Grown Men In Tights

It’s about the time the NBA stepped in to stop the madness.

This season numerous NBA players have started to wear long johns, um, I mean spandex during games. The list of players that have taken to wearing spandex during games includes, Ray Allen, Andrew Bogut, Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, Allen Iverson, LeBron James, Michael Redd and Dwyane Wade.

Most of the players claim that dressing up like women help prevent them from getting injured but I’m not buying it.

“It’s something to keep you warm,” Joe Smith told the Associated Press. “It keeps my knee from swelling up, keeps some tightness around it so it won’t blow up on me when I’m out there. It’s meant a lot to me.”

Jerry Stackhouse weighed in on this issue when he told ESPN that, “I’ve had a couple groin injuries and they help me get comfortable. I wear thigh sleeves, too, and the tights also help keep them from sliding down my legs. They just hold everything together.”

Come on Stack, be a man and use a cup to hold everything together like every other man who plays sports. There’s no need to prance around the court in stockings.

I feel the idea of grown men wearing spandex is brutal and there’s excuse for this nonsense. Luckily the NBA has taken notice of this problem and they are working on a solution to stop this problem. According to Darren Rovell and Marc Stein over at ESPN, “Although NBA officials are not publicly commenting on the issue, sources say that the league simply does not like the look of players wearing visible hose. It’s believed that the league office, which already has regulations in place to curtail short lengths, can unilaterally outlaw tights by simply amending its uniform code before the 2006-07 season.”

I think the idea of the NBA banning spandex is great news for NBA fans. What basketball fan wants to see their favourite players running around in “hose” anyway?

With the spandex problem about to be solved as soon as the Bulls get rid of their Matadors all will be right in the basketball universe again.

Basketball Mural Update

Matt had the day off work Monday (lucky punk!) so he came over and spent some more time working on the mural. So far he’s finished two of the three walls and he’s well on his way to finishing the final wall. I’ve included a picture below and you can see the rest of the pictures by clicking here.

 

Basketball Mural Update

Two of the three walls in my washroom have been completed and the mural is almost completed! The best part is yet to come though as Matt’s going to start the final wall which will have one of the players soaring through the air for a Jordan dunk that is going to look amazing.

You can see a couple thumbnail pictures below but you can also access the entire collection on my Flickr account by clicking here.

Basketball Mural: Day One

The first day of my mural saw the completion of the rough sketches as well as the completion of the sky. To see how this mural is coming along you can click here to view my photo’s on FlickR by clicking here.

Basketball Mural

I realized this past week that I’ve now spent a year in my condo and I have yet to leave my “mark” on my building. WhileI was chatting with Matt about this and we decided the best way to do this would be to create a basketball mural in my condo. While all the girls I know laughed at the idea all my boys loved the idea. This lead me to one simple conclusion – this is something that I need to do while I’m a still a bachelor because once I get hitched flowers and shades of pink will be sure to overtake my condo.

Over the next week check back for pictures on how this mural is starting to look. Today I’ve posted the “before” pictures that can be viewed on FlickR by clicking here.

Adrian Wojnarowski’s Tribute To Coach Chaney

College basketball fans received news today that Coach Chaney would no longer be coaching the Temple Owls. With his wife undergoing an unspecified medical procedure he has elected to leave the Owls on the verge of the NIT tournament. While some fans may judge him on the timing of this anyone who has their priorities in line will realize that family should be a bigger priority than any basketball game.

One of my favourite writers, Adrian Wojnarowski, penned a great column that’s posted over on ESPN. Wojnaroswki start’s the column by writing the following:

“On one of those blustery predawn mornings at St. Bonaventure, a student manager named Mark Murphy had unlocked the gymnasium doors and let the Temple Owls into the Reilly Center for practice. The campus paper had gone to bed now, and I had been walking out the downstairs doors, only to hear a voice beginning to boom on the floor of the gymnasium.John Chaney was always a thoughtful proponent of what he believed.

Soon, the basketballs were sitting on the steel racks and the Temple players were surrounding John Chaney in a semicircle. This was a closed classroom — nobody but his team invited. But I found a spot behind some chair-back seats in the stands, lay on my stomach and watched through a space between the rows.

