Scott Sargent

"The personality inequity between football and basketball is parceled out on several fronts, and it’s fair to point out that many of them have to do with the total number of players on the field and the actuality and rules of the respective games. But after watching Tebow turn into America’s favorite meme, I’m now convinced that the differences lie mostly in the cultures of the leagues. There’s a reason why the NBA took off in the celebrity culture of Los Angeles, just as there’s a reason why the NFL’s model of grit and teamwork plays better in the middle of the country. There’s a reason why most NBA fans will just forget about this lockout and go about their lives of retweeting Delonte West and Brandon Jennings."

Grantlandl’s Jay Caspian Kang on the NBA Lockout

Jay Caspian Kang shuns the psychobabble regarding LeBron James

It is not hard to be a compelling asshole. Rasheed Wallace’s unabashed humanity, Ron Artest’s ongoing psychodrama, Jordan’s dickishness, and the vacillation of opinion on whether or not Kobe Bryant is a megalomaniac or if Kobe Bryant burns with some ineffable “competitiveness,” added a dimension to their legacy as players. We psychoanalyzed them because it was fun, and, sometimes, even instructive to do so. With LeBron, one gets the feeling that even if his story never drags itself out of this chapter, we have already exhausted our desire to figure out why.

Grantland

Jeff MacGregor went about his “everyday life” today and absolutely owned LeBron James. Or what we though was LeBron James…

Turns out Mr. James doesn’t exist. He is a construct of the hyena media. A hypothetical. A mystic figment. An incantation. He is an empty vessel into which Nike and the networks and sports writers high and low pour our nonsense and our curses and our syrup. And has been since middle school.

He is a scarecrow stuffed with sticks and feathers and money. He is a phantasm, a distraction, an undigested bit of corporate drama.

ESPN

Today’s lesson: Grit and desire > stats and replay. And, everything > Miami Heat

The 2011 Finals, strangely, is the most metaphoric series in years, not because the Mavericks, or even Dirk, carry any inherent meaning, but because something must stand in opposition to Team Villain. The stats-and-replay revolution has freed sport of much of its weight and cleared the way for a more rational, genteel discussion, but the heroic song of Dirk versus the Heat — the one starring the blonde, bedraggled gunslinger and the three severely talented villains in black-and-red — has wormholed us all back to the 1950s, when every blade of grass on every field was idyllic, when every football game was won on abstractions such as “grit” and “desire,” when the outcome of a boxing match might tell something about ourselves and how we might get along.

Jay Caspian Kang

So…about the next Pistons coach…

Isiah Thomas is an unlikable twerp with an almost unsurpassed record of abject failure in everything he has attempted since he hung up his playing shoes and his artificial public-relations grin. Allowing this unemployable gossoon anywhere near anything having to do with any basketball team anywhere is precisely the same thing as hiring Anthony Weiner to be a guidance counselor.

CPP

I hate to see Shaquille O’Neal retire, but it has been amazing for journalism.

[S]winging around the NBA every season, a rolling carnival show. When Shaquille O’Neal retires Friday at the age of 39, he will leave a void almost as oversized as he was, in every way.

After all, who can be like Shaq? Dwight Howard tries, but he is neither as good nor as funny nor as complicated, which were the pillars of The Big Aristotle’s appeal. No big man has ever been more comfortable in his own skin, or had so effortless a grasp of the reality of celebrity, or had the common touch that Shaq enjoyed. There are still pictures of Shaq, who broke in with the Magic in 1992, plastered to the walls of various Orlando burger shacks and burrito joints, smiling with the owner, making funny faces. They still love him, after all these years.

Bruce Arthur

[I’ve] never met an athlete so comfortable in his own skin, in being the person Whoever created him to be. Anyone who follows basketball is familiar with The Unhappiness of the Bigs. They are grumpy. They’d rather be anywhere else, as long as it was at a lower personal altitude than the one with which they’d been cursed. They’d all rather be two-guards. (See “Sampson, Ralph” for details.) This was not the case with Shaquille O’Neal. He revelled in who he was. He had an instinctive sense for the limits of the absurdity that is the professional athlete’s life. “They’re gonna make a cartoon out of you anyway,” he once told me. “The important thing is to make sure you control the cartoons.” The barstools in the Unfulfilled Potential Lounge are full of people who lost control of their cartoons. He never did.

CPP

He grabbed the side of the lectern as if it were a life preserver. He shouted and gestured like someone thrashing in deep water. […]

From Zen to zealous, from meditation to perspiration, the Lakers have gone from the son of a preacher to, well, a preacher himself.

Bill Plaschke on new Lakers coach Mike Brown

One of the better Shaq tributes I’ve read in the last 20 or so hours:

Shaq won’t disappear. He can’t, and not because he’s so massive, but because of his personality. Like Charles Barkley, Shaq isn’t going to recede into nothingness. Some TV set is waiting for him, whether we’re talking reality or basketball. (Reality seems more his venue.) Bad enough for those of us of a certain age that basketball seems to have lost the old-fashioned pivot man, what with Yao Ming’s status so uncertain. There are only a handful of men now who continue the lineage.

And with all due respect to the Magic’s Howard, a likeable fellow with a big game, the league has nobody like Shaq. Kobe gave us some of what we missed when Jordan left, and LeBron gives us some of Magic’s flair. But there’s no facsimile of Shaq, no big, young, prodigiously talented youngster who rattles rims and flattens 7-footers with his rump backing into the basket. Nineteen years is a long, long time to do anything that requires that much physicality, and Shaq’s time as a player of consequence has been done for a minute or two.

Spo’s not exactly living the life, but he’s three wins from the LOB

[Eric] Spoelstra is the Heat’s Dungeonmaster. He rarely sees the Miami sunlight and will sometimes go days without visiting the inside of his Miami Beach studio — a converted hotel room — because he overnights in The Dungeon. There, he breaks down game tape, evaluates players, figures out where the pick-and-roll defense is failing and which offensive sets are producing results.

Sometimes Spoelstra’s late-night findings after a game need to reach the Heat while they’re traveling. Since the main FedEx office in Miami closes early, Spoelstra hops into his old Toyota station wagon it the middle of the night and drives out to the cargo terminal at Miami airport.

Excellent stuff from Kevin Arnovitz