The latest Ask Charles: “So Charles Barkley, would you rather have dinner for breakfast or breakfast for dinner?”
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Posts tagged as:
Chuckster
I haven’t made much headway in my whole Every NBA Commercial Project endeavor, but the new LeBron Nike spot from the famed Wieden + Kennedy advertising agency is obviously already a basketball commercial Hall of Famer.
I’ve been pretty baffled about why everyone has felt the need to make LeBron into some sort of monster this summer. He has been a bit of a naive douche of late, perhaps, but the whole “he ruined his legacy [at 25 years old],” “he’s scared to be the man” and “MJ or Kobe never would have played with Wade” stuff is just completely silly to me. Who cares? New era with new era players who want to win title with their friends.
Seriously, not a big deal.
And that’s what makes this Nike spot so brilliant. It acknowledges all the silly rhetoric that talking heads have been saying for months now and just exposes it all as being totally silly. By the end, the only thing a rational basketball fan can realistically see is, as Matt Moore of Hardwood Paroxysm noted in an email, “a dude that switched jobs and did it in an obnoxious manner.”
That’s all the ever really happened. Calm down. (Cleveland fans can keep being pissed — I get that.)
Meanwhile, the “Hi Chuck” part is one of the best moments in any commercial ever and the kid actor voicing young LeBron who says “should I give you a history lesson?” sounds like Randy Wagstaff from The Wire.
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In the Spring of 2007, I was just a young pup in this NBA blogging world. Since then, I have accumulated literally dozens of readers and made untold tens of dollars writing about the NBA, but back then the only people reading this blog were me and Drop Dead Fred. (He didn’t even like it … I just spammed his Gmail account with links to my posts.)
Then, on April 4, 2007, I did a post called “The Top 50 NBA Commercials of All Time” that got linked to from Henry Abbott’s new ESPN version of TrueHoop and a cavalcade of other NBA blogs that probably don’t even exist anymore and, like, 40,000 people showed up. Since my previous high in any day was somewhere south of 4 unique users, it was pretty cool.
Unfortunately, within the year I switched hosting companies and perhaps-due-to-nonpayment (who remembers really?), I lost pretty much all my old content in the transfer. It seemed like a bummer at the time, but honestly the commercial thing and like three other posts were probably the only not completely terrible things I ever did. Still, losing stuff sucks.
HOWEVER, through the miracle of the a tech-smart friend of mine, I was recently able to recover some stuff. And so, mostly because I want to put it back in my archives, I’m re-posting it as it was originally posted verbatim in April, 2007. (Thus, forgive the omission of any spots from the last three years that warrant inclusion.)
Additionally, this may as well be the formal launch of “The NBA Commercial Project,” which will be an attempt to gather links to video for every NBA commercial ever made. We’ll start with just these 50 and build on that. And that’s where I’ll need your help. Head over there and drop links to videos in the comments.
Just do it (wocka, wocka, wocka).
Check the full, original Top 50 after the jump.
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This sounds like a really dumb video. And it probably is. But for some reason, watching seven minutes of the “top” 70 missed dunk contest dunks in NBA history is rather entertaining. Much more entertaining that the 2010 Dunk Contest at least.
Here are the highlights:
- At 0:56, Terence Stansbury falls down comically.
- At 1:15, Jerome Kersey, yes, that Jerome Kersey, awkwardly flails at a self-lob attempt, which leads to this comment from the announcer: “I don’t think he wanted to do it with the left hand, Steve.” I think you’re correct, Phil. Also that’s what she said.
- At 1:45, Shawn Kemp’s misses a windmill that probably could have won this year’s contest.
- At 2:04, as always, John Starks sucks.
- At 2:25, a human being actually says this following about Clarence Weatherspoon: “He reminds me of a young Charles Barkley.” Then Clarence airballs a dunk.
- At 3:00, Antonio Davis severely overestimates the amount of air in a basketball.
- At 3:19, I learn that a guy named “Jamie Watson” apparently once played in the NBA.
- At 3:38, Darrell Armstrong makes a reverse layup.
- At 4:06, we see the infamous Michael Finley cartwheel.
- At 4:57, J-Rich misses his attempt at a 360 elbow hang. That kid just wasn’t human.
- At 5:06, they inexplicably show only one of Birdman’s 387 straight misses.
- At 5:15, Amar™e drinks some serious Sprite — reverse Sprite even.
- At 5:21, Iggy damn-near decapitates himself.
- At 5:35, we hear this non sequitur from Sir Charles: “I think Big Baby was eating all his food.”
- At 6:20, we see the best dunk that Shannon Brown had after they #letshannondunk.
Watch the whole thing below. And here’s the full video of all of Birdman’s failed dunk attempts since they somehow only included one. (video via Dime)
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