“Thanks for passing the torch…I think I burned my hand, though.”

I was reading an article from NBA Fanhouse Monday morning in which Matt Steinmetz was remembering the career of Nick Van Exel and it made me remember my constantly waffling view point of how he embodied the change between the hard-nosed style of play of the 1990s to the flash and image conscience youth of today. I was always a closeted Nick Van Exel fan from his first days in Cincy until his last days in San Antonio. There was nothing particularly amazing about his game when you break it down. He was a good, not great shooter. He was a solid ball-handler that didn’t make a ton of mistakes. He was an above average passer.

He had a ton of quirks to his style of play. He wore high socks when he was feeling squirrely. He stood about two-feet behind the line when he was shooting free throws. He was knock-kneed and a crafty lefty. He was a part of the sect of basketball players like Popeye Jones and Sam Cassell that were constantly compared to aliens because of their facial and head shapes. And he would look at a teammate the entire way down the court on a fastbreak before looking away as he passed it. It was a poor attempt at a no-look pass or maybe a tribute to Magic Johnson. I could never really figure that out.

No matter what you felt about Nick Van Exel as a person or a player, there were two certainties when he was on the court: 1) he was going to score points and 2) he was going to be volatile while doing so. Steinmetz mentions him pushing referee Ron Garretson back in 1996 as his most memorable moment in the NBA. This happened during a time in the NBA in which guys like Dennis Rodman, NVE, John Starks, and Vernon Maxwell were terrorizing the officials in the league. Sponsors were getting more and more frightened by the images of their products being associated with the imagery of these outlandish acts happening on the court, which eventually came to a head when Ron Artest burst onto the scene in Detroit (literally).

But I also would rather remember him for his incredible scoring ability. Actually, to me he was more than just a scoring point guard; he was an attitude of reckless abandon, defiance, and a walking example of having a problem with authority. He seemed to bang heads with coaches, players, officials, and others as a brash young, gunslinger. But he always put on a show in doing so. He was the origin of Gilbert Arenas’ style – a point guard that was too small to play shooting guard but too good to worry about where you played him. He carried the torch of this role from guys like Sleepy Floyd and Calvin Murphy and bridged the decade of the 90s before giving way to Arenas and today’s audacious young scorers.

NVE was never afraid to take the big shot or to put the scoring load on himself. He would reliably score when his team needed it. He would take on personal challenges and try to make them fit into the ultimate goal of a team win. He would make personal points to respond to challenges, even in big spots (like scoring 40 points in a 2003 playoff series game (Game Three) against the Kings after Bobby Jackson stated that he wouldn’t exploding for 36 again like he did in Game Two). As he got older and wiser, his scoring became more about fitting in than it did about proving his own worth. His style was converted into tangible currency like winning, instead of his usual panache that had no real discernable value.

Van Exel always seemed to be toeing the line between walking the company line in order to keep his minutes on the court consistent and being an ostentatious explosion of flair, capable of putting Barnum and Bailey out of business. He was one of those few players that I figured would never be seen again. He was a showman, playmaker, and great scorer but incredibly undersized compared to the bigger, faster point guards that have become nouveau riche. We can find guys like that scattered here or there but rarely with the same attitude that Van Exel possessed. The attitude that should put off the majority of fans but at the same time is too enticing to completely hate.

Thank Higher Being for Brandon Jennings.

Brandon Jennings may be the most confused professional basketball player we’ve ever seen. He’s all about self-worth, aggrandizing himself, and showing that he’s one of the best. But he does it in astonishingly unselfish ways. His attitude contradicts his play. He distributes. He makes the smart pass while making it fancy. He leads his team while judging them with eye-rolls and passive-aggressive sighs. His trip overseas wasn’t just a way to avoid college, classes, and not being paid a wage for his duties but it was also a Sonny Vaccaro style alternative of trail blazing for his future colleagues.

I honestly can’t figure out the psyche of Brandon Jennings and I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about it over the last couple of weeks. He seems like an affable, fun guy and yet, acts completely adolescent between plays on the court. He seems like a one-person production of Coach Carter- trying to find the gray area between his eventual capsizing hubris and his natural instincts that shape him towards spreading the wealth on the court. He seems to be confused with his own identity as well but perhaps, he’s like a young puppy just trying to figure out what he can get away with.

His play in the Summer League was pretty telling of what we all expected from him. He passed the ball well (8.2 apg) and turned the ball over a lot (4.2). He was opportunistic on defense with 3.6 steals per game but a lot of those came from some lazy dribbles by Tyreke Evans while he unfocusedly brought the ball up. His shot was completely inconsistent. And his attitude replicated his shot. When he was on his mental game, Jennings was a great teammate as he calmly congratulated teammates after made baskets. But when they missed a ball, dropped a pass, or clanked a shot off the iron, his eyes rolled like spinning rims. He huffed and puffed like he was being kept out of a little pigs house one minute and acted like a leader the next. He was a good teammate until you blinked and saw that he was actually throwing a bit of a mini tantrum.

It’s rare that you get a great pass-first point guard that appears to be completely self-involved. The last time we saw this was probably Mark Jackson and all he did was end up with the second most assists in NBA history. With Jennings, it’s hard to predict where he’ll land in the world of NBA lore. Will he adhere to the rules and advice of Scott Skiles to become an All-Star point guard? Will he get into a petty war of words with Skiles on a consistent basis that nets him in-house fines and bewildering minutes given to Luke Ridnour? Will the smart move have been jettisoning Ramon Sessions, an assist machine, for the higher risk-reward Jennings? Will Jennings be known for eventually kicking Steve Javie in the teeth or will he rack up so many assists that we’re debating his HOF candidacy in 20 years?

There’s no way of predicting his career.

Even though he’s unlikely to give us the scoring exploits of what Nick Van Exel gave us over his career, I fully expect Jennings to carry on the legacy of bravado amongst semi-controversial point guards. Much like NVE, he has much growing up to do and it might not happen under the same cap he was wearing on draft night (you know, after he oops, pow surprised David Stern on stage). It may take a couple of travels until we begin to see the production that we anticipate appreciating. We’ll ooh and ah together before we turn around and cringe at his immaturity.

