If You Smelllllll What Coach K Is Cooking

Coach K, the coach of the men's Olympic basketball team, gave a verbal bitch slap to President Obama today:

"Somebody said that we're not in President Obama's Final Four, and as much as I respect what he's doing, really, the economy is something that he should focus on, probably more than the brackets."

Damn!  There's having balls and then there's taking on the most popular president in recent memory and taking him to task.  This whole thing smacks of Coach K (or "K" as I like to call him) being annoyed that Duke wasn't put further in Obama's bracket.  Despite that selfishness, the manliness of the comment still impresses me.  You KNOW that the media is going to blow this story way out of proportion (if it hasn't by the time I'm done typing this) and eventually K will say he is sorry and didn't mean anything, but for now it's a great read.  Chuck Norris, you've got some competition.

Lithuanians Have The Heart

I was debating with one of our loyal readers about whether Lithuanians were great basketball players (I am Lithuanian, hence my interest in it) and we got to the question of whether the country has successfully exported good players to the NBA because the team seems to have a lot of heart.  I argued that the team seems to somehow be in the medal discussion every Olympics even though they are written off, and this is due to the nation's pride and borderline bloodthirsty interest in winning.

He simply sent back this response to show where the country's residents priorities lie.  

Well played sir, well played. -But look at the HEART of that guy yelling at his teammate to stop blocking his shot!

Team USA Loves Them Some Burgers

If I were a Wendy's exec, I would make this my new commercial STAT!:


Man, will the fun with these Team USA candid videos ever end? God bless Chris Bosh and his ridiculous filming. I feel like I learn something every time I watch these, with me learning three key lessons while watching this:

A) You can get Penzoil at Wendy's in China.

B) Lebron wears cheap-looking watches.

C) Dwight Howard cannot communicate while eating.

D) If this is their idea of a fun time, I would probably have absolutely no fun hanging out with Team USA (Considers the team probably spent their free time laying down in a blanket of groupies and money and reconsiders this).

Have a good weekend, folks!

DWIGHT HOWARD GOT DUNKED ON (and USA won the gold)

Kobe Might Go To Italy! Monkeys Might Fly Out Of My Butt!

Kobe Bryant is now saying that 50 million is one spicy-a meat-a-ball, and he would consider playing in Italy for that much. Since Bryant spent some time in Italy already, people are starting to think that his words have more creedance than Lebron's European interests.

Well, that, and this clip. -Easily my favorite clip of Kobe because I don't speak Italian and thus can't get annoyed at how cocky his words are:



I'm just going to put this out there: I just flat out don't believe any of this Euro junk. All it takes is Nike, Reebok, or another corporate sponsor to say, "Kobe...you aren't going anywhere. You make more money for us in America. In addition...sign our shoes" and the talk is done. Kobe is like Brett Favre in that he likes to pop his name into whatever news story is hot at the moment. People are demanding trades? Ooo, I want one of those too! Europe is the hot place? I MIGHT go there! I was actually a bit amazed to not see him stepping out of a limo, showing his cesarian scar around the time those Britney photos came out.

-Ah well, there's still time. Ciao!

Ben Gordon Likes Him Some Tea And Crumpets

If this upcoming Olympics is any indication, apparently there are a bunch of quality players in the NBA who are British.  

Yeah, I didn't believe it either when I read it. 

 Besides John Amaechi, who almost no one had heard of before he came out as the first openly gay basketball player, I had no idea British people even knew what a basketball was.  I envisioned them changing the channel from NBA games to the live coverage of British Parliament while they ate various jams on toast and plotted nefarious ways to put a stamp tax on America once again.

 

Turns out I was wrong.  Right about now is when Paul Revere hops on his horse and starts yelling, "THE BRITISH ARE COMING!"  Word is that Ben Gordon will join Bulls teammate Luol Deng on the British national team for the 2012 Olympics.  Yes...the same Ben Gordon and Luol Deng who have absolutely no accents and probably have never even heard of cricket.  Turns out Ben Gordon was born in England and then taken to America at a very young age.  Meanwhile, Deng moved to England as a youngster to escape conflict in his homeland of Sudan. I like these sort of fun loopholes that allow NBA players who wouldn't play for US

A basketball to compete in the Olympics.  Next up: Mike Miller to play for the French national team simply because his hair looks dirty and he probably smells like cigarettes!

