Deception

I last left you with my account of the difficult start to my vacation and the news blackout I experienced and enjoyed. There’s still no news. It’s still August, so let me carry on, bypassing the incident where I found the tikki idol in a cave, and jumping right to the end of my trip out west.

It was 12:30am, on a Westjet plane at Calgary International Airport. Sleepy. Feeling very sleepy. The plane is just starting to back away from the gate, when a large man interrupts the stewards’ presentation of the safety precautions. He apparently decided that his heart could not be counted on to make the entire flight without incident. That will require a wait for paramedics to arrive and take him off the plane, and more of a wait for his luggage to be found and removed. I’m thinking that this means certain death for the rest of us: the plane will crash and this guy will proclaim that the hand of God saved him. Why am I thinking this? I do not know. I had not seen Inception as of yet, but it was true that this idea stuck like …

Any Abyss

Earlier this month I was on something of a vacation, visiting family out west. During the flight out to Calgary I came across a magazine article that featured the following lines of Baudelaire’s poetry:

Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge
to Hell or Heaven - any abyss will do -
deep in the Unknown to find the new!

From Calgary, my wife and I (and three dogs) drove to Canmore, where we picked up my Sister and Dad and headed to my brother’s place, about an hour across the Alberta/BC border in Golden. We made it halfway through Yoho National Park when all traffic stopped. Minutes passed. An hour passed. Nothing. We dipped into some of the beef jerky we had picked up in a small resort close to Lake Louise. Another hour went by. No sign of anything. Just a long lineup of cars sitting in the summer sun in the middle of a mountain range. People started to walk down the shoulder a ways. Some stepped out onto the empty stretch of asphalt that ran alongside us, looking for some answer. My wife had Mochi, the nutless wonder, doing some tricks on …

The Only Solution

One word has dominated Bryan Colangelo’s communications over the last couple of months. Whether it be in scrums, more formal pressers, or his most recent letter to fans, he has said it over and over: evolve. OK. So what has happened with the loss of Chris Bosh is not something that wasn’t anticipated? Good I guess, although I think he repeatedly tried to assure us that if Bosh left there would be a fair bit coming back. Maybe he will manage to convert the Traded Player Exception into something fairly exceptional. If that happens then we should all move on and allow the evolving to continue.

But at this moment I see a flashpoint that cannot be ignored before we just think this team will go on with business as usual. Bryan has been here for some time now. In his first year he made an excellent assessment of what was needed, put forward a blueprint with a core that looked promising, and he got real real results. They are results that he still throws out there to vindicate himself. At the end of the season he pointed out that the team averaged …

Still a Fossil

I almost felt like the clock was going to turn back a little there. I fell in love with the game as a kid, back when Boston simply couldn’t be beaten in a game 7. And it seemed like that leprechaun touch would last forever at the time. But now the Lakers have nearly won as many titles, the old parquet floor got torn up along the way, and Red is as much ash as all those victory cigars turned out to be.

For a moment there I thought it was going to happen like it did long ago. I thought this group of Celtics was going to make me feel much more nostalgic then the championship group from a couple years back did. I was in the midst of fondly remembering the rotary dial phone, the typewriter, and the wooden tennis racquet. The Celtics were up by 13 and bringing it on home. Fisher was back in the dressing room. Kobe was sucking horribly. The refs were not all that noticeable. And best of all - the game could be reduced to how the effect of the old-school guys, namely Sheed and Artest played …

Story Time

Last Friday morning I was in the middle of a field in Fergus, waiting for my wife to compete with our dogs in a big Agility trial. To kill time I played a game of scrabble against my iPod. There was no competition involved with that. I killed it again. And what actually made it a little fun was how I scored on two great words for triple word scores. The word PIG was sitting right up against the triple word square in the bottom right corner of the board. I had an S to make PIGS for the triple, but I didn’t stop there. I was able to use another three delicious letters running up from that S to make ANUS. There it was - PIGS ANUS. Not a huge score, but good enough to beat an iPod. And just so satisfying in an aesthetic sense. I may never be able to enjoy scrabble in the same way ever again. It was like getting a royal flush. You just can’t feel good about the chances of getting another one again, even if the laws of probability are not effected.

Now had I been using …

J. Edgar Who For What For?

So far we have seen the heralded Free Agent class of 2010 fail to create any real excitement outside of the talk about whether they will stay put or go elsewhere. There has been a whole lot of underachieving, disappointment, and failure. At this point the only guys with any measure of success would be Amare Stoudemire and Ray Allen, and Amare has looked awful in his current matchup, while Ray Ray’s mother has probably garnered more looks than he has.

And I don’t blame the players. Not as individuals anyways. It’s the league. And I suppose since it’s a player’s league, then you can blame the players as a group. What happened to the ability to assemble a core of truly great players who go on to allow a certain mastery of the game to be distilled right down to the role players at the end of the bench? Forget about matching up two or three All-Stars (something which in itself happens infrequently). How about allowing us to see two or three future Hall of Famers on the court together? In their prime? And then stick some more All-Stars alongside them for good measure.

OK …

beat down

It might just be me trying to ease the pain of the Raptors failing so badly, but for something like the third season running, the last two for certain, the playoffs are a stunning bore. Are 30+ and 40+ point differentials the new 20 point winning margins? Is losing by 18 or 20 a good sign that your team is at least hanging around with a chance to come back up until the last half of the fourth quarter?

No. I don’t buy it. I actually see Toronto not being that far off from what we’ve seen in terms of quality play in the playoffs. If the bar is set at being able to provide the odd competitive matchup, then I think the Raptors can clear it. That doesn’t reflect on my homerism as much as it reflects on the sad state of the NBA. I’ll admit I can be prone to foolish homerism. And I won’t apologize for it. Right now I have to be foolishly hopeful just to keep from making it a daily practice to set up my Raptor mascot wind-up toy on the railing of my balcony, and shoot it down …

Paper Tigers

There are some uncanny parallels and connections between the Dallas Mavericks and the Toronto Raptors. Both teams began the decade with old coaches that could both look forward to accumulating more wins and more losses than anyone else. They would both soon after go with motivational coaches with southern drawls, not long removed from their playing days, and with coach of the year honors not being enough to keep them employed long thereafter. The two franchises have front office guys that are revered, maybe a little too highly, by their fanbase. The