by Nick Gallinelli

Many sportswriters and fans would scoff at my mention of this. In fact, most of them would probably lose respect for me and tease me until I cried. ‘Which team had Michael Jordan?’ is what most of them would say, and that’d probably be sufficient and effective argument, but it’s at least worth speculation.

I’m not sure about you, but I was merely four years old when The Dream Team was assembled. I could have been a late mental bloomer or something traumatic might have happened when I was four, but I don’t remember anything from that age. I have a few hazy pictures and memories, but I’m beginning to think that’s just me putting stories from my parents into picture form and calling them memories. What grade are you in when you’re four? Are you even in a grade?

To most people, especially my idol sportswriter, Bill Simmons —who wrote an awesome, 752-page tome titled ‘The Book of Basketball”—, even making an argument that this year’s men’s National Basketball team is comparable to the 1992 team is sacrilege. I understand. I’m not even saying that it is comparable, but that’s what you do when you talk about sports. We love comparing things. There are simply too many “what if”s. What if Michael Jordan didn’t have Scottie Pippen? What if Babe Ruth played today? What if the Knicks actually tried to stop Wilt from scoring 100? What if Chris Webber knew how many timeouts there were? What if Mark Sanchez could throw a football? It’s all just guessing. Just like looking forward and projecting the future is speculation, looking to the past and changing scenarios is just speculation. It’s fun, for me at least. Especially because it’s hard to accept that you missed the best basketball team ever.

And even if you’re calling me stupid in your head, know I’m with you— I think it all the time. But let’s just speculate.

(Warning: If you’re not much into basketball, leave now. We’re about to get geeky.)

When I wrote my (shameless plug) article “The 9.5 Best Moments from the 2012 Olympics” the men’s basketball gold settled in at number four (although the list wasn’t in any specific order). I’ll start with the point I made there.

The 1992 Dream Team played Croatia in its gold medal game. They crushed them. In the U.S.’s first Olympic team that boasted NBA players, they won their gold medal game by 32— 117 for the U.S., 85 for Croatia. A slaughter? Relatively, no. This was actually the closest game the U.S. team played in the entire Games. In its prior games it won by 68, 33, 43, 44, 41, 38, and 51 for an average margin of victory of 43.75. The Gold game was not close, although it was the closest.

But this Croatian team, of a roster of twelve, only had two current NBA players on its roster— Dražen Petrović* and Stojko Vranković (although others would eventually make the NBA).

Competition back then was, simply, not as competitive.

This year’s team won its games by 54, 21, 40, 6, and 22, or an average of 32.1. However, the Spain team they played for gold had five NBA players on its roster, including stars like the Gasol brother, Pau and Marc.

So how many NBA players on a roster equal a margin difference of 11.65? Wish I could calculate that.

Also, if Croatia were the silver medalists in the 1992 games, that’d probably mean it’s a pretty good basketball country, right? Actually, no.

As basketball has gained popularity throughout the globe, Croatia has s(t)unk in quality. In fact, Croatia’s basketball team didn’t even qualify for the Olympics this year. ’92’s silver medalists didn’t even have a chance at a medal this year.

So that’d mean that Croatia isn’t a good basketball country, but was just more exposed to basketball than most countries in 1992, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t the quick leap from other countries and quick demise of Croatia imply that Croatia isn’t good at basketball, but, sort of, just happened to play the most at the time?

And they were the best team in the world other than the U.S. in ’92. The competition disparity is undeniable— this year’s team played tougher competition, and it showed.

More “what if”s. So what would 1992’s team have done against 2012’s competition? Well, we don’t know, but we can dive further into speculation.

The Dream Team had some of the biggest names in basketball history, proven by 11 of its 12 players eventually entering the Hall of Fame (Laettner the only exception). Yes, you read that right, 11 of 12. They had two of the best centers of all time, David Robinson and Patrick Ewing, the point guard with the most assists ever, John Stockton, a maniacal Barkley, a doesn’t-need-to-be-explained Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and the best player ever, Michael Jordan. Every player was a household name. They still are. But one of the reasons every single one was a household name is because of how old they all were. The Dream Team’s average age was 29.9 years old, which is a pretty ripe age in NBA terms.

According to a study by Southern Utah University made popular by the Wall Street Journal, ‘NBA players peak at 24 years old and basically stay at that level until they turn 25, at which point they start declining.’ This is in contrast to other sports like baseball, where the peak age is generally accepted to be around 28. Basketball is demanding, especially when you add in Olympic games. After a long season it’s tough to continue without a break, especially when Jordan, 29, Pippen, 34, and Drexler, 30, all played through the NBA Finals. The Finals end one month before the Olympics begin, but don’t forget Olympic practices.

