Entertainment Tonight: The Western Conference Playoffs, Part 1.
I may not have mentioned this before, but in addition to basketball and every other big-time sport, I’m a huge movie fan.
It’s partly about the temporary escape from reality, and partly just something fun to go do on occasion. Even bad movies can be fun if you’re watching with the right people.
The best thing about movies is that you can find parallels to sports teams and when it becomes a running joke, it takes your enjoyment of random games to an entirely new level.
This is especially the case for this year’s western conference playoff field. There are going to be so many subplots, story lines and just some good old-fashioned bad blood, just like the movies.
The following is quite a convoluted attempt to combine two of my passions into one.
1. San Antonio- Rounders:
“Hanging around, hanging around. Kid’s got alligator blood. Can’t get rid of him. “- Teddy KGB.
The Spurs have been ready for the playoffs ever since the regular season started. Of any team in the league, they don’t care who they play, where they play, any of it. Roll the ball out there, they’ll toss it up and more often than not, they’ll beat your team.
They’ve had such an extended run of excellence that it’s hard to remember the last time they were bad, or even average, for that matter. The Spurs are always in the hunt and have been ever since Tim Duncan’s rookie season in 1997-1998.
In a way, San Antonio assembled the first “big three” in the NBA. Even if Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker were relatively unheralded when the Spurs won their second title, they played huge roles in winning in 2005 and 2007. Parker even won the Finals MVP in 2007 over Tim Duncan.
The Spurs aren’t flashy, but they get the job done by playing efficient offense and defending everyone who moves. Everything about them is fundamentally sound.
Mike McDermott was one of the best card players in town, almost single handedly paying his way through law school with his winnings.
Mike took the advice of his friend and adviser, Knish and tried to take down one big pot per hour. It wasn’t fancy, it wasn’t sexy, but it paid Mike and Knish’s bills. As long as a player didn’t get selfish, they could make a pretty good living grinding out those small wins.
In this scenario, Knish is coach Greg Popovich, who also doubles as one of the greatest coaches in NBA history. Pop doesn’t ask his guys to do anything that they can’t do and Knish actually advised against such thoughts (even if he was pretty impressed by Mike sitting at a table with Johnny Chan.)
Mike and the Spurs also have a guy around that could potentially cripple their hopes and dreams.
For the Spurs, that guy is Stephen Jackson. Captain Jack was on the San Antonio championship team in 2003 and Tim Duncan has called him the best teammate he’s ever had. However, Jackson was also a driving force behind The Malice At The Palace in 2004 and has pouted his way off of two different teams in the past three years. He can still score and defend, but for a team that’s so careful with chemistry, bringing him in was an interesting idea, to say the least.
For Mike, that guy was his best friend, Worm. Worm had been with Mike for a long time, and was prominently involved when Mike made most of his bankroll. Then Mike went away for a stint in jail. When he got out, Worm fell right back into his old ways and even involved Mike when he started borrowing money under his name.
The climax of the movie revolves around Mike having to sit with Teddy KGB, a local Soviet card shark, to win enough money to save his and Worm’s collective butts.
For what it’s worth, everything worked out for Mike in the end. He beat Teddy KGB twice, paid their debts and took off for Las Vegas and the World Series of Poker. What happened there, nobody can be sure, but just being able to get there was a victory for Mike. We can be sure of one thing from San Antonio: it’s not enough to just be there. They want to win one more for Duncan, Pop, Parker and Ginobili and cap off an astounding run of excellence.
2. Oklahoma City Thunder- Fight Club:
“When people think you’re dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just.”-Narrator.
“Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak?”- Marla Singer
A lot of time was spent during the 2011 playoffs by fans, announcers, bloggers, pretty much anyone with any sort of opinion about anything, wondering aloud if the Oklahoma City Thunder were better off with Russell Westbrook taking more shots than Kevin Durant. Not so coincidentally, the Thunder seemed to come up short in games in which Westbrook got more looks than Durant, making him a natural scapegoat for fans of Durant who may have doubled as Westbrook-haters.
By all accounts, Durant is the best scorer in the game, and the Thunder’s best player. How dare Westbrook take so many shots, even if he is a great player in his own right? The nerve.