And then someday, he’ll pass the torch to the next guy.

Zach Harper also runs Talkhoops.net, a general NBA blog, and Cowbell Kingdom, a Sacramento Kings blog part of the TrueHoop Network. You can email him at zharper[at]talkhoops.net. You can also follow him on twitter here and also here.

“Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!”

If you watched the Music Television Video Music Awards (or the MTV VMAs as I so cleverly have dubbed them) then you undoubtedly are either a 13-year old girl, not into football, haven’t given Mad Men a chance yet or you really had nothing better to do and wanted to see if Perez Hilton was going to show up with a orange-ish Mohawk-ish hair style, pink shorts and what looked to be cut-off, yellow rain boots. So if you fall into any of these categories, you undoubtedly watched Kanye West storm the beaches of Normandy the stage and professed one of the great injustices of our lifetime that he disagreed with the selection of Taylor Swift’s video for Best Female Video when Beyoncé’s video wasn’t even nominated. I didn’t watch it live by any means but after quite an uproar on Twitter and Facebook (the modern day equivalent of the Boston Tea Party is a scathing 140-character update or changing your status update on Facebook from a quote about dancing like nobody is looking to ripping Kanye West), I felt the need to inquire about it and find the YouTube clip.

Now, I’m not sure what a Taylor Swift exactly is but from what I’ve gathered through extensive research over the course of last night, she’s a young country singer who may or may not be worthy of a Purple Heart or Nobel Peace Prize after enduring such a heinous attack. So why did Kanye West do this? Because he badly needed attention? Because he was afraid that after such a huge flop of his latest album, he needed to pull a stunt to prove that he was still the Jay Marriotti of rappers? Because the MTV producers scripted him to?

More likely than not, it was because he wanted the attention (assuming that MTV didn’t script it). When he called Beyoncé’s video (which later won Best Video of the Year or best spectacle involving Jay-Z’s lady friend in a uni-tard) “one of the best videos of all time,” he didn’t actually mean that. He just felt like he had to get up on stage and show that he was still breathing and was still suffering from the same eye condition that Vin Diesel’s character had in Pitch Black, which forces him to wear sunglasses indoors. There was no actual injustice here but it is fun to pretend like there is because that’s what this culture does. We blow things out of proportion so that we can find a cause to complain about in a New Media environment. Do we actually blame Kanye West for it? I would hope not. We are all reveling in the fact that West ran up on stage, grabbed the microphone from the terrified, young, white female and set the internets on fire.

It’s the same reason why we love Ron Artest and Stephon Marbury at our core level. What Ron Artest has done with video blogging (especially the ones that get deleted by his management team) should be classified as transcendent. The internet wasn’t really invented so that we could share more information at a faster pace. It was invented so that he could make tributes to Michael Jackson, show us the process of him signing with the Lakers, and feed homeless people with Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. Whenever we see a headline from Skeets on Ball Don’t Lie that involves the words “video” and “Ron Artest” we get a level of anticipation that only Ron or a last second shot can bring to our central nervous system.

We feed off his insanity and have, since he decided to bum rush the crowd in Detroit, more than half a decade ago. But insanity isn’t exactly the correct or proper term for what Ron Artest does on a consistent basis with the internet. It’s just brilliant marketing. The worst thing that a person like Artest can become is irrelevant. He has a mentality through his own upbringing and psychological makeup that requires him to be the center of attention, or as close to the center as he can get. It isn’t really a narcissistic thing either; it’s more of a needing to feel acceptance by a mass audience that he can’t get when he isn’t directly in front of 20,000 people watching his every move. Personally, I believe things are much more calculated with Ron Artest than they are with someone like Stephon Marbury.

Stephon Marbury went a different route with his Social Media experiment; he inundated the market and never let up. The benefit of this was the fact that he instantly became a topic of discussion in nearly every form of communication amongst basketball fans. He hadn’t been a real topic of conversation outside of a couple of minor instances over the past two seasons. He was a passing thought as people tried to figure out ways for their respective teams to get better, until they realized that he was simply not the right cure for their ailing franchise. By throwing his name and brand into the Twitter network, he was essentially testing the waters to see if broadcasting his life for a full 24-hour day would be well received or received at all.

When there was an initial response that ultimately appeared to be quite positive, Steph and the folks from uStream jumped at the opportunity. He was all of a sudden being broadcast for days on end and it left a feeling of bewilderment that lead to depression and feeling sorry for the former star. He was no longer an icon but a complete sideshow, like the bearded-lady and Star Jones. Instead of slowly building up a dedicated audience like Patton Oswalt, he flooded the market like Dane Cook but didn’t have the college female following to turn it into an actual longstanding success.

And now?

We are relegated to the clips of him getting in a car crash, eating Vaseline, and trying to prove to people that he’s not a homosexual. The attention he warranted hasn’t been sincere and it hasn’t been adoration. It’s the rubbernecking that comes with a bashed up car on the side of the road. And it should be a cautionary tale for the rest of the young NBA players that are looking to reach out to their fans through Twitter and whatever the next social media craze is.

Guys like J.R. Smith and Michael Beasley have gone through the downs of this new culture while Charlie Villaneuva, Dwight Howard, Chris Bosh, Kevin Durant, Kevin Love, and others are experiencing the ups. The call for attention isn’t as desperate as Kanye West showed us on Sunday night. It’s a connection that is distanced and at the same time, shows a look into the lives of those that fans never get to see it.

We don’t necessarily want guys like Brandon Jennings to go smoothly through their ascension from young star to accomplish star to aging star. We don’t want him to just follow us on Twitter and update us with his workout regimen. We seemingly want him to find ways to be outlandish and troublesome. We need him to shock us. We need him to fill our need for a cause to complain about. It’s the same reason that news is more scintillating and gets better ratings when there is more crime in the broadcast than puppies and kittens living in ignorant bliss (although we love that too).

