The Orlando Magic are a very interesting franchise. They're located in sunny Orlando, Florida, a city that at first glance would appear to be a haven for potential NBA free-agents. And yet they have a miserable history of not only attracting players, but keeping the few players they manage to bring in. The Orlando Magic have the bizarre distinction of being a prime destination that no one ever goes to. It's almost inexplicable.
For instance, last night, Dwight Howard scored 14 points and became the Orlando Magic's all-time leading scorer, passing Nick Anderson, who held the previous mark with 10,650 points. Considering that the Magic have been around for nearly 23 seasons, it's hard to accept that Nick Anderson -- who was just a role player on the great Magic teams in the 90's that had Penny and Shaq -- had held this mark for this long.
But it really was a record of attrition. Anderson held it because he is not only the only Magic player to spend ten consecutive years with the franchise, he is the only player period to last ten years with the franchise. It isn't just that Orlando has been unable to attract many big-name players (Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill and Rashard Lewis barely qualify as exceptions). It's that they've been categorically incapable of re-signing the good players they manage to get. They lost Shaq after four years, they traded Penny, they traded McGrady, they lost Hill, they dealt Steve Francis, and it's pretty damn clear that they're about to lose Howard too.
Their lack of success in retaining players is staggering. Assuming they lose Howard, not only will they have lost every single superstar they ever had no longer than seven years into their contract, they've never re-signed anyone of importance. I had to scour Basketball Reference's archives just to be sure, but here's two pieces of information that personify their ineptitude: they have never had a single player who played with them for more than seven years who made $10 million in a season with them; and Dwight Howard is the only player in franchise history to sign an extension that gave him a $10 million salary. And, again, they're about to lose him.
So what exactly is going on here? It's one thing for a cold Midwestern team to struggle to attract players and eventually lose the good ones they have. But this is Orlando, a city with a fantastic climate, an array of amusement parks and tourist attractions, and, let's not forget, it's in a state where you don't have to pay an income tax, which is an enormous plus if you happen to be a multimillionaire basketball player. And yet no wants to be there for very long. Weird.
Choking happens to athletes all the time, but that doesn't make it an indictment on the player. In 1997, in Game 5 of a semifinals series against the Jazz, an 18-year-old rookie Kobe Bryant shot not one, not two, but four airballs in the final five and a half minutes of regulation and overtime, in a game his Lakers eventually lost. By any definition, this was choking at its most obvious. Now, 15 years later, Kobe Bryant is regarded as the clutchest player in the NBA by a mile; a 2011 Sports Illustrated poll asked 166 players, "Who do you want shooting with the game on the line?," and a whopping 74% of them chose the Black Mamba. The next closest player, Kevin Durant, got only 8%.
LeBron James wasn't even in the top five.
Like Kobe, LeBron has had some disappearing acts in crunch time, most notably in the 2011 finals. Unlike Kobe, LeBron has become defined by his failures. But LeBron is a totally different animal from Kobe. Kobe resembles Michael Jordan in his brazen willingness to try to take the game over, to take as many contorted, mid-range fade-aways as humanly possible, and to always take the final shot. LeBron is a much more efficient player, even eliminating the weakest aspect of his game, the three-point shot, from his arsenal this season. Often, he seems content to let D-Wade and Chris Bosh take the last shot in the game, and whereas Kobe seems to exhibit a rabid competitiveness -- shown last week when he indignantly referenced an ESPN ranking that had him listed as the seventh best player in the league -- LeBron doesn't seem to have that drive. He was perfectly willing to join the Miami Heat and relinquish his role as the team's alpha dog, as the team leader and primary go-to-guy; it's hard to imagine Kobe willingly accepting a such subservient role.
At the same time, it's hard to believe Kobe wouldn't bristle at having such a pathetic showing in a poll by his peers. LeBron is the best player in the NBA, and not even 2% of player said they wanted him with the ball in the final minutes.
And maybe that's why Kobe is considered clutch and LeBron isn't. Whereas Kobe's imprint is always on the fourth quarter, LeBron will just vanish sometimes for no conceivable reason. With the Heat, he's developed a nasty tendency in the fourth quarter to hand the ball off to one of his teammates and just sit there in the perimeter, not even trying to get open. Not even trying to make a screen, or direct a play, or do anything that makes it look like he's in the offense. It's not even about deferring to Wade or Bosh -- there are times when he simply doesn't try, where he'll allow a gnat like J.J. Barea or Jason Terry to guard him without ever posting them up.
