Winners and Losers…Wild Card Weekend Edition
Each week throughout the playoffs, we’ll be recapping winners and losers from the week’s action. Let’s get right into it:
Winners
Houston Texans fans: Can’t help but feel happy for the fan base. They lost their football team in the 90s when they moved to Tennessee, welcomed an expansion team back to the city about a decade ago, then watched the team become one of the most notoriously underachieving squads in football. Their chance at a division title opened up this year thanks to a particular neck injury to another quarterback. And they seized upon it. Injuries along the way have derailed realistic chances at a Super Bowl. But their home win over the Bengals this weekend was a huge stepping stone for the franchise. The Houston Texans. Finally relevant.
Cincinnati Bengals: Yes, that was a disappointing playoff loss and debut for Andy Dalton and A.J. Green, and it leaves Marvin Lewis still winless in the post-season. But the future is bright for this team. With two first round picks in the upcoming draft, the Bengals might be competitive again in 2012. The Steelers and Ravens should get a handful from this team in the coming years.
Sean Payton: Everyone likes to say that the New Orleans head coach is fearless for his repeated decisions to go for it on fourth down. To me, he’s just maximizing the potential of his personnel. Taking risks is one thing, taking risks that makes sense is another. Ask Falcons head coach Mike Smith about that one. The Saints offense didn’t get going until the second half, their receivers were uncharacteristically shaky with a lot of drops, and they still set an NFL playoff record for total yards in a game. That’s got to be a disturbing thought for the rest of the playoff field.
Matt Flynn: Still the most sought after quarterback in free agency this off-season. No one displaced him this week. That makes him a winner.
Josh McDaniels: If you haven’t heard, McDaniels is back with the Patriots as an offensive assistant for the remainder of the playoffs, with the understanding that he will be their offensive coordinator next year when current coordinator Bill O’Brien takes the head coaching reigns at Penn State. McDaniels had a trying year in St. Louis, and now gets reunited with the Brady bunch. Funny that he will face the quarterback he drafted a few years ago in Denver, Tim Tebow, on Sunday. Not sure what it means, but that’s one more storyline to keep an eye on.
Tim Tebow: You know, ever since Tebow was put into the starting line-up, everything that he’s succeeded at has been taken with a grain of salt. There was an underlying assumption that he was doing things that didn’t make sense, that this couldn’t last, it felt more like satire than a real inspirational story. But that was a legitimate win over the top ranked defense in the league on Sunday. The Broncos didn’t win in spite of Tebow, they won because of him. You can talk about his throwing motion, you can break down the numbers, you can say it doesn’t make sense. But it might be time to consider the Tim Tebow story as legitimate.
Losers
Atlanta Falcons: On a day when they dropped a turd, it made sense that they’d end up with a deuce on the scoreboard. Still winless in the playoffs in the Matt Ryan era, and there has to be questions surrounding head coach Mike Smith.
Dick LeBeau: Another side-effect of Tebow. When he tears your defense up, you will be questioned and scruntinized because it’s never suppose to happen.
Phil Simms: Paraphrasing what I heard while he was commentating the Steelers-Broncos game: “For it to be a forward pass, it has to go forward.”
The referee doing the overtime coin toss in Denver: It seemed like he forgot his cheat sheet while explaining the new overtime rules. Thankfully, Tebow saved the officiating crew from any misinterpretation of the rules in overtime.
John Elway: Just because from now on, when they talk about “The Drive”, they will also mention “The Overtime Pass” by Tebow. The two of you are stuck together forever.
Fans: Just seven more football games left until the off-season.
Fear the Durantula.
He might not win his 3rd consecutive scoring title this year. He might not secure his first ever MVP this season. But don’t let that fool you, Durant’s taken his game to another level this year.
More balance, better defense, expanded offensive arsenal, smooth ball handling, feverish facilitation with the ball in his hands and first place in the West.
