I’m not much of a basketball fan, so this should be simple. It’s from his current mailbag:
Q: If Jerome James swapped numbers with Quentin Richardson, how long would it take for his No. 23 to become the best-selling NBA jersey?
-Ty, Huntsville, Ala.
SG: Two days. And it’s amazing the Knicks haven’t thought of this yet.
Can someone explain why that’s humorous? I’m trying to come up with why “James - 23” would be a funny Knicks jersey to have.
LeBron James, currently a player for the Cleveland Cavaliers, wears number 23. It has been widely speculated that LeBron, who is among the very best basketball players alive, will sign with the Knicks when he becomes a free agent.
I agree.
OK, I get it now. (Told you it would be simple :))
Which is an indictment of the idiocy that is the NBA these days, since King James (even if he wants to) can’t join the Knicks for another 2 freaking years, and yet they’re already obsessing over his “impending arrival”.
Well, he is on the cusp of pretty much obsoleting the NBA, and the Knicks have been a disgraceful joke for years now. I think they can be forgiven. I’d certainly be looking ahead if I was them.
Obsoleting?
Is that question about my grammar or my basketball cosmology?
Well, yeah, I know what he meant. It’s just . . . really? Obsoleting?
Verbing weirds language.
Well, OED says that obsolete has been a verb since 1640, so, I don’t know. Sorry if it grated.
I look forward to the days when language is a complete impediment to understanding.
Lebron James + Mike D’Antoni’s offensive system = Brain boggling statistical explosions
Agreed. Either Lebron can’t be allowed to go to New York or Mike D’Antoni has to die.
Either way, they’ll have so much cap space tied up in him, and he plays such atrocious defense, they’ll never win the title with those two. Oh, they’ll come close, until Daniel Stern changes the rules again to get him the crown, but things being as they are, there’s no way it’d happen.
Er, who plays atrocious defense?
I hope you meant D’Antoni.
I knew making him the commissioner was a bad idea! Celtic Pride sucked. They should have stuck with the old guy, David Stern.
D’oh! Mea culpa.
Jimmy, I meant Lebron.
That’s a pretty difficult claim to substantiate one way or the other, but it doesn’t gibe at all with either my anecdotal experience, the statistical evidence, or what I’ve heard as the prevailing common sense.
Lebron currently stands at third in the league in defensive win shares, if the fancy new numbers are your thing. If they aren’t, he’s averaging 2 steals and almost a block and a half.
If that doesn’t do it, he’s probably going to be named defensive player of the year. There’s also the fact that the Cavaliers are probably the best defensive team in basketball this season, which is tough to do with a superstar who is as bad as you claim, although I’ll concede it’s possible.
I mean, I think he’s a very good defender, especially considering how much he’s used offensively. If you don’t think he’s great at it, OK, I concede that popular opinion doesn’t go very far when it comes to defending, but citing his defense as a reason he’ll never win seems about two orders of magnitude too far for me.
He’s not an above-average defender now. He’d be much much worse under a D’Antoni system.
Also, Marcus Camby won the Defensive MVP in’07. He had the most blocks, but he wasn’t the best defender.
I wouldn’t say that Lebron is as bad a defender as, say, Dwyane Wade, but he’s not Kobe Bryant or Allen Iverson (I’d say Iverson does it with freakish quickness most of the time, though).
When you state your opinions as facts like that, you run the risk of having them treated as facts.
But I’ve already given my position. Third in the league, best team in the league, and he guards the best perimeter guy. Your opinion has trumped it.
I thought so.
Either way, he’s going to put up some nasty stats in New York under D’Antoni.