2012’s team, dubbed the ‘Keep Dreaming Team’ by Bill Simmons, is, on average, 25.8 years old— if you’re bad at math, that’s 4.1 years closer to SUU’s peak age than the Dream Team. They had four players who played through the NBA finals, champion Lebron James, 27, Russell Westbrook, 23, Kevin Durant, 23, and Rich Harden, 22, all better suited age-wise than the DT’s Finalists.

The age might be insignificant, though, when you take into account utter competitivenes. The Dream Team was stacked with tenacious competitors— Patrick Ewing (aka The Warrior), Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, nutty Charles Barkley, and Michael Jordan, who Bill Simmons notes might be the most competitive person of all time, in anything, ever.

The Keep Dreaming Team was fierce, too, but also wasn’t. LeBron James, who doesn’t only play to win but to say “eff you” to every of his many naysayers, Kobe Bryant and Tyson Chandler (didn’t play much) are of the most competitive in the NBA, but that’s pretty much it. They also had duds like Carmelo Anthony (there are actually videos about his laziness) and seemingly money-hungry Deron Williams.

You could argue that they’d all hustle their butts off in the Olympics regardless of the way they play in the NBA, but wouldn’t someone with true innate competitive ferocity show it all the time? Jordan sure did.

If you’ve gotten this far into the article, then you probably know that this year’s team and its dearth of powerful

big-men forced them to play what you’d call “small ball”. They had to rely on speed, quickness, passing, and three-pointers (which can be fickle). The team’s biggest weakness was exploited in Sunday’s gold game vs. Spain, when Pau and Marc Gasol dominated the U.S.’s big guys and kept Spain in the game all the way through the third quarter. So it would only make sense that if the DT played the KDT, the DT’s all-time-great centers, Robinson and Ewing, wouldn’t have much trouble shaking and bumping the KDT’s LeBron and Kevin Love. And guess what, (super analysis time) shots taken from close go in more often than shots taken from afar. With even mediocre perimeter defense from the DT’s guards, they’d be able to ride Robinson and Ewing past the KDT.

Ultimately, it’s probably impossible to convince anyone that this year’s team is better than 1992’s, and probably impossible to dissuade believers that 1992’s team isn’t better than 2012’s. There’s a reason most people don’t even give the debate a thought. They don’t care that 1992’s assistant coach, Mike Krzyzewski, was this year’s head coach, therefore imparting all his years of knowledge onto the KDT, or that Lebron James is combating Jordan for ‘best player ever’. The stone is set, understandably so.

You’ll continue to hear pundits mock the “idiots” who make the comparisons, but it’s something worth looking at and thinking about. It’s simply entertaining, even if it does irk 1992′s club. To avoid derision, I’ll admit the DT’s superiority. After all, ‘which team had Michael Jordan?’

…And so I cry, because I’m too young to remember the best basketball team ever.

*Petrovic died in a car crash at 28-years-old, but ESPN’s page says he’s now 46. I’m confused.

]]> http://nypress.com/sports-geek-and-the-shameful-debate-whos-better-the-dream-team-or-2012s-club/feed/ 0 http://nypress.com/goodbye-jeremy-five-things-well-miss-about-linsanity/ http://nypress.com/goodbye-jeremy-five-things-well-miss-about-linsanity/#comments Tue, 17 Jul 2012 21:33:30 +0000 NYPress http://nypress.com/?p=51291 Linsanity headed to Houston and the Rockets

photo by DvYang

Well, it’s been reported by numerous outlets that the thing we all knew was going to happen happened. Jeremy Lin is to leave the Knicks and take his spurious ball skills to the Houston Rockets, rendering my article from yesterday ultimately useless henceforth. Time well spent.

There’s not really much to worry about though, because the Knicks have year-in-year-out proven an adept perspicacity for basketball potential and success. Even though they’ve let Lin go, we can trust them. There’s no reason whatsoever to look to the Nets for some decent New York basketball next year. With acquisitions like the $15 million-dollar-man Steve Francis and his 11.3 Points Per Game in 2006-07, or first-round-pick Renaldo Balkman and his career 4 PPG, there is no reason to doubt the Knicks front office.

Everything in the last paragraph is not true.

But now that we do know the fate of the quickest sports phenomenon New York has seen in ages —not to rule out the possibility of Tim Tebow outpacing Lin by weeks— we do know a few things. We know what we’ll miss about Jeremy Lin and the excitement he brought to the vanilla, selfish Knicks.