He talked about life and living, about education and opportunities, insisting to his kids that they were forever one bounce from the curb. Looking back, one of the best college lectures I ever heard as undergraduate would come that day out of the visiting professor at Temple University, John Chaney.

The balls never left the rack that day, and I never did make it to my 8:30 a.m. class.

This was before Chaney threatened to rough up John Calipari at UMass, before he lost his mind with his self-described “goon” against St. Joseph’s a year ago, before one of college basketball’s most inspired minds had become one of its most irrational acts.

This is the Chaney that I’ll want to remember, a Hall of Fame coach out of a generation when most Southern blacks couldn’t get basketball scholarships to major universities. He would go to Bethune-Cookman on a scholarship, and coach Division II ball at predominantly black Cheyney State, before getting his Division I break at age 50 at Temple in 1982. All of that history — all of that struggle — made Chaney a dying breed in coaching: an original thinker, an original doer, in a profession where they pump these coaches out on the assembly line of sameness these days.”

In recent years Chaney had managed to soil his reputation in the minds of casual basketball fans because they weren’t not familiar with the full story involving Chaney. They didn’t see his past and were blinded by his recent indiscretions and lapses of judgement. Should he have stepped down a couple of years ago when the game started to pass him by? Probably. Would I have stepped down? No way! He had earned the right to continue coaching at Temple and no one should begrudge him that. I just hope that when it time to elect him to the Basketball Hall of Fame that voters aren’t caught up with the tail end of his career and rather can look at all the monumental things he was able to accomplish in the game of basketball.

In recent years Chaney had managed to soil his reputation in the minds of casual basketball fans because they weren’t not familiar with the full story involving Chaney. They didn’t see his past and were blinded by his recent indiscretions and lapses of judgement. Should he have stepped down a couple of years ago when the game started to pass him by? Probably. Would I have stepped down? No way! He had earned the right to continue coaching at Temple and no one should begrudge him that. I just hope that when it time to elect him to the Basketball Hall of Fame that voters aren’t caught up with the tail end of his career and rather can look at all the monumental things he was able to accomplish in the game of basketball.To read the rest of the article by Wojnarowski click here. Enjoy!

Love and Basketball

Jason McElwain was discussed on Killer Crossover a couple weeks back but I wanted to dedicate some space on my Blog to talk about this kid and what his accomplishment means to me. For those of you that aren’t familiar with “J-Mac” he’s an autistic boy who was the team manager for his high school team. As a way of saying thanks for all his hard work his high school coach put him in for the last four minutes of the teams final game of the season and he exploded for 20 points and a school record six three pointers.

I love J-Mac’s story because it reminds me why I decided to coach kids. As a teacher in Canada there aren’t any financial rewards for coaching and sometimes I wonder if I’m making a difference in these kids lives or of if I’m just putting in time. Don’t get me wrong, I love basketball and coaching but there are days when I question why I spend 10 hours a week trying to mold these stubborn kids. When a story like J-Mac comes my way and I’m reminded of all the cool things that I can accomplish as a coach. I’m reminded that I can be the coach who makes a kids year by taking him because he has potential instead of one of the more athletic kids who’s not willing to learn about the game. I can make a kid grin ear-to-ear just by telling him how much his jump shot has improved. Instead of ranting and raving like some of my peers I can crank tunes during practice and watch my kids break out into fits of hysterics as Mr. McNeill tries to dance.

I didn’t fall in love with the game because of a coach yelling at me, I fell in love with the game of basketball on a summer afternoon playing in the park with music blasting and talk about girls in-between games.

Basketball isn’t about x’s and o’s, it’s not about whether you can create the perfect play for your team to run and it’s not about wins and losses (regardless of how thrilling those wins are or painful those losses may be).

Basketball is about those exciting plays that bring you out of your seat, it’s about sweating with your teammates over grueling practices and that bond that forms with your teammates and it’s about shooting hoops on a summer afternoon under the blistering soon because there’s no place else you’d rather be.

Basketball isn’t always about fundamentals or winning, it’s more than that.

Basketball is about emotion and passion.