02-18-2009

It's my birthday. Last year I wrote a post on my birthday, so I decided to this year to make it a tradition. Though it has been an eventful year for me in many ways, I am particularly proud of the story I've been telling here since October. This blog has been a real challenge for me, and I am enjoying every post that I'm able to make. It's true that I thought I would be able to post more chapters, more often, but time management has been a serious struggle. I have had to make adjustments to both my approach and my personal expectations regarding NBA Dramatique, but learning those things through trial and error has been an essential part of the process. I think my story-telling will be greatly improved over the remainder of the season because I've worked on solving the issues that led to diminished posting.

I really want to thank all of you that have read my work here, and those of you that have taken the time to comment on the posts. I honestly smile every time I find a new comment on my blog, regardless of what you have to say. I greatly appreciate the feedback. I know there are some readers that have made requests and I haven't gotten around to delivering on those, but I haven't forgotten, and I will be looking for ways to work in your favorite team or player.

If anyone is wondering - yes, I do plan on doing this again next year, and I expect it to be even better. I'm not sure yet if it will be a continuation of this year's story, or if I'll find a completely different approach with the same underlying concept, but I've had a lot of fun and I want to keep doing it.

As far as the real-world NBA season goes, I have to admit that it really hasn't been what I expected. I thought a number of teams were going to be better than they have been, and despite being last year's finalists, I didn't think the Celtics or the Lakers were going to be as good as last year. I wanted to see better things from the Wizards, the Sixers, the Grizzlies, the Bucks. I thought the Heat would be better, and that they'd make more impressive personnel decisions than they have thus far. The Hornets are doing worse than I expected, but I'm glad. I am surprised at how Detroit has underperformed. I will say though that, in my opinion, the Pistons aren't losing because of Iverson. They're not losing because of Michael Curry. I feel that the Pistons are losing because Ben Wallace left. Doesn't seem to make sense, does it, considering how he's played since? But my feeling is that Ben and the other starters from the '04 champs and the '05 almosts were a crew, a gang, a brotherhood in the way that they were better as a group than they ever could be apart. The Cavs and the Trailblazers are both making me happy, winning about as much as I thought they were going to. At this stage, I'm expecting a Spurs/Lakers Conference Finals, and a Cavs/Celtics Conference Finals. I think that's pretty much what everyone is expecting now. Here's the order in which I'd prefer to see Finals combinations:

Celtics/Spurs - the match-up I hoped for but we didn't get to see last year.
Cavs/Spurs - An '07 rematch, but certainly no sweep this time.
Cavs/Lakers - LeBron's team and Kobe's team all in. That seems entertaining.
Celtics/Lakers - eh. Doesn't do much for me.

Tomorrow is the trade deadline. I'm going to hold off on any commentary on the trades that have already gone down until the deadline has passed, but I do have one request to make since it's my birthday. Please, please, please, Basketball gods, do not let the Spurs send Mason and Hill away in return for Vince Carter. Vince is not cool. Hill and Mason, cool. Oberto and Bowen are guys that I've liked, but they've seemingly reached the end of the road. I even thought Udoka was going to be a solid player, but his mojo appears to have defected. I don't care if Pop loses any of those three, but I think George Hill is going to be awesome, and Mason has earned his spot. The Spurs don't need Carter. Not for that price. Please don't let it happen. While I'm at it, Portland doesn't need you either, Vince. Stay away from my teams!

NBA Dramatique: I Am The Law

They were punks. No respect for authority. No common sense. No concern for anything or anyone outside of themselves. He was not impressed. Hadn't been for a long time. If you coaxed it out of him with the right combination of beer and conversational collusion, he'd probably admit to hating them.

He was one of the Overlord's Regulators. Had been since before most of the current soldiers had even been born. His job, his purpose in life, was to make sure war remained an honorable and noble method of power transfer. But that task grew harder every year, because these thugs today didn't know what honor was. Wouldn't know noble if it bit them on the ass.

He watched now as two armies fought against one another. The Legend's Legion defended their Fieldhouse from the attacking forces of King James and the Royal Battalion. Crawford blew air out of his mouth and shook his head in ridicule. This guy was no king, he thought. The Legion came from a land with a rich tradition of war. Their mentor and lord was true to his name - a legend. Crawford could respect that guy. This kid, though...