The good news for Thunder fans is that Westbrook and Durant have finally figured their shooting situation out and have looked like the team to beat in the west for most of the 2011-2012 regular season. Durant and Westbrook stopped waiting for their turn to shoot and focused their collective energy on beating down opponents.
Add in James Harden’s breakout season and the Thunder probably have the best offense in the NBA. However, as Tyler Durden once famously proclaimed, “it’s only after we’ve lost everything, that we’re free to do anything.”
Tyler could have been talking about the Thunder. Maybe they needed to come up short against Dallas in the playoffs last year, maybe Westbrook needed to hear from people outside of the locker room that he wasn’t doing his job to help him develop a thicker skin. Maybe everyone in the Thunder locker room didn’t want to tell him themselves.
I doubt Westbrook really cares what fans have to say about him because he is a great player, probably one of the best 15 players in the game and in different circumstances, he would be his team’s best player by far. In fact, the reason he took so much heat is because he’s been lucky enough to have Durant on his team. If you switched Westbrook and Derrick Rose, nobody would take any issue with Westbrook getting 28 shots a game. They’d probably wonder why he wasn’t gunning more.
Tyler Durden and the narrator hit their own rock bottom as well, but their moment of conflict ended with the narrator shooting himself in the head to try and release himself from Durden’s grip. I doubt that Durant will be shooting himself anywhere anytime soon (please don’t, KD) but if the Thunder come up short this year, could they look to move Westbrook? They have lingering concerns about keeping Harden and Ibaka in town when their rookie deals are up. If they could get a cheaper piece for Westbrook, would they do it? You never want to break up a championship team (unless you’re the Mavericks) but if OKC comes up short against the Spurs, Lakers or Grizzlies this year? They just might.
3. Los Angeles Lakers- There Will Be Blood:
“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.”- Daniel Plainview.
If Kobe Bryant has never said this, or some variation of this in real life, I would be surprised. Look, there’s no denying Kobe’s career or production to this point. Quite simply, he’s one of the best 12 players in NBA history and probably the second-best shooting guard, just behind Michael Jordan.
However, he’s also been one of the league’s worst teammates for almost his entire career. At different parts, he blew the whistle on Shaq’s extra-marital affairs and ran him out of town, demanded that Andrew Bynum be traded and then demanded his own trade when Bynum remained on the roster in the early portion of the 2007-2008 season. This never gets mentioned now for some reason. It was only after the Lakers appeased Kobe and traded for Pau Gasol in early 2008 that he settled down and led the Lakers to three straight NBA Finals, winning two of them.
Daniel Plainview was one of the finest oil men in California in the early 1900’s and worked hard to stay on top. Plainview also had a more lovable public persona that he showed to potential contracts. Behind closed doors, he was quite difficult to deal with, as Eli Sunday would find out in time.
Plainview represented himself as a family man that ran a family business, but he famously “abandoned his boy” when he sent him away to a school when he could no longer hear because of an injury he sustained near one of Daniel’s oil derricks. It was only when this became public knowledge that Plainview tried to make up for his misdeeds and sent away for his son to rejoin him. We also caught a glimpse of Plainview’s temper at a restaurant just after being reunited with his son, H.W. when he ran into fellow oil man H.M. Tillford and threatened to come wherever Tillford slept to cut his throat. By any measure, there was always more to Plainview than met the eye. Just like Kobe.
Make no mistake, Kobe can’t win an NBA championship all alone. In fact, as we found out in 2005, he can’t even make the playoffs on his own. The Lakers will need help from Gasol, Bynum and the newly acquired Ramon Sessions. That’s a fine team, but Kobe will decide whether the Lakers win their sixth world championship or suffer another second-round playoff exit.
At the end of “Blood,” within the span of about 20 minutes, Plainview had disowned his only son and beaten his longtime rival, Eli Sunday to a bloody pulp with a bowling pin. Plainview was all alone, nothing but him and an empty mansion. A similar fate could very well await Kobe, no matter how many championships he wins or game-winners he hits. If Kobe ends up beating Tracy McGrady to death with a bowling pin, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
This has been part one of my NBA Western Conference playoff/movie preview. I will be going all the way to the 6th seed, since I think those are the only teams with any sort of shot to make the Finals, and also because nobody know who’s taking the last two spots, even if we can be reasonably sure that the Rockets won’t be anymore after a crushing loss in New Orleans last night.
Part 2 will be up after lunch.