Can't We All Just Get Along (With Two Cents)?

Who knew that Stephen Jackson could arouse so much contention in this little corner of the Blog-O-Verse - and over off-court antics, no less?

I didn’t see the comment(s?) Mike left on Shane’s blog before Shane took them down, so can’t really comment on whether or not they were appropriate.

However, having said that, I think that the type of discussion that can emerge by way of posting comments on someone else’s blog is one of the more interesting applications of this kind of communication; the blog-o-verse just seems so much more personal and expansive than discussing things in forum threads. But, I also understand Shane’s point about not wanting to have your blog used by someone else as a place for them to put their own posts. Again, missed Mike’s comments, so don’t know for sure.

So here’s my two cents (and all comments are welcome):

I could not be less interested in the Stephen Jackson thing specifically, nor in the Pacers generally. I have been losing interest in, and respect for, the NBA for a long time, sometimes half-heartedly hoping that the ship would right itself and that the Association would become respectable again (by which I mean less dunking, less hotel maid raping, less 3:00 a.m. rented-Bentley driving and then getting shot at, less leaving college early or skipping it altogether, and, uh...less dunking).

As my interest in and respect for the NBA has waned, however, I always continued to support the Pacers, because they are the hometown team, because I grew up watching and going to Pacers games, because the formerly sad sack Pacers turned into a real contender in the mid-1990s and began to put a high quality product on the floor (I always liked Dale Davis, whom I used to refer to as “RoboDale” because of all of the surgical tinkering that has been done to his shoulders over the years - in fact, I think there may still be a Dale Davis jersey in the closet of my old bedroom at my parents’ house), and because I wasn’t quite ready to write professional basketball off as the same kind of failed experiment that the Old Testament eventually became.

Then Ron Artest came along. He left St. John’s after two seasons to go pro. Maybe his game didn’t have any further up to go; but as an upperclassman, you learn more and more about leadership and maturity. Those lessons would have served him well in his NBA career. He is one of the, I don’t know, top five?, most talented players in the league, overall - when you factor in offense AND defense. He’s also poison, or least was for the Pacers. He’s super-talented, and he knows it; and he floats around on that cloud, thinking that what he does on the court will take care of everything else.

And it did - when he went from on-court to off-court in Detroit. It took care of the last chance Reggie Miller had to win the NBA title. It took care of the year after that, when the Pacers were still title contenders, but Artest turned into a crybaby who wanted to leave town. It was a soap opera, and the Pacers missed out on two chances to seriously contend for the NBA championship.

The team is now in a shambles, Donnie Walsh is at the end of his career, and we still have soap opera nonsense making headlines over and above what the team is doing on the court.

Here’s the point: I can understand, sort of, how the Pacers wanted to hold on to every last shred of hope they could muster that Ron Artest would turn himself around and fly straight. You do that with someone who is that talented. I guess.

Stephen Jackson isn’t even close, not even when he’s on - and when he’s on isn’t often enough. When he is on, I’d take him over almost anyone in the league; when he’s off, I’d sooner take the second coming of Dontonio Wingfield, one of the many freshman-year-leaving busts who have populated the NBA over the years. Anybody remember Rashard Griffiths? I didn’t think so.

I just don’t care anymore, and I actually sort of lament that fact, because the Fieldhouse is a great place to see a game; but the Pacers have finally lost their battle and have joined the three-ring joke that is the NBA. But hey, at least they’ve done one thing right, with the new age rule. Now I can at least watch Greg Oden play college ball for a year.

Pro football starts in the late summer and runs concurrently with college basketball from November to February; by the time college basketball ends, with a quick nod to golf and the Masters, the weekend after the NCAA title game, baseball has started, and that takes me all the way back to the NFL in the fall. The NBA is utterly irrelevant. Good riddance.