Please Don't Fake the Funk on a Nasty Dunk, I Don't Think My Heart Can Take It.

Yay dunk contest! It's this thing that happens during all-star weekend that used to be awesome, and is now just alright, but we still watch it because we replay J.R. Rider (yeah I called him J.R.) doing the East Bay Funk in our heads over and over ad nauseum, praying that someone will do something sweet and not wack or boring. Participating in the contest are the incumbent Gerald Green, Rudy Gay, Dwight Howard (Jesus Christ), and Jamario Moon, the lone rookie in the event.

Rudy Gay's been coming strong with his campaign; he's been all over YouTube having fans post suggestions for his dunks, and there's a bunch of them out there. Some are trash, some are GREAT, but we've seen a lot of acrobatics from him, and he has managed to make Luis Scola look less sexy, which is hardly a simple feat.

Dwight's been pretty quiet; he claims he's got some "tricks up his sleeve" and he did make a surprisingly unfunny campaign video, but we saw the highly underrated sticker dunk, we saw the kiss the rim dunk in practice, so we know what he's capable of, and there's been speculation about him raising the freaking hoop to dunk on a 12 footer (the NBA wouldn't let him last year).

Jamario Moon's sort of the wild card in this since he's the only rookie, but people are abuzz about him, and many have picked him to win. He's got a very natural, effortless looking flight, and his campaign video is my favorite out of all of them. Plus he was a freaking Globetrotter, and those dudes dunk terduckens while jumping over hookers snorting coke off of Meadowlark Lemon's chest; they're ready for anything.

Lastly but certainly not least, returning champ Gerald Green, is ready to make people remember why he won it last year. He's even responded to Rudy Gay's request for dunk ideas with a sick one of his own. I like Gerald Green because he's been pretty much invisible (12 mins a game?!) all year, and so far I haven't heard anyone say they think he'll win, even though he's the champ. Usually guys hear things like that and get mad and do crazy things, not Rae Carruth crazy, but crazy enough to win.

What's pretty fresh about this year is that in the Final Round, the fans will be able to vote on each finalist's 2 dunks, and that score will be combined with the judges' votes to determine the winner. Usually I'm against fans voting for anything, but in this case it's ok; dunks are pretty universal and people will vote for who they like. Right now, there's not a clear favorite to me, you have Rudy Gay, the cocky jock who doesn't even have to think up his own dunks, Dwight Howard, the clean cut straight man who will be victorious when the crowd starts playing little hand drums in rhythm, Jamario Moon, the mysterious bad boy with an attitude and a cold stare, and Gerald Green, the former champion that knows it's still his game to win, but can't stop grasping at the past. Oh my God do you see what I just did there? Somebody get John Hughes on the phone right now, It's a hit!

So who wins it? I personally like Dwight Howard, because it's hard to vote against the Messiah, but I digress. Now you can all thank me for forcing you to do YouTube searches for Harold Miner dunks!

R.I.P. Shaq Shoe

The NBA All-Star reserves were announced today, which inevitably lead to numerous rants about who got snubbed and how "the NBA never gets it right." Some good points were made, like the exclusions of Baron Davis, Manu Ginobili, and Marcus Camby, but I'm certainly disapointed to not see one VERY important name on anyone's list: Shaquille O'Neal.

Shaq's sub-par performance this season certainly doesn't earn him a spot on this year's Eastern squad, which sadly likely spells the end of the...(sob)... Shaq Shoe.


What good is an All-Star Weekend without Shaq? He's brought spontaneous break dancing competitions, crazy suits, center-lead fast breaks, free-throw dunk attempts, synchronized player introductions and other such shenanigans that brings us back year after year and keeps us glued to the set in anticipation. Who do we turn to now for excitement? David West?

Considering that this year's All-Star Game is in New Orleans, I have been trying to guess what kind of shoe Shaq would debut. Would it mix Pat O'Briens hurricanes, strip off its top, toss beads, or projectile vomit? Damn you, Eastern Conference coaches! We'll never find out now!

All Star Voting Makes Me Want to Punch Random People

You know what really grinds my gears? For the past couple of years, the NBA All Star voting has been a joke, and it's one of those things where people don't care all that much, so it just goes on like it is, not being changed, not being noticed. Well you know what? I say screw that. But since I have more important things to do (playing Rock Band) than marching on David Stern's home, so I'm gonna blog about it.

Have any of you seen the actual vote tabulations for the All Star squads yet? Of course you haven't. Well the fans think that the Houston Rockets are the Harlem Globetrotters of the West. Which is fine, because I love antics, and those Generals always took it in the shorts, and there's something very relieving about that, it means all is right in the world. Wait what do you mean staged exhibition games?!?!

Anyway, apparently besides Yao and T-Mac, which are sanctioned votes, because they're actually doing things like scoring points and getting rebounds, fundamental type stuff you know, unlike their other counterparts who are getting votes right now, Luis Scola and Shane Battier. Don't get me wrong, these guys are not bad players. Battier is a nice player, he's a glue guy, but he gets it done. I stand by drafting him every year in Fantasy Basketball, and he doesn't disappoint. Scola has done very well for himself also, through week 11 he's 5th in Rookie rankings and is a young Antonio Banderas. However, you mean to tell me that they're better than Kevin Durant or Josh Howard? Cause according to the votes, they are. Battier finished with 3779 less votes than Shawn Marion. Freaking Shawn Marion. That my friends, is too close for comfort. Now I don't want to be racist guy, I'll leave that to LSU fan (warning, that video has retard tigers in the wild), but if Yao wasn't a Rocket (and Chinese), this wouldn't be happening.

Now this is no surprise to any of us that actually know the NBA, but those who are sort of casual fans aren't aware of the effect that Yao has brought on a national scale, and the wave of Chinese fans that are voting based on Yao has sort of been the impetus that got this whole thing going.

That's just one example though. There are guys getting votes that have played very little basketball; Gilbert Arenas is 5th among Eastern Conference guards, and T.J. Ford is 10th, while his replacement Jose Calderon (11.8 PPG, 8.4 APG) is playing absolutely lights out basketball and are nowhere to be found. The Calderon thing infuriates me because those numbers are crazy, with turning the ball over 1.5 times a game, that boys and girls, is outstanding.

I have a few solutions for this redickulousness so please follow along, it's a blues riff in B, watch me for the changes, and try to keep up. I think that we need to go to a more specific positional voting system. Right now it's just guard/forward/center, which was fine from the 50's to the late 80's but there is a resounding number of combo guys in the league and that's making it pretty hard for people to get noticed at their position, and no one is being rewarded for being "a pure point guard/shooting guard/small forward/power forward", which is a dying breed (see Jose Calderon). Right now, Paul Pierce is 4th in Eastern Conference forwards, which seems odd to me personally; in my opinion the guy's not a forward. In that situation, if you specialize the positions and separate the voting, that puts Pierce second in the votes behind LeBron, which makes considerably more sense. Following that, guys like Hedo Turkoglu and Josh Smith, who are playing out of their minds right now get bumped up, and get noticed for their game.

Other than that, it would probably be a good idea to make the stat ranking rule that the NBA uses (guys have to play 85% of games in order to be ranked) follow suit for the All Star game. This way, you don't see Arenas and T.J. Ford getting voted for, and those guys are going to get replaced by reserve selections anyway, which get chosen by the head coaches in those respective conferences in the first place. So why even go through the motions of voting for those guys? It's a win win, the fans still get to vote, and it's fairer because injuries don't come into play.

With those options out there, the NBA gets their fan friendly image, and we get to see a better represented game, so everyone's happy. What do you guys think?