Oh, and he’s still not an asshole.
h/t fuckyeanba via @BrocknessMnstr
Let’s talk free throws for a minute.
Last night Dwight Howard set the NBA record for free throw attempts in a game (39), but hitting only 21 of them didn’t really bring him close to breaking the record for free throws made in a made (Chamberlain, 28).
Meanwhile in Milwaukee, the Pistons and…
The Perfect Imperfection that is LeBron James
Basketball is a beautiful game, played by humans of vastly different sizes and abilities, doing different tasks on the court with seemingly divergent goals, yet with the symmetry and coordination of a ballet. Both pleasing to the eye and thought-provoking to the brain.
But the real complexity of basketball isn’t in how the play is drawn up, or how one uses the pivot foot to step through and past a defender, essentially creating a one man pick’n’pop. The system draws us in because it takes a symphony of various skill-sets performing in unison to complete the simple task of putting the ball through a metal rim, 10’ above the ground.
The game needs both tall and small, but strong & wide and thin & nibble bodied souls. It isn’t because basketball is an equal opportunity employer, it’s because certain frames are able to accomplish certain tasks that others simply and physically can not.
The game needs 7’0” ferocious monsters in the paint, gobbling up rebounds and vaporizing weak shot attempts with the palm of their hands. Breaking the will of opponents with thunderous dunks and punishing post moves. yet these men couldn’t dribble a ball if it had a string attached to it.
We leave the dribbling, driving and dishing to the little guys. Let them do their thing on the perimeter, rarely asking them to spend time camping in the forest filled with big men.
We even have a Power Forward position to be as menacing as a Center yet a touch more nimble so they can score with a bit of class and flare.
Then we have the Shooting Guard sized somewhere between the point and the center, operating somewhere between the point and the center on the court.
And somewhere between all of that, we squeeze in the Small Forwards and the Swingmen.
We haven’t even gotten into the varying abilities that exist within the varying positions of basketball. Shoot first point guards. Slashing shooting guards. Defensive centers. Low posts. High posts. Three point specialists. The list goes on as far as the imagination can stretch it.
For the longest time, the idea of the perfect basketball player didn’t exist due to the nature of the sport. The game had so many variables, so many different shots and requirements that no one man had been able to do it all and no one expected them too. Even the great Oscar Robertson, who averaged a triple double for an entire season, had his short comings.
Other greats that had incredible all-around games also couldn’t ‘do it all’ per se. Magic, the 6’9” point guard who forcibly played center in the NBA Finals and helped the Lakers take home the championship, had glaring flaws in his game. His defense was suspect and his 3-point shot was malnourished. Despite Magic’s success, he was more of the exception than the rule. He didn’t reshape the mold of the point guard, he only temporarily shattered it. While points did grow in size over the years, no one set out to find the next 6’9” point guard.
It took Michael Jordan nearly ruining our concept of basketball for us to mold an archetype of the perfect non-center super star, non-center being the keyword. 6’6”, 200 lbs became the perfect dimensions of a franchise player that wasn’t a center. We figured that at 6’6”, Jordan had the ability to score and rebound and defend nearly every position. He could still dribble with ease, yet overpower smaller defenders and use his agility and quickness on larger, clumsier players. Michael could attack the rim, slash to the basket, hit the mid range, and sometimes, and I stress ‘sometimes’, knock down the 3-ball. Jordan was as near-perfect as any non-center player was going to get.
There’s that term again, ‘non-center’. And that’s because even the great demi-god Michael Jordan couldn’t really do it all. The show he put on was epic in proportions and delivery, yet if you took a peek behind the curtain, you’d see that the 3-point shot wasn’t his only short coming. We like to pretend there was nothing that wasn’t within Jordan’s ability, but there were a lot of things.
To put it simply, Jordan could never play center.
‘Well, duh, he’s not a center.’
