bulls celtics game 7

  Betty said:

Also it can be quite funny watching it broadcast on Australian digital TV because sometimes they don't go to an ad break when TNT (or whatever) does so you get to hear the commentators talking candidly and swearing. Previously I have been shocked when nice guy Marv Albert will turn into a petulant fucking prick and start berating his crew for minor technical difficulties as soon as he thinks he is not on the air.

hahaha, that's fantastic. any of them seem especially cool 'off the air'? bob costas maybe?

bob costas is a faggy little woman

it was a great series, but the bulls just didn't have the experience and the poise to hold the celtics off. Ben Gordon is a great natural shooter, but he is probably more of a liability for the Bulls at this point. his shot selection is fucking insane. all he wants to do is shoot. no ball movement, no looking for the open man...just one on one playbround shit. they should trade him.

but it was a great series and great season for the bulls. they'll be back next year and hopefully the young guys will work hard in the off season with the taste of what could have been still lingering in their mouths.

  Rambo said:

Also we need more threads about shopping and vandalism/opera, just my opinion.

Hey, Paul Allen: I WANT BEN GORDON.

  LOL Alzado said:

it was a great series, but the bulls just didn't have the experience

THIS

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Ben Gordon is a great natural shooter, but he is probably more of a liability for the Bulls at this point. his shot selection is fucking insane. all he wants to do is shoot. no ball movement, no looking for the open man...just one on one playbround shit.

Yeah but some say it's more than just Ben Gordon who are guilty of this:

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I enjoy watching basketball from 25-30 years ago more than I enjoy watching it now. I like the flow of the game back then, the patterned movement outside of the paint and the way players hustled into position for the best shot, not the one they insisted they could make. The model for today's teams isn't the '60s Celtics or the '77 Portland Trailblazers or the early '80s Lakers: it's the late 1970s Philadelphia 76ers, with World B. Free and Kobe's dad and Doug Collins, the team that despite their popular appeal drove all of us nuts the exact same way certain teams drive us nuts today. Today's game is sloppy and frequently boring. There are excruciating lulls in today's game that I don't remember back then and don't see when I watch tape except maybe when Milwaukee and its mid-'80s legion of giant white guys with Polish names played the Clark Kellogg-era Pacers. Apparently, the only jumpers worth taking today are from three-point range or further back. The defenses are mostly awful on an individual basis, and the offenses seem entirely comprised of isolation plays. I preferred short benches and teams that employed match-up advantages to players with vaguely defined roles and energy guys. Come on, you know it's true: Not only couldn't the Redeem Team beat the Dream Team, a team of pros from 16 years before the Dream Team would beat the pants off of today's stars, too. Kareem Abdul-Jabaar in his prime would score 78 points on Chris Bosh, and a Dr. J in the full flower of his talent would match LeBron and Kobe highlight for highlight and dominate them outright hair-wise. Carlos Boozer takes a swing at Rick Barry after the fifth Jack Davis-drawn rainbow jumper. He doesn't connect.

 

Anything I do end up liking about the game since the mid-'90s fades as quickly as a world financial market indicator. The Lakers/Pacers Finals had moments of strong, consistent basketball. I've enjoyed several of the Phoenix games I've seen over the last few years. I still might if they had decided not to trade for Shaq, Grant Hill and Curly Neal. The Kidd/Kenyon/Jefferson Nets had their moments. I like watching a few individual players currently playing, such as Chris Paul and (sue me) Carmelo Anthony. I enjoy watching other players under certain conditions, like Luol Deng when he's in the offensive flow of a game or Tayshaun Prince when he's guarding someone perfectly suited to his defensive skills. Even the greatest players going right now seem to disappoint as frequently as they delight. I don't remember Magic Johnson disappearing in playoff games for quarters at a time, and when his play was only awesome instead of super-awesome in the 1984 Finals it was a huge deal. I can't imagine Michael Jordan making a claim to be the greatest player in the world without having dominated every single game in a championship run, and never after failing to lead a team to the playoffs a year earlier. Of course, Jordan wouldn't make such a claim in public anyway. He wouldn't have to, and he just wouldn't.

 

I actually think David Stern did the right thing by taking the emphasis of his game's exposure through television away from the networks and onto cable. Greater and more relentless exposure better mirrors the actual season, and an ongoing, winter-long sprawl of contests should be a great way to enjoy a year in basketball in much the same way I think baseball is the most fun to experience as a constant presence in your home through your hometown squad's appearances on TV and radio and in person. The NBA's problem is that the product isn't worth putting on every night. In fact, it is specifically at its least attractive when viewed more than once a week. I can't be the only who tunes in to watch Charles Barkley and then flips it over to Gary Sinise's strangely rictus-like face when the Rockets and Blazers come back on. I'd trade exciting, precise, sustained basketball for every wider storyline shoved down my throat. I can't be the only who doesn't care about Kobe Bryant's endless trip into full adulthood. I can't be the only one who treasured Brandon Roy last year in part because I knew fuck-all about him one step away from the court.

 

Without passionate, furious gameplay on a regular basis, without a convincing consistency on the court, the playoffs and the drama that should come with them always arrives with an element of suspicion. If they're bad, you're not surprised; if they're good, you become angry about all the lousy play in the ramp-up. What nearly killed the NBA in the late 1970s wasn't players doing drugs, it was listless play caused by that massive drug ingestion. And those games were still more fun to watch. Forget rigging by the referees; winning in today's NBA is capricious because it favors those teams with the most players on their up cycle, who's on rather than who's best. That's a performance measurement for your booth team at the big trade show, not the most freakish athletes in the world playing this century's sport of choice. There was a time in the Eastern Conference finals last year when PJ Brown was the best player on the floor. PJ Brown! This is like Tree Rollins dominating a key game in the 1987 Hawks/Celtics series, only if it took place in 1995. This is like Kool Moe Dee roaring back up the charts by inserting himself into someone's brand-new rap feud via YouTube. This is like Gabe Kaplan becoming the hot new doctor on Grey's Anatomy. It's absurd, and it's disheartening.

 

The NBA's biggest star sometimes looks like he might not ribbon in a skills contest at a high school basketball camp. A serious MVP candidate from last year's best team avoids the ball in crunch time like it's going to serve him papers. We were asked to cheer the game's most compelling personality when he managed not to make a group of same-age peers hate his guts so bad they couldn't play with him, a life skill most of us learned in kindergarten.

 

I don't like the NBA because I don't trust the games will ever again unfold in that particular way that sport satisfies, where it's both the contest you're watching and the culmination of all the games that came before it that decides the day. I no longer need the athletes in the sports I follow to be the strongest, the fastest or even the best. I do need some of them to become better, more improved versions of themselves each and every year until injury or old age takes that away from both of us. That's the thrill of sport, that through a limited purview you can see people that are really, really good at what they do perform at a high level and compete against one another. It's not seeing who gets their shit together long enough to make a run, who hides their deficiencies the most effectively so as not to damage their team's best foot forward. Today's NBA is a worst-to-first league, and I can't shake my memory that some of these teams were so recently the worst. The NBA and I are officially broken up. I'll check in from time to time and maybe even sit through a game once a while, and I'll certainly remember the good old days, but I can't see us ever getting together again.