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| Love it or leave it |
I have no tried and/or true mnemonic device
that I rely on when attempting (drunk or sober) to name all fifty states in my
attempts to impress (or bore) people at parties. I find connections where I can
and blast through. The West Coast is easy! Those states are huge and hip and
think overmuch of microbreweries. Washington is on the West Coast and Idaho is
next to Washington, Built to Spill is from Idaho. Texas Is The Reason. Mike
Huckabee plays bass and used to be fat man and lived in Arkansas. The Southwest
states are jagged and dusty and loud and obvious. The 13 Colonies are a chopped
up snake with a rough and tumble “youze guys” way about them. Then there is
Sarah Palin’s Alaska and Sarah Marshall’s Hawaii.
On and on and on and over
the course of several minutes, I can usually get close to nailing all fifty,
something that many elementary aged children spanning the globe can much faster.
Now the last time I did this, my count sat incomplete at 49. It must have been
hours before I finally broke down and looked at a map and realized, somehow, somehow, that I had forgotten Kentucky.
The state of Kentucky means absolutely nothing to me in any way; it is adrift in
moonshine and hill tribe lore and barely something I consider real. But the
thing is: Kentucky is real. People live inside of Kentucky. They elect
senators. They buy Air Jordans. John Calipari runs a little college basketball mafia
inside Kentucky. The goddamn American Civil War stomped all over Kentucky. Other
things: bourbon, Hillary’s colossal but way too late primary shellacking of Obama,
and also that Colonel Sanders with his spine chilling smile. All these anchors,
all this obvious, palpable evidence that Kentucky exists, and yet…Nothing led me there. Kentucky is festooned to some
other reality than mine. And if you asked me to name all 30 NBA teams, I could
easily rattle off 28 in about fifteen seconds, followed by a one minute pause
to recall that the Bobcats have been snuffed from history and are now Hornets
again, before a slumping hour long gloominess in which it comes to me as I am
cooking steak and eggs that I had forgotten the Orlando Magic. Of course. This is the only thing that makes too
much sense. Why would anyone who is not currently a member of the Orlando Magic ever think of the Orlando Magic? I’m not sure.
With that in mind, here’s our preview
of the Orlando Magic, NBA basketball team.
The Magic went 20-62 in the
2012-13 season, and added three wins the following year, for 23-59. Their
offense was not good. Their defense was not good. As far as pace goes, they did
not play fast, they did not play slow. They moseyed their way through games. Their
division, the Southeast, is a sultry and less talented mirror image of the
Southwest Division, with four of the five teams expected to reach the
post-season. Indeed, many seem specifically fashioned to act as spoilers. The
Orlando Magic are the fifth team, entering year three of General Manager Rob
Hennigan’s “slow but steady wins the race and hopefully we’ll get the Number
One Pick at Some Point Rebuilding phase.”
I have a lot of faith in Rob Hennigan. He’s a millennial, so he’s probably a crafty devious jerk but also sort of sensitive because he came of age in a post 9/11 world. Hennigan’s patient demolition of the team that defeated LeBron’s Cavaliers and advanced to the 2009 NBA Finals is complete. Let's just be real and accept the preordained truth that the Magic are in for another long year of punishment, with Hennigan’s prognosis the decidedly half-optimistic “We expect to see growth” as sort of proof that he himself expects only to see his guys run plays without stepping out of bounds. For more of this wunderkind’s circuitous corporate sanctioned analytics friendly prognosticating, see here.
I have a lot of faith in Rob Hennigan. He’s a millennial, so he’s probably a crafty devious jerk but also sort of sensitive because he came of age in a post 9/11 world. Hennigan’s patient demolition of the team that defeated LeBron’s Cavaliers and advanced to the 2009 NBA Finals is complete. Let's just be real and accept the preordained truth that the Magic are in for another long year of punishment, with Hennigan’s prognosis the decidedly half-optimistic “We expect to see growth” as sort of proof that he himself expects only to see his guys run plays without stepping out of bounds. For more of this wunderkind’s circuitous corporate sanctioned analytics friendly prognosticating, see here.
Let’s get familiar with some our your 2014-15 Magicians!
First
up: one “has-been” and one “never-was”!
Willie Green
The Bloody Ballad of Blind
Willie Green. Take a minute to imagine the perfect basketball player. You can
even watch this psychopath try his hand at constructing such a paragon. Okay, here’s the tough part: now imagine the opposite of what you just imagined!
If you are imagining correctly, you should be imagining Willie Green, face daubed
with a neutral smile or maybe it’s a frown. A shooting guard that has crested
the mountaintop of his thirties, standing at 6’3” and possessing almost no
discernable marquee “skill” basketball, Willie’s decade plus of survival in
this unsentimental and savagely competitive league is nothing less than a minor
miracle, or more realistically, some sort of massive clerical oversight.
Unimposing, streaky, and generally “not very good”, Willie Green has been confounding fans of particular teams and also the Fates for years. And yet he’s often been the darling of coaches, numerous coaches, whether logging minutes as the starting two-guard or as “instant” offense off the bench, a bench full of bewildered players muttering things like, “I really should be in this game before Willie Green,” and “I agree, you should, and so too should I be.” To be fair, though his game has never been pleasing to the eye, he did post pretty decent shooting percentages (field goals but especially in three-pointers) in his year as Vinnie Del Negro’s best friend. Also he often posed for pictures with Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, and you got the weird feeling he was trying to convince us he was a card-carrying member of the Big Three. I hope he never goes to Houston, because I reckon Dwight Howard and James Harden would beat his ass for pulling something like that.
