Somewhere, Sllaacs is Crying

Boom Dizzle opts out. Great job, Warriors. Gwen Knapp pours salt in the Warriors fans' wounds, musing that he wants to play in LA so he can be near the company he runs with Jessica Alba's baby-daddy. She thinks the Clippers are the team, but wouldn't it be funny if he ended up on the Lakers?

Cheap Shot of the Week: J.A. Adande

Writing for ESPN.com, J.A. Adande drops this little simile into his account of Kobe's maturation into the leader of the Lakers:

Winning always helps. L.A. is a town that adopted the Raiders, which is like picking up a hitchhiker a mile from a prison. But they were only a year removed from winning the Super Bowl when they got to L.A., and they won a Super Bowl their second year there. So there are still people who miss them more than a decade after they returned to Oakland.

(Emphasis added.)

The Raiders-as-thugs sentiment is nothing new, and indeed at times we Raiders even seem to want to cultivate it (as in the tag line to this blog: Like Rhythm, but Thugged Out). The larger point however, that people in Los Angeles still miss the Raiders, is undeniable; go to any game at the Coliseum and you'll meet people who have driven, flown, or bussed up from Southern California.

In other news, it's been a long time since this blog has been updated. That's okay, since anyone who wants Raiders news can go to Jerry Mac or Jason Jones and get it hot. But my mother-in-law gave me three books: Black Knight: The Story of Al Davis and His Raiders by Ira Simmons, Cruisin' with the Tooz by John Matuszak and Snake, by Kenny Stabler. I've started the Al book; I'll be reviewing it as I go along here while waiting for training to camp. From what I can see so far, it's definitely hagiography, and what Simmons lacks in the prose department he more than makes up for with his enthusiasm for his subject. Snake has the best cover: an overturned Raiders helmet filled with crushed cans of Olympia and PBR.

Unfortunate Metaphor

Just caught the fourth quarter of the Lakers/Warriors game from Staples. A player on the Warriors hit two clutch threes in the final 38 seconds to seal the win.

Bob Fitzgerald, understandably excited, said something like, "Every good western has its gunslinger. And tonight, that's Stephen Jackson."

The Stephen Jackson who has this tattoo.

Ric Bucher wrote an excellent profile of Stack Jack last month that doesn't shy away from his history with guns and violence.

It's just interesting to me how prevalent and cherished the "gunslinger" metaphor in our culture (Fitzgerald went on to say this evening that tonight Jackson was "John Wayne.") And personally, I use it all the time. But when an athlete in real life gets shot (Darrent Williams, Shaun Taylor), some of the same people who throw around these labels are the first to moralize about "ghetto mentality" and "thug life." I'm not saying Fitzgerald does that, I'm just noticing the irony. There's a similar dynamic with the term "warrior," which gets thrown around a lot, but then when Kellen Winslow, Jr. rants after a game that he's a "soldier" gets scolded about wounded veterans at Walter Reed (I'm talking about you, Mark May).

So we, as sports fans, should maybe stop using these terms. Or we should lighten up a little when Kevin Garnett takes the metaphor a step further and says he's getting strapped with his "nine, his uzi," etc...Brad Miller certainly added to the levity there when he said he was getting his crossbow and shotgun or whatever Nugent-style arsenal he was going to meet KG with.