I know, and neither is LeBron James, yet he could, conceivably play center and have some success. In fact, I don’t think we’ve seen a single player before LeBron that we could create four clones of and have all five of them play basketball together successfully. LeBron has all the tools, we’ve seen them. Not just in individual spurts of action, but all of them working together in games for stretches long enough to single handedly shift the outcome in favor of his team. As Shoals says, we’ve witnessed LeBron transcend the complexity of basketball. We’ve seen him solve the puzzle. He’s not the orchestra, he’s the one-man band that sounds as glorious as the orchestra. With his size and skill set, there isn’t a single thing LeBron can’t do on the court. Pass, shoot, jump, rebound, defend. The man can defend any position at anytime. He almost sees like a figment of Naismith’s imagination or at least Pat Riley’s.
Bethelehem Shoals wrote some thoughts on the burden of being LeBron, how he spoils us, why we hate him for it and how the only way for LeBron to be deemed a success would be for him to destroy the concept of basketball all together. Sort of. From the Classical:
LeBron James disappears and wilts under pressure, but is very rarely seen as having been defeated. If James were simply being himself, much of his game would be a no-brainer. That’s why LeBron provokes such broad, and nasty, emotions, longing and desperation cloaked in hate. James isn’t the guy who comes up short. He’s the guy who has no right to come up short and does anyway.
Against the Clippers, his hopeless moves to the basket bore some resemblance to this game-winner against the Wizards in the 2006 playoffs. Eric Freeman pointed to that bucket as a turning point, the moment when everyone realized that, in theory, there were no limits to what LeBron James could do on a basketball court. Games are closed out with jumpers, not by exploding past three defenders in traffic for an uncontested lay-in. While he showed up in the league fully-formed and better than advertised, it took a few seasons for us to truly realize what we were watching. At his best, LeBron causes one to reconsider the structure of the sport. Maybe it’s too easy. Maybe they should raise the hoop. It’s maddening that James can’t live up to his calling, but also a little comforting. We hate him for what he can do; we also hate him for not doing it.
Shoals is spot on, LeBron has gifted us with the idea of a perfect basketball player. As much as I hate to reaffirm the statements of such an inflated ego, LeBron was right when he said he’s “spoiled us”. He has. He’s shown us things that we once thought impossible. LeBron’s arrival seemed to have solved the Grand Unifying Theory of Basketball. He showed us the formula but then he quickly wiped the chalk board clean. Instead of us being left in awe that the formula exists or that someone has the ability to solve it, we’re upset that it was solved yet the books which contain them were lost.
It’s both captivating and puzzling that the sole reason that we spend countless hours deconstructing LeBron’s game is because he handed us the blueprints in the first place. Without him showing us exactly what he was capable of, things no one else has ever been capable of, we wouldn’t even know what we were missing out on when he failed to deliver. As if James pulled off the greatest magic trick the world had ever seen, yet was never able to duplicate it again. People would start to wonder if he truly knew how to conjure up such magic or was it only a fluke.
This mess that LeBron finds him self in today, it’s his own fault. LeBron has no one else to blame but himself. He’s responsible for his own burden and he must shoulder the blame until he can once again deliver to the masses what he once promised. He once showed us perfection or at least a glimpse of it and yet we sit here, now impatiently, starving for more.
Or is this our fault? We don’t appreciate the glorious acts that we once saw; we only demand to see them again. And again. And again. With no interruptions and no imperfections.
We’re waiting, LeBron.
Jason Taylor says good bye to the game amongst his fellow soldiers.
As tough as this game of football is, it too has its touching moments.
![gotemcoach:
THE END OF AN ERA…AND A TRIBUTE:
You may never see another Shaq again. Forget the size, athleticism, and power. Forget the championships, the Finals MVPs, and the 28,596 points. Forget the commercials, the rapping and Kazaam.
This guy was the King of Giving Himself Nicknames. Hell, “Shaq” is a nickname.
“In light of today, I am retiring all my nicknames. The Big Aristotle, Shaq-Fu, The Big Shamrock, The Big Cactus, The Diesel, and finally, the one and only, original, never to be duplicated or replicated … Superman. From now on, you can call me The Big AARP. Association for the Advancement of Retired Persons.”
