Archive for the ‘Pick-and-Pop’ Category

You could go an entire postseason without getting a game half as crazy as Monday night’s Spurs-Warriors contest, a double OT affair with countless bizarre plays, swings in momentum, big shots, and even a couple unforgettable broadcast moments. In the case of this year’s postseason, though — which I have to say, is off to an absolutely baller start through one-and-a-third rounds — you only had to go back nine days to another game of comparable lunacy.

Game 4 of Bulls-Nets, the triple OT game in Chicago now known familiary as “The Nate Robinson Game,” seemed for all the world like it would go unchallenged as the single craziest game from the 2013 playoffs. In my article listing the 10 craziest moments from that game — and narrowing it down to 10 was no small feat, mind you — I predicted that “you won’t see a zanier, more entertaining, and in all likelihood, more unforgettable game for the remainder of this postseason … and probably won’t for a couple more to follow, either.” I felt it was a sure bet at the time.

Yet just one series later, and we have a true challenger. Which of these two exhilaratingly surreal and unpredictable basketball contests was truly the weirdest? Let’s break down the qualifications, one by one.

1. More Overtimes: Let’s get this one out of the way first, since it’s important to consider — more overtimes, more time for further twists and turns — but obvious and inarguable: Bulls-Nets went three overtimes, Warriors-Spurs only two. Boring, but worth mentioning.

Advantage: Bulls-Nets

2. Single Biggest Shot Hit in the Game. For Bulls-Nets, this would probably have to be Joe Johnson’s rolli ng jumper in the lane in the first overtime, forcing the second OT and negating NateRob’s crazy banker (more on that in a minute) that seemed to seal the deal for the Bulls, a shot that totally deflated the Untied Center. For Spurs-Warriors, it’d of course be the Manu Ginobili three-pointer in the second OT with just seconds to go to put the Spurs up two, which had Gregg Popovich Googling how to make huevos rancheros. The Joe Johnson shot was huge but super-anticlimactic, while the Ginobili three seemed like the only way — minus a Steph Curry halfcourt swish — the Spurs-Warriors game should end.

Advantage: Spurs-Warriors

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On July 31, 2007, something happened that set the course for the next half-decade of American professional basketball: the Boston Celtics traded five players and two draft picks to the Minnesota Timberwolves for Kevin Garnett. Then about six months later, the team’s age-old rival from across the country, the Los Angeles Lakers, responded by upping the ante, trading three players and two draft picks to the Memphis Grizzlies for Pau Gasol. The two trades, and the ensuing personnel moves they helped make possible, would fortify the two teams into perennial powerhouses, in the process reviving a feud that had once (twice, even) defined the NBA, and would result in the teams combining to win the next three championships — two of which even featured the clubs squaring off against each other, as they did six times in the ’60s, and three times in the ’80s.

That’s all over now. If one more nail in the coffin of Lakers-Celtics, Mk. III was needed, it was certainly provided in this year’s postseason, when for the first time since the Pau and KG trades, both teams have lost in the first round, in series that neither were expected to win. Both teams are in a state of personnel-related turmoil that they largely managed to avoid over the first five seasons of their resurgence; now, of the many players who have defined the two franchises, it’s unclear if any of them will be back and healthy at the start of next season. The Lakers and Celtics will almost certainly be really good again, possibly at the same time, and possibly even soon, but it won’t be with this same cast of characters, or anything close. It’s time to move on.

Still, upon the death of this latest incarnation of the NBA’s oldest and greatest rivalry, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the significance that Lakers-Celtics III played in re-shaping the NBA over its half-decade of prominence, how it helped revive the league from one of its deeper lulls, and how it now leaves the league in a much better place than where it found it. Not to mention, the many memories it provided, the careers it validated, and the mythology it helped re-perpetuate.