In simplest terms, LeBron James is hiding himself in the offense. Anyone who's ever played basketball can see it. I certainly know what it's like to have an off game, and to make a less concerted effort to find a shot out of fear that maybe I'd get the blame, or let my team down, or look badly. But I'm not an NBA player. LeBron seems to embody that self-consciousness mentality in every fourth quarter he plays. He seems to do as much as he thinks he has to, or as much as he thinks is acceptable, but little else besides that.
Dwight Howard shot 39 free-throws on Thursday, breaking a single-game record that had been held by Wilt Chamberlain for nearly 50 years. Chamberlain once attempted 34 foul shots in a game on February 22, 1962 -- just a couple weeks before his absurd 100-point outing against the New York Knicks. Chamberlain, in case you weren't aware, averaged 50.4 points, 25.7 rebounds and 48.5 minutes per game in 1962, in what is unquestionably the most statistically-incomparable single-season in NBA history, and probably sports history. So for a modern day player to actually supplant one of his seemingly-impossible benchmarks really is impressive, even if it's more a record brought on by futility than an actual accomplishment.
Now I can hear what some of you guys are going to say about this: (Or maybe it's dementia kicking in. But either way...) "This is horrible. We don't watch basketball to see a guy go to the line 39 times. It slows the game down and makes it boring to watch. Get it out of the game." And I would be inclined to agree with you... sort of.
If this was an epidemic, if these ridiculous foul-shooting numbers started popping up every other day, with DeAndre Jordan shooting 30 free-throws and Andrew Bogut shooting 20 free-throws, then yeah, I'd say a rule would need to be established to prevent this from happening all the time. However, this was a pretty unusual event. Coming into this game, the most freebies Howard had taken in a game was 14, so I doubt this will become a trend or anything. Plus, as long as it isn't being exploited to the point that it makes the game unwatchable, I don't mind seeing teams take advantage of the one obvious, glaring flaw in Dwight Howard's game.
Another reason why I don't think a rule needs to be enacted to cancel Hack-a-Shaqing is that the teams that do it almost always do so in defeat. The Magic won last night. Shaquille O'Neal, for whom the intentional foul strategy is based off of, had 10 playoff games in 2001 in which he shot 20 free-throws, and the Lakers went 9-1 in those games -- not to mention going 3-0 that year in regular season games where he went to the line 20 times. And the games in 1962 that Chamberlain shot 30 free-throws (the second being the 100-point game)? His team won both games. So let's be clear that while this tactic is annoying to sit through, it's only seen in pure desperation, and isn't something likely to catch on anytime soon.
So earlier today, I posted something on what I thought was the senseless backlash on the hiring of Penn State coach Bill O'Brien, where people are losing their minds over what a horrible hire it is. To me, it's a fine hire because he has nothing to do with the Joe Paterno-regime, and the fact that some people were actually upset about that irritated the crap out of me.
For the record, I go to Penn State, and I've been ashamed at my university over the last couple months, and not just because of what Sandusky did and what Paterno tolerated. I'm ashamed that the phrase "Penn State Proud" continues to be used. It tears at me every time I hear it. It's loyalty to a faculty that doesn't deserve it, it's indifference to the victims who have every right to hate this school. I am not proud to be attending a school where such a human rights violation could repeatedly take place. There are many words to describe what I feel, but pride isn't one of them. At the moment, there's nothing redeeming in saying you went to this university; not when doing so means blatantly disregarding everything that went on. I mean, Jerry Sandusky was recruiting for the football program as recently as last year; how can I possibly say I respect this school after learning that?
The issue isn't something you can wash your hands of. What happened indelibly stains the reputation of this campus. Child molestation is inarguably the most heinous crime anyone on this planet can commit, so what kind of people are we when we flippantly use the word "proud?" What kind of example are we showing, when we say we're proud knowing full-well what went on? Just what the hell are we proud of anyway, that we can ignore something so terrible that happened so frequently?