Maybe "King" James wasn't really so bad on his own. If he had come up through the ranks under the watchful eye of the Legend, the kid might really be something. If he had come up on 7th Avenue, or if he had been trained within the stone walls of the Bastion, maybe he'd be alright. But armies these days didn't make soldiers the right way anymore. There were ways to do things right and ways to do things wrong, but somewhere when he wasn't looking, people started to confuse the two. Even the Overlord and some of the other Regulators got it wrong a lot of times.

See, armies are supposed to be human. They're supposed to live by the blood pumping in their veins and the hunger eating at their guts. They're supposed to have instincts. The blood and the hunger and the instincts are the things that should drive men to the Prize, not Machines. But things changed. They let the brainiacs come in and start screwing with things. Now it's planning and strategy. It's calculating. It's not war - it's math and head games. It's damn cyborgs.

(Crawford knew an old story, and he had every reason to believe it was true. He had heard that there was a young fighter, a real smart and powerful kid. That kid was in the hopes of a lot of armies, but every indication was that he was going to the Bastion. Then the kid vanished. Disappeared. But what was really funny about the whole thing, was that right after that, some tycoons started to spread the news that they had developed the perfect warrior. They said that they had trained a young athlete and wired him up, made him both more and less than a man. The Machine was born. The whispered part of the story though was that the Machine's prototype cyborg fighter was in fact the Bastion-destined young warrior, kidnapped and made a guinea pig for science. It made Crawford sick.)

Well, the more the Machine won, the more armies tried to be like the Machine. Now they had little mathematicians and robot-wanna-be advisers spread throughout the warring nations. The One Who Wished He Was King had a few characters in his court that Crawford suspected might be a little too mechanical, if you catch the drift.

Crawford knew that his job was to maintain order and fairness. He also believed that his job was to uphold the honor of the War, and that sometimes meant giving order and fairness a nudge in the right direction. This battle was close. Too close.

*****

It was a dive, and Crawford drank alone. He sat in a dark corner where he would not be recognized and listened to the broadcast tell of the war he had affected last night. A few other people were in the bar, drinking and smoking and shooting pool. The cell phone in his pocket began to buzz. He answered with the push of a button.

"Yeah?"

"Joey, you made a lot of noise last night. King James is not what I'd call 'low-profile.'"

"So, what's the fall-out this time?"

"You got lucky. No fall-out. Vizier Brown was so incensed that he was arrested for inciting a riot. His temper-tantrum effectively took the heat off of you. But you're not always going to be that lucky, and picking such high profile targets is a bad idea."

"Did you make the Vizier pay?"

"Twenty-five K."

"Good." Crawford pressed a button to hang up.

He drank his beer and thought about the War, and felt like a hero.

Kobe Bryant

Bill Simmons recently wrote a column for ESPN in which he explained why he did not think it was correct to classify him as a "Kobe Hater". I was a little aggravated to see he had written it because I had been thinking about my own attitude towards Kobe, and wanted to get it on my blog, but didn't want it to appear that I was following any kind of trend. I guess that's what I get for not posting frequently enough.

Because of his incredible skill and abilities, Bryant is more famous than basketball. Like Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson before him. Like Tiger Woods and the game of golf. Like Wayne Gretzky and hockey. People who know nothing about basketball know that Kobe Bryant is good at basketball, not because they've seen it, but because they've been told enough times. I think this creates a negative stigma towards Bryant for true fans of the sport. They take praise of Kobe as a slight, because they've put in the hours and the study and the effort to know the game, which in sum might tell them that Kobe Bryant is the best active player in the NBA, but someone who does none of those things can reach the same conclusion. This creates the impression that Kobe is the ideal of the non-basketball fan, or the fair-weather fan, who has not the necessary education to levy such judgement. Kobe is thus derided for the wide recognition of his talent.

