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.