From the Vault: Super Bowl XLII Review

In the name all things nostalgic – and as a system of checks-and-balances against my own stupid opinions – the LCHC will occasionally republish and reconsider articles and features I originally wrote for other sites. The goal of this is both to shine a light on my past work, and then to subject that work to mockery and derision thanks to the benefit of hindsight. 

This article was originally published on The On Deck Circle on February 5, 2008 – Super Tuesday 2008 and two days after the biggest Super Bowl upset ever .

Imaginary Player: Super Bowl XLII Review – Barksdale Edition

With the Queen’s Sports Industry Conference pilfering my entire life’s schedule last week, you, the loyal reader (ed: singular form intention) of this space were regrettably not treated to my superfluous yet scintillating ramblings last week. In order to correct this misstep, I will be live and in full effect at least twice this week. Yes, containing of your excitement may prove impossible, so try not to strain anything.

Today though we will fully examine the forty-second version of the Great American Game. The most over-exposed and promoted Super Bowl ever did the impossible: it managed to surpass the hype. 97.5 million people saw the Giants somehow make 18-1 a reality. The unbeatable Patriots were brought to their knees in a flurry of secondary blitzes and perfect execution by the New York front four. For one night at least, Eli F’ing Manning (!) was the finest player in all the land. No, really.

When considering and appraising the brilliance that was Sunday night’s drama, it is only fitting that we pay homage to our time’s greatest drama, one that delivers a theatrical spectacle EVERY Sunday, Super or otherwise. I speak of course about the power and the glory that is The Wire, the most compelling, mesmerizing piece of television canon ever created.

From the Vault: Kobe Bryant – Shadow of the Bat

In the name all things nostalgic – and as a system of checks-and-balances against my own stupid opinions – the LCHC will occasionally republish and reconsider articles and features I originally wrote for other sites. The goal of this is both to shine a light on my past work, and then to subject that work to mockery and derision thanks to the benefit of hindsight.  

This article was originally published on The On Deck Circle on July 18, 2008.

“You’ve changed things… forever. There’s no going back. See, to them, you’re just a freak.” – The Joker

It comes as no great surprise to those that know me that I have a small number of things for which my enthusiasm is borderline obsessive. Chief among these compulsions are basketball and comic books.

My preoccupation with both started at a young age and resonates to this day. Interestingly enough, there is a central figure in each domain that drives the engine of my fixation. For roundball, it is Kobe Bryant; for literary devotion, it is The Batman.

Call it what you will: man-crushes, fan-boy drive, or just someone in need of a new girlfriend. Regardless, this faithfulness has served me well. With The Dark Knight arriving in theatres today, it seemed appropriate that I finally put forth a contention I have championed in private for some time: Kobe Bryant is the NBA equivalent of The World’s Greatest Detective

Much more (including my original snaptake review of The Dark Knight), after the jump…

Ladies and Gentlemen, Your 2013 Gotham Rogues (Ancaster Edition)

It is an absolute truism that no one who isn’t in your league actually cares about your Fantasy Football team and that you should therefore keep any ramblings you may have about it to yourself.

And yet, in a cruel twist of fate, there are very few things one cares more about than their own Fantasy Football team, and almost nothing that so readily prompts one’s desire to ramble.

…Perhaps someone should write a song about this kind of situation…

With this truth considered, and at the risk of turning this into the sports fans’ equivalent of a D&D discussion thread, I nevertheless felt that following our draft this past Sunday it was only right to present my team’s Official Yahoo! Draft Report Card (a solid “B” according to the auto-bots at Automated Insights) and my starting roster, if only so that everyone here can mock and ridicule me in public later when the season goes horribly awry.

More to come later today on how I managed to completely abandon my Draft strategy in the very first round, and the heartbreak of losing out on a Top-3 Keeper pick, but for now, behold the “Arkham All-Stars”, the future champions of Ancaster 2013/Yahoo League ID #25451, your Gotham Rogues…

So Crazy It Just Might Work: Vernon Davis at WR

The San Francisco 49ers are in an interesting, challenging spot as they look towards the new NFL season. The team was only a few minutes away from coming back to win the Super Bowl last year, and quite rightly carries renewed championship expectations ahead into this season.

Confidence and experience aside though, injuries already make the team’s chances of a return trip to the title game anything but assured. They face the painful reality that its leading receiver Michael Crabtree will be out until at least November with a torn Achilles tendon, and overall their stable of receivers is untested and underwhelming. One would think that no matter how terrific their defense is, if the Niners expect to have any kind of meaningful success this year Colin Kaepernick is going to need to have guys to throw to before Thanksgiving.

