NBA 2010 Off Season Thread

[Nark Order]

lol, this is going a little overboard here.

[IC Champion]

is it?

[Nark Order]

Yes. I just said that, you fucking cock!

[IC Champion]

You're made that Lebrons the bigger narcissus, arent you?

[IC Champion]

LeBron went from a beloved sports figure, to one of the most hated men in sports so quickly.

[Nark Order]

The way I see this situation is this:

Yes, the guy went overboard with broadcasting his decision on ESPN. Complaining about anything other than that just seems like "bitterness". He went to a place where he's probably going to win a championship. As a player, your goal is to win championships. Getting on the guy because he didn't take the hardest road to a ring seems a little silly.

And taking the backseat to Wade doesn't sound like something somebody completely consumed with their own ego would do. It's inconsistent with the overall claim. Let's at least be honest about it all. Broadcasting on ESPN for an hour seems pretty arrogant... but the way he came off on TV didn't seem like that, and the way that he's going onto a star studded team doesn't seem like that either. Call apples apples and oranges oranges here.

[Emperor Smeat]

I would argue the fact the decision came in the 1st 15-20 minutes meant the whole show switched focused to Lebron gushing about being in Miami and becoming a "team" player while at the same time insulting Cleveland after years of demanding players to boost the team and his stats.

Crowd was basically dead/cold after the announcement since they must have been pro-Knicks (location) or pro-Cavs and had no clue on how to react without it coming off bad on tv.

[Emperor Smeat]

Derek Fisher meeting with Pat Riley set for Saturday about potentially being on the Heat.

http://sports.espn.go.com/los-angele...ory?id=5368129

If he leaves, its assumed Steve Blake takes his spot in the starting lineup for the Lakers.

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John Wall hurts his groin in 1st practice with the Wizards.

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Bobcats sign Tyrus Thomas to 5 year $40 million deal.

[Nark Order]

Alright, Derek Fisher is where I draw the line.

[Juan]

Fish

[Juan]

Word in LA was that he was supposed to resign with the Lakers sometime this week.

[Triple Naitch]

There's no way the Heat will offer more than the $2.5 mil the Lakers offered.

[DaveBrawl]

They are going to auction off the Sharpie's Wade, Bosh and James just signed their ceremonial contracts with.

[Emperor Smeat]

Originally Posted by Triple Naitch There's no way the Heat will offer more than the $2.5 mil the Lakers offered.

Its Pat Riley, I wouldn't be surprised if Fisher takes the offer since Riley managed to sign 3 top tier/max contract players without using max contract deals. The Knicks and Bulls wished they had thought of what he did first so they could have gotten all 3 easily.

[Dragon]

That Heat press conference just made them even more hated then before. Seriously, LeBron guaranteeing more than 7 championships when he hasn't touched one before? Amazing how quick his attitude changed from yesterdays sob story one hour special. Also interesting how Bosh talked about how it was basically the plan for months now.

Pretty hilarious how the person that could probably come out looking the best in this is Kobe. He beats the "Three Kings" next year and he is gonna be loved by everybody.

[RP]

I hope Kobe kicks the living shit out of the Heat

[Rev. Hallowell]

Heat, Lakers, Heat, Lakers...you know, these guys are still around, right?

[RP]

[Jesus Shuttlesworth]

Originally Posted by McLegend I agree 100%. I would never want help a team out. Unless I was getting something really big in return. on the flip side... You could say that's steal for Beasley if it turns out to be really good. Big if though

Exactly. Beasley could potentially still end up being a really good player, basically got him for nothing

[Skippord]

I hope the Heat win 7 straight titles

if the Nuggets don't ever win any

[Nark Order]

Originally Posted by Rev. Hallowell Heat, Lakers, Heat, Lakers...you know, these guys are still around, right?

...Yes. Fully aware.

[Jeritron]

Pat Riley is probably on the phone with David Stern trying to get I.O.U's to fall under the cap

[RP]

From Bill Simmons twitter





cant stop laughing

[RP]

" LETS GET EVERYBODY OUTTA THE DRESSING ROOM AND KICK HIS ASS! "

[McLegend]

I caught the highlights of the "concert" in Miami... Unreal.

[DaveWadding]

[McLegend]

WWE should be begging The Heat to use the NWO music.

[Triple Naitch]

Originally Posted by Rev. Hallowell Heat, Lakers, Heat, Lakers...you know, these guys are still around, right?