Consider what the league was like just before the Kevin Garnett trade. The reigning powers in the West and East were the Spurs (who won three championships in five seasons) and Pistons (who made five straight conference finals, soon to be six), seemingly because no other franchise had come along that was talented and consistent enough to totally dethrone them. The Pacers once appeared to be building a championship-caliber team, but they were derailed by the Malice at the Palace, and gutted by the ensuing suspensions and trade demands. The Heat and Mavericks both made the Finals in 2006, but fell apart shortly afterwards, neither team winning a single playoff series for another three years. The Suns tried to prove you could do it without defense, and very well might have if not for the basketball gods (and/or the Spurs, and/or David Stern, and/or their own cheapskate owner) constantly getting in their way. And whether or not he was personally ready, it’d take the Cavs another couple of years to realize LeBron James needed more than Larry Hughes and Drew Gooden as “help” to win his first title, though he did manage to drag Cleveland to their first and only Finals appearance in franchise history, anyway.

It might not have been a state of chaos in the NBA, exactly, but it had precious little in the way of order or narrative. Average NBA fans found it tough to muster excitement for history-devoid Finals matchups like Heat-Mavericks or Spurs-Cavaliers, and not even diehard NBA fans could make a whole lot out of the resulting games from the latter, four low-scoring games all won by San Antonio, which produced the lowest ratings in NBA Finals history. Though teams like the Seven Seconds or Less Suns and the We Believe Warriors gained well-deserved followings, there was no big market, powerhouse team to really capture the nation’s imagination the way the Jordan Bulls or Shaq Lakers had — and that’s exactly what the NBA suddenly needed to distract fans from the Tim Donaghy scandal, which broke just about a week before the KG trade and threatened to undermine the integrity of the entire sport. (“After the most damaging NBA season in three decades … we reached the tipping point with Tim Donaghy,” wrote a noted Lakers-Celtics anthologist for ESPN. “Guilty or innocent, we will never watch an NBA game the same way.”)

While all this was going on, Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant were toiling away on subpar Celtics and Lakers teams, either just scraping their way into the playoffs and losing in the first round, or missing the postseason entirely, as Kobe did in ’05 and Pierce did in ’06 and ’07. By summer ’07, both franchise players were growing impatient and gritting their teeth through their team’s lean years. Adrian Wojnarowski reported in June of that year that Paul Pierce would request a trade shortly after draft night were he not paired with “a talented veteran co-star,” and Kobe actually did request a trade, very nearly being sent to Detroit. But both stars were talked off the ledge, with Pierce particularly assuaged by the Celtics’ draft night deal for perennial All-Star Ray Allen, and Bryant eventually comforted by the improvement of big man prospect Andrew Bynum in his third season, a player who Kobe had previously insisted the Lakers deal for veteran help. Soon, of course, both players would get the blockbuster deal to validate their hard-earned patience.

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You’ve been wondering it. You’ve been reading about it everywhere. You’ve even heard commissioner David Stern ask the question himself during Game 4 of Bucks-Heat: “Is this the worst year ever [for injuries], or does it just seem like it?”

It’s a question worth asking. It seems like every couple of days, a new injury pops up that could affect the postseason — either just a series, or perhaps the entire title race. Just during the playoffs we’ve seen David Lee, Russell Westbrook, Tiago Splitter and Jeremy Lin suffer injuries that have kept them out of games or even longer. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t feel like this was already the case for most of the NBA season, in which just about every team — particularly in the East — seemed to lose a key player for much or all of the regular season. (Except for the Heat, of course, because those guys got so good that they are now impervious to bad things happening to them.) And it wasn’t just relatively important role players that went down — it was also franchise players, league-defining superstars, and even a couple former MVPs who went down.

But is it actually that much worse this year? It seems like a lot for one season, but is that just a recency bias that doesn’t actually hold up to deep study of the injury situation of other regular seasons and playoffs?

I decided to look at the injury situations of the last five seasons and postseasons, to compare and contrast in order to see if this year really is far and away the worst in recent memory. I’ve listed all the major injuries suffered to key players for most or all the regular season or playoffs — “key players” being loosely defined as a top three player on a lottery-bound team, or a top-six player on a playoff-bound one, and “most” being more rigidly defined as more than half of the team’s games played. (The latter qualification unfortunately doesn’t count for important regular-season injuries such as Dirk’s 29 games missed for Dallas this season, or post-season injuries like Chris Bosh’s nine playoff games missed for Miami last year, but nearly every player gets injured for some amount of time over a season, and I had to draw the line somewhere to avoid filtering in too many less-consequential IR visits.) Players who already missed the entire previous season were not counted in a year’s tally, so Greg Oden gets listed no later than 2010, for instance.