We want to be outraged. Otherwise, we just end up tweeting about our work day and waiting to grasp onto the next great injustice of our time.

“Two men enter, one man leave.”

It’s no secret the Oklahoma City Thunder possess a bright future thanks to young stars, a potential perennial MVP candidate, and a patient genius for a GM who comes from a spectacular pedigree of learning from the most successful franchise of the past decade.

So I’m not splitting the atom or slicing the loaf here when I tell you that this is a team worthy of playoff contention within the next two seasons. I’d be mildly surprised if it came together this season but willing to bet the farm it will definitely happen by the end of the 2010-2011 season. But I don’t really want to talk about how great Kevin Durant is. I’ve halted against calling him the next superstar in the past because I wanted to see a little bit more from him to distinguish himself apart from the group of guys like Rudy Gay and Danny Granger (fantastic scoring small forwards but it’s unclear if they can actually be a top player some day). I also don’t really want to talk about the versatility of Jeff Green or how perfect the James Harden pick is going to be for them because he seamlessly fits into what they’re building and will be a fantastic third or fourth option in the playoffs.

What I want to discuss is the next nightmare of the NBA: Russell Westbrook.

The Thunderdome headline was a cliché and obvious choice because I think it’s one of the internet laws that every other article about the up and coming OKC Thunder has to have some reference to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. But when you think about the current state of what Russell Westbrook brings to the basketball court in year two of his NBA career, there is a certain sense of chaos, battle, and getting to the weapons first. He’s more athletic than most of the top athletes in the world. He has no place on a traditional NBA court because he isn’t easily defined. He’s the fun, confident kind of arrogant – secure in his ability to complete the objective at hand.

I asked Royce Young from Daily Thunder to expound on his feelings in getting to watch Westbrook every game and he said, “The thing about Westbrook is that he doesn’t fit the mold. He doesn’t even fit his position. He’s a total tweener that isn’t made to play the point or the two-guard. He can’t shoot well enough to play shooting guard. He makes too many bad decisions to be a true point. He’s too small to guard other two’s. He too offensively inclined to be a one. He’s a hybrid guard that does a little of everything. Like there is in college football recruiting, the position he really fits is just “athlete.” He plays ‘point guard’ because that’s the best place for him to be when he’s on the floor. But truthfully, he doesn’t really fit in.

But that’s what makes him so damn special. He just plays basketball. He crashes the boards for rebounds, tries to challenge power forwards at the rim, goes for every pass, never takes stops running and plays with such reckless abandon you think he’d taken PCP before the game.”

Watching him play is like watching the future unfold in front of your eyes. We’ve been moving this way for a while with basketball players. Extra athletic players that aren’t exactly reliable in shooting the ball but also, not really a liability either in that department. And after seeing what Westbrook was able to do as a rookie with next to zero experience, it’s kind of scary to see him make the leap into next season. He reminds me of Allen Iverson in many ways without having any semblance of the same skill game as A.I. did as a young’n.

Westbrook is so confident in his ability to play basketball that he didn’t want to add a better point guard to improve the talent of the team. He damn near refused to consider Ricky Rubio as a future teammate in June. It wasn’t because he thinks Rubio is bad by any means. Rubio and Westbrook would be a backcourt capable of rewriting how you play offense and defense around the perimeter. Their defensive abilities combined with their offensive attacks would have created baffled opponents with timid demeanors against the Thunder. But Russell wanted to prove to everybody that he is capable of playing point guard and doing so at the highest level. So Sam Presti decided to believe him and move in a non-complicated, role-playing shooting guard in James Harden. That’s the proverbial “dog in him” that begins to separate him from the rest.

He’s also fearless in the way he reacts on the court, despite the fact that most guys are bigger than him. He’s like Dajuan Wagner, except he’s a little taller and appears to be mainlining adrenaline during game nights. You’d be hard pressed to find more highlights from any of his rookie classmates from last season. Sure, Derrick Rose is a better basketball player, a better point guard, and has his fair share of YouTube folklore but Westbrook is arguably more explosive and more worthy of cracking the Top Ten plays every night with his go-go gadget leaping ability. He erupts towards the basket and makes defenders, stupid enough to jump with him or incapable of getting out of the way, wish it was throwback night and they were wearing James Worthy’s goggles.

His production is also unheralded throughout NBA history. There are only nine players in the NBA’s nearly 60 years of existence that have totaled more than 1200 points, 400 assists, and 375 rebounds in their rookie season. Those players are Michael Jordan, Oscar Robertson, Alvan Adams, Steve Francis, Magic Johnson, Anfernee Hardaway, LeBron James, Chris Paul, and (yep, you guessed it) Russell Westbrook. That’s not a bad list to be on. I’m not saying he’ll be as good as any of those players outside of Steve Francis. But his rookie numbers are nearly identical to Chris Paul’s and he has Steve Francis’ athleticism.

And even though he has his drawbacks as well, he seems to always do something to make you forget those mistakes instantly. “Sure he makes me want to dry hump a porcupine sometimes with his bad decisions and pension for dribbling into traps. But then he makes up for it five seconds later with a crossover and bolt to the bucket for a ridiculous dunk,” says Royce. His shooting was pretty atrocious last season at just under 40% (39.9% to be exact). But a lot of that may be attributed to that alleged “rookie wall” since he was shooting well over 40% in the first half of the year. He also had the 19^th most turnovers in NBA history for rookies with 274. But while the mistakes are plentiful (as is often the case for rookie point guards), the positives far outweigh the negatives.

As for his leap into next season (and trust me, there will be a leap), it’s kind of hard to predict what he could do or turn into. Monta Ellis was able to make one of the more impressive leaps from rookie to sophomore year for a combo-ish guard in recent memory and Westbrook is probably a better player than the Mississippi Bullet. Rookie point guards usually find themselves exploding into their second season because of their greater understanding of the world around them (like K-PAX). For Westbrook, I think the hard work and the talents will yield some terrifying results. Not terrifying for him, his organization or his fans but terrifying for everyone that has to deal with him as an opponent next season.