You forget how he got half of these. While some are regional - “The Big Agave” - others need an explanation.
“’The Big Aristotle’ was coined the day I won the MVP last year [2000]. I stole a quote from that Greek philosopher cat: ‘Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.’”
“Wilt Chamberneezy” needs no further back story. “The Real Deal Shaquille O’Neal” had an intrinsic rhyming property that lends itself to a great nickname. I would have thought there would never be a way to beat “Shaq Daddy,” but he tried. Oh, how he did try.
“’The Big Stock Exchange.’ I start off at one price. Every now and then I’ll go down, but eventually I’ll go back up”
An apt comparison. Let’s stay financial for a second.
“‘The Big IPO.’ Put your money on me. Because when I go public, we all gonna make money.”
He called himself the “The Big Quotatious” for his propensity to provide great soundbites - like the kind of soundbites that end with a guy nicknaming himself “The Big Quotatious.” If you couldn’t tell, “Big” seemed to be a recurring trend. Shaq had a game-saving steal in Orlando, which spawned, “The Big Felon.” “The Big Sewer” because he “had a lot of sh*t.” What about the time Shaq made his free throws, and referred to himself post-game as “The Big Havlicek?”
“Can’t forget ‘The Big Antarctica’ because I’m so cold.”
Don’t forget the abbreviations. “M.D.E.” meant Most Dominant Ever. “L.C.L.” meant Last Center Left. Wondering why did Shaq called himself “Shaqovic?”
“If you go around the league, anybody with the last name ‘vich’ is a great shooter. Radmanovic, Vujacic…all those ‘iches.’”
Makes sense. He wasn’t without a misstep here or there. After “terrorizing” Keith Van Horn in the 2002 NBA Finals, Shaq actually said the phrase “Osama bin Shaq” out loud. Not his finest locker room hour. When Shaq “fought” Oscar de la Hoya on an episode of his reality show Shaq Vs., O’Neal was coached by Freddie Roach, Manny Pacquiao’s world-class trainer, and dubbed himself “Manny Shaquiao.”
My personal favorite? In 2000, after eliminating foreign-born centers Vlade Divac, Rik Smits and Arvydas Sabonis on his way to the NBA championship, Shaq called himself, “The Big Deporter.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - you’ll see another Michael Jordan before you see another Shaquille O’Neal. Thanks, one last time, Shaq.
@gotem_coach
(for the rest of the Shaq Retirement Tribute - click here)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx8kseFVld1qcmnsoo1_1280.png)
THE END OF AN ERA…AND A TRIBUTE:
You may never see another Shaq again. Forget the size, athleticism, and power. Forget the championships, the Finals MVPs, and the 28,596 points. Forget the commercials, the rapping and Kazaam.
This guy was the King of Giving Himself Nicknames. Hell, “Shaq” is a nickname.
“In light of today, I am retiring all my nicknames. The Big Aristotle, Shaq-Fu, The Big Shamrock, The Big Cactus, The Diesel, and finally, the one and only, original, never to be duplicated or replicated … Superman. From now on, you can call me The Big AARP. Association for the Advancement of Retired Persons.”
You forget how he got half of these. While some are regional - “The Big Agave” - others need an explanation.
“’The Big Aristotle’ was coined the day I won the MVP last year [2000]. I stole a quote from that Greek philosopher cat: ‘Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.’”
“Wilt Chamberneezy” needs no further back story. “The Real Deal Shaquille O’Neal” had an intrinsic rhyming property that lends itself to a great nickname. I would have thought there would never be a way to beat “Shaq Daddy,” but he tried. Oh, how he did try.
“’The Big Stock Exchange.’ I start off at one price. Every now and then I’ll go down, but eventually I’ll go back up”
An apt comparison. Let’s stay financial for a second.
