04/18/24
February 14, 2004
What the hell was up with that Rookie Challenge?: It ended with each side LITERALLY taking turns dunking on an open hoop. I know that taking an All Star game seriously is ridiculous, but this game had no business being scored. This was not much different than watching a bunch of kids play down at the Y. Why bother televising this kind of nonsense? Am I alone in my outrage?
posted by forksclovetofu to basketball at 01:46 AM - 23 comments
It was fun. I don't expect anything more.
posted by corpse at 08:32 AM on February 14, 2004
The NBA is clearly feels the need to compete with the Super Bowl for trashiness. All I can ask is: How long until spring training?
posted by dzot at 10:26 AM on February 14, 2004
dzot, the EPL is in midseason form and going strong right now, why wait?
posted by billsaysthis at 10:55 AM on February 14, 2004
God, it's supposed to be a fun game . If you're looking for competition, watch the regular season. The All-Star game is supposed to be entertaining first and serious second. It's a change from the regular grind and it's a great time for everyone involved, I'm sure. You televise it because it's entertaining. Going down to the Y and watching some streetball is entertaining too and there's nothing wrong with just playing the game for fun.
posted by dfleming at 11:03 AM on February 14, 2004
It ended with each side LITERALLY taking turns dunking on an open hoop. Isn't that how the regular season is too? /college game fan
posted by mick at 11:54 AM on February 14, 2004
billy: EPL? WTF is EPL? Established Performance Level? Oh wait, I get it. You're talking about soccer, or more correctly Metric Football. If I wanted to see people attempting to place an object in a net I would watch hockey which is faster, more exciting, more violent (fans excluded) and more slippery. Plus, there are fewer naked chubby blokes with pasty white thighs attempting to disrupt the game.
posted by dzot at 12:10 PM on February 14, 2004
Whee. This again.
posted by taupe at 01:20 PM on February 14, 2004
I can see where forksclovetofu is coming from. It's a new era of basketball. I really doubt that championships do matter to the majority players anymore. Granted, it is an all star game but atleast show a little class and play defense, which is still part of the game. Wow, dzot, that took a lot of creativity.
posted by jasonspaceman at 01:40 PM on February 14, 2004
From the linked article: "If I didn't have a mike tied to my jersey I would have thrown my jersey as well," he said, adding it was all about the players and fans having fun. Did you miss that part, fork? These rookies don't get to play like this all season, and I'm not going to say they shouldn't do it when they get the chance.
posted by bcb2k2 at 02:08 PM on February 14, 2004
I'll buy the game is all for show and fun. I realize that, so why are the performance of LeBron an Carmello being lauded as something spectacular in this meaningless exhibition? Stoudemire had a better "game " than both of them and was literally a parenthetical mention as MVP in the big box top of the page headline on ESPN last night. I know LeBron and Carmello are good and will only get better in time, no need to force it down my throat at every turn.
posted by pivo at 02:21 PM on February 14, 2004
Minutes after reading this topic, I had to run into this at Calpundit, which crystallizes all the issues relevant even to responding. That said, none of the measurements used in "Metric" football are even really metric -- they're all based on English units. Apart, of course, from the whole question of what kind of bumpkin with sadly limited life experiences finds "Metric Football" a remotely clever thing to say.
posted by taupe at 02:35 PM on February 14, 2004
Did anybody bother to WATCH the damn thing? I did. It was marginally entertaining at first, but when players would dribble away from an unguarded basket so that they could get a running start to dunk, when Boozer felt the need to flex his arm and show off his grizzly bear tats (wha? is that hood, somehow?) after every slam, when I stopped counting the missed dunks (after twelve), after LeBron took FIVE of the rookie teams shots in a row without passing and after defending players stopped crossing halfcourt after the inbounds... Well, then it just got stupid. This was unfortunate to watch and NOT fun. Instead it was a reinforcement of the athlete as hyper-macho, bonehead "me-first" showoff. Glorification or acceptance or even "eh, so what" shrugoff of this kind of nonsense is, in my mind, tantamount to endorsement. Reducing the "all-star" game to "who can slam hardest/who has the biggest penis" is boring and sad. I wanted to watch some PLAY. This was nothing even RESEMBLING a game. More distressing, this is the future of the league, so excuse me if I sound a little crotchety.
