Oh, Monday.
The Gospel of the Lefty, Or: Why the Detroit Pistons are Your New Favorite Team
Bethlehem Shoals
GQ
It is looking more and more like the Detroit Pistons will be this year’s folk team among hardcore NBA fans. Like the Nuggets of 2012, the Pistons have assembled a core of offensive wild-cards that could either work marvelously together or fail spectacularly. Bethlehem Shoals identifies another intriguing element of the Pistons: their left-handedness. Both Jennings and Smith (the Pistons marquee acquisitions this offseason) are lefties with an offensive grab bag that is filled with both candy and razor blades. And that’s what makes them cool, argues Shoals. “In basketball, there’s a clear tactical advantage to lefties. They do everything righties do, just backward. It’s hard to match up against, and almost reflexively, lefties get labeled “crafty.” There’s a touch of exoticism in there, too,” he writes. There’s been a lot of Pistons talk lately, and they may fall flat on their faces. But they certainly are compelling, for a number of (occasionally unlikely) reasons.
- JG
Your 2013 Free Agency Primer: Part 1
Raza
Basketbawful
I cruised by Bawful the other day, and was delighted to see this post up. For the young’n's out there: Basketbawful was one of the first basketblogs to really make waves and put gonzo blogging on the map. They’ve been going strong (under several different ownerships since the mysterious funny-man Basketbawful skedaddled) in some form or fashion since January 2005. That’s like 284 years old in blog years. Anyways, the site doesn’t post as regularly as they used to, but they can still bust out some really funny stuff. Any piece of subpar NBA fan fiction you read is really a cheap imitation of a 2007 Basketbawful piece, whether they know it or not. If you’ve never read Basketbawful, this piece is a good start. They can still drop lines like “[GM Danny Ferry] offered nearly 10 Million a year to Paul Millsap on a two year deal since nobody really wants to commit to the Hawks long term”. Brilliant.
- JG
No, For the Love of God, Johnny Manziel Isn’t Rosa Parks
Dave Zirin
The Nation
Jennifer Floyd Engel’s boneheaded piece that compared Johnny Manziel to Rosa Parks has been soundly destroyed by just about everyone who has a brain, but few people have identified the truly outrageous aspect of her article: the simplistic narrative of Rosa Parks. The Nation’s Dave Zirin provides us with necessary knowledge about Parks’ knowing act of civil disobedience that day, and provides key details into her life of activism over a decade before she refused to get off the bus. That Engels reduced the Civil Rights movement to an opening paragraph for an empty Manziel piece is bad enough. That she didn’t take the opportunity to educate readers on Rosa Parks is worse. That said, given what she writes on her own blog, I don’t think she’ll be backtracking any time soon.
- JG