He’s a nightmare now. As he continues to add some consistency to his shooting range, he becomes more and more complex and unpredictable. But the difference between him and the other young sophomoric combo guards of the past is the strength that goes with his athleticism. He’s like a cougar. Not the pathetic, cheetah print wearing, Botox injected, Maroon 5 listening, 40-year old hags going to nightclubs, hoping to get a young guy drunk enough to make them forget about their stretch marks, leather skin and Oliver Miller-esque expanding waist line. He’s like the animal – majestic, streamlined and ready to pounce on unsuspecting foes.

Most opponents still won’t know what’s about to come their way. His jump will be too quick. His first step will be a senile memory that seems to be nothing more than a blur. His defense will be staunch and unfathomable for a player so young. He’ll become a flash of Gary Payton with a pogo stick. And there’s nothing the opposition can do about it. All they can hope for is that his jumper never learns how to fall and that the NBA implements a true zone defense so that they can crowd the lane against Russell Westbrook.

41 times this coming year, two men will enter at the point guard position but more often than not, Russell Westbrook will be the only one leaving.

Zach Harper also runs Talkhoops.net, a general NBA blog, and Cowbell Kingdom, a Sacramento Kings blog part of the TrueHoop Network. You can email him at zharper[at]talkhoops.net.

“A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.”

Okay, I’m not exactly experiencing déjà vu here. Because I don’t remember this happening. At all.

But apparently it did.

I mean… it freaking happened!

I was reading a post on Sactown Royalty by an author who goes by Exhibit G. He’s a really good writer and does a nice job of pontificating about the Sacramento Kings and where the entire organization and fan base stand. In the post, there is a point in which he mentions Jamaal Magloire and then throws in a brief mention that the former first round pick from Kentucky was once an All-Star.

And the crazy thing is that he’s not making that up. He’s not lying at all. It actually happened.

Perhaps, you’re asking yourself, “How does someone who’s allowed to post on Hardwood Paroxysm not know that Jamaal Magloire was once an All-Star in this league?”

That’s the thing; I do know that this happened but I don’t really remember it. I guess it’s just something that I’ve tried to push out of my memory as a human being – like the playing career of Troy Hudson or Dick Butkis taking over the head coaching job for the Deering High varsity basketball team. The fact that he was an All-Star still just never makes sense. It was arguably the biggest and unlikeliest occurrence in American professional sporting history.

First, let’s look back at that season for the New Orleans Hornets. It was their second year in the city of New Orleans and the place was buzzing (a really unfortunate choice of words and not meant as a pun at all) with excitement over their new basketball team. They were coming off of a 47-win season in their first year in Louisiana and Baron Davis was becoming a star. He was teamed with veterans like Jamal Mashburn and David Wesley and looked poised to make a deeper run in the playoffs than their previous first round exit.

But something weird happened that off-season – their head coach was fired. Not only was Paul Silas fired but he was fired after compiling a record of 186-142 (56.7 winning percentage) in four seasons. The reason was presumed to be the fact that he had a 13-16 playoff record but whatever the reason was, he was moved aside for and replaced with a confounding choice. The new head coach of the Hornets was Tim Floyd. Yes, THAT Tim Floyd.

The same Tim Floyd who had just finished compiling a 49-190 (20.5 winning percentage) record with a rebuilding and sputtering Chicago Bulls franchise. The same Tim Floyd who needed three full seasons worth of games to win two more games than what the team he was taking over had accomplished the previous season. And he was leading that team to a disappointing .500 season in which he’d never get to coach a tick off the clock of the following season. Instead, he’d eventually end up taking his coaching career and NBA money to USC (literally).

So that was the state of the team. But what was the state of the center position in the NBA that allowed for Jamaal Magloire to earn a spot on the often overly esteemed All-Star team? What was the state of the Eastern Conference that warranted Jamaal Magloire to be selected to battle with Ben Wallace against the duo of Yao Ming and Shaquille O’Neal?

Magloire made the team with pre-All-Star break numbers of 12.1 ppg, 9.4 rpg, 1.29 bpg, and field goal percentage of 46.9%. At the time, he was the seventh leading rebounder in the Eastern Conference behind Ben Wallace, Carlos Boozer, Jermaine O’Neal, Kenyon Martin, Lamar Odom, and Kenny Thomas (yes, THAT Kenny Thomas). In fact, Boozer and Odom by far had better numbers than Magloire did before the All-Star break that season and yet, Jamaal was playing in Los Angeles for the extravaganza that year.

So why not Odom? Maybe they thought if he was back in Los Angeles for a couple of days, he’d get hooked up with his weed dealer again and it would look bad for the league. So why not Boozer? Maybe the Cavs asked that he didn’t make an All-Star team since he was heading into free agency that summer and they didn’t want him to warrant big money from another team because he was now officially an All-Star, not knowing that he was just waiting in the wings to swindle a blind man.

But we all know the reason – it was a glitch in the system. The system used to be that there were five starters voted in by biased fans followed by a backup for each traditional position and then two wild cards entries that usually included a guard and a forward. By today’s standards, they’ve jettisoned the idea of there having to be a backup center and just allow the coach to select whoever seems most deserving and/or whoever is someone the coach can tolerate being around. But back then, Jamaal Magloire was the benefit of some good ole positionalist thinking. He was invited to the All-Star Game because he was a center, not because he was an All-Star.

And the crazy thing was he played really well in the All-Star Game. He scored 19 points and grabbed eight rebounds in 21 minutes. In fact, he took 16 shots in those 21 minutes. 16!!!! Who does he think he is – Von Wafer?

Hold on a sec, I have a couple more

Who does he think he is – Allen Iverson?
Who does he think he is – Isaiah Rider?
Who does he think he is – Darrick Martin?
Who does he think he is – Eddie House?
Okay, that’s probably enough.

