Opening Of The Flood Gates, Part III

Around this time last year, I affectionately dubbed A Pack To Be Named Later the "Best Blog Ever." I've come to realize this proclamation was a bit hasty. In the last year, I've come across many blogs I would consider better. So in the spirit of highlighting a really great blog -- and jacking their idea a second time -- I'd like to crown "A Pack..." as the "Best Blog You've Probably Never Heard Of." Their mission is simple: purchase a pack of sports cards, open said pack of sports cards, the scan and post the cards for their readers to see. Anyone who loved cards as a kid (or still does) could easily lose themselves for an hour on this site.

I bought two packs of the 2009/10 Upper Deck Greats of the Game series -- a set dedicated to the greats of the college game. I bought them at a Dollar Store. Don't laugh. The Dollar Store is an untapped gold mine for card collecting. Firstly, there is no purchasing competition because no one knows they can buy basketball cards at the Dollar Store. Second, $1 for a pack of relatively new cards is cheaper than anywhere else. The big drawback, of course, is selection. What's there is there and sometimes what's there sucks.

Not the case this time, as the Greats of the Game set is a pretty good one. I looked up the set's details when I got home and am kicking myself now. The retail price for a box of these cards is $65 and contains 16 packs of 8 cards (128 cards). Each box contains TWO AUTOGRAPHS and ONE MEMORABILIA card (jersey swatches, etc). Each pack at the Dollar Store contained only five cards, so I could have bought 26 packs (130 cards) and ended up with the equivalent of a box. It would have been $39!!! cheaper and the odds say I would have driven home with three (sentimentally) valuable cards. Oh well. Here were the ten cards I pulled. No autographs, no memorabilia, just some damn good basketball players.

   

We'll never even see a middling NBA player from the Naval Academy in today's game, let alone a player as talented as Robinson.

Here's something fun to do in college: drunkenly argue with your roommate about whether Magic Johnson or Oscar Robertson is the greatest NBA point guard. You both will inevitably agree on one of them -- then some one at the party neither of you know will throw John Stockton's name into the ring.

Pulling a Michael Jordan from the pack is and always will be a big deal to me. He is incapable of taking a bad action photo.

And to follow Jordan up with Rose, almost too good to be true! Not much to say except I still can't believe he plays for the Bulls, I still can't believe he's one of the League's best players, and I still can't believe he's going to get better. Rose's career thus far is like going from 0 to 60 mph in 0.7 seconds.

George Gervin was listed at 6'7 and 180 lbs. in his playing days. He looks even skinnier than that in every picture I've seen of him. Think Kevin Durant but two inches shorter, 30 pounds lighter and less range. I would love to see if he could score on today's bigger, stronger players. Also: the American flag in the background is the stuff of legends. What a shot!


For Part II of the 2009/10 Upper Deck Greats of the Game pack opening, click here.

Throw It Down, Big Man!

Here is a list of the Top 10 things I miss the most about the NBA:

1. Michael Jordan
2. The NBA on NBC theme song
3. Bill Walton (The Commentator)
4. High Top Fades
5. Broken Backboard Dunks
6. Lil' Penny Commercials
7. The Washington Bullets Logo
8. Detlef Schrempf
9. The Charlotte Hornets
10. The 2000-01 Sacramento Kings (RIP Sacramento, by the way)

In all seriousness, the Top 5 are very dear to me. Their loss has been a little easier to cope with because every few years, one of the Top 5 threatens to make a comeback. Jordan already came back once and is practicing with the Bobcats again. Bill Walton occasionally calls Celtics and Kings games. Brandon Jennings reintroduced the NBA to the high top fade for a short time last year. The NBA on NBC is never coming back, but the NBA on ESPN/ABC theme song is flying under the radar. It's no NBC, but pretty good nonetheless. The current group of youngsters will look back fondly on the ESPN/ABC theme like we do the NBC.
The age of broken backboards however, isn't coming back. I suppose that's a good thing. Raining glass can be pretty dangerous. The NBA also saves time and money -- two of the League's biggest assets at this point.
We all know that the rims and backboards are made sturdier nowadays, but how exactly do they work? Arthur Ehrat is credited with the invention of the breakaway rim as we know it today. Not a fan of basketball himself, Ehrat was contacted by his nephew, an assistant basketball coach at St. Louis University in 1975, about creating a rim that could withstand forceful slams. After a couple failed attempts, Ehrat struck gold -- in the form of a John Deere cultivator. He found that the spring was strong enough to not only withstand missed shots, but dunks as well.
Ehrat's new rim debuted in the 1978 Final Four. Dunking had been illegal since 1967 in the college game, but recently reinstated in 1976, due in large part to the popularity of Dr. J and the rest of the ABA's high-risers.
The NBA followed suit, introducing the breakaway rim in 1979 as a response to Darryl Dawkins, who shattered two backboards that year. While the new rim proved to be more successful than its predecessor, players were still bringing backboards down.
That changed in the early 1990s. NBA rims are now attached directly to the arm extending beyond the backboard. The arm, coupled with the springs on the breakaway rim absorb the force that the glass backboard used to. The video below contains a nice visual of this process, in addition to a disheartening experiment for those still hoping to see another broken NBA backboard in their lifetime. 