More to the point, what exactly have we learned when we criticize the hiring of Bill O'Brien? He was hired specifically to be something different from Paterno, an outsider with no ties to the previous administration, which when informed of the incident in the shower chose to look the other way. To me, this is the only thing that matters about O'Brien. Right now, football is the most inconsequential, irrelevant subject in the world. I really don't care if O'Brien is the worst coach on the planet. All that matters is getting the human-decency part of it right. Besides, even if O'Brien is a lousy couch, who the hell are we to say we deserve better? For three decades, our football program allowed a pedophile to use his status as an assistant to establish a charity, which he in turn used as a farm system to molest as many kids as possible. I don't think I'm saying anything extreme when I write that if Penn State goes 2-10 the next five years, it won't be the most unfair thing in the world. Truth be told, I don't think there should be a football program. You can say what you want about SMU, the last school to receive the death penalty, but as crooked as they were, little kids never got fondled.
And so when I read articles and Facebook statuses and Twitter updates and had face-to-face conversations were people actually told me how upset they were over the hiring, it threw me off the deep end. To me, it just confirmed everything the people in the media have been saying about Penn State. It's unbelievably insensitive to be demanding a better football coach, knowing full-well what a gift it is to even have a football program at all. This is the same campus that threw a riot after Paterno was fired, that formed a vigil around his house as though he was the victim, that promised to walk to his house in the event that they actually won their next game. This is the campus that showed virtually no outrage and anger and fury to the coach that allowed Sandusky to recruit for him, nine years after he was spotted raping a kid in the team locker room. And now, now of all times, the campus gets indignant and upset and furious at their coach… And why? Because they don't like him.
I'm going to be honest: I know almost nothing about Bill O'Brien. I know he was/is the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots, but the only time I had heard of him before now was when Tom Brady shrieked at him during a Redskins game. (Perhaps provoking O'Brien to look for new work, me thinks.) Besides that, I can't profess to knowing a whole lot about the guy, and I certainly can't make a pronouncement on if he'll be a good coach or not.
But here's what else I know: the people railing against his hiring know just as much about him as I do -- and probably less. And make no mistake about it. People associated with Penn State hate this hiring, with the anger ranging from his lack of ties with the school to the fact that he isn't a big hire. Rather than paraphrase examples, I'll just direct you to some from the SB Nation Penn State blog Black Shoe Diaries, although one particular paragraph from their post-hiring recap caught my attention:
"Dave Joyner (and Ira Lubert, behind the scenes) arrogantly conducted this search with what appeared to be no help or input from anyone else, strung along Tom Bradley and the rest of the remaining coaching staff, acted coy in the media, assured everyone that Penn State knew exactly what it was doing, let the process drag out until the very last weeks of the recruiting period, and came back to us with Bill O'Brien. They proudly strode up to a five-alarm fire, waited six weeks, and threw a Dixie Cup of water on it. Tim Curley's hire of Patrick Chambers -- a mid-major coach tapped to take over a rarely-successful and marginally profitable men's basketball program -- was infinitely more clever and inspired than this."
I can't tell you how annoying it is to hear this debate right now, to witness people actually focus on this hire as though it means anything, as though the school deserves better. It pisses me off that members of my university continue to live in a cult-like vacuum, where the day-to-day decision-making of a doomed program is analyzed without anyone looking around and realizing that it's about as important as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It pisses me off that people are wasting their breath discussing this hire, while only referencing the child molestation fiasco that shook the university to the core as "the scandal" or "the debacle," like it's ancient history. It's insulting, it's sad, it's pathetic, and it makes me ashamed to be even slightly related to this college.
Clearly, we have learned NOTHING from the Jerry Sandusky incident. If there was any maxim the school, and the students, and the athletic program could have adopted in the wake of everything that was discovered, it was that football needed to be less of a priority. It was that human lives and the well-being of children needed to matter more than a geriatric's winning record, and that what happened with Sandusky -- when adults looked away and allowed a pedophile to wear the crest of the school's uniform knowing what he had done -- was a travesty.
So when Penn State went out a brought in a complete outsider, a man with no connections to either Sandusky or JoePa to run the football team, the alums should have understood that this was a good hire, for no other reason than because it was a necessary turn of page from the child-molestation-tolerant regime of Joe Paterno. But instead, I've spent the last week listening to PSU people bitching about the hire as it reflects the football team, saying he has no experience as a coach, saying he has no ties to the school, saying he wasn't a splashy hire. I've read and listened to complaints that have nothing to do with the Sandusky aftermath and everything to do with their on-the-field performance, and what's worse is the people most upset with the hire don't even reference Jerry Sandusky at all.