posted by forksclovetofu at 10:14 PM on February 14, 2004
Oops, it seems I've accidentally stumbled onto "CrotchedyOldManFilter". All-Star Weekend is what it is: entertainment and nothing else. If you're not entertained by it, don't watch. I see no reason to act like an exhibition game without defence means "the future of the league" is in trouble. If the players played hard like it was a real game, the odds that one of them would get injured would increase astronomically. For example, Chris Bosh has a sprained ankle and most Raptors fans just wanted him to take it easy in this game so he wouldn't make it worse. The same goes for Vince Carter in the big game. He should throw down at least one nasty dunk to remind everyone who the real slam dunk champion is, then he should coast for the rest of the game and have fun. dzot: If you want to talk about trashiness, how many professional baseball players are on steroids? It's not a good idea to make sweeping statements about somebody else's favorite sport. One person's "trash" is another person's treasure.
posted by Scott Carefoot at 09:58 AM on February 15, 2004
forks, this is the NBA you're talking about after all.
posted by garfield at 11:33 AM on February 15, 2004
Asking again: did anyone other than me watch this? Seriously, I'm curious whether I _AM_ getting crotchety. I'm aware the NBA is a "hyper-macho, bonehead 'me-first' " slamfest these days and it doesn't normally bug me. Hell, I watch Slamball fr'crissakes. But the rookie game I watched represented a new low and I'm wondering if anybody else who watched that game from start to finish can tell me if I'm alone.
posted by forksclovetofu at 01:21 PM on February 15, 2004
I agree with forksclovetofu. I'd like to see more defense like we do in baseball and to an extent, football all star games. What's the sense of having all stars who cannot play to the full realm of the game. Gaining home court advantage for your conference would take care of this.
posted by jasonspaceman at 01:25 PM on February 15, 2004
Minus bowling over the catcher, it's pretty hard to get hurt in a baseball All-Star Game. And in football, while the defence is genuine, the Pro Bowl takes place after the season. If Mark Cuban isn't going to let his players play in the Olympics (which arguably do more for the market growth of the league than any individual All-Star game), he certainly isn't going to let his players go hard at an All-Star game and risk getting injured. Cue joke about Maverick players playing hard on defence...
posted by smithers at 01:42 PM on February 15, 2004
C'mon, smithers, Allas plays OK.
posted by forksclovetofu at 05:52 PM on February 15, 2004
amn straight they o.
posted by smithers at 10:35 PM on February 15, 2004
I'm with Forks. When your rookie/second-year game ends up looking less competitive than the celebrity game (hollah if ya feel Frankie Muniz!), then there's a problem. I think it's systemic, though. We all expect professional all-star games to be low on the defensive scale. The other three major sports, however, at least make a show of caring about the outcomes of the contests. The NBA doesn't. The game is entirely about marketing and dunking, so take it with a grain of salt, I suppose.
posted by wfrazerjr at 08:30 AM on February 16, 2004
I think Doug Collins lamented about the lack of D in the rookie game for about 1/2 an hour during the actual All Star Game. Not that Mike Fratello was going to let it go. It's cyclical forks. Most, if not all of the rookie games (to this point) have actually been contested in the final quarter. The first 3/4 of the game everyone is flashy and feeling out their teammates but in the 4th, you play to win. This year the Sophmores put it pretty far out of reach. The 4th quarter was a moot point, and we all saw it. It would have been nice to have seen the effort though.
posted by lilnemo at 02:20 PM on February 17, 2004
Did I hear during the REAL ALL* game that the NBA was thinking of issuing a formal reprimand to the players involved, and to the league in general? Anything come of that?
posted by garfield at 02:47 PM on February 17, 2004
This is the same NBA that had Ashton Kutchner coaching a game to start the evening. It lost any kind of purity a long, long time ago.