In 1992, Shaq became the last player to shatter a backboard in an NBA game. The once famous trend lasted for 46 years but will never be seen again, at least in the NBA anyway. In memoriam, I conclude with this:

An Interesting Inquiry

Below is an excerpt from Larry Bird and Magic Johnson's book When The Game Was Ours, written by Jackie MacMullan:

   The "Dream Team" needed buffers for their privacy and their safety. During their 16 days in Barcelona, the Ambassador's game room served as an exclusive club where the players could shoot pool, play cards, enjoy a beer, and invent occasions to compete with one another.
On the night of August 7th, [some of the players] were wide awake, embroiled in an emotional debate over a simple question posed by Bird: which NBA team was the greatest of all time?
"Obviously one of our Lakers teams," answered Magic, leaning on his pool stick. "We won five championships. More than all of you."
"No, it's the great Celtics teams with my man Bill Russell," said center Patrick Ewing, who played for the New York Knicks but was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "He won 11 rings."
"You're forgetting the '86 Celtics, with the best front line in the history of basketball, including this guy right here," added NBC commentator Ahmad Rashad, pointing to Bird.
"That Celtics front line was brutal," agreed Charles Barkley.
Jordan, refusing to allow the chatter to disrupt his concentration, knocked his ball into the corner pocket and puffed on his cigar. He was 29 years old and had just won his second straight championship and his sixth consecutive scoring title. His counterparts in the room were decorated NBA veterans, yet their body of work was nearly complete. The maestro of the Bulls was only just beginning to add new strokes to his championship canvas.
"You haven't even seen the best NBA team of all time yet," Jordan announced. "I'm just getting started. I'm going to win more championships than all of you guys. Tell you what. Let's have this conversation after I'm done playing."
"You aren't winning five championships," Magic protested.
"Michael, I'm going to steal at least one of them from you," Barkley shot back.
"Quiet," Bird said. "Charles, you ain't won nothing. You're out of this discussion. Ahmad, same thing. You're gone. Patrick, you don't have any championships either, so you need to shut up and sit down right here and learn some things."
Jordan insisted that his Chicago teams belonged in the conversation about the all-time greats; Bird reminded Jordan that he used to torture Scottie Pippen regularly before his back betrayed him.
"I feel sorry for you," Magic told Jordan. "You will never have what Larry and I had. We went two weeks without sleep knowing, if we made one mistake, the other guy was going to take it and use it to beat us. Who do you measure yourself against?"

Magic's last question, "Who do you measure yourself against?" particularly resonates in today's NBA. The League's current batch of stars has been criticized for being too friendly with each other, a criticism that reached its pinnacle this summer when LeBron, Wade, and Bosh joined the Heat together. But is "friendly" necessarily a bad thing?
Magic, Bird, and Jordan would have never played with each other. They said so themselves, and there's no reason to suggest otherwise. As the story goes, they were too preoccupied with trying to beat the other than to ever think of joining them. Fair enough.
From 1985 until the end of their careers, Magic and Bird had a friendly rivalry. They were cordial but still wanted to beat each other. Magic also wanted desperately to play with Bird -- in the 1992 Olympics. Battling chronic back problems, Bird had planned on foregoing the 1992 Olympic games. It was Magic that talked him into it. He was intrigued by the idea of playing with a comparably talented player who also exhibited the same competitive drive that separated him from the rest of his Laker teammates. Jordan called the Olympic experience, "The time of his life." Every member of the team relished the opportunity to play with teammates who pushed them everyday at practice.
Competitiveness is something we as fans often overlook. Great players, and teams for that matter, often get bored playing against inferior competition. Before this year, LeBron and Wade never played with anyone in their life that approached their skill set. The daily competition in practice will make them better players, in a way that competing against each other every so often couldn't.
That's not to say I agree with their decision to join the Heat. I still would have much rather seen them as the best player on two different teams. But the notion that one of them would have to scale down their game to accommodate the other has already been proven wrong. In fact, Wade and LeBron are better players this year than they were last year. I think just being around the other has brought out the best in them.
While never actualized, even members of the 1992 Dream Team recognized the vast potential of teaming up. LeBron and Wade were accused of lacking competitiveness because they took the dream of the 1992 Olympic squad and made it an NBA reality.
We may have all been wrong. The Heat may have done the competitive thing. They just did it in a way that the previous generation of players would have never conceived. 

