Odds and ends

Can we just give this man the White House already? If the Heisman wasn't enough, check ESPN's special on Air Jordans. ESPN interviews experts like Jordan Brand designer Tinker Hatfield, famed director Spike Lee, former SLAM editor-at-large Scoop Jackson and Barack Obama.

In case you're curious, all I am looking for in president is a young, basketball-playing, Desmond Howard posing, Jordan wearing man.

On to other people who will greatly affect my life in 2009, not bad stats for future-Cat Brandon Jennings.

Meanwhile former Cat Mustafa Shakur seems to be having the time of his life in Poland.

"Um...Mr. Livengood, Could I...have that money...back? I accidentally choked this guy unconscious and I need pretty much everything I got for my lawyers right now."

There's really no better way to style your hair than having fresh Shane Battier cornrows smoothly transition into a mohawk.

Way old news, but something I completely missed in 2007 was UPS removing left-turns from their delivery routes. This just blows my mind for some reason.

Back to the present, I really like what Stanford is doing off the gymnastics mat.

I'm contemplating planning a trip to New York just to see some Asian gun powder art and have my mind blown by this exhibit.

Yes I do feel much better about myself after killing 30 minutes on the New York Times version of YouTube compared to the real YouTube.

If Mos Def didn't produce "Black on both sides" and he wasn't one half of Blackstar, I would have a lot of questions for the man. The first being why are you acting in a movie where you work in a VHS cassette rental shop with your buddy being an accidentally-magnetized Jack Black, who accidentally erases all the cassettes in the shop.

Tell 'em why you mad son

I always wondered how Darius Miles looked in the mirror every day. Having throwm away all the potential in the world, it seemed like he had the whole world in his hands back in the Clippers M.O.B. days. Him and Q-Rich were too ill with their silly head bop and Gangstarr laced Jordan commercials. For a second they had people believing there were two basketball teams in LA.

Thankfully John Canzano of the Oregonian ripped the shit out of Miles with this godly article and explained how Miles is completely complacent where he's at. A definite must-read, as any article that begins with Darius Miles and Dennis Dixon together in a strip club is.

Even though D. Miles is one of the biggest idiots in a league where they come a dime a dozen, I'll always respect him simply for the fact that when he got hurt on the Blazers, the next day he went to downtown Portland and bought 50 different suits, just so he would have a new suit to wear for every game.

It seems like every team doctor in the league always says, "(insert your favorite player) will return from his injury quicker than expected because of how incredibly fit he is and how determined he is to get back on the court."

Not Darius Miles, he's content wearing suits on the sideline (most of the time) and cashing his check on the 1st and 15th.

Random:
As if the New York Times recent articles revealing how it's easier to quit crystal meth than Facebook weren't bad enough. This old video should provide a little bit more of paranoia.

Vimeo.com is like YouTube from the future. All the videos are near HD or actually in HD.

Quotes, ASG, UO

All Zona coverage will resume in due time...

Quotes of the week:

Ballard on Shaq trade:
"Did he come here because he's a big Coyotes fan?" Coyotes defenseman Keith Ballard said. "I think we heard that. I follow basketball a little, not too much, but (I like) having him here and Amaré Stoudemire, two big guys.

"I want to go to a Suns game. I tried to go last year to see the Suns and Lakers, and they couldn't get me tickets. We'll give them hockey tickets. We'll give them 100 of them. We're another professional team ... reciprocity." (via azcentral)

Jordan Hill's bold claim before the Stanford game:
"Guarantee," Hill said when given a chance to retract his statement. "We've (beaten) two top-10 teams at home, so we can't let up now, we've got to keep on now.

"I guarantee we're going to get it." (via Schwartz's reporting)

Coach O'Neill's reaction to Hill's guarantee:
"God, almighty.'' (via Daily Star)

(The Cats ended up losing the game)

WPM on ASG Sat Night:

David Stern killed the whole thing before it even started by nixing D12's idea to raise the hoop to 12 feet, this despite Rudy Gay and Gerald Green being down with a 12 or 13-foot hoop. This would have made the contest insane.

Actually the dunk contest was over before it started since, it didn't feature LeBron, Kobe, Vince or J-Rich...or James White.

Instead we were treated to another decent dunk contest in which Magic Johnson and Kenny Smith scream "The dunk contest is back! It's back!" over a mediocre performance. Yeah Dwight Howard's "Superman" "dunk," yes that "dunk" needs to be in quotes, was pretty cool especially in the freeze-frame shot, but it wasn't "Oh my god! Is that humanly possible?!" cool.

My favorite dunk of the night was Gerald Green's "Birthday Cake" dunk, it wasn't that physically difficult, but I just loved the creativity. Green averages 5 points and 12 minutes a game for the second-to-worst team in the league, needless to say on-court productivity isn't really his focus. You gotta to love that he probably spent the last month getting high with Rashad McCants eating a million pastries trying to think of creative dunks until it finally hit them.

Why not put a cupcake on the back iron? Brilliant.

Rashad pulling it out of the pastry box was another well-thought out touch.

Also Rudy Gay, what the fuck happened? You were the sickest dunker throughout the season and then you pull some uninspired bullshit, despite pleading to all the YouTubers to submit dunk ideas.

Also, this is old as fuck, but the ending audio is priceless.

Wouldn't be complete without Oregon:

The Nike designers who decided to make the new Oregon basketball kits with the names stitched on the back in the same color as the jerseys deserve some kind of award. Coldest jerseys I've seen since Oregon football season. You literally couldn't read the names unless the camera was focused just right on the jerseys.