Let’s begin with a look at this year, which obviously still has a ways to go:

2013:

Key players injured for most or all of regular season: Andrew Bynum, Anderson Varejao, Glenn Davis, Kevin Love, Chauncey Billups, Andrew Bogut

Injured for most or all of playoffs: Russell Westbrook, Danilo Gallinari, David Lee, Kobe Bryant, Jeremy Lin (if he misses Game 5)

Injured for most or all of both regular season and playoffs: Amar’e Stoudemire, Rajon Rondo, Danny Granger, Lou Williams, Derrick Rose

Number of All-Stars from the previous season (2012) to miss significant regular or postseason time: Six (Bynum, Bryant, Westbrook, Love, Rose, Rondo)

Number of injuries that affected the title chances of possible contenders: Four (Westbrook, Stoudemire, Gallinari, Rose)

Analysis: Obviously a ton to work with here. The six missing All-Stars is easily the most of any of the years I looked at, and that’s not even counting 2012 All-Stars like Dirk, Pau, Nash and Manu, all of whom missed notable regular season (and in Nash’s case, playoff) time, but not more than half their team’s games. The Westbrook and Rose injuries both have significant impacts on the playoff races in their respective conferences, and though you can argue whether the Nuggets were really title contenders even with Gallinari, or whether Amar’e's injury actually hurts the Knicks’ chances of contention, their injuries are not without postseason impact either.

Also worth noting are the Kevin Love and Andrew Bynum injuries, both of which arguably affected the playoff race by eliminating the Sixers and Timberwolves respectively from the equation altogether — were both healthy for all or much of the season, the two squads were likely to be postseason bound. And of course, there’s Kobe Bryant, whose injury probably affected the postseason little in the long run, but whose star power and league-wide recognition eclipses any other player to go down with a major injury in recent years. Really, only a missing LeBron James would compare in that respect, and that’s probably not happening anytime soon.

Now, let’s see how each of the last five seasons stack up injury-wise, by comparison:

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What a game.

I don’t know if people really properly appreciated it while it was happening. Around the times of the second and third OTs, my Twitter timeline was mostly filled with NBA fans irritated that the game simply refused to end, while TNT simultaneously refused to find another home for the concurrent start of Game Four of the Grizzlies-Clippers series, of which national viewers ended up missing the entire first half. And it’s true that in the grand scheme of things, this game was almost completely inconsequential — barring the miraculous return of You Know Who for a second round series against the Heat, neither of these teams have much chance of surviving to the conference finals, thus making it more of a curious footnote to these playoffs, an amusing distraction amidst the actually important dramas of the first round.

Still. You won’t see a zanier, more entertaining, and in all likelihood, more unforgettable game for the remainder of this postseason than Game Four of Bulls-Nets, and probably won’t for a couple more to follow, either. By my estimation, it’s the best game we’ve seen in the first round of the playoffs since 2009, when the Bulls played the Celtics in a series that had three or four games as good as this, because that was the greatest playoff series ever. (Thibs was even asked in the postgame conference if this game reminded him of that series; unsurprisingly, he denied any such connection and looked pissed that the question had even been asked.) I gasped, I screamed, I jumped out of my seat so many times eventually I just kept standing. It was awesome.

Because there’s a chance that the team that wins the series — probably the Bulls, though I wouldn’t count out the Nets just yet — ends up getting blanked in the second round, and then NBA lore forgets about the game altogether, I wanted to make sure that there’s at least some sort of historical record of all the crazy crap that went down between the Nets and Bulls on Saturday. Here are the 10 things that’ll stick in my mind the most about this game.