Claimed off the infamous waiver wire, Green has been dragged to the humid depths of Florida to teach the young bloods how to be well-behaved cogs in the machine. Veteran presence in the locker-room is a coveted late career position for mediocre and sub-mediocre athletes, and I wish Willie the best in trying to convince Aaron Gordon and Victor Oladipo that he has anything to teach them besides which fork to eat salad with. But the more enduring mystery…WHO IS WILLIE GREEN DATING?
Unimposing, streaky, and generally “not very good”, Willie Green has been confounding fans of particular teams and also the Fates for years. And yet he’s often been the darling of coaches, numerous coaches, whether logging minutes as the starting two-guard or as “instant” offense off the bench, a bench full of bewildered players muttering things like, “I really should be in this game before Willie Green,” and “I agree, you should, and so too should I be.” To be fair, though his game has never been pleasing to the eye, he did post pretty decent shooting percentages (field goals but especially in three-pointers) in his year as Vinnie Del Negro’s best friend. Also he often posed for pictures with Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, and you got the weird feeling he was trying to convince us he was a card-carrying member of the Big Three. I hope he never goes to Houston, because I reckon Dwight Howard and James Harden would beat his ass for pulling something like that.
Claimed off the infamous waiver wire, Green has been dragged to the humid depths of Florida to teach the young bloods how to be well-behaved cogs in the machine. Veteran presence in the locker-room is a coveted late career position for mediocre and sub-mediocre athletes, and I wish Willie the best in trying to convince Aaron Gordon and Victor Oladipo that he has anything to teach them besides which fork to eat salad with. But the more enduring mystery…WHO IS WILLIE GREEN DATING?
Ben Gordon
Much like Willie Green, Ben
Gordon represents a somewhat confusing acquisition, albeit one that might
actually yield a halfway bountiful harvest assuming you pray at the altar of the Gods Below and not Above. You see, unlike Rust-jaw
Willie Green, Ben Gordon used to be a player.
Some of you kids might be too young to remember (this is the saddest sort of
old fogey-ism, akin to a Blink 182 fan bemoaning the youth for listening to too
much Fall Out Boy!), but Ben “Shooting Baskets” Gordon used to be an explosive
scorer on an insurgent Chicago Bulls team.
Like Sandpaper-Guts Willie Green, Gordon is an undersized shooting guard, a position that has been through the wringer and then some since the last time he was considered a factor in the league. Wounded by how Chicago seemed to favor golden boys Kirk “Kurt” Hinrich and Luol Deng, Gordon was all too happy to take a shitload of money from Joe Dumars and escape to a longtime Central Division rival, the Detroit Pistons. Yeah, the ol’ escape to the city of Detroit and hope everything works out plan. As hoops historians are all too aware, it didn’t work out so nicely. Gordon found himself poorly used by a succession of coaches on a roster riddled with both huge gaps and shoot-first pass-sometimes redundancies.
About the best thing you could say about Ben Gordon’s miserable time in the Motor City is that he was among the list of heroes who did not blatantly mutiny against John Kuester. With production declining, this ghost was shipped to Charlotte, where he may have risked his reputation as a nice fellow when he allegedly refused to stop bouncing a ball as Bobcats coach Steve Clifford was just trying to talk to the team! Gordon then told Clifford to “humble himself”, which is sort of a genteel way to say check yourself before you wreck yourself, sir. Gordon’s been brought in on the slim hope that he can just produce sort of like he used to produce. It’s just another one of those over-the-hill short shooting guard good cop/bad cop games with Ben Gordon and No Hope Willie Green in the starring roles. It’s my hope, as someone who doesn’t care about the Orlando Magic at all, at all, that Ben Gordon proves to be an unlikely boon for this team, can hit some shots off the bench when called upon to do so, and regains some of the light in his eyes he left behind in Chicago.
Like Sandpaper-Guts Willie Green, Gordon is an undersized shooting guard, a position that has been through the wringer and then some since the last time he was considered a factor in the league. Wounded by how Chicago seemed to favor golden boys Kirk “Kurt” Hinrich and Luol Deng, Gordon was all too happy to take a shitload of money from Joe Dumars and escape to a longtime Central Division rival, the Detroit Pistons. Yeah, the ol’ escape to the city of Detroit and hope everything works out plan. As hoops historians are all too aware, it didn’t work out so nicely. Gordon found himself poorly used by a succession of coaches on a roster riddled with both huge gaps and shoot-first pass-sometimes redundancies.
About the best thing you could say about Ben Gordon’s miserable time in the Motor City is that he was among the list of heroes who did not blatantly mutiny against John Kuester. With production declining, this ghost was shipped to Charlotte, where he may have risked his reputation as a nice fellow when he allegedly refused to stop bouncing a ball as Bobcats coach Steve Clifford was just trying to talk to the team! Gordon then told Clifford to “humble himself”, which is sort of a genteel way to say check yourself before you wreck yourself, sir. Gordon’s been brought in on the slim hope that he can just produce sort of like he used to produce. It’s just another one of those over-the-hill short shooting guard good cop/bad cop games with Ben Gordon and No Hope Willie Green in the starring roles. It’s my hope, as someone who doesn’t care about the Orlando Magic at all, at all, that Ben Gordon proves to be an unlikely boon for this team, can hit some shots off the bench when called upon to do so, and regains some of the light in his eyes he left behind in Chicago.
NEXT UP: ELFRID "WHO" PAYTON!
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