A Sllaacs NBA Take

So how do you win 50 games and still not make the playoffs? Compete in the NBA's Western Conference in 2008, that's how. No NBA team has ever won 50 and not made the playoffs - I think Houston missed the post season with 45 wins or something like that a little while ago in the 2000's. Some of the Western Conference teams who were on a 50-win pace have already started to slow down, like the former Jail-Blazers, now the Brandon Roys; and the Hornets - the CP3's - may not be far from skidding back toward the 35-win plateau where they belong. Hell, my own GSW's may hit the shnide also; they are really just a Boom Dizzle injury away from dropping off the playoff map.
One Western conference team that will not slow down is the Los Angeles Lakers. They did the improbable with that bullsh*t trade they made to get Pau Gasol. I mean, how the hell does Kwame Brown bring any type of decent player in return, let alone a baller like Gasol? Meanwhile, the Warriors signed Chris Webber and were excited about that addition (with not a single player subtraction, I might add) and not really chagrined by the Gasol deal due the simple fact that Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations, Chris Mullin got rid of his Salary Albatross (the lovable Adonal Foyle) before the season and had no giant one-year deal to trade away to Memphis, like L.A. did. Good for Kobe and Jerry Buss and Phil Jackson, and Jerry Buss's daughter (whom Phil is banging) - they deserve a little success right? After so much suffering? Puh-leez.
Who else does the success of the Lakers piss off? Only me? Okay then, I am alone. The Lakers do have the best record in the West as of today, and they actually look like the best team out there - especially after running the Suns and Shaq off the floor recently.
The Warriors did not trade Mickael Pietrus for a bag of peanuts and popcorn because they were like; "F*ck that, we ain't giving away nobody for some sh*t-weasel in return." So he still plays in Oakland - and will be available to guard Kobe when the Warriors and Lakers play back-to-back in late March. Hooh-Ray. And how do the Warriors match up now with the Lakers? Horribly, as always. Mainly because there is and never was anyody to guard Kobe - Stack Jack does a relatively strong job, but c'mon, this is Kobe I'm talking about - and when Gas-Hole was on the Grizz, he would torch the Warriors like there was nobody on him trying to play defense. Even before they got Pau, the Lakers had won nine in a row against GS in a streak that ended in December. The Lakers are now much better equipped to compete with San Antonio and maybe are even the favorites to take the West this year.
The Warriors? Well, they had better not draw the Jazz in the early rounds of the playoffs - I actually think the Warriors match up better with the Lakers than Utah - and they would be better served to avoid San Antonio at all costs - or they will just get Duncan'd and Ginobili'd and Parker'd and Bowen'd. And that sucks.
The NBA in the West is exciting, sure - sort of the antithesis of the Eastern Conference with their all-new, all-rebuilt Cleveland Cavaliers and the Super Celtics not withstanding - but more than anything, the best players and teams reside there, so expect the eventual NBA champions to come from the Western Conference... Again.


Sllaacs

Happy Valentine's Day

The Raiders seem to have quieted down on the drama front, hiring James Lofton to coach up the receivers and getting a new strength and conditioning coach, supposedly both interviewed and hired by Lane Kiffin, which I'm choosing to take as good news. And they re-signed Fargas, which is great news.

I was thinking about writing about the NBA, which I may yet. When the Raiders moved to Los Angeles in 1982, I kind of stopped caring about football. I still watched it, but I didn't have a favorite team. Basketball became my first love. The Los Angeles Lakers and Magic Johnson in particular (yes, you can point out the hypocrisy of being mad at the Raiders for moving to Los Angeles but then loving a basketball team from Los Angeles, if it will make you feel better).

So the Pau Gasol trade is good, good news. I've been talking to some of my friends (mainly Sllaacs and Ken and my lawyer Nappy McBigtoe) about rediscovering basketball.

Which brings me to Valentine's Day. I always liked it as a kid, because it was fun giving and getting the little Peanuts and Ziggy and Spider-Man Valentine's Day cards in elementary school. And I liked the candy. One time, I even got Michael Jordan Valentines. I still might have a couple of those, actually.

Anyway, once I got old enough to have an actual girlfriend on Valentine's Day, it went all bad, and I longed for the nostalgic days when everyone got cards, even the ugly people with snot on their shirts.

Junior year, the first time I had a real girlfriend, she came over to my house for dinner. My parents got into a fight that eventually involved my mother throwing some small appliances (clock radios, a small black and white TV) at the wall behind my Dad's head. My parents didn't fight like this very often, but when they did they always made sure they had an audience. It inflated the apparent level of domestic strife in the Sousa house, but at least they had some style about it. That kind of behavior in the privacy of your own home without anyone to witness it is a cliche.