[Triple Naitch]

Originally Posted by Rectal Pertruder From Bill Simmons twitter cant stop laughing

So is Kobe supposed to be Ric Flair or Roddy Piper. He can't be Sting because Kobe's going from the most hated to the savior of the sport.

[Triple Naitch]

Mike Miller is definitely Buff Bagwell.

[McLegend]

Sting is going to be Kevin Durant.

Ric Flair is probably more like KG. You know since they are both old, and have bad knees. Then Rondo, Pierce, and Allen are the rest of the 4 horsemen.

[Crimson]

lol @ nwo video

[Heros Welcome]

[McLegend]

Not as good as the other one. Still pretty good

[alvarado52]

In other news, the two Laker rookies looked strong in their summer league debut. Of course its just summer league, but im sick of hearing about the Heat.

Ebanks, the 6-9, 210-pound Trevor Ariza body double at small forward (he even wore Ariza's No. 3), led the Lakers with 21 points to go with two assists and two steals. Caracter, 6-9 and now 270 pounds -- after losing more than 30 pounds since college -- added 20 points, 10 rebounds and two blocks in the Lakers' 89-84 loss to the Pistons.

[alvarado52]

i also didnt realize Gerald Green was on the Lakers summer league roster.

[IC Champion]

I didn't realize Gerald Green was still in North America.

[IC Champion]

Bosh and James both signed 6year/110 million dollar contracts, so they didnt even really take that much less money. The Heat really wont have any money left. Looks like everyone else will be making the league minimum.

[IC Champion]

Just saw a miami press conference, ridiculous. They don't even have a full team and there talking championships. I hope Orlando or Chicago crushed them. even Boston.

[IC Champion]

Another interesting story. Has some good points, and a good take on things.

The Decision" was simultaneously the most painful and most hilarious television show I've seen in a long time. Its entertainment value rested almost entirely in its scope -- the same way a person goes to the Niagara Falls or to the Grand Canyon for that take-your-breath-away moment when the heretofore unimaginable vastness of the vista is first perceived, I watched "The Decision" in breathless awe of the sheer scale of the narcissism involved.

By any measure it was a landmark moment in the history of human self-involvement, eclipsing previous peaks in the narcissism Himalayas (Nero's impromptu fiddle concert as Rome burned, the career of the prophet Mohammed, Kim Jong Il publishing "The Popularity of Kim Jong Il") mainly because it was a collective effort. You can understand the citizens of Tsaritsyn cheering the decision to rename their city; if they didn't like "Stalingrad," they were getting lined up and shot.

But what was our excuse? The weird thing about this Lebron story is that seven or eight years ago, he seemed like a nice kid. All he did was step into a media machinery deisgned to create, reward, nurture, and worship self-obsessed assholes. He was raw clay when he went in, and now he's everything we ever wanted him to be -- a lost, attention-craving narcissistic monster who simultaneously despises and needs the slithering insect-mortals who by the millions are bent over licking his toes (represented in The Decision by the ball-less, drooling sycophant Jim Gray).

I'm sure there's a larger point to make in all of this about how the insane pathology behind the LeBron spectacle (read: a co-dependent need to worship insatiable media-attention hogs gone far off the rails of self-awareness) is what ultimately is going to destroy this country and leave us goverened for all time by dingbat megalomaniacs like Sarah Palin. But for now I think it's important to just enjoy "The Decision" on a pure humor value basis, since we're unlikely to see anything that funny for a good long while. To me the top five moments:

1. So here's LeBron James, sitting in a gymnasium full of children from the Boys and Girls Club, the charity that was to receive the proceeds from the event. Let's note the first thing: LeBron had a full hour to say anything he wanted, and might perhaps have used that time to talk about the Boys and Girls club, which was conceived for the express purpose of helping kids who don't have enough parental guidance -- kids like LeBron, for instance (whose biological father was an ex-con who was never there). LeBron instead chooses to have a show entirely about himself filled with navel-gazing commentators raving over his highlights, followed by Gray and his idiotic questions about whether or not LeBron bites his nails. Then, when Gray finally gets to a question about whether it might be hard to share the spotlight with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, LeBron answers, "It's not about sharing. You know, it's about everybody having they own spotlight." That's his message to the Boys and Girls of America: It's not about sharing! I exploded in laughter when he said this. Even funnier, nobody commented on it. I mean, what's the problem? The kids got the proceeds, didn't they?