Enter all-everything tight end Vernon Davis.

Davis was already expected to be the Niners primary target from his natural position of TE, but now news has emerged that he has also spent some of training camp lining up at wide receiver. If that doesn’t put the fear of God into several corners in the NFC, I’m not sure what will.

Steve Nash (Sort Of) Tries Out for Inter Milan

Steve Nash is a man of many passions and many talents. Throughout his NBA career, he has often pursued sideline interests beyond the game itself – whether it be in fashion, film, or business. Chief among his hobbies has always been soccer…er, football. On Tuesday, the two-time NBA MVP will have the chance to live out a childhood dream, as he has tryout (of sorts) with Inter Milan before the club opens play in the Guinness International Champions Cup tournament.

The tournament itself features eight club teams from around the world engaging in what are essentially meaningless ‘Friendly’ exhibition/publicity matches over next week. Nash’s involvement is expected to be brief – his tryout, or glorified workout really, takes place this afternoon in New Jersey two days before Inter plays its first match in the event in Indianapolis against Chelsea.

More details on Nash’s thoughts about the unlikely pairing are after the jump…

NBA Finals: Game 7 Hangover

• 37, 12, and 4. 45 minutes played. 5 threes. I guess we got “World Destroyer LeBron” after all.
• As someone who cannot stand most of the Heat players, I am profoundly disappointed with the result of this series. I hate (HATE) that Wade now has three titles, and that I live in a world where Mario Chalmers is a valuable contributor to multiple title winners. But as someone who loves the game of basketball, and as someone who appreciates the history of the game and this league, I am truly thankful to have been able to watch LeBron James in his prime. Seeing LeBron continue to push his limits these last few years, to have now fully realized his otherworldly potential as a player, has been a pleasure (despite how much I have rooted against his team succeeding). My resentment and sports-hatred towards Chris Bosh, Wade, Chalmers, and others on his team does not supersede my ability to respect and appreciate James’ achievement.
• On the note of legacies though, can we please all try our best to have a deferment on the whole “Where does LeBron rank all-time?” discussion for now? Two titles and all of his individual successes have surely secured his place “in the conversation” as one of the greatest to ever play – for now, acknowledging that alone really ought to be enough. None of us know where this run is headed: the Heat could run off another title; or, they could lose next year, but reload in a few years and have a second reign at the top of the NBA mountain; or, this could be the last time James wins a title. No one knows at this point. That ignorance of what it is to come is a truly beautiful and magnificent thing. It may seem that he is pre-destined to continue to stack chip after chip until he’s caught Jordan (Just ask him: “Not five, not six, not seven…”). Remember though that we once thought that would be true for the Shaq/Kobe Lakers as well. So, We. Just. Don’t. Know. Enjoy that, and argue about his place in history when his time is done and his career is set in stone. As fans we often rob ourselves of enjoying a great player’s prime years because we are consistently trying to put their achievements into historical context, even while they are still happening. We do that just so that we can proclaim his place in the stars neatly and move to the next debate. I am as guilty of this rush to evaluating legacies as anyone, but at least I have the self-awareness to know it is a foolish instinct. I will get off my soapbox now by adding that when LeBron is Tim Duncan’s age, or when he is in Kobe’s current position as the league’s elder statesman, THEN we should go about trying to figure out where his career ranks in history, not before.

Much more, after the jump…

Seven Key Questions That Will Decide Game 7

1. Which LeBron James will we see tonight? Headband-less Destroyer-of-Worlds LeBron? Or Shrinking Violet, 3-12, Boris-Diaw-Can-Guard-Me LeBron?
2. How much energy does Tim Duncan possibly have left in the tank?
3. Can Danny Green, or perhaps Gary Neal, recapture the magic he lost in Game 6?