Instead of adopting that maxim, the Penn State alumni have pissed on it and thrown it out a window. They had one chance to redeem their insane rioting behavior in the wake of Paterno's firing and show that they aren't a lockstep band of idiots too obsessed with football to see what's really important; tragically, all they've done is confirm it.
I rage on in Part 2 after the jump... [explicit]
Monday was the 30th anniversary of The Epic in Miami, a playoff showdown between the Chargers and the Dolphins that is widely considered the best NFL game of all time. The game had it all: an epic comeback, a series of clutch plays, a miracle hook-and-lateral at the end of the first half, an all-time great performance from Chargers tight end Kellen Winslow, and even a few missed field-goals that nearly pushed the game to double overtime. (If you're interesting in reading more about the game, I wrote a diddy about a few years back: 1/02/1982 - The Epic in Miami.)
However, there's one aspect of the Epic that's never made sense to me, and that is the widely-reported figure that Kellen Winslow lost 13 pounds during the course of the game. 13 pounds! Yeah, the game was played in the extreme humidity of the Orange Bowl, and it was a four-hour game, and Winslow caught 13 catches for 166 yards, blocked a field-goal, and played with a pinch nerve, a 105 degree temperature, a swollen eye, a split lip, an injured shoulder and cramps brought on by dehydration, and that he had to be carried off the field. But still... 13 pounds?
This isn't a Twitter-inspired, totally-unreliable factoid either. Here's a Washington Post column where it was noted in 1997. Here it is again in an ESPN25 retrospective column (which, I need to point out, misidentified Winslow as having 16 catches in the game). And here is an SI article and a New York Times article where he supposedly lost 12 pounds, and not 13. So am I really supposed to believe that this completely unbelievable figure is true, that in a four-hour period, Kellen Winslow lost the equivalent of 52 Quarter Pounders, that he basically gave birth to a pair of 6.5 pound sweat babies? (Or 6-pound sweat babies, depending on which version you believe.)
I'm skeptical. If he really did lose that much weight, then we truly are the dumbest country in the world, because the world's greatest weight loss program has been under our noses for 30 years, and we haven't utilized it at all. Sure, you may have to suffer a split lip and a few cramps and injuries along the way, but who can argue with the results? It's especially hard to take the number at full value because there are plenty of Chargers who, to this day, believe that Winslow was greatly exaggerating his injuries, with the cou de gras being the final moment when he appeared unable to stand on his own feet and had to be lifted off the field. Former San Diego linebacker Kim Bokamper expressed as much in 2006: "Every time I see it you wonder whether he should have gotten an Academy Award for the performance. It gnaws at some people, and it certainly gnaws at me."
But until the Academy awards Winslow an honorary Oscar, the credibility of the sources above push this story out of the myth category. It really is amazing that anyone could lose that much weight that quickly, assuming that it's true.
One of the longest standing maxims in not only football but in all of sports has a tremendous chance of being proven wrong this year. Those who believe defense is more important than offense will probably have to reevaluate their beliefs in February, since it's all too likely the Super Bowl winner will not only have a bad defense, but one of the worst defenses of all time.
As of now, the benchmark for the worst defense to win it all is the 2006 Indianapolis Colts, who despite having the second-best pass defense in the league ranked dead last in rushing yards allowed. However, that pales in comparison to the Saints, Packers and Patriots of 2011, all of whom already have allowed substantially more yards in 15 games than the '06 Colts allowed in 16. The Packers and Patriots in particular are allowing 400 and 412 yards a game, 40 and 52 more yards than the Colts allowed per game. And while the Colts ranked 21st in yards allowed, the Saints, Packers and Patriots rank 26th, 31st and 32nd overall, while the Packers and Patriots are on pace to allow 1,000 more yards than the Colts did in 2006.
And here's another nugget. In 2006, of the teams that ranked 17-32 in yards allowed, only three had a winning record. In 2011, half the teams ranking 17-32 in yards allowed are at least 8-8, while two other teams (Tennessee and Arizona) have 7 wins. And of the eight teams that don't have 8 wins, only the Buffalo Bills aren't also one of the 16 worst teams in the league in terms of offensive yardage. In other words, there are hardly any examples this season of a team entirely owing its futility to defense, if there's even an example at all.