2. The day after the show, I woke up and checked the internet to see if "It's about everybody having they own spotlight" had already made Bartlett's quotations or something -- it seemed primed to be turned into a famous line that encapsulates the mood of a country for a whole decade, sort of like "Tune in, turn on, drop out" or "Greed is good." But when I Googled it, I found less than a full page of hits. Why? Because ESPN not only spent the whole evening shamelessly deep-throating LeBron, they fixed his grammar post-factum. In the official transcript, LeBron sounds not like stammering, uneducated buffoon he sounded like on live TV, but just like any other ordinary, more or less literate mass-media dickhead. Some of his malaprop gems will survive ("I want to win into the future"), but otherwise... apparently, fame is now its own spell-checker. Obviously this isn't all LeBron's fault -- the guy didn't go to college, after all, and he's not being paid to be a public speaker -- but this is part of the story, the fact that sports stars don't need to go to school really at all anymore and can get to the pros by going to sham high schools that exist solely to crank out basketball players. But even that part of the story gets whitewashed.

3. Gray isn't visible during most of the interview -- thank God -- but about five minutes into their talk LeBron glances down slightly, and suddenly I was conscious of feeling Gray's off-camera eyes locked on LeBron's crotch during LeBron's answers. I burst out laughing. Overall, the whole scene was an uncanny replay of the Hot Tub Time Machine sequence in which the balding white Rob Corddry is forced to suck off black comedian Craig Robinson after losing a football bet. This has to have been the absolute low point in the whole history of the "interview," right? Charlie Gibson's 2008 Bush interview is a candidate, I guess, but this has to be the worst ever -- especially when you throw in the fact that Gray was a) paid by LeBron to do the interview, and b) chosen because he has a "special sales relationship" with one of the sponsors, the University of Phoenix.

4. When Gray asks LeBron, "Was it always your plan to play with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh?" watch as he hedges for a second in between the words 'Well," and "I mean," before answering, "Well, I mean, I'm looking forward to it. To say it was always in my plans, I can't say it was always in my plans because I never thought it was possible." In that one little hedging moment he starts, ever so slightly, to smile. And everybody knew what that smile meant: it meant, "What the fuck do you think? Of course, we've been planning this for years." So he smiles, giving the deal away completely, then instantly switches gears and just turbo-lies right into the camera. I thought: this is just like politics! A terrible, totally unskilled liar, telling a completely transparent lie, who then improbably gets let off the hook by the sycophantic moron interviewing him. What is it about this story we love so much?

5. The camerawork was spectacular. The slow zoom-in leading to the EXTREME LEBRON CLOSE-UP during the key question -- You've had everybody else biting their nails. So I guess it's time for them to stop chewing. The answer to the question everybody wants to know: LeBron, what's your decision? -- if you'd asked a great comic film director to spoof reality-show direction, that's what it would look like. But here's the question: was this a spoof of reality-show TV, was it reality-show TV, or was this a society that can no longer tell the difference? Several times during the ESPN broadcast I got the sense that the network itself had lost track of where "reality" was. Were we really supposed to believe that this thing wasn't decided ages ago, that Wade was seriously considering going to Chicago at one point, that the Knicks were ever in it, that LeBron was trying to convince Bosh to come to Cleveland? Of course not, it was all bullshit, designed to snare viewers, the grownups among us all know that. But the ESPN anchors looked like they were hanging desperately on every tweet, almost like they really believed this stuff. Poor Stuart Scott, he's been podded completely, if you chopped that dude's head off, nothing but little plastic balls containing digitized "Boo-yah" chips would fall out of his skull. It's the prototype for all future news coverage-- one or two dominant news networks pushing sensational fairy-tale versions of reality in a race for ad revenue, competing with a few scattered hacks on the internet covering the much less important parallel "real story," i.e. the truth. In order for the networks to push their version most effectively, they have to genuinely believe that what they're spinning is real. Which is why you see them starting to mistake fake drama for real drama from time to time -- they're beginning to drown in their own bullshit.

Watch and see if that doesn't become the template for presidential campaign coverage in 2012. See if those reality-show zoom-ins don't start to creep into interviews with candidates. This is the beginning of our big Lost in Space journey together, where news and reality-show programming fuse completely and we all end up complete morons, voting strippers and X-games athletes into the White House. I'm psyched. Are you?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...0/179533/83512