Zona Zoo...lame

Dear Zona Zoo,

Your e-mails are completely worthless. Please stop sending me a million e-mails telling me when I can line up for the game. I will continue to get there 45 minutes before tip-off and continue to be complacent with mediocre seats.

Just because the team (outside of Bayless) let down the entire school against ASU, doesn't mean you have to push Thursday's Cal game extra hard. If Chase Budinger and Jordan Hill aren't going to show up for the game, why the fuck should we.

Please note that during football season it would take a lot more than a free Chipolte burritto for me to support any program Mike Stoops' name is attached to.

Figure out how to get your ticket system working and please leave me alone.

If you want to see how a real student section is run, refer to Oregon's Pit Crew. Please review their brilliant listserv.

Hey Everyone,

So here’s the deal. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the theme of Thursday’s UW game is “Happy Valentine’s Day Ryan Appleby.” I didn’t want to send a message out too early in the week, as we want this to be a complete shock to him. That’s also why we’ve been telling reporters all week that Thursday will be really bad, because we wanted them to fuel the fire and make Appleby think this year will be like last year. What happened last year is old news, so lets create something that will be remembered for the right reasons. We don't want to be like the Washington students and do the same old, dumb stuff every year.

This is a great opportunity for us, as a group, to show how creative we actually are. Make giant Valentines day cards for him, write poems, dress up in your finest attire; we want this to be something special! It’s the last thing he and his teammates will be expecting, and the more we can throw him off, the better. The best/funniest Valentines card, addressed to Appleby, will win a pair of NIKEiD Oregon Shox courtesy of NIKEiD.com. Sign it “from AB” or "Aaron" if you want, but be creative and keep the content and slogans funny, not malicious. We will collect the best cards and give them to him after the game. Ryan’s girlfriend will also, reportedly, be at the game and we will present her with flowers before the tip-off (if she makes an appearance.)

Ya, I realize UW is a Rival, I hate the school as much as everyone else, but lets get this done and make the reporters who’ve been writing all this garbage about the Pit Crew lately look silly. That means during the game as well, don’t chant “Applebitch” or anything like that, it’s old and frankly, quite dumb. Cheer for the Ducks, and if it's having an effect, cheer for Ryan as well throughout the game.

The best e-mail ever

I just got this e-mail and it made my day/month/year.

Hello Justin,

I am a fan of basketball. I saw that you are a fan of Paul McPherson.

P-Mac play with my team in France (Hyères-Toulon Var Basket).

But, he plays very bad. He could leave the team tomorrow...

look this link, it's Paul : http://htv83.free.fr/gallerie/albums/userpics/10001/HTV-Elan-PAU-12-01-08-057.jpg

Holla

Fab.

Can you dig it?!

No, not really. Definitely not now at least.

(not my genius, credit Niketalk)

Yesterday as Shaq to Phoenix rumors started swirling, I thought nothing of it. There is no way Shaq is coming to Phoenix, If the Suns couldn't pull KG, who was begging to come to Phoenix, how are we going to now get Shaq. More importantly why the fuck would we want Shaq. It's not the early 00s or whatever you call the period from 2000-2005, it's 2008. Last time I checked Shaq was a shell of his former self, on the injured list and on the worst team (9-37) in the league.

Last night I was still in a delusional state hoping this was another retarded trade deadline rumor a la the rumor of Portland giving up Jarrett Jack, Travis Outlaw and Channing Frye for Devin Harris in a Jason Kidd trade. I joked I'd rather trade Shawn Marion straight up for Devin Harris for two reasons: one, Devin Harris is not 52 years old, two, he is not owed $40 million over the next two years (that one is not an exaggeration).

More of angry, pissed off Justin's thoughts:

We might as well see if we can trade for a 2001 version of Allan Houston, so we can officially have the worst bang for the buck of all time. Seriously though, worst case scenario, the Suns can Allan Houston Rule Shaq.

If we are going to trade our second-best player, I'd rather have anybody not named Kwame instead of Shaq.

As much of a constant bitch Shawn Marion, he still fit the Suns offense better than anybody in the league, period.

Why not just keep Kurt Thomas, who the Suns traded to Seattle to save a little over $8 million. Seriously Kurt averaged 4.6 points and 5.7 boards in 67 games for the Suns last year. This season he's 7.3 and 8.9 and has played 38 games for the Sonics. Shaq put up 17.3 and 7.4 in only 40 games for the Heat in '07 and was averaging 14.2 and 7.8 in 32 games for the Heat this season. Yes Shaq's numbers are better but are they $12 a season better?

What the fuck is Steve Kerr doing?!

Justin's coping-with-it thoughts on the Shaq trade:

First and foremost, Shawn, you were never happy being an all-star, playing along side two all-stars on a championship caliber team, while getting paid a max contract. You're now on the worst team in the NBA, a team which already lost 15 straight games this season. Suck a dick and a half bitch (c) E-40.

Honestly we were never going to win a championship with the team we had, not unless the rest of the west caught the Black Plague, any change is good, I guess.

It is Shaq, at least he'll be entertaining.

Maybe proving the world wrong and keeping Kobe from ever getting another ring will be all the motivation he needs.

We no longer have Marcus Banks. That's just great.


In other horrible basketball news, Where's P-Mac's prodigal son, Nic Wise may be out for the season after knee surgery to repair a torn meniscus. This sucks in more ways than I'm able to comprehend right now, the only silver lining is Nic's Facebook status which reads: "Nic Wise Had surgery. P.S. USC & UCLA i gave you buckets with a torn meniscus."

On a positive note, if you follow Philly women's prep hoops like I do this article is a must-read. Or if you just want to learn about the Tarnowski hoops history.