Looking back, there was no real explanation for why he made it. It was arguably the most improbable All-Star selection in sports history. He wasn’t asked to come because a player was injured. He wasn’t asked to come because an injury replacement wouldn’t cancel his three-day trip to the Bahamas. He was a fourth year center averaging decent enough numbers on a playoff-bound team that wasn’t living up to expectations and was being coached by a coach with the 13^th lowest winning percentage in league history and he made the All-Star Game.

We’ll never see something like that ever again. There simply won’t be déjà vu with this type of occurrence in the NBA. In today’s age of sports and politics, if something like that was about to happen again then people would be asked to testify before some type of oversight committee on Capitol Hill.

But back then?

It was just a glitch in the system. I know that it happened but I can’t remember it at all.

“You ever just know something, Mr. Nash?” – General
“Constantly.” – John Nash

I’m in full belief that I have a gift for recognizing talent. I could be full of crap. But it’s the belief that I have.

Now clearly, just about everyone not named Andrew Bynum has required basketball talent in order to make it to the NBA. We never fully get to realize just how good these guys are. We read tales of players like Wally Szczerbiak and Peja Stojakovic making 85 out of 100 threes in practice but think they can’t be all that good because when it comes to in-game, crunch time situations, they rarely come through for their fans. But their talent is off the charts.

I’m narcissistic (or maybe delusional or maybe both) enough to believe that I can look at any player and tell you whether or not they’ll be great or not, simply by watching them play for no more than a minute. Much like Matt Moore can find writing talent (excluding myself of course; who knows what the hell he was thinking there?), I can find an NBA player and tell you if he’s one of the special ones.

But when nobody else outside of a certain Pacific Northwest, rabid fanbase can see what you see, at what point are they completely ignorant or are you completely wrong? At what point do you trick yourself into seeing what isn’t there or realize you hit the jackpot of evaluation by recognizing what others simply choose not to see?

Welcome to my obsession with Greg Oden.

We all know the tales of Gregory Wayne Oden, Jr. He was an All-American at the high school and college level. He was the number one overall pick over the smooth scoring Kevin Durant. He had micro-fracture surgery before his pro career even started and instantly started getting catcalls that referenced Sam Bowie. Bill Simmons thinks he’s a bust while having stated in consecutive pre-season podcasts how good Andris Biedrins and Andrew Bynum are with his buddy, Joe House. Oden is a running joke right now amongst those that don’t cheer for the Rose City. Hell, he’s probably even a joke or punch line for you and your friends.

But I have to tell you something.

You’re wrong.

Greg Oden is a beast of a man, ready to unleash hell on the rest of the NBA. He’s a rebounding vacuum. He’s a shot-blocking, missile defense system that the Pentagon would be envious of. He has an Ike and Tina kind of relationship with the rim on offense. He’s a decent enough free throw shooter and he moves as smartly without the ball as any young center in the NBA. Greg Oden is not only a good player; he’s a sure-fire perennial All-Star who will help his team win a couple of titles. He’s a Defensive Player of the Year a couple times over.

I could try to get my Kevin Pelton on right now and spout off all of the pertinent statistics that tell me I’m right about how good he can be. I could mention his Per 36 averages of 14.8 points and 11.6 rebounds per game. But that wouldn’t convince you. I could mention that he was one of the top rebounders in the league last year based on rebounding percentage but you wouldn’t care about that. I could mention that his offensive rating was 12 points higher than his defensive rating but you would just scoff. I could mention that Greg Oden is one of 12 centers in NBA history to get 4.3 Win Shares or greater as a 21-year old rookie or that his PER was 18.1 last year or that he is far more athletic and skilled than you could ever imagine but you think he sucks and is a bust.

But then again, you don’t see what I see with Greg.

Wait; do I actually see what I see with Greg?

You see injuries, slow feet, and an awkward shuffle up court.

I see powerful dunks, skying for blocked shots, and brute strength unlikely to be matched by feats of feeble young giants.

You see Pyrite, sedentary in a hearth of failure.

I see 1970s Solid Gold magic.

And that’s where a man by the name of John Nash and the movie portrayal of his life come into play.

In A Beautiful Mind, John Nash is the type of genius that nobody can understand. He sees codes where others see inanimate objects of little consequence. He finds diamonds in the rough, military plans in a wall of numbers and trends in months of magazine articles. He’s the greatest mathematical mind that had the gall to disprove 150 years of economic understanding. He is a protractor’s wet dream.

He’s also completely F’ing insane. He believes he’s being chased down by Russians and has an imaginary roommate from college who also has an imaginary niece. He thinks that he’s been decoding secret Soviet messages and helping the Department of Defense when in fact he’s been mumbling gibberish and stuffing nonsensical letters into random mailboxes. He hallucinated half of his life’s work and personal interactions and needed intense therapy for psychosis. Eventually, he learns how to balance medications and his own gift for seeing things that nobody else can sees (in a sane way) but it raises two questions for me, one being in regards to him and one being in regards to me and Greg Oden.

Does it make what Nash experienced any less real if it was ultimately a hallucination?

And am I cracking code with who Greg Oden really is or just hallucinating a college roommate that I wish I had?

Personally, I tend to think I’m right about this. Then again, John Nash thought he was ripping Sputnik a new one. For those who think Greg Oden is a bad basketball player and a bust, you’re absolutely dead wrong, no matter how crazy I am about this guy. The more appropriate question with Oden is how healthy can he be? He seems to have suffered a series of freak accidents in his career with injuries.

He broke his wrist right before his college career began and never fully healed until the NCAA title game. He needed micro-fracture surgery on his knee before his pro career could start but it was such a small area of his knee that needed the cartilage rebuild that it couldn’t have been a better and easier surgery. He hurt his foot playing against the Lakers on opening night this past season and the Blazers cautiously sat him for weeks on end.