Senior year the shittiness of Valentine's Day had nothing to do with the girl I was dating. That part actually went okay. I think I got her a Prince tape (Diamonds and Pearls). But I had a game that night at Pittsburg (I was an Antioch Panther) and I forgot my goddamn uniform at home. That was fucking embarrassing waiting for my mom to drive home and get it while I explained to the coaches why I wasn't getting dressed. Thank god it was a Pitt, and not at say, Berkeley or El Cerrito.

Freshman year of College, I had a girlfriend who was one of those "I don't want to be known as John's Girfriend, I'm my own person" types. Anyway, so she said "I don't want to celebrate Valentine's Day." Since I was a fucking idiot, I believed her and didn't get her anything. So she was pissed at me.

I managed to avoid the next 6 or 7 Valentine's Days because I was single. When I finally got another real girlfriend, I think I was 25, she broke up with me on Valentine's Day. Actually put the breakup letter in a Valentine's Day card. That was cold blooded.

But again, I was a fucking idiot, because I'd seen that one coming, and I should have stayed home to watch the Lakers game on TV instead of going over to her house to get that stupid letter. I should have made her use a stamp.

Okay, you're asking as you're reading this, where does the Professor fit into all of this? I bet she just loves reading about all of your ex-girlfriends. Well, when we were first courting, I got a CD from her for Valentine's Day. And it almost made cry. And we've since had 6 great Valentine's Days. And now that we have Baby Lily, I get to vicariously re-live the glory days when everybody gets a Valentine in their cubby hole.

Is Bill Simmons a Jinx; John's Picks

The other day after Bill Simmons wrote the column asking which was Boston's best ever team, the 1986 Celtics or the 2007 Patriots, I said he was "jinxing the hell out of them."
I know Dan isn't a fan of Simmons' work, we've talked about this and he said as much in the comments of that post, implying that he is part of ESPN's Bristol, CT-based East Coast Bias.

It's actually a little more complicated than that. See, ever since espn.com debuted Page 2 in November, 2000, I don't think I've missed a column by the guy who was then known as "The Boston Sports Guy." Back then, there were three writers I absolutely had to read every week that wrote for Page 2: Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph Wiley, and Bill Simmons. Hunter and Ralph both passed away, and now it's just Bill Simmons that I still read every week.

The thing is, there are two Bill Simmonses. There's the "Sports Guy," who has great composition skills, understands the intersection of sports and pop culture and navigates that intersection better than anyone. He's a populist writer who regularly features a "mailbag" column in which he prints his funniest readers' comments and questions and responds to them, and the feel is like a group of friends hanging around talking about sports, movies, and TV shows. One of the signs of a great writer is that he or she gives you a feeling of intimacy when you're reading them, so that even though you've never met that person, you feel like you're buddies. Bill Simmons is that kind of writer.

Here's an example of how that works for me. In 2002, I got married and moved from Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, to Connecticut, where the Professor was immersed in her graduate studies at Yale. Around that same time, Bill Simmons married the Sports Gal and moved from Boston to Los Angeles. His columns made a lot more sense to me now, since I had driven on Merritt Parkway, and I now knew who Mike and the Mad Dog were. Then we both had daughters within 4 or 5 months of each other. So even though I've never met Bill Simmons, I feel like I know him because of the shared experience as sports fans and fathers, all transmitted through his columns. This Bill Simmons is one of the reasons I wanted to have a Raiders blog.

The other Bill Simmons is the "Boston Sports Guy," and this guy is an insecure, boring, otherwise-regional hack. He carried the collective angst of New England's sports fans to a world that was otherwise able to ignore it. This is where his love of TV and pop culture comes in. Sure, everyone knows about Ken Burns and his 17-hour exegesis of the 1986 World Series Game Six Collapse, where all of Boston's literary icons pompously left the R's out of words describing their heartbreak. But to the average sports fan who doesn't watch PBS or listen to NPR, here came Bill Simmons writing about "The World's Strongest Man" and "The Real World." The teams from his hometown were losers: it had been 14 years (in 2000) since the Celtics had won a championship, seemingly cursed with the deaths of Len Bias and Reggie Williams, and Rick Pitino trying to murder the franchise; the Curse of the Bambino was in full effect; the Patriots were losers who had never won anything.