Almost all of the other players on the British Olympic Basketball Team are kids in American universities, but we wouldn't be surprised to see another NBA player hop in there while there is time left.  Heck, if I wasn't so damn patriotic I'd try out for them myself.  I can't lie: I would be doing it entirely for the off chance of getting close enough to Hugh Grant to kick him in the balls. 

Oh Yeah...This Sounds Like A GREAT Idea!

If I were to break my foot, and my career and millions and millions of dollars rested upon it healing correctly, what would I want to do?

You guessed it: I'd get massages and consume wheelbarrows full of Ginseng!

I bring this up because one person who apparently is following this line of thinking is Yao Ming, who (following surgery) will reportedly use traditional Chinese healing methods. Not rehab. Not high-tech medicines and machines. T-Mac's "IT'S ON ME!" speech may as well just play on loop during Rockets games from here on out.

This is big business for the Chinese government (who love to give free press to things it exports), and big-time armpit sweat stains under Rockets management. I imagine a Rockets front office guy, wearing a cowboy hat and a giant foam "We're #1" finger, hearing this and yelling, "Accu-what? Accu-PUNCTURE?! They stick NEEDLES in yer FACE? Aww helllllll no!" Let the record state this is what I envision everyone in Texas looks like, which I will believe until proven otherwise.

I know, I know...many of you fancypants new-wave people will be quick to point out the healing abilities of Chinese medicine. To these people I say that you haven't popped your heads into the same shops in Chinatown as me apparently. Here is a typical photo of one of the products for sale in a traditional Chinese market in Chinatown:

How would you like to see that on your physician's table, next to the tongue depressors? Looks like somebody tried a get-rich-quick "brain in a water cooler" scheme. I must have missed that Kool-Aid flavor as a kid.

Here's another traditional Chinese medicine medicine. I'm not joking on this one either:

Yep, dried whole baby turtles. Isn't that what Mary Poppins sang you'd need a spoonful of sugar to help go down? Somewhere Splinter getting his ass kicked by the Foot Clan with no backup.

Yao might not be using these particular medicinal solutions, but the possibility of them should make TMac worry enough to even have his eyes face in the same direction. All things considered, we're wishing Yao a safe recovery. Watercoolers of brains for everyone!

HUGE NBA News: I Guess We Better Start Brushing Up On Our German

First of all, in case you missed it, here is our post explaining how our previous Knicks article turned into an image of some nude guy. Once again, we apologize for that and return to our regularly scheduled CLOTHED website...

-Black and Blue Jor

-------------

A while ago David Stern tried to put his personal stamp on the timeless game of basketball by making his balls synthetic. This, as we know, stunk and caused a near riot against anyone who had a pair of hands (which it turns out many people have).

The obvious question that followed was, "Okay, if this egomaniac guy can't change the ball itself, what can he do to make future generations show that he was the greatest commish the sport has ever seen?" I had thought he would tell the refs to stop calling fouls and make the league an explosive league of gore, like the now-defunct XFL. Well, it turns out he would rather mimic the now-defunct World League.

Yes, ladies and gents, David Stern is putting a plan in action to bring the NBA to Europe! He wants there to be a 5 team European division in the next decade that includes London, Madrid, Rome, Berlin and....some other place. This is supposed to be the huge announcement over the All Star weekend, as they needed to do something big to make up for the loss of Shaq's shoe.

While on one hand we think the thought of European expansion sounds pretty cool (we at THF love our English Premier League Soccer), on the other hand this announcement will come with the gut-churning realization that our kids might one day be a fan of the "Berlin Wall-Knockers" or something. It's also a toss up how it will work out, as American expansion in Europe is still limited to big technology corporations and college coeds sleeping around while on study abroad semesters.

One thing I am very excited about is how the "bad seeds" on the NBA will get into whole new predicaments in another continent. The same NBA player who got busted for taking drugs and sleeping with prostitutes will now get in trouble for getting gored during the running of the bulls and drunkenedly falling off of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Also, the incredibly wacky injury reports of players will become even wackier once things like "Mad Cow Disease" and "severe allergy to saurkraut during Oktoberfest" start creeping in there.