He’s never had a string of injuries like a Danny Manning or a Yao Ming. He’s just had the on-the-job kind of luck Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor. And that’s why I think he has the ability and the likelihood to be great.

He’s never been in true NBA shape. He’s been conserving his explosiveness and his aggressiveness in order to make sure the knee heals properly. This off-season, he’s apparently been shedding pounds and moving much better as he trains. He will no longer have that twinge in the back of his mind keeping him from moving properly on the floor in fear of facing another physical step backwards. Those were the type of things keeping him from being in position properly last year while he racked up nearly four fouls per game in just 21.5 minutes each night.

With more confidence in his movement and therefore more confidence in his game, you’re going to see a lethal attack of two-handed jams while he throws his pelvis in the air ala Shaq. You’re going to see him swatting weak floaters in a single bound. You’re going to see drop steps and hooks with both hands landing like he was Bernard Hopkins. If there is a rebound to be had, he will have it. He won’t be an All-Star next year. He won’t lead his team to the title next year. And he won’t score even half the points that Kevin Durant puts up.

But the foundation will be laid. And he will be established as the next big thing.

In A Beautiful Mind John Nash said, “You have no respect for cognitive reverie.” I believe that at this current moment, I haven’t convinced you to change your mind on Greg Oden. I believe that you read my cognitive reverie about this giant and believe me to be hallucinating. But I’m confident in my assertions.

Sometimes, you just know something.

The salary cap is a fickle game in which GMs and owners are as turncoat and conniving as the brats on 90210.

Actually, it’s not like 90210 so much as it’s like another one of my favorite shows (yes, I like 90210).

One of my favorite TV shows is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s irreverent, crude, hilarious, brilliant, and perfect for any person from the age of 16 to 60, that doesn’t still buy into the BS, ill-conceived notion that it’s wrong to judge people. There have been so many hilarious moments in this show’s history:

None of these are Suitable for Work

You see what I mean? For the three people on this planet that still hadn’t seen this show, those three clips and one promotion for the new season should be enough to convince you to start watching. So what does ANY of this have to do with the NBA salary cap situation? I’m glad you asked that.

Remember when the Portland Trailblazers tried to pass off Darius Miles as a broken down, must retire piece of cap relief? They tried to get his incomprehensible contract off of their books by saying he needed to retire due to injury and it nearly worked. In fact, had it worked the Blazers would have been about $16 million under the cap figure this off-season and in position to add one more major piece to their young core before the extensions of Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge start being discussed.

But something happened; the Boston Celtics signed Miles last fall and played him for a few games in the pre-season and a few games in the regular season before letting him go. The significance of this was if Miles played 10 games total last year, his contract would go back on the books for the Blazers and their cap space would drop to around $7-10 million this summer. Well in an effort to hurt the Blazers future plans of building a dynasty, the Portland front office knew some team would sign Miles and get him to the 10-games played landmark in order to slow the progress of the only team in the Northwest.

Blazers’ president, Larry Miller, tried to put a stop to it before any team dare mess with his rebuilding plan by threatening everybody with this memo:

“Team Presidents and General Managers,

The Portland Trail Blazers are aware that certain teams may be contemplating signing Darius Miles to a contract for the purpose of adversely impacting the Portland Trail Blazers Salary Cap and tax positions. Such conduct from a team would violate its fiduciary duty as an NBA joint venturer. In addition, persons or entities involved in such conduct may be individually liable to the Portland Trail Blazers for tortuously interfering with the Portland Trail Blazers’ contract rights and perspective economic opportunities.

Please be aware that if a team engages in such conduct, the Portland Trail Blazers will take all necessary steps to safeguard its rights, including, without limitation, litigation.”

Unfortunately for them, that made an owner like Michael Heisley take that challenge to heart and sign Miles. Darius reached his 10-game mark and then some to take away Portland’s chances of making a big splash in the free agent market this summer. Instead of being able to offer Hedo Turkoglu money he couldn’t refuse, they were only able to offer him something Toronto could easily match and they ended up losing him to Canada. It was all because Michael Heisley finally decided to try to be a competent NBA owner by screwing over the Blazers.

So what does this have to do with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

Well, there’s an episode in the second season of Sunny PA (just an easy way to shorten the title in conversation) in which Mac ends up having sexual relations with Dennis’ mom. In fact, the episode is titled, “Mac Bangs Dennis’ Mom.” In the episode, Mac has foreword advances from Dennis’ mom while visiting to pick up some things. He decides to not “bang” her because she’s the mom of his friend even though he really wants to. Their other friend Charlie (the one that thought “Private” read “Pirate”) is in a feud with Dennis because Dennis is blackmailing him by threatening to sleep with a girl Charlie is obsessed with (but who wants nothing to do with him). So in retaliation, Charlie convinces Mac to sleep with Dennis’ mom so he can set up a chain reaction of backlash and chaos.

Charlie shows Mac leaving the mom’s house to Dennis one morning and Dennis’ reaction is to kill Mac. But Charlie convinces him that it wouldn’t “un-bang his mom.” He convinces Dennis to attempt to sleep with Mac’s mom, despite that being arguably the most disgusting thing anyone could ever do. And that’s what brings us to the latest in salary cap banging.

The Blazers were furious after the Grizzlies intentionally signed Darius Miles and played him to hurt their future cap space. They wanted to sue and get thousands of other team’s dollars tied up in litigation. But none of that ever happened because they knew their own threats were baseless. So instead, they waited for their opportunity this summer to try and hurt another team’s salary cap and that’s exactly what they attempted with the Paul Millsap offer sheet.

Part of them had to know that they were probably never going to get Paul Millsap into a Blazers uniform for next season. They offered Millsap an offer sheet of roughly $36 million over four years once it was clear that the market for the restricted free agent outside of Utah was completely dry. The Knicks and the Thunder were the only teams with any real cap room to bring him in and neither franchise had Paul in their long-term plans. So Portland took it upon themselves to strike a deal with Millsap because it was seemingly a win-win situation for them.

