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Obviously you have followed basketball in the past. This is a reasonable question, but Bryant and the rest of the Lakers are at home—they were handled pretty roughly by the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference semifinals. Kobe, for his part, is padding around his sprawling, overly air-conditioned home in sunglasses; giving pissed-off and undermine-y postgame "press conferences" to an audience of stuffed animals in his manse's "media room"; and calling Pau Gasol on the phone, waiting until Gasol picks up, sighing discontentedly, and then hanging up.The Miami Heat. Two things on this: 1) More like the Miami Super-Wealthy Russian Oligarch Jerks on Coke Making a Scene in a Restaurant, am I right? And 2) this team is really good, aren't they?
Yes, it is definitely more like 1), or at least more like Grotesque White Club Promoter Guys Who Dress Like Rick Ross or Grown-Ass Men Dressed Like Either DJ Khaled or a 10-Year-Old Boy, if There's Even a Difference.
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Rajon Rondo, their point guard, looks like a handsome alien and is playing absolutely, brilliantly out of his mind. You should watch a game to see him play, if that sounds like something you'd like to see. Paul Pierce is the world's greatest and most gifted grouchy uncle and Kevin Garnett is like if the alien from Alien developed a mid-range game and a mean, taunting sense of humor. They should be likable, but they're mostly not.
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Yes.That's it? This format doesn't work unless you make it work, man.
No, I… I know, and I'm sorry I was terse. It was for effect—the Western Conference, and the interplay between the amazingly precision-calibrated and bafflingly great Spurs and the mercurial but totally giddy, lovable and great Thunder—is definitively where it's at. But yes, these are the games to watch, especially after the Thunder snapped the Spurs' 20-game winning streak—which included sweeps in the first two rounds of the playoffs—on Thursday and made it look, tentatively, as if this might be a series.It probably won't be, because the Thunder can't quite play boring-ish team basketball as well as they should or eventually probably will, but mostly because the Spurs unexpectedly but inarguably look better on offense than any NBA team in recent memory. It seems, at times, as if they have seven guys running around out there. This is all the more impressive because they won a bunch of titles playing as the basketball equivalent of an unshakeable sinus headache, and because many of the players they have out there are random-name-generator goofuses who have been cut by other teams. But they're amazing. You don't have to hate them because they were boring when George W. Bush was president. Enjoy this, it doesn't happen much.Non-basketball, but briefly: does TNT have some sort of secret market research indicating that NBA fans love Breckin "Elf Bro" Meyer? He's everywhere, during every broadcast. Acting in Franklin and Bash, aka Doucheman, Fratster and Choad, Attorneys At Law No Homo, but also producing that sitcom with the autistic-seeming guy from That '70s Show where male friends treat each other like garbage and bro down about titties. I thought they were letting him coach the Thunder, but that was actually Scott Brooks, who looks like Breckin Meyer's dad. But this is weird. Is there a reason for this?
No, TNT just thinks you're sort of a simpleton because you watch basketball.Ah. That does explain it.@david_j_roth