Spurs vs. Inter Milan - Champions League Game 4

Every so often an athlete comes around that you can't help but marvel at. Let my preface my point by stating there will be very little analysis of the game in this piece. This will be closer to a Gareth Bale love fest. The type of "he can do no wrong" love fest I normally reserve for Derrick Rose. Bear with me.
Like I was saying, every so often an athlete comes around that you can't help but marvel at. Gareth Bale is one of those athletes.
Bale is the type of athlete that demands your attention. Some people watch sports casually. They turn on the TV and do something else. The game is merely background noise. That is, unless one of the aforementioned "special" athletes is playing. Look away and you might miss something.
Michael Jordan, Barry Sanders, and Ken Griffey Jr. all had this effect. Every possession, rush, or at bat seemed important, because, in reality, they were. History was being made, and we were well aware of it.
The 21 year old Bale belongs amongst the ranks of these great individual talents. Every time he touched the ball, it was like time stopped. When the ball was passed to Bale, the crowd cheered, followed by a split second of silence, and then an "ooh" or "ahh" reaction after he made a play. This confirmed what I already believed: fans dropped whatever thought, conversation, or text message they were enamored in and watched Bale's every move. They didn't want to miss something special. While watching the World Cup, Lionel Messi is the only player I can remember that had a similar "time-stopping" effect as Bale did tonight.
The reactions on Twitter to Tottenham's 3-1 win were often comical. The attention was focused almost solely on Inter's Maicon, who was widely regarded as the best right back in the world until Bale torched him in two straight games. Maicon was a trending topic, not Bale. Most tweets were jokes directed at Maicon, and I'm proud to say, I got a few in myself.
The amount of attention focused on Maicon tells me that Bale's dominance this year has been accepted as a common occurrence. It's not even interesting anymore to discuss how great Bale has been. It's more fun to rip on one of his many victims.

Tonight, Maicon played Craig Ehlo to Bale's Michael Jordan. In the deciding Game 5 of the first round of the 1989 playoffs, Jordan hit what would be his first career playoff game winner in a Hall of Fame career filled with clutch moments. Most people aren't even aware that Jordan scored 44 points in that game, or that "The Shot" clinched the series for that matter.
Jordan's dominance was accepted. The lasting image from that shot was Craig Ehlo, a great defender, playing picture perfect defense and then crumbling to the ground because he did everything he could, but still got beat by a superior player.
We talk about Ehlo because he didn't get beat like that. Just like Maicon doesn't get beat like he did today. They're the unfortunate fall-guys. The talking points to reaffirm the greatness of others when ironically, Ehlo and Maicon were/are great in their own right.
Bulls color commentator Stacey King likes to say of Rose, "He's too big, too fast, too strong, too good." Sometimes simplicity works best. Bale was all of those things today.
In the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy Bale's development as a world class player. I'm not sure how long he'll be in a Spurs uniform. I imagine this is how Royals fans felt watching Zack Greinke's 2009 Cy Young season.

Just Wright - Two Rights Can Make A Wrong

We've all heard the saying "Two wrongs don't make a right." Theoretically then, two rights shouldn't make a wrong, correct? As I found out this weekend, that is most definitely not true.
How can Common, one of the greatest rappers of all time in my opinion, who gave us this classic metaphorical track, one of the greatest songs of the 90s...


and this classic DJ Premier produced cut, one of the greatest songs of the 2000s...



Coupled with basketball, the game that gave us such great moments as Michael Jordan's 1998 NBA Finals game winner...



and John Havlicek's improbable steal to seal Game 7 of the 1965 Division Finals...



Create this travesty?

To be fair, I wasn't expecting this movie to be good. One look at the movie poster is all it takes to know this film is going to be filled with supremely awkward moments. For that reason alone, I decided to rent Just Wright and watch it with my girlfriend.
Here are my Top 5 train wreck moments:
1) Scott McKnight (Common) is playing the piano while rehabbing his knee injury. Yes, he apparently plays the piano quite well. Leslie (Queen Latifah, his physical therapist who becomes his love interest) brings him a plate of some marshmallow and chocolate chip cookie concoction. Scott takes a bite and whispers to Leslie in a pseudo-smooth voice, "Incredible." Common doesn't do the romantic moments too well.
2) Scott McKnight, star player for the New Jersey Nets, injures his knee while attempting a spin move...in the All Star Game. Has anyone ever tried hard enough to warrant an injury in the All Star Game? I had to laugh at this.
3) In that same All Star Game, they were able to reel in Marv Albert, Mike Fratello, and Kenny Smith to make an appearance as the announcing team. During the pre-game analysis, Fratello says something like, "We have many great stars here tonight. Dwyane Wade, Dwight Howard, but most people are here to see Scott McKnight." Too over the top, and since when do people watch the All Star Game to see one player? Isn't every All Star kind of a big draw?
4) Dwight Howard stops by McKnight's house to inform him that the Nets are not planning on offering him a new contract. While it's funny that he'd hear this news from Howard first, that's not the best part. Howard enters the room by grabbing Common's remote control airplane mid-flight and then does a dance my girlfriend says is called "The Stanky Leg."
5) The lack of chemistry between Common and Queen Latifah. Something tells me they'd have much better chemistry in the booth. Their kiss at the end of the movie was painful to watch. You could tell neither wanted any part of that. I would have preferred to watch 100 minutes of Paula Patton.
I'm not sure if this movie was intended to be a comedy, but it gave me a few laughs. If you're in to movies that are so bad they're good, check this one out.