Worst-case scenario, the Jazz didn’t match the offer sheet and Millsap joined the young, dynamic frontcourt of Greg Oden, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Joel Pryzbilla. Best-case scenario for Portland was the Jazz matched the offer sheet and had to take out a substantial loan in order to cover the signing bonus-laden deal that was designed to hurt Utah financially. Well, the Jazz decided to match the offer sheet, have to take out the loan to cover the initial expenses for retaining Millsap and now have to decide whether or not they want to pay the $10 million+ penalty in luxury tax costs next summer or trade Carlos Boozer in order to shed some money this year while hurting their depth and frontcourt power.

Portland ended up making this decision because they had the ability to do so. It was created by the Darius Miles fiasco and part of me believes that they were still bitter about the fallout and financial restrictions from Memphis playing a useless D-Miles just to hurt Portland. Part of me believes the Blazers wanted to retaliate with another team in the West and took it out on Utah.

And you can’t really blame them. Their mom/salary cap situation was completely banged/ruined because of petty and shrewd business moves. They weren’t wronged in any way. Every team in the NBA should have been prepared to do what Memphis did just like every team with cap space should have tried to drive up the asking price for Paul Millsap, knowing that Utah was almost certain to match. That’s just a good business practice and a way to keep the competition down. Portland tried to retaliate by banging/ruining someone else’s mom/salary cap situation.

Unfortunately, that didn’t un-bang Portland’s salary cap and they still haven’t been able to add a big piece to their roster.

There are only two things that NBA Draft picks can become – success or failure.

It’s a simple fact of life and a simple fact of the NBA that potential is reached, not reached or exceeded. It doesn’t matter if it takes three months, five years, 10 years or 20 years. NBA players will either be regarded as one of the good picks or one of the bad picks. They’ll be a bust, steal, or no-brainer. They’ll sail the seven seas, find the Holy Grail, cause a nation to weep, drive fans insane or make people want to put their head through a wall just to avoid seeing that player miss his assignment on defending the pick and roll for the umpteenth time. Anything is possible.

Whoops. Sorry, KG.

Anything is posssssssibbbblllllleeeeee!

We have our steals in recent draft memory. Whether it be Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker, Danny Granger, Michael Redd, Paul Millsap, Gilbert Arenas or others, there is always the hope of a diamond in the rough that will be discovered and help your franchise shine. And we also have our busts in the draft. There’s Michael Olowokandi, Danny Ferry, Pervis Ellison, Marcus Fizer and Marcus Haislip.

Wait a second; let’s hold back on Marcus Haislip.

Marcus Haislip is coming back to the NBA. Not only is he coming back to the NBA but he’s also coming back as a member of the San Antonio Spurs. Normally, I’m not interested in guys who don’t make it here and then are jettisoned overseas, unless I come across one of their games on NBATV or some random DirecTV channel that I didn’t know I subscribed to (see: Omar Cook, Trajan Langdon, or Qyntel Woods). But with Marcus Haislip, I’ve always been a lot more intrigued with what happened to his NBA career.

I mean, where did it go? One day it was here and the next day it vanished – like David Copperfield, laser disc and the Sega Dreamcast.

He was a lottery pick for the Milwaukee Bucks; thrust into a forward heavy rotation in beers and brats country that consisted of various combinations including Toni Kukoc, Tim Thomas (back when he was regarded as a “one of these days, he’s going to make us look like geniuses” type of player), Anthony Mason, and Keith Van Horn. He played a grand total of 704 minutes in the birthplace of sweet, sweet Miller High Life before finding his way to Indiana to sit behind the fallout of the Ron Artest melee in Detroit. Needless to say, in 79 career games in which he cracked 20 game minutes just 15 times, Marcus never really got a chance to prove he wasn’t a bust.

So what does he do? He does what any young strapping lad with no job and very little direction does in their early to mid-20s. He heads over to Europe!

And what does he do in Europe? He finds a craft, hones it and bides his time like the Count of Monte Cristo. He moves through Turkey for two years before finding his home in Malaga, Spain. He becomes a highlight real of go-go-gadget dunks and Hakim Warrick-like blocked shots. He adds a three-point shot to his repertoire. He learns how to shoot free throws. He becomes a slashing power forward because he doesn’t score well from the block. He finds ways to adapt, blend in, and star for a successful club.

Now, he’s not the perfect swordsman that the Count of MC was. He isn’t a great defender outside of the occasional highlight swatation. He doesn’t really have low post moves. He rebounds at an extremely poor rate for a 6’10” jumping jack. He doesn’t exactly scream a lower-middle class version of Shawn Marion like the highlights might allude to.

But in San Antonio, he doesn’t have to be all of those things. He doesn’t have to exact revenge on those who have wronged him. He doesn’t have to be the Tim Duncan to Tim Duncan’s David Robinson. He just has to be an option. He just has to be energy off the bench for the often old and slow San Antonio frontcourt. He wasn’t given a fair shot before but with San Antonio, you have to feel like he’s being brought aboard for a reason. Maybe it’s just insurance in case Ian Mahinmi is still Ian Mahinmi or in case Tiago Splitter is as motivated to jump oceans as Fran Vasquez has been.

R.C. Buford often knows what he’s getting himself into, especially with foreign players. Marcus Haislip is inherently and biographically terrestrial to this country but he might as well be a foreign commodity. He was unknown and unwanted here. He busted out before he ever busted in. But redemption is his to have in the great state of Texas. Teaming with veterans and champions creates an environment of winning and permeates through the young players that want it badly enough.

In San Antonio, Marcus Haislip has proven that endurance and separation lead to a chance for atonement. He hasn’t proven anybody wrong and he hasn’t proven anybody right. But what he has done is currently erased the label of failure next to the 13^th pick in the 2002 draft.

He’s a step back in the direction of success. Once again for Marcus, anything is possible.