10. The final score was Bulls 142, Nets 134.
Even though it was inflated with the three OTs, let’s not lose sight of how bizarre it was for so many points to be scored in this game, especially considering that the last contest between the Bulls and Nets ended at 79-76. The teams combined for 121 more points this time around, in just 15 minutes of bonus action. Even by the end of regulation, with the two teams knotted at 111-111, they had already outscored their combined total from Game Three by 67.

I saw the final score of this one flash across my screen a couple times on the TNT and ESPN tickers while I was watching the later games, and pictured how much my mind would be blown to see that final score for the first time completely out of context. Pretty hard to imagine.

9. In a game where five other players fouled out, Brook Lopez somehow ended up getting whistled just three times.
I didn’t even notice this until well after the fact. Kirk Hinrich, Taj Gibson and Joakim Noah all fouled out for the Bulls in this one — meaning Nazr Mohammed was playing crunch time in the third OT, actually making a couple game-saving plays, an Honorable Mention crazy thing from this game — as did Gerald Wallace and Reggie Evans for the Nets. Yet Brook Lopez, the Nets’ seven-foot rim protector, who not only led the game in blocks (along with Noah) but leads the entire league for the playoffs with his 4.3 rejections per contest, plays 51 minutes and still ends with three fouls to give? How the hell is that possible?

Of course, most Bulls fans would protest that Lopez actually committed far more than three personals over the course of the game, but that referee Tony Brothers just wouldn’t blow the whistle on them. One no-call on a possible Joakim Noah and-one towards the end of the first overtime seemed particularly egregious, with Lopez clearly raking Noah across BOTH arms, and Noah seemed to draw enough contact from Lopez on a last-second drive in the second OT to get to the line as well. You’d think the home team would be the one to get the preferential treatment in a game like this, but the Nets got whistled eight fewer times than the Bulls over the course of this one, and Lopez didn’t get whistled once over three OTs, until an intentional end-of-game foul on Marco Belinelli. Bizarre.

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If you’ve managed to catch any of the Bucks-Heat series thus far — and if so, hopefully you’re turning every game off after three quarters — you’ve probably heard mention of something Milwaukee point guard Brandon Jennings said about the series a couple days before the playoffs started. The quote came from the Wisconsin Sports Awards ceremonies, where Jennings was presumably asked about the Bucks’ upcoming first round series against the heavily favored Heat. His take on the series? “I’m real confident. I’m sure everybody is writing us off but but I see us winning the series in six.”

After the Bucks lost the first two games of the series in Miami — by a combined 35 points, with Jennings shooting 31 percent — the over-confident point guard was given a chance to retract his initial prediction. He respectfully declined. “I still say six,” he told Craig Sager. “I think we just showed so much [in Game Two]. We just let it slip towards the end … but as a team, we showed a whole lot of improvement.” Brandon looked a little nervous while giving the interview, perhaps, and did allow that the Bucks’ victory in six “might take a little longer,” but for the most part, he held strong in his initial bold prediction.

Well, after last night’s Heat victory in Milwaukee — which, like the first two contests, was a game for about three quarters, until the Heat hit the NOS and just sped away, as they are wont to do — Jennings’ prediction is officially a bust. There’s still a chance that the Bucks come back to take the next four games — though it’s not a particularly big one, considering no team has ever come back from a 3-0 series deficit in NBA postseason history, and if it ever does happen, it probably won’t be a team as average as the Bucks doing it against a team as outstanding as the Heat — but no matter what happens from here, Bucks in Six is officially a no go.

So the question then becomes: Do we get to make fun of Brandon Jennings for this yet? His prediction was basically laughable from the get go, but there was always that tiny chance that he and the Bucks had been playing possum for the entire season, or that he knew of some secret weapon the Bucks were about to unleash on the Heat for the series (Drew Gooden?), or maybe just that he was going to hire someone to whack LeBron James in the back of the leg with a crowbar in the locker room before Game One and then say mean things to Chris Bosh on the way out. Now that three games have passed and none of those things appear to have been the case, it seems like a pretty good time to start pointing and laughing at No. 3 for Milwaukee.

