Game Of The Weak
It's been a while since I've commented on basketball in this space, which has, I'm sure, left three or four of you bereft. My mood regarding the Suns, to use terror alert terminology, is currently Elevated. I visited my ancestral homeland of Phoenix last weekend for one of my dad's better Thanksgiving dinners. I prefer the years when he doesn't buy the mashed potatoes frozen from Costco. On Friday night, my brother-in-law and I shelled out money for horrible cheap seats to watch the Suns play the Nets. We spent the first half miserable, though the Suns chop-sueyed the Nets into a mere 30-point output. But thanks to a new eyeglass prescription, I was able to spot an empty seat in the seventh row of section 103, directly across the stadium from us. Lloyd and I walked down like we meant it, and I charmed the woman behind us by showing her my son's school picture, which I know can cause even the driest reproductive system to ovulate.
We chose the better half to listen to Steve Nash's grunts up-close. The Nets mounted a comeback, though as Lloyd pointed out, you know the game is lost when Jason Kidd starts jacking up threes. J-Kidd (oh, when will that nickname formulation go away?) appears to finally be slowing down. He's only three years younger than me, and sometimes, when I stand up, both my knees hurt. I can only imagine what his feel like. The Nets also have Cliff Robinson coming off the bench. Was Truck Robinson unavailable? They don't have much depth. Vince Carter play-acted the fool and Richard Jefferson missed a breakaway dunk. On our side, Kurt Thomas yanked down 19 rebounds, and made my favorite play of the game when he went to the floor with three Nets and somehow managed to bat the ball out to Nash, who then made some sort of absurd bat-radar pass to one of the Suns' many anonymously lithe role-players.
Then the Suns had five days off, which gave them plenty of time to wax the Pacers' collective ass on Wednesday night. The Pacers were just coming off a triple-overtime game more than 700 miles away, or something like that, so the game might not have been a fully accurate estimation of how the Suns stack up, but I'm still encouraged. Tread water at .540 until February, boys. The highly-reliable Arizona Republic says that the Christ-Amare's knees are feeling better.
The Suns-Nets contretemps wasn't the best NBA game I've ever seen, but it was a damn sight better than the abomination TNT uncorked on me tonight as I unsuspectedly went to the gym for a listless 35 minutes on the elliptical trainer. The Jazz versus the Lakers may have been a good matchup in 1999, but on this night, it was shite. I don't care that the Lakers won by three in overtime. It shouldn't take overtime to beat a team that is still starting Greg Ostertag at center. The TNT halftime bump featured Mehmet Okur and Smush Parker, for god's sake. Meanwhile, I saw about a dozen commercials advertising the drama of the NBA, 32 teams, only one champion, blah de blah blah. But that doesn't mean anything when the star of one also-ran (Kobe) is trying to fake the star of another also-ran (Kirilenko), out of his shoes, and the result is a missed jumper 22 seconds into the shot clock. Chris Mihm doubling down on Matt Harpring hardly feels legendary to me.
Is that enough NBA for you? I thought so. Now you should read Jonathan Goldstein's Lenny Bruce Is Dead, an odd, impressionistic portrait of a sexually confused Jewish guy growing up in Canada. I would definitely not call it a genre book. I would call it book number 47 for the year. Let's sum it up as Jesus' Son with fewer drugs, and a lot more poopy jokes.