Five Things We’ll Miss about Jeremy Lin:

1. Lintinis

There’s a reason that people mixed the name “Lin” with the word “insanity”. The sheer speed at which Lin hit the scene was maddening, so maddening that he began to influence one of the most storied cocktails ever.

At Arctica on Third Ave., Lintinis, a mixture of Bombay, blue curacao, and tonic became the house drink.

This, deservedly or not, boosted Jeremy Lin to James Bond status. I’m not sure how I feel about that, considering Bond is a much better shot than Lin, but now we have to go back to drinking boring ole alcohol.

2. Ball movement

It’s been heavily documented that Lin is a turnover machine. During his 940 minutes last season, Lin had 126 turnovers, about 0.13 turnovers/minute. The NBA’s leader in turnovers, John Wall, 255 turnovers in 2386 minutes played, about 0.1 t/m.

That doesn’t seem like much, but in per-minute speak, that’s humongous, and John Wall led the league in turnovers!

Put it this way, if Lin played as much as Wall, he would have had 319 turnovers.

But, aside from that number (which surely supports yesterday’s article. Hey! Time really was well spent!), Lin kept the ball in motion.

During his time on the court —and with the help of an injured Carmelo Anthony— the Knicks seemed to flow, cut and pass. The ball was always moving, which kept the game moving faster and more interesting.

Now that he’s gone, the offense will revert to one-stop-shopping, where it’ll live and die with Anthony’s ability to score.

3. A guy proud of his religion but who doesn’t punch us in the face with it

Tim Tebow is a nice guy and a philanthropist, and his faith is a major part of that, but I’m not sure if this is a great pump-up song before a football game.

Tebow once justified his vocalness about his faith by saying “If you’re married, and you have a wife, and you really love your wife, is it good enough to only say to your wife ‘I love her’ the day you get married? Or should you tell her every single day when you wake up and every opportunity?”

No, but I wouldn’t go around telling everyone else everyday that I do.

4. Humility

It’s often overlooked, especially in New York. But Lin’s willingness to park his butt on the bench until he got his chance doesn’t deserve oversight.

Lin, and probably because he didn’t have the credibility to make any demands, never spoke poorly or negatively about any of his teammates. No matter what trap questions he was asked last season:

“Whose offense will it be when Anthony returns?”

“Do you think you can play with Anthony?”

“Do you like playing with Anthony?”

He ignored the “I” in Lin. (See how tough it can be to play with a guy like Anthony?)

But now he’s gone, and that humility is gone. Guys like Anthony, whose ability to get coaches fired is second only to Dwight Howard’s, will run the show once again.

5. Unfortunate (or fortunate) editing oversights that result in quick backlash for companies as large as ESPN

Not sure if I should link to this or anything —NY Press probably can’t defend itself as well as ESPN— so I won’t.

But there was certainly a bit of comedy at the expense of that poor ex-ESPN employee.

Two Thing We Won’t Welcome about the Lin-less Knicks:

1. Raymond Felton and Twitter jokes like this from Grantland’s Bill Simmons:

After winning over the Asian community with Jeremy Lin, the Knicks now expect to win over fat people with Ray Felton.

— Bill Simmons (@sportsguy33) July 15, 2012

2. Grantland articles tacitly encouraging Knicks fans to ditch and root for the Nets.

–Nick Gallinelli

It’s a bit of an odd thing to begin with— Jeremy Lin’s “Linsanity” legacy. How often does 25 games started, one insane week, and post-season injuries and irrelevance constitute one of the most-talked-about monikers in all of sports?

photo by DvYang

Doesn’t Derek Jeter have a legacy, too? One with five World Series rings, over 2500 games, and a captaincy over the most famous sports team on earth?

So how is it that both of them have what we call a “legacy”? How is it that right now, Jeremy Lin is on the cover of ESPN.com, while Jeter, who is actually in season, and cruising to yet another AL East title, is by the wayside?

This isn’t a comparison between the two, because that’d be Linsane. But it’s a realization that this Lin attention has an extremely odd quality to it. And that’s a good thing. But now it might be over. Is that a good thing?

During the most fervent moments of “Linsanity”, New Yorkers sipped on Lintinis and Lin & Tonics, while  the Nom Wah restaurant in the heart of Chinatown held viewing parties in the midst of Time Warner’s inability to strike a deal with MSG (leaving 2.5 million New Yorkers without him, according to the Huffington Post). It was almost pandemonium. Insane, if you will? But it wasn’t always like that. And with the rush of enthusiasm that hit New York so quickly, it can be a bit hard to remember the spunky reserve that sat, all-day-in-all-day-out, at the edge of the New York Knicks bench.

