Basketbawful

Monday, January 23, 2006

What a wild weekend. Lebron James scored a season-low 14 points on 5-for-22 shooting in Cleveland's 99-79 loss to Golden State. So Mike Dunleavy, a man who can't even stop dryer lint from collecting in his pocket, has been officially credited with shutting down the league's third leading scorer. Teammate Jason Richardson, who himself hasn't played defense since sometime in the fall of 2002, wondered out loud what Dunleavy had eaten before the game. I think we all know the answer to that question:

You too can shut down Lebron. Actually, no you can't.
How many times has this happened? There's a battle of "The Superstar versus The Schmuck," the superstar has an off night, and suddenly the schmuck is a stopper. I'm sure we all remember how LaBradford Smith supposedly stuck it to Michael Jordan, only to suffer a public castration when Jordan dropped 36 on Smith -- in the first half -- the next time they played. Robert Reid got labeled a Bird-stopper in 1981, and Larry went on to have seven 40-point games against him. So it didn't surprise me when Lebron went out the next night and got 51, bad knee and all.

Look people, scoring averages are just that: averages. If Allen Iverson scores 50 on a given night, that means he's probably going to score less than 33 points on several other nights. Basketball players, even the superstars, are human. They aren't always at their best, even against crappy players.

Anyway...Lebron's scoring explosion meant that the sports writers stopped talking about Kobe Bryant for nearly five minutes, and Kobe Bryant didn't like that. He didn't like that at all. History has shown that Kobe is an attention whore. He doesn't just need a lot of attention, he needs all of it, from everybody. I'm sure that if there's a Buddhist monk living on a mountain somewhere, and that monk never has any contact with another living being, Kobe's going to get his agent to send that guy some Lakers game tapes. And probably a 60-inch TV with surround sound, so the monk can get the full "Kobe Bryant Experience."

So yeah, Kobe took 46 shots last night and probably scored some ungodly amount of points. Whatever.

In a few unrelated notes: Tyson Chandler woke up from his season-long coma to have a 15/14 night, and, not coincidentally, the Pacers coughed up a home game to the Bulls. And I fell from first to fourth in my fantasy league, all thanks to Jermaine O'Neal and Emeka Okafor. Man, I hate you guys.

0 Comments: