Basketball-Reference.com, the preeminent stat site for the NBA, has a pretty cool feature where you can sponsor individual team and player pages. The price is based on popularity and traffic, meaning that the MJ page is a lot more expensive and in-demand than the one for, say, Calvin Booth.
I’ve had the Sheed page for the past two years, during which time that shrewd investment has steered dozens of new readers — dozens — towards Both Teams Played Hard. And as you can see from the screen-shot below, Bill Simmons is now sponsoring the Mike Dunleavy Senior page (with improper pluralization even). You can read further here about why he’s not a huge fan of MDJ’s pops.
In other Sports Guy news, I finally caught up on some of his BS Report archives. The ones with Rockets GM Daryl Morey and ESPN number-cruncher John Hollinger are both particularly good for stat heads (additionally, here are some of Henry Abbott’s thoughts from the Sloan MIT Sports Business Conference run by Morey and attended by Simmons and Hollinger), and the first half of the recent one with Chuck Klosterman has a rather good debate about the NCAA vs. the NBA. (The second half is all about the death of the newspaper and is decent, but Simmons seems to be confused and/or defensive about what Chuck is trying to say most of the time so they don’t really get anywhere.)
In what is clearly the best thing to happen to the Indiana Pacers franchise since they punched all those fans in in the face that one night, the team decided to grow mustaches for last night’s game against Houston.
Naturally, on the strength of those mustaches, they won.
Below are the highlights. (Inspired by Indy Cornrows)
But given the gravity of the how great this might become, I’m gonna go ahead and name a pre-occurrence Great Moment for the following, which unfathomably has the possibility to displace the time someone convinced Rik Smits to shave his bulbous, albino dome as the best Pacers team-bonding idea since the franchise left the ABA. (via Dime)
Mike Dunleavy was able to convince most of his teammates to grow mustaches.
The players involved have until practice Thursday to have their mustaches or to have their beards shaved. [Ed note: that sentence is confusing, but the implication is "shave the rest of your beard by Thursday or we'll shave it for ya."] I’m not sure what the consequence is for those who don’t fulfill their end of the deal.
“I’ve never had just a mustache before,” said Troy Murphy, who’s one of the players that has to shave off the rest of his facial hair before Thursday. “I may use some Maybelline and color it in so that it can be nice and dark.”
Foster’s mustache has already grown in. All he needs to do is grow his hair out, put on a skin-tight t-shirt and some tight blue jeans to look like he’s back in the 70’s. Foster, too, said he’s never had a mustache before.
Regardless of whether or not the Indy roster is transformed into the cast of Super Troopers before their next game, Mike Dunleavy, Jr., you are a prince of Maine, a king of New England.
Despite my Indiana info expectations, this article on the NBA’s All Whitey Team turned out to be quite worthwhile on its own merit.
Here’s the run-down. (Difficulty: No foreigners.)
PG – Hinrich
SG – Mike Miller
SF – Dunleavy Junior
PF – David Lee
C – Chris Kaman
Reserves: Brad Miller, Kyle Korver, Steve Blake, Kevin Love, Wally, Troy Murphy and Nick Collison.
The author features a synopsis of each guy, plus includes a White Men Can’t Jump allusion, something far too lacking in this world.
This guy started 21 games last year. (Photo: Pacers.com)
Despite the preseason shooting woes of Danny Granger (5 for 32 from the field in three games), the overhauled Pacers roster has looked somewhat promising in camp. And while I put all preseason NBA happenings on roughly the same plane of credibility for projecting reality as the Decabox pundits on CNBC are on for estimating daily Dow fluctuations, this marks at least a first sign that Indy fans like myself can maybe possibly sorta think about removing the paper bags from our heads.
For a team that unbelievably only has two players left from its 2005-2006 squad (then rookie Danny Granger and rebounding savant Jeff Foster) and ranked dead last in attendance last year (12,000 per game, which was more than 1,000 less than the lame-duck Sonics drew in Seattle), it is absolutely imperative that a few guys emerge who can not only help the team win games on the floor, but also establish themselves as the new face of the franchise to a disillusioned fanbase.
In last night’s victory over Dallas, rookies Roy Hibbert and Brandon Rush both scored 15 points and new acquisitions Rasho Nesterovic and Jarrett Jack have each shown that they will likely be at least solid rotation contributors. Most importantly, it has become increasingly clear that TJ Ford, if healthy, is going to absolutely flourish in Jim O’Brien’s free-wheeling, quick-shooting system, giving the team a third perimeter threat to drop 25 on any given night (in addition to Granger and Dunleavy) and the capable penetrator not named Jamaal Tinsley that Indy has not had since Jalen Rose.
The interior is still a mess, there remain a host of other problems and the team still clearly isn’t good.
But these two photos below better illustrate the promise of a new post-brawl era and the feeling of refreshment that, for better or for worse, the JO trade/2008 Draft has provided Pacers fans than any season preview you could possibly read. (Though “The Dunleavy Faces” graphic alone on Ball Don’t Lie’s team preview makes this link fully worth the next ten seconds of your life.)
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