For years Jeremy Lin was unremarkable. A Harvard star, but without the NBA size (Lin is listed generously at 6’3, 200 pounds), Lin went undrafted in the 2010 draft and floated around the NBA’s D-League (Development League), eventually landing on the Golden State Warriors roster. There, according to basketball-reference.com, he played in 29 games, averaged a meager 9.8 minutes per game, an even more meager 1.6 assists per game, and an even more meager 2.6 points per game.

He eventually was cut, and was picked up perfunctorily by New York.

And then, it was practically instant.

When Lin hit major minutes in the Knicks’s lineup on February 4, it marked the beginning of an 7-game win streak that carried until the 14, and, with some help from the symbol he represented —”an Asian-American in the NBA?! and he’s good?!” were the thoughts of many— marked one of the quickest rises to fame in recent sports history. Quick enough to be quantified.

Honestly, the #Knicks franchise has spent money on Stephon Marbury, Eddy Curry, and Steve Francis.Give Lin a shot to grow. #NBA

— NBA Wired (@NBAWired) July 16, 2012

According to The Hollywood Reporter (who cited a social study by company General Sentiment), in the days between Feb. 6 and 14, Lin’s Twitter account, @JLin7, was the most-mentioned NBA player in social media. Based on the study, Lin was mentioned 2,610,684 times on Twitter in that timeframe— more than second-most Lebron James, whose regal handle @KingJames, has almost 5.5 million followers.

But it wasn’t just NBA-related. During the same time, Lin was mentioned more than an account whose following amasses near 18 million people. Said handle is that of our President, Barack Obama.

And it was more than just numbers on a relatively new social media sensation. Lin was a symbol for Asian-Americans across the globe. Lin stood brighter than usual because of his NBA-unique ethnicity.

Glancing quickly at a March Yahoo! blurb, Lin is the second-best Asian-American player to ever play in the NBA, and this without ever completing an entire NBA season.

According to the list, Lin is second behind Yao Ming, a similar sensation during much of the 2000s. The other two on the list? Yi Jianlian and Rex Walters. Who?

But the amount of  followers James has, despite Lin’s week of fame, outnumbers Lin’s by 4.5 million people, and symbolizes how Lin was possibly a bright flash in an otherwise disappointing Knicks frying pan.

Letting go of Jeremy Lin is one of the smartest things the Knicks have done in the last 10 years

— Joe Perrone (@Perrone27) July 16, 2012

If it wasn’t for the Knicks’s penchant for signing starpower rather than a full squad (i.e. overpaying Amar’e Stoudemire, whose knees (and defense) are so shaky that they were actually denied insurance and letting fan-favorite Landry Fields out of their grasp), maybe there wouldn’t be so much attention. Maybe the over-the-top contract, $25 million/3 years, from Houston, which would, after accounting for luxury tax, would cost the Knicks $30 million in the third year alone, would be recognized as a cost unpayable.

i’ll miss jeremy lin, but there’s no way they can pay $30 mil

— Chris Molicki (@chrismolicki) July 15, 2012

New York and its vast Asian-American culture birthed Lin’s story, but is now making it pretty tough for the Knicks avoid appearing loyalty-less.

But, like mentioned before, what’s the middleground between salary requirements and what makes so many New Yorkers so happy?

There are guys on the Knicks better than Lin. Carmelo Anthony is widely considered one of, if not the, best pure scorers in the NBA. Iman Shumpert is a quickly-developing shooting guard. Heck, you could even argue goggle-clad Stoudemire still has more in the tank than Lin.

But how much do stats and reps matter over a guy who only “Lin, Lin, Lins!” games?

According to a February WebProNews article, during Linsanity’s birth week, MSG (the host-channel for Knicks games) ratings increase an outrageous 87%.

Jeremy Lin is not worth 30million

— Harry Fraud (@Kick_Push) July 16, 2012

A whole lot of attention for a week’s worth of winning, but then when Lin got hurt in late March, and subsequently sat for the season’s duration (including the playoffs) Lin was a large part forgotten.

Is all the new hoopla just a result of the suffocating New York publicity? Is a guy who means so much to Asian-American communities worth the money to make the fans happy? What does he mean to Asian-American communities? Is he even actually good? Will he even stay healthy?

One New Yorker, and probably to the frustration of many New Yorkers, hasn’t fully bought into Linsanity, and thinks Marcus Camby, Ray Felton, and Jason Kidd, are a step in the right direction for a franchise whose volatile, multi-coached, multi-chaptered season was a mess.

And now we wait to see what the Knicks think.

by Nick Gallinelli