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It was bad enough when ABC unveiled will.i.am and Justin Bieber’s “#thatPOWER” as their official song for the playoffs, complete with a music video featuring the likes of Dwight Howard and Joakim Noah (and on the low end of the awkwardness spectrum, Zach Randolph and Brook Lopez) dancing and fake-balling with the Black Eyed Peas frontman, and followed by an increasingly uncomfortable in-game interview segment with Jeff Van Gundy and Mike Breen. Like most will.i.am-related songs (and all will.i.am solo singles), the song is mind-numbingly silly and irritating in a way that seems benign on first listen, but becomes distinctly unforgivable the 40th or 50th time around. Still, at least this was only the ABC song. You only hear that on the weekends in the playoffs, at least at first, and it never seems quite as pervasive as the then-yet-to-be-announced TNT song.

Sadly, the TNT song turned out to be nearly as bad. Rihanna’s “Right Now,” unofficial single off the Barbadian singer’s “Unapologetic” album, isn’t quite as stoopid as “#thatPOWER” — there’s no hashtags in the title, at least, and no boasts about “staying in fly attire” or “feeling funky fresh” — but it’s similarly uninspiring, and similarly grating with repeat listens. A collaboration with famed producer/DJ David Guetta, “Right Now” follows the established formula of Guetta vocal productions being inversely proportional in effort and creativity to the celebrity of the performer, so as you might guess, “Right Now” is exceedingly phoned-in and anonymous, with the same pre-Mayan Apoclypse (when recorded, anyway) lyrical fixation on PARTYING NOW NOW QUICK NOW WORLD ENDING as 65 percent of pop songs of the 2010s, and a hook so unimaginative as to be practically non-existent.

Compounding the general unlikability of both songs is that they’re basically unlikeable in the same way, as bottom-of-the-barrel by-products of the EDM moment in recent pop music. will.i.am and David Guetta were two of the guys most responsible for bringing European-styled electronic dance music back to the US pop charts, with their chart-topping (for 14 weeks!) collaboration on the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” helping to open the floodgates, and now both are milking the genre’s mainstream acceptance for all its worth, without exactly doing a ton to push things forward. The fact that both are showing up in promos for the playoffs for a major American sport (though at least Guetta’s creepy, zonked-out mug has been thankfully kept out of the TNT promos) is surely yet another peak in dance music’s all-out takeover of the country’s popular culture.

Like all NBA promo music, you rarely hear the songs in full over the course of games, or even for a verse at a time. More frequently, a single motif from the song is used coming in and out of bumpers and laced through pregame coverage. Since this is dance music in the 2010s we’re talking about, that of course means that all we usually really hear from either song is the break, a couple of bass-heavy, wordless drop sections with little to do with the primary melodies of their respective songs. Hear enough of both of them, and they start to sort of blend together in your head, until you forget which break belongs to which song (or maybe they’re actually secretly identical?). As Shaq would say, it’s a hell of a 1-2 punch.

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Is anything gonna be better than this Western Conference first round? I couldn’t have plotted it better myself — all four matchups are the exact ones I was hoping would shake out going into the final weeks of this regular season, not an obvious NBA TV series among them. (OK, maybe Warriors-Nuggets, but that’s more about the market sizes and lack of marquee players than any comment on the likely quality of the games themselves.) The four series should be filled with enough drama for an entire postseason, with player comebacks, long-simmering feuds, stylistic clashes, and a whole lot of across-the-board star power. It’s gonna be great, seriously.

But before that starts — like, TOMORROW — you gotta know your subplots for each series. Here are the five biggest for each of the Western Conference first-rounders.

OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER (1) VS. HOUSTON ROCKETS (8)

1. James Harden vs. His old team.
Duh. This subplot is worth two or three regular subplots just on his own. The two teams behind the biggest trade of the season (technically last offseason, whatever) meeting up in the first round of the playoffs, with the biggest name moved in the deal taking his new team from the lottery to postseason respectability, and his old club prospering even further in his absence. And there’s absolutely no telling how Harden will perform in the series. In three regular-season games against the franchise that drafted him, Harden had 17 on 3-16 shooting, then 25 on 6-17 shooting, then 46 on 14-19 shooting. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a couple games of each in this series.