“‘The Big IPO.’ Put your money on me. Because when I go public, we all gonna make money.”
He called himself the “The Big Quotatious” for his propensity to provide great soundbites - like the kind of soundbites that end with a guy nicknaming himself “The Big Quotatious.” If you couldn’t tell, “Big” seemed to be a recurring trend. Shaq had a game-saving steal in Orlando, which spawned, “The Big Felon.” “The Big Sewer” because he “had a lot of sh*t.” What about the time Shaq made his free throws, and referred to himself post-game as “The Big Havlicek?”
“Can’t forget ‘The Big Antarctica’ because I’m so cold.”
Don’t forget the abbreviations. “M.D.E.” meant Most Dominant Ever. “L.C.L.” meant Last Center Left. Wondering why did Shaq called himself “Shaqovic?”
“If you go around the league, anybody with the last name ‘vich’ is a great shooter. Radmanovic, Vujacic…all those ‘iches.’”
Makes sense. He wasn’t without a misstep here or there. After “terrorizing” Keith Van Horn in the 2002 NBA Finals, Shaq actually said the phrase “Osama bin Shaq” out loud. Not his finest locker room hour. When Shaq “fought” Oscar de la Hoya on an episode of his reality show Shaq Vs., O’Neal was coached by Freddie Roach, Manny Pacquiao’s world-class trainer, and dubbed himself “Manny Shaquiao.”
My personal favorite? In 2000, after eliminating foreign-born centers Vlade Divac, Rik Smits and Arvydas Sabonis on his way to the NBA championship, Shaq called himself, “The Big Deporter.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - you’ll see another Michael Jordan before you see another Shaquille O’Neal. Thanks, one last time, Shaq.
(for the rest of the Shaq Retirement Tribute - click here)
This piece on the murder of former Denver Bronco Darrent Williams is truly deserving as the best sports writing of 2011.
HARD-CHARGING’s BEST OF 2011: “Bad nights in the NFL” by Thomas Lake. Sports Illustrated, April 11.
Writing non-fiction murder mysteries is complicated work. Everyone has their own tale of what went down. Everyone has their own culprit to blame. Everyone has their own tiny details that stand out. And you’ve got that pesky libel issue to worry about.
Lake tells the story of the night Darrent Williams was murdered in Denver. He tells it through the eyes of the witnesses and those surrounding the former Broncos cornerback. He tells it through the eyes of the police and the community. But mostly, he tells it through the jewelry.
This was my favorite sports story written in 2011 because it had everything I look for in a great piece of writing: difficulty factor, compelling storylines, in-depth reporting, true conflict and artistic craftsmanship. Lake took a complicated story and broke it down piece by piece while carrying a wonderful theme about the vanity of the young and the rich through the story. A quote:
One thing is certain, though. Javon Walker had nothing to do with it. He was in his own limousine full of women at midnight, still on his way to the club. In fact, it might have been better if Walker had been there. He had more money and experience than everyone else there, and he knew the right way to spray champagne: You notify management ahead of time. You get security to create a perimeter. You make sure all men are out of the blast radius. Only then do you pop the cork.
There isn’t much fat in this retelling of a night four years prior. There is a theme, an understanding. And there is a lot of reporting. An attempt to see the story evenly. It works as a murder mystery. It works as a sports feature. It works as a social commentary.
When the New York Jets take the field on Sunday, it could be the end of an era, and I’m not talking about Rex Ryan’s time with the Jets.
LaDanian Tomlinson, arguably the greatest running back of all-time, has publicly stated that it could be his last game. LT burst onto the scene with the Chargers out of TCU, and appeared invincible until a few years ago. LT began to wear down, succumbing to age and injuries. The Chargers let LT sign elsewhere, and he chose the Jets. He has embraced splitting time and a third down back role like few greats have ever been willing to do, and has been a team leader and an integral part of the offense. If he goes, the NFL will have lost one of its greats, and his bust in Canton will be waiting.