Many seem to take issue with Kobe Bryant: The Person Off the Court. Essentially this is a judgment on how the man conducts his personal life when he's not wearing a Lakers jersey, or a team USA jersey, or a Western All-Star Jersey. Though often unstated, I get the sense that criticisms of Kobe the Human are rooted largely in the accusation of rape and the subsequent trial that occurred a few years ago. When his highly-publicized trial was underway, I had not yet become a follower of professional basketball. I don't really care what happened in Denver on the night in question. I wasn't there. The trial ended. Bryant was not convicted. But because so many people in this country love the rise and fall of the rich and famous, Kobe will never stop being on trial for the things that did or didn't happen in Denver that night.

When I was able to get past the fame and move beyond the reputation, I started to see the basketball player. Kobe Bryant is an incredible basketball player. For the first phase of his career he was burdened with the "Next Jordan" tag. He didn't shy away from it, and made more than one move to deliberately paint his name over Mike's. After Shaq split from the Lakers, and the team began its spin out of playoff contention, the criticisms began to come with a more frequent accusation: Kobe will never be Jordan. I think it may have been the best thing that could have happened to him. Kobe looked at his feet, and the road beneath them, and looked back at the history of the game and where he had been in that history. Then I believe he came to a realization. He realized that those were his feet. He was standing on his own road. His place in the history of the game was his and his alone, just as Jordan's place was only Jordan's and Shaq's place was only Shaq's. He accepted that Kobe Bryant wasn't going to be the next anything, but that he was going to be the only Kobe Bryant. He transcended the burdens of being himself that had been placed on him by everyone up to that point, and began being himself for himself only. I loved that.

About two weeks ago when the Lakers played in Boston, there was a moment that solidified my appreciation for Kobe. The first quarter was about to expire, and Kobe had the ball. He was dribbling, standing still, in front of his defender. The shot clock was winding down. With less than two seconds remaining on the clock, Kobe whipped the ball to the far side of the court where Trevor Ariza stood, just outside the three-point line. Ariza should have shot the ball as soon as it hit his hands. Instead, Ariza caught the ball, put it on the floor and took a step inside the line, then picked it up to shoot. Guess what? Time expired before the shot was off and the quarter ended. Kobe looked at Ariza like he was the dumbest ass hole ever born, and that was the moment that I realized why I like Kobe.

I make that face.

I'm guilty. Sometimes, I'm kind of a dick. I don't mean to be. I don't want to be. But sometimes I am, and I am in the same kind of situation that Kobe was at the end of that quarter. He expected someone else to do exactly what he would have done in a given situation, and to do it just as well as he would have. That didn't happen, and he was pissed about it. The circumstances didn't matter to Bryant, only the end result, which was failure by someone he trusted to get the job done. In Kobe's head, if hadn't given that shot to Ariza, he would have made the shot himself. If the roles had been reversed, he would have caught the ball and shot it, scoring three points on nothing but net at the buzzer. It makes no difference that he might have missed it too. In Kobe's head, he knew what needed to be done, asked someone to do it, and they couldn't. They let him down. Kobe knows how hard he works, how much time he puts in, and how much sweat he has poured into becoming one of the game's greatest players. As far as he's concerned, everyone else who plays basketball could be that good if they just tried hard enough, but they don't. They're lazy. They don't care as much. So when do I do that? All the time, over stupid things. Washing the dishes. Cooking food. Putting things in the refrigerator in an orderly fashion. Driving. Talking to women. Writing. Any job that I get paid for. It's absurd. And when I take a step back I recognize that I'm being a conceited ass. But in the moment, if something didn't work right, or if it broke, or the result was not as expected, it's because it wasn't done the way I would have done it. More accurately, it wasn't done the way I like to believe I would have done it. It is because of this trait in Kobe (that I recognize now in myself) that I feel I can appreciate him as a player a little bit more.

So, Kobe, I feel you man.

To everyone who knows me - sorry for making that face sometimes.

NBA Dramatique: Scar, Scar, Can You Feel My Power?

It just hadn't worked. There were mistakes, maybe. Missteps. But now what to do?

The pale necromancer walked alone through his private quarters, reflecting on his past decisions. He thought back on the steps that had brought him to this point in time. He remembered his youth as a soldier, fighting along side the Super Hero. He felt the weight of rings upon his hand, reminding him of his once deadly sharp-shooting. He remembered being assimilated by the Machine when he was a little bit older, and he had foggy, dream-like memories of his cyborg life within that construct. When the Machine eventually purged him, he knew that there was not enough humanity left within him to fight as a soldier, but perhaps he could fight another way. Winning wars had lined his pockets well, and he could use that wealth to affect the war from beyond the battlefield. The once young sharp-shooter invested his money in an army, and began to study the ways of war as a scholar, not as a soldier.