NBA Finals: Game 6 Hangover

• So…wow. I can’t even… No, just forget it. Still speechless, a full day and a half later. There are no words. I’m without words. I am wordless.
• Ah hell, let’s give this recap a try any way. Game 7 is only a few hours away – the shelf life on this is practically up as is…
• So, in attempting to recap Tuesday night, the most challenging part of assessing what happened is to force yourself to not get too wrapped up in the moment. All that will do is lose overall perspective, and lead to even more hyperbole than normal. The game was certainly one of the most special contest we’ve seen in years, maybe even this century, but there was an immediate reaction to want to crown this as “the greatest basketball game ever” that rang a bit false to me. There is no doubt that the storylines and the narrative drama that played out over the fourth quarter and overtime make this one of the most riveting and emotionally compelling games anyone can remember. But it was not necessarily particularly well played – at least not all the way through – and it did not feature good officiating, or sustained stretches of great play for both teams. What we saw instead was pockets of singular moments, or runs, of brilliance, and incredible isolated moments where star players rose to meet the moment they were in. And that was wonderful, and thrilling, and as entertaining as anything I’ve seen on a basketball court since the 1990s. But it was not GREAT basketball – it was great theatre from teams that were fighting tooth-and-nail despite poor execution and exhaustion.
• For me, great theater and great single plays in isolation are important when identifying a game was transcendent, as are the built-in narratives around ‘heart’ and ‘legacy’ and ‘historical significance’. But also important is having prolonged great play on the floor from each team at the same time, and we didn’t get much of that. Just like in every other game this series; we saw one team go on a massive run met by an equally massive response from the opponent, and a seesaw of momentum, but not big plays met with big plays in immediate response.
• So, a day removed to have time to reflect and consider Game 6 of this series for all the memorable, fun, electrifying moments it brought us, I would place it immediately beside Game 7 of the 2010 Finals between LA and Boston as one of the two most entertaining and memorable games I’ve watched this century, but I can’t go higher than that. Perhaps the drama that in inherent in a Game 7 compared to just a Game 6 is what ultimately means the Lakers’ win trumps the wackiness from Tuesday night for me, or maybe (definitely?) it is because I am a Lakers fan and therefore have a considerable personal bias in assessing how special and emotionally taxing that Game 7 was. Either way though, I think what we got the other night is something that we as basketball fans will all remember for years, if not decades, on, and it is a reminder of how much fun it is to be a fan of this game

More thoughts on Game 6, and some on Game 7, after the jump…

NBA Finals: Game 5 Hangover

• In ‘Kenan Thompson as Charles Barkley’ voice: “GINOOOOOBILIIIII!!!!”
• In a Finals matchup that has been most defined by its scoring runs, it is telling that the Spurs’ seized control of the series with a performance that featured unique runs of 19-1, 15-2, and 10-0 at different points of the game.
• While there is no question this series has been memorable, it is interesting that five games in we have had only one contest where both teams played equally well. Only Game 1 has been a single digit win, and in every other game one of the teams has totally and utterly seized control in the third quarter to the point where every other game so far has seemed decided halfway through the fourth. One team has always found itself mid-way through the third quarter, and manages to push its advantage until the lead is out of hand. Miami hopes they are the team that finds that 5th-gear in the third quarter Tuesday night, or else they risk heading home for a very long, very interesting summer.
• Speaking of runs and of the fickle nature of momentum in this series, Coach Spo had an excellent description during his post-game press conference as to why the game got out of hand in the third quarter. Spoelstra said that when Miami missed a series of shots that they typically should make, and that from there their confidence dropped and their mistakes compounded so that the Spurs’ momentum “snowballed” to very quickly push the game out of reach.

NBA Finals: Game 3 Hangover

• “Get your name in the paper” – G. Popovich, The Best.

• Two days later, it seems tempting to reduce the entirety of Game 3 down to the following two sentences: “Danny Green and Gary Neal were incredible. LeBron was incredibly human.” That kind of distillation of what actually swung Tuesday night’s game is not exactly “wrong” – it is efficient and any many ways the result is as simple as “The Spurs role players were great and Miami’s stars were not” – but it does miss a lot of the details in the name of a condensed narrative. Sure, you can understand what happened by reducing the game down to San Antonio hitting threes and Miami quitting, but if you have the time and interest there was more complexity to the match-up than just those talking point.

• That said, it’s not a bad idea to start by hitting those same talking points – Gary Neal and Danny Green were unbelievably good Tuesday night. Sports fans and writers are guilty of throwing around words like “amazing” and “extraordinary” too often, but here they seem apt considering the deviation above each player’s expectation level of performance. When Wade or Parker has a game like this, it is worthy of praise, but also within reason; given their talents and place in the hierarchy of the League’s elite, it is completely rational to that they would perform to that level. That’s not the case with Green and Neal. They played arguably their greatest games as professionals during what was the most pressure-filled game of their respective careers (to date, at least). That is worth applauding. Each player embraced the moment and completely gave themselves over to it without forcing the issue, and as a fan of the sport it was a treat to watch, team allegiances aside. Green’s sheepish/“aww shucks”/ “I can’t really believe this either guys” grin after his seventh three of the night was the best moment of the series so far in my opinion, because of the humanity and relatability it captured. Maybe I am just a sucker for NBA mortals upending the balance of power instead of the traditional NBA Titans like Duncan or LeBron solely defining events.

More thoughts on Game 3 after the jump…