Zach Harper is the author of TalkHoops.net and Cowbell Kingdom. He has difficulty (as most people do) with how fast I speak in real life. He’s a former male gymnast who won gold at the 1994 Bel-Air gymnastics tournament. That last part is a lie. He’s our newest contributor to Hardwood Paroxysm. That part is not a lie. Revel in him. He opens with a discussion of hoops junkiehood, and the joys of young boys. Seriously.

There are basketball junkies and there are BASKETBALL JUNKIES.

There are people who watch most of the games and there are people who will argue the importance of Muggsy Bogues and how he changed the concept of what basketball could be (perhaps a future article?).

I fall into the latter category of basketball fans. I’m someone who can’t really consume enough of it. I actually enjoy watching the Bucks and Bobcats go at it on a random Tuesday night because it gives me a chance to compare and contrast Larry Brown’s affect on a team as opposed to Scott Skiles’, it gives me a chance to see if I believe in Boris Diaw Frenchness more than I believe in Charlie Villanueva’s hairless approach to scoring, and it lets me figure out if I’m actually willing to back Ramon Sessions in some future argument of the Nevada point guard versus Raymond Felton.

But there are points in a season or calendar year in which the grind starts to wear you down. Chris Paul’s jumper starts to look flat and pointless. Emeka Okafor’s jump ball genius loses its luster. Kobe Bryant’s spin moves and reverse pivots seem cumbersome and my criticism of LeBron James’ defense even starts to annoy me.

These are the points in which your mettle as a basketball nerd is tested and tested hard. It’s like David Noel at a pre-draft combine trying to prove that his athleticism is more valuable than his lack of pure basketball skill. It’s like LBJ learning through failures how to win. It’s being tested like Dwight Howard learning that he’s entered the mode in which it is better to foul him than give him a shot to make a move towards the rim. I feel like Maximus at the end of Gladiator in which I’m trying to honor my family while proving myself to hordes of people wondering if I’ll make it or not through the end of the final act.

And this year was no different. I felt those struggles and the wear’n’tear of 2,460 regular season games as the second season began in mid-April. But something different happened in my life to keep me juvenated and inspired to keep wanting to consume more and more basketball.

I started assistantly coaching junior varsity basketball for a local high school. It was going to take up two nights a week of my life from 6-8pm and it was going to dominate my weekends with four tournaments in four weeks. It didn’t just find a place in my life. It didn’t just become part of my schedule. It became my schedule. In fact, it became my schedule during one of the more exciting basketball playoffs in recent memory. Sure, the series weren’t all that great and there were quite a few teams that looked more like they were playing in those aforementioned Bucks-Bobs games than the Celtics-Bulls series but it was still a good time to be covering basketball on a nightly basis.

However, I was so hooked after my first practice with this group of 10 high school freshmen and one eighth-grade child that I realized an even deeper love and appreciation for the game of basketball. We traipsed through the first couple of weeks of our summer league by learning the correct ways to play basketball and by learning the strengths and weaknesses of our team. We figured that our team wasn’t very big or athletic but we had a lot of basketball skill from our best player to our 11th best player.

We played our first game four weeks ago and in that game, we learned everything we needed to know about our team for the rest of the summer. We were good. Check that. We were REALLY good. We were chaos masked in peach fuzz, braces and XBOX Live handles. We were a running, pressing team that played harder than anybody we faced and more hectic than Don Nelson’s brand of basketball could ever dream of being. And we won. A lot.

I missed the second tournament we played as I attended Blogs With Balls in NYC and never felt a more longing for home than since my first sleepover when I was five years old. I attempted to network and chitchat throughout the weekend while I kept checking my phone for voicemails and text messages to see how my team was fairing. When I heard the stories of success and losses, I felt like a working father who had to miss his child’s recital because of a business trip. When I came back to the team, I realized how much I loved coaching and it took over every moment of playoff splendor that I ingested.

Over the last two weeks, I saw my team win eight out of ten games and finish with a summer record of 17-4. In the final game of the summer with four months between this final 60 seconds of basketball and the next time we’d see the players at JV tryouts, we decided to run a play for our backup center who had been begging to let him shoot a three-pointer throughout the summer. We decided to put him back in the game with one minute left and allow him to shoot the three as long as it was in rhythm and off of a pass. Instead, he caught the ball on the break, took three dribbles to get to the three-point line, and fired up a three-point shot. It was against everything we taught our kids on how to play basketball the proper way. Shots off the dribble were bad and we took the ball to the basket in a strong manner on fastbreaks.

But the ball ripped through the net and pushed our lead to 21. The parents in the stands erupted. The kids on the bench went Dikembe Mutombo at a dunk contest as they tried to hold each other back while beaming with elation. The center and newfound hero of our summer was brimming with confidence and joy as he ran back up the court like he had just moved his school deeper into the NCAA tournament. It was a pure and heartwarming moment that capped off the summer in the best way imaginable.

It was the culmination of everything that we had worked hard for in the summer. It was the reward for the players who did everything we asked them to do. It was everyone coming together as a bonded group. It was basketball at its best.

And it’s the reason that I understand coaching much more now than I ever could have before this experience. I understand why Mike Dunleavy would never want to give up his spot as the play caller for the Clippers. I understand why Mike D’Antoni loves to create pandemonium on a basketball court. I understand why Mike Woodson struggles to get through to Josh Smith but keeps coming back for more. I understand why Scott Brooks is making the most of a situation that most men will never get close to. I understand why Maurice Cheeks would put up with guys like Zach Randolph, Qyntel Woods, and Darius Miles on an everyday basis. I understand why Larry Brown can’t stay away after not being able to stay in one place. I understand why Phil Jackson loves to win so much and why Red Auerbach received no greater joy than lighting up that victory cigar.

Coaching basketball is more than X’s and O’s. It’s more than game-planning and making sure your team knows the correct rotations on a full court trapping press that will be assured to create turnovers.

Coaching basketball for some is renewing that faith in basketball that wasn’t going to go away but become more mundane with the passing seasons.

And that’s where I’m at as a basketball junkie, once again. Ready for more.