Ultimately, while I would love to sit here and pan the idea as yet another example of a league getting too big for its britches, I am very excited about seeing foreign cities represented in the NBA. After all, how could a Lithuanian like myself pan the idea of the NBA in Europe after the "Lord of Lithuanian Sports" Sarunas Marciulionis said it was a good idea? You're right, I can't.

The only sad part of this whole thing is that Bryant "Big Country" Reeves is out of the league before this will happen. Seeing him try to salsa in Madrid would make me die a happy man.

I've Got A Fever, And The Only Prescription, Is More Jawai

What do you get when you cross Beatlemania with a pile of Koala droppings?

Nathan Jawai, a 21 year old Australian player who has NBA scouts using their frequent flier miles to go to the land down under in droves. Every year there is some crazy and kooky international player that takes the NBA by storm, be it Yao, Yi, Bargnani, Nowitzki, or Fettucini. This year the hype is starting to build around Jawai, a guy from Cairns, Australia.

I lived in Australia for about half a year and stayed in Cairns for a while. It is the equivalent of Miami times a bajillion, as it is a fairly built up area that happens to be surrounded by amazingly beautiful natural resources. I don't mean "Hey, we got the everglades and shit", I mean, "We have the great barrier reef, tropical rainforests, and a ton of tanned gorgeous nude people bathing in waterfalls"*

*This part might have existed only in my mind.

Despite the fact that he originally comes from an area around New Guinea, him playing in Cairns leads me to believe this Jawai guy probably is something of a surfer dude, as everyone I met in Northern Australia was either a beach bum or a rainforest guide (Those guys just sorta smelled like B.O. and always had short shorts. Hey moron, you're in the rainforest with a million bugs. How about some slacks?)

I also kept getting stung by jellyfish when I was surfing in Cairns, and was repeatedly told that it was the "good season" if I only got stung a few times. Apparently during the "bad season", there are so many jellyfish in the water that you face certain death if you go in the water. How delightful! Someone sign this guy to a multi-year deal now so we can see the NBA toss in stuff about jellyfish into their contracts!

So what makes this guy better than the rest of the international players out there? I have no idea, but it says he is 208 centimetres (they spelled it with an "re"...how adorable!) and he obviously means something if the Toronto Raptors are checking him out. The Raptors and Spurs seem to be the only teams who actually evaluate overseas talent correctly, so when they go somewhere I pay attention. I was one of the few people who actually paid attention when the Spurs drafted Tiago Splitter recently while the rest of America was talking about foos like Acie Law. Splitter was a top 10 pick option the year before, and the Spurs nabbed him on the last pick in the first round. It's like the Patriots getting a high first rounder in this upcoming NFL draft: you just have to look to the heavens and ask God to not make it so obvious who his/her/its favorite teams are.

For now, we will wait and see what happens, but whenever you finally hear the name Nathan Jawai get drafted remember where you heard his name first.

-And then give that source lots of money for the knowledge, preferably in crisp $100 bills.

THF Enjoyable Video Of The Day: Dunk Of A Lifetime

Rarely do I watch a video on Youtube and have it stick with me. Youtube, Google Video, Myspace Video...they're all so jam packed of silly junk and morons singing along to asian dance videos that about 98% of the videos on them have become completely useless.

Well, I was very happy to watch a gem one day.

I am a Lithuanian gentleman and enjoy checking out what is up with the national team from time to time. Particularly, I am eternally on the lookout for footage from the greatest basketball game I have ever seen live: the triple overtime Lithuania vs. Croatia game in the 1996 Summer Olympics (Lithuania won, used the game to go on to win the bronze medal, and subsequently became a basketball powerhouse afterwards). Toss in the fact that that team was sponsored by the Grateful Dead and had cool skulls all over their merchandise, and I was in heaven.

Anyhoo, bored and on Youtube, I happened to type in "Lithuanian basketball" to see what would pop up.

What would follow is the video that enters my mind (and will FOREVER enter my mind) whenever anyone mentions "Slam Dunk Contest". Officially THE best dunk of all time.

Paulius Parachomikas (pictured left), in an oldie but a goodie.

Enjoy: