The idea was simple enough. My wife wanted a place in the yard where she could send the kids to entertain themselves and stay out of her hair. When she suggested putting a basketball area in the twelve-foot-wide swath of land next to our garage, well, I ran with it. Big time.
I'm not sure what she was expecting. Hell, neither was I. But I knew I wasn't going to half-ass it, not given the chance to create a legitimately cool place for me...uh...I mean...my kids, to shoot hoops.
In our backyard, we used to just have one of those six-foot tall movable kiddie hoops, so what I chose to create was, to say the least, an upgrade. For those of you who enjoy an episode of This Old House, this should give you a fix. And for those who just like to drool over trick basketball shots, you're covered too. Enjoy. -ET
I'm not sure what she was expecting. Hell, neither was I. But I knew I wasn't going to half-ass it, not given the chance to create a legitimately cool place for me...uh...I mean...my kids, to shoot hoops.
In our backyard, we used to just have one of those six-foot tall movable kiddie hoops, so what I chose to create was, to say the least, an upgrade. For those of you who enjoy an episode of This Old House, this should give you a fix. And for those who just like to drool over trick basketball shots, you're covered too. Enjoy. -ET
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My backyard already lends itself to a small court, so I just had to put up one of those home hoops you can get at Target. The only work I really had to do on it, other than regularly cleaning up the dog shit, was trim the big tree next to it, which I named Bill Russell, because it's big, brown & green, and kept blocking my shot.
(And damn you for making me lament not having a hoop in the driveway anymore.)
@TransINSANO: That last bit got me a great laugh.
Nobody really cared about me on my roof tossing up shots. I created no disturbance at all...
...you may notice on the off-the-garage-roof shot that I dubbed the audio...it was getting late (and I was getting anxious) and the cicada (those annoying bugs that make noise at dusk) were in full throat.
Azreous - As a ball purist, I thought the area was too narrow (hard to visualize with the trees and crap in there)...it was my wife, surprisingly, who said it was wide enough. I was supposed to be the visual / spatial one...huh.
Barry - Well, the people who invented the product had a great idea. It comes with two weighted posts (you fill them with sand), but the area isn't wide enough to make the return work right. So I tossed the posts, and used the fence and garage, and It pulled the net far enough apart to make it work. I know, TMI. I'm just into this stuff.
Clifton - Yeah, that was the first one I made, and I was pretty pleased with myself. The rest were done in a single day a couple days later - my favorite is the extreme Larry Bird shot. Because it's extreme, and named after Larry Bird.
ET
The ball return is a great idea too. Having to chase down my missed shots (which is just about all of them) when playing on my own is one of the more depressing things. I so rarely even just shoot around that I'm past the point of caring about missing; It's running after the ball that I hate.
Great trick shots at the end, by the way.
that's the bonus mode in Matt McHale: Technical Writer Challenge, after one successfully performs the CHAOS DUNK.
I also love the child labor. You should be subcontracting them and keeping the profits. I mean, it's THEIR court, right? They should pay for it!
Were you challenging MJ and Bird to the rights to that Big Mac meal that's been slowly cooling to an inedible state because you were all too busy playing HORSE instead?
And one idea for the ball-return net to send balls to one spot: attach two sandbags with caribiners to two points in the middle of the netting (or whichever spot you like) so that it "funnels" the ball towards that spot.
I actually made the first "off the roof" shot one time just as the batteries died in the camera. My son was off getting new batteries when I took the shot alone, and of course, it went in. Only thing worse would have been sinking a hole-in-one under the same circumstances.
I felt that looking "excited" kinda takes the juice out of it...it's practically like saying "I've been f***ing trying to make this all day." Gotta look like you belong there.
Drake - I did think of parodying that commerical with a few edits (the ball hitting various surfaces and going in), but as I managed to make each successive shot, I got married to the purity of no camera tricks.
RE: your idea - The ball kinda rolls naturally to the center with the slack in the net, but the original product showed how you can reposition the weights to make the ball return to various parts of the court. (sadly, my court is basically only the "paint" area, so doing stuff like that isn't possible - and the weights went into the garbage).
Hiring Isiah Thomas is a genius move in disguise. The Knicks will just ask Isiah what he would do, and then do the exact opposite.
This should be good for some bawful next season.
And how stupid are those knicks starting to look again? This is the pros man! shouldn't everything be, you know, professional and all?
Relative to market size vs quality they've probably been the worst team ever over the last decade. The NBA has always been ruled by large market teams if you think about it. That's where the money is, the big city glamour, that's where the top FA's want to go. And still they're not really doing better that your average T-wolves or Bobcats or anything...
(The garbage heap wasn't so big when I played. This pic was taken after some months of absence.)
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