Outside of his slam against the Rockets, one against the Raptors a couple years ago, and those two dunks he had against us in the Rock the Court tournament, these are actually the only other dunks of Matt Bonner’s entire basketball career. I know it’s a surprise, but it has to be true.
(via Nik D)
There are a lot of players in the NBA that are entertaining, but few are as so as the gunslinger Stephen Jackson*. I mean, you don’t have to scroll through headlines more than a few minutes before you find SOMETHING. Like this thing from earlier this week about him getting fined by the league for tweeting to Serge Ibaka that he was going to fuck him up the next time he saw him (paraphrased, by the way). Which is why the very first NBA Activity page had to star him.
*Stephen Jackson was a key piece of the Spurs’ 2002-03 championship team, and a star on the Golden State team that knocked the dastardly Dallas Mavericks out of the playoffs in 2006-07. I will forever love him. He could punch my sister in the stomach and the first thing I’d say would be, “Hey, remember when you bombed all those threes in the 19-0 run against the Nets in Game 6 of the NBA Finals.”
Oh, real quick, background: In October, I created this thing called Bun B’s Jumbo Coloring and Rap Activity Tumblr. It’s a combination of rap-inspired coloring pages and rap-inspired activity pages like word searches and connect the dots and so on. It got popular, and it’ll actually become a book in fall 2013, thanks to the nice folks at the prestigious ABRAMS book. So from that came the NBA Activity pages. Every so often, we’ll upload an actionable page here for you to complete, exclusive to The Basketball Jones.
So again: This first one is a Stephen Jackson activity page, wherein you can color him and his headbands and then attach the headbands to his head, paper doll-style. So do that. Aces.
How is this even possible? Even Tyrone Prothro is like, “Umm…that doesn’t make sense.” How did he keep possession of the ball and turn it in to points? I do not understand this, but it is my new favorite rebound.
(via Oskar Jamtander)
They obviously existed a long time before this ever happened, but ever since Michael Lewis wrote about Shane Battier for the New York Times, advanced statistics have become an increasingly important part of basketball analysis. Get the right broadcaster and you’ll hear about points per possession instead of points per game, comments about how pace can affect raw team numbers or such and such a player’s rebound rate. There’s even occasionally a ticker on ESPN that lists the league leaders in PER. My dad emailed me about it once.
And while some coaches eschew this extra information that can be used to make their teams better, the real smart coaches have bought in to this stuff. The Spurs’ Gregg Popovich is one of those really smart coaches and he’s totally on board with one specific statistic. From the San Antonio Express-News:
“That score at the end of the game is huge,” Popovich said. “I don’t think it’s ever been wrong. It’s proven to be the most consistent stat.”
I did a little digging and it turns out that Gregg Popovich is right about this (surprise, surprise) — every team that has been leading at the end of each basketball game has come out with a win. There is a HUGE correlation between leading at the end of a game and who wins the game.
Does it surprise anyone that it would be the Spurs that figured this out? No way. They’re such a smart team — and they have an organization that is so committed to winning and finding new ways to do things — that it only makes sense that they would be the franchise that truly cracks the code on statistics. No wonder they’ve been good for so long, they just keep trying to have the lead at the end of every game. Very smart.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Look NBA guys, us commoners/coyotes just want a quick touch with greatness. We’re not asking for much — just a little skin-to-skin action to see if it’s actually possible to steal your superpowers like we are Rogue from the X-Men. It’s probably not going to happen, so you don’t have to worry that much, but a little dap would be appreciated.
No pressure, just think about it. Nothing creepy will happen. Probably.
(first video via CJ Fogler)
It might not seem like it now, but it’s lucky for the Spurs that Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili couldn’t get on the list for Tony Parker’s fancy steaks barbeque. Bad things happened the last time their French friend was at an exclusive party, so it’s better for the Spurs if they don’t lose all three of these guys to flying shards of glass, kind of like how the president and vice president aren’t allowed to fly on the same plane. Never more than now has “Safety first, then teamwork” been more fitting.
And then he went home, threw some pizza rolls in the microwave and played a couple of games of NBA 2K13, all of which he won in dramatic fashion while getting a whole virtual piggy bank full of VC that he then used to equip the Closer signature skill. All in all, it was a good night for Tony Parker.