2. Sam Presti vs. Daryl Morey
Most debates about the league’s best GM will include these two guys at the forefront, the rare front-office types with visibility and name recognition on par of their head coaches and even some of their players. Even before they pulled off the biggest and least-expected trade of the year in tandem, they were associated with each other for their smart drafting, innovative cap-management techniques and ability to see both the short and the long game. But after the Harden deal and this upcoming first-rounder, they’ll likely be mentioned in the same sentence for the rest of their careers.

3. Derek Fisher vs. the Rockets
Yeah, technically Fish was an ex-Rocket (as were, of course, Kevin Martin and Jeremy Lamb, as well as Hasheem Thabeet for a minute there), but he never actually played a game in H-Town before being cut and re-routed to OKC, so that’s not why he’s listed here. Rather, he’s listed for this play in the 2009 postseason, where he responded to his Lakers getting muscled around by the tougher Rockets in their second-round matchup by absolutely decking Luis Scola (who probably flopped a decent amount, but still), then giving a kind of “What? Me worry?” head-scratch. The list of teams around the NBA that hate Derek Fisher for various reasons is a long one, and the Rockets’ case against him will likely only get stronger after he gives Jeremy Lin a forearm shiver this postseason (and somehow gets Lin called for a charge in the process).

4. Winston Garland Flashbacks.
Journeyman point guard and Leigh Ellis trading card favorite Winston Garland made the news last year for something he had done nearly two decades earlier, when he illegally snuck on to the court at the end of the Rockets’ Game Seven of the ’93 Western Conference Semifinals matchup with the then-Seattle SuperSonics, a minor and ultimately inconsequential cheat that went unnoticed until Ethan Sherwood Strauss noticed it and wrote about it for ESPN. Memories of the play and moment will be especially strong for one guy involved with this series: Thunder coach Scott Brooks, who was on the sideline right next to Garland when he made his out-of-bounds creep, and who played with the Rockets for two-and-a-half seasons, even winning a championship with them in ’94.

5. The divided loyalty of the Oklahoma City RedHawks.
The triple-A team of the Houston Astros — and a bunch of future stars they surely are — is based out of OKC, called the Oklahoma City RedHawks. Who will such part-time major leaguers as Jordan Lyles and Jimmy Paredes, or prospects like Jarred Cosart and Jonathan Villar, be rooting for in this series? In any event, the Triple A club should do a promotional scrimmage with the big league club at some point in this series. At best, the Astros would be 3:2 favorites.

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Archive for the ‘Pick-and-Pop’ Category

Pick-and-Pop: Which was crazier, Bulls-Nets Game 4 or Spurs-Warriors Game 1?

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under 2013 NBA Playoffs, Chicago Bulls, Pick-and-Pop, San Antonio Spurs on May 08, 2013

The Pick-and-Pop: A eulogy for the third era of Lakers-Celtics in the NBA

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, Pick-and-Pop on May 06, 2013

The Pick-and-Pop: Is this really the worst season for injuries in recent memory?

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under 2013 NBA Playoffs, Pick-and-Pop on May 01, 2013

Pick-and-Pop: The 10 craziest things about that 3OT Bulls-Nets game

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under 2013 NBA Playoffs, Brooklyn Nets, Chicago Bulls, Pick-and-Pop on Apr 29, 2013

Pick-and-Pop: Should Brandon Jennings be held accountable for his ‘Bucks in 6′ prediction?

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under 2013 NBA Playoffs, Milwaukee Bucks, Pick-and-Pop on Apr 26, 2013

Pick-and-Pop: ‘#thatPower,’ ‘Right Now,’ and the dregs of EDM soundtracking the NBA playoffs

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under Music, Pick-and-Pop on Apr 24, 2013

The Pick-and-Pop: Know your playoff subplots, Western Conference edition

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under 2013 NBA Playoffs, Pick-and-Pop on Apr 19, 2013

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