Over the course of the next few years, the man watched as his investment paid off. The army had developed into a surprisingly potent force, and as their skills and abilities made them well-known, their fortunes increased. They were the People of the Sun, and their brilliance in action was matched only by the break-neck speed at which they executed those actions.

But there was one problem. The Machine.

Slow and plodding and mechanical, the Machine was the opposite of the People's army. The People of the Sun were free-flowing and creative and quick. They had an offensive efficiency that rained long-range bombs on their enemies with overwhelming frequency. There seemed no logic in the fact that they could not defeat the cyborgs, but in the final stretches of the war, some twist of luck would go against them, and the Machine would gleam triumphantly.

This was very troubling to the investor. It seemed to him as if the Machine continued to take from him, even after it had taken the last of his physical ability. The Machine had used him to help win a war then cast him aside, but would not allow him to enjoy post-purge success. The pale man was determined to change this, and went to the People of the Sun to leverage his investment.

In the course of his studies, the man had ventured into knowledge of the dark arts. He made it known to the other investors of the army that he knew unspeakable things and that he could use that knowledge to overcome the Machine. They were uncertain, but accepted, because they feared there was no other solution.

They were wrong. Tragically so.

The first act the necromancer performed once he was given the keys to the keep was a magical mass murder. He poisoned the soldiers to put them into a coma, using their sleeping bodies as a staging ritual. While they slept and dreamed, he sacrificed one of them to conjure a demon from Hell. The demon was monstrous and powerful, and his arrival sent such a psychic shockwave through the assembled men that they died instantly without ever again opening their living eyes. The demon then revived the army into undeath, and christened himself the Big Resurrection.

The People of the Sun were at once changed forever, and renamed themselves the Followers of the Sun, for the light of day was something they were never going to see again. The arms dealer, D'Antoni, who had previously been the facilitator of their quick and deadly attack style, was uncomfortable with the dark conversion of these soldiers who had been his friends, and soon packed his bags and headed east. His departure came just days after the undead Followers had been put out of another war by the cyborgs of the Machine.

The necromancer had continued making changes to the army that dismantled the old, fast, rapid-attack force that had been so promising. They were slower. They were attacking less. They were not winning as much. He had been so certain that the changes he had made were going to be the right ones, but it was becoming clearer and clearer that he had been wrong.

A decision must be made. The necromancer was standing in the chamber that the Followers revelled in after the sun set. At the moment, they were corpses, scattered about the room in repose during the daylight hours. The Big Resurrection was a hulking mass of decay in the center of the room. Amare was gently decomposing at his piano, waiting for the moonlight to restore his un-life. Nash was flat on his back on the floor, arms behind his head, looking like he would come to life and start doing sit-ups.

In the necromancer's left hand was the nozzle of a spray gun, the hose of which ran to a tank on his back. The tank was filled with gasoline. Highly flammable gasoline. In the necromancer's right hand was a revolver, loaded with a single bullet. He slumped down onto a plush chair and looked around at his dead men. He looked at his left hand, then at his right. His left again, then his right.

Something had to be done. But he could not decide which trigger to pull.

H-O-R-S-E

They're going to play HORSE during All-Star Weekend.

Awesome.

Something Completely Different

Hello, everyone! I know I have left you in a murky silence for over a month. I'm not abandoning this blog, and I assure you things are coming around again that will carry the story steadily from All-Star break to the play-offs.

I have been busy with many other things. My girlfriend is now my fiance, and I'm no longer a temp. I've been very fortunate to find myself working with people that value a person's ability to form thoughts and put them in writing, so I wanted to offer you the opportunity to read the first public piece I've created for their website. Fair warning: the piece and the site are very political with a distinctive lean to the left. If that's not your cup of tea, that's just fine. I'm not interested in making NBA on the Brain a political forum and I won't cross-pollinate, but I wanted to extend the invitation to find me elsewhere if you're so inclined.

Please click here, and jump around over there for more thought-provoking material.