Then, a couple of things happened. Walt Coleman created a Patriots Dynasty. The Red Sox came back from a 4-0 deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and went on to win their first World Series since 1918. And now the Celtics got Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and have the best record in the NBA. It's quite conceivable that Boston could have all three major sports championships, which would be not only impressive but downright fucking irritating to the rest of the country. With all of this success, Simmons' Boston columns went from being anxious rants to obnoxious, gloating rants. And I don't blame him, I just don't enjoy reading them.

The 86 Celtics vs. 2007 Pats is the perfect example of this new, arrogant Boston Sports Guy. First of all, nobody outside of New England remembers anything about that 1986 Celtics team, except maybe that Len Bias died, and because of him black kids get sent to jail for longer terms over crack than white businessmen get sent to jail for having the same amount of cocaine powder. He writes that the defending champion Lakers team allowed themselves to be be "'shocked' by the upstart Rockets -- with Sampson making the series-winning shot in Game 5 at Los Angeles -- to avoid what would have been a ritual beating by an unstoppable Celtics team." This is a bunch of crap. That Lakers team would rebound the following and beat the Celtics, and then repeat in 1988 for the first back-to-back NBA Championship in 20 years. Sure, people remember the 80s as the golden age of the NBA, and Lakers vs. Celtics was the main reason. But outside of New England, only racist white people rooted for the Celtics. And no matter what anyone from Boston tells you, that is the absolute truth. One summer in 1988, my friends and I were playing ball down at the local school yard. We were like 13 or 14 and there was this older man, probably in his mid-forties, and his son, who was 19 or twenty. We played with them because we need two to make it four on four, enough for a full court game on the short courts. When the older guy asked what team we were, I said the Lakers, and he said, "The Lakers are a bunch of Niggers. You want to root for white people. Be the Celtics." His son was kinda embarrassed, I think, because when we were talking later he said, "I like McHale, but I bet you'd rather be Worthy..."

Besides, it was Magic who joined Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline "They Dominated the Eighties."

Now, this Patriots is dominant. And they're probably good enough not be beyond Jinxing by Bill Simmons' column. But if you were going to write a column comparing a dominant team in one sport to a dominant team in another, wouldn't it be the 1996 Bulls team that won 70 games and had All Stars up and down the roster? Brady and Moss compare better to MJ and Scottie Pippen, with Rodney Harrisons' Punk Ass analogous to Dennis Rodman's Punk Ass. I'm just saying.

Anyway, in what is either a blatant ripoff of one of my favorite writers, or, if you're generous, an homage to someone I admire, here's an email I got from the Professor the other day that will segue into my picks:

Subject: Your Daughter and Your Dog are Disgusting

Lily pooped in her panties, which I noticed after she came into the kitchen and told me "poop!" She had a big old saggy load. I pulled off her panties right there in the kitchen and the turd log fell out onto the floor in front of the fridge. I took her into the bathroom to wipe and wash hands. In the meantime, Iggy smelled a tasty treat and hopped out of bed to go have himself a snack. By the time I turned around, he'd eaten half of Lily's turd. I yelled at him to quit it and he ran away, but it was like he had peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth that he kept trying to swallow but couldn't. He's outside now, washing his mouth out with soap. Fucking disgusting.

I'm running away from home today. You can raise these two yourself.

I should point out that we're potty training, which is why Baby Lily was not wearing a diaper. But the reason this email is relevant is because having to choose between the Patriots and the Chargers is akin to having poop stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. I can't think of two teams I hate more (I hate Denver and Kansas City as much). Anyway, I think New England wins but it's closer than everyone expects. 27-20.

Green Bay wins. I have to go. This has gone on too long and people are becoming exasperated with me.