way. I'm not getting anything done, eating a lot of Trader Joes nut mix, checking facebook in upwards of 10 times an hour but not doing anything with it, and, most productively, probably watching about two hours of NBA videos on Youtube per day. There's a lot of incredible stuff out there. Fascinating characters, specimens and freaks of nature, exciting calls and finishes, weird home video segments, snippets of stars out of their element, funny forgotten clips of players before their respective primes; it's a gold mine.

I'll get to more of these later, but recently I've been watching the entirety of the 1984 NBA finals, often called the best finals ever, with Bird's Celtics (before McHale even started) versus Kareem and Magic's Lakers. I don't know who goes through the trouble of posting this stuff in its entirety (something that could be asked legitimately for almost every web video, and is often explored by my good pal this guy). Anyway, it's a great series, and there's a lot to take in, from the presentation of the broadcast to how damn loud the crowds were and how good Kareem actually was. I could probably go all day but yeah I don't like typing.




I do want to talk a little bit about the NBA finals, because they happened, and I watched a lot of them, and sort of fell in love with basketball again in the process (see above).

It takes a pretty heartless, fair-weather basketball fan to just leap head- first into a month-long binge of game viewing, blog reading, thoughtful postgame analyzing, and constantly scrambling to find a TV to see said games, but that's sort of how it all happened. I watched a good number of games on shitty Justin.tv live web streams, which feels both diehard and pathetic.

All in all, I was really impressed with how the finals played out, and took on a whole new understanding about how the media tries to put together specific narratives throughout the playoffs to try and "establish" what these finals are "really all about". Which is mostly bullshit. If I hear another time about how Kobe "needed to win this one without Shaq" I think I'm going to vomit.

Thankfully, I won't have to, and there was definitely a wealth of just pure, good games throughout the finals that will sit fondly in my memory into the offseason (which I have taken a greater stock in). Other than the mega tease and premature ejaculation of the Celtics/ Bulls series, we saw a really promising first round victory by the Rockets, summed up nicely in this buddy comedy postgame press conference.



The streakshooting Magic were a surprise, and with Skip-to-my-lou, Turkoglu's ugly shooting, Rashard Lewis's Egyptian goatee, and Dwight Howard's twitter, a lot of fun to follow. I really became fascinated by Stan Van Gundy though. He has a brutal honesty in his press conferences which is weird, because his responses certainly feel nicer than packaged, programmed answers, but he does tend to beat his players up pretty bad.

In the end, I'm happy LA won. We saw three incredible games (2 through 4), a lot of bogus storylines crushed, Dwight Howard dealt a "learning experience", and a particularly awkward coach-announcer brotherly connection. But in the end, Kobe still needs the most dominant center in the league on his team to win a title.



This is one of the few times I will congratulate Pau Gasol. He deserves it; he absolutely punished Howard in the post all series. But he looks like a 6 year old kid in this picture. With a moustache. Gross.

In the next few posts, I think I'll talk about some of these things.
basketball
life aspirations
amazon widget
bicycle
things to discuss in the next blog
music
comics
mocca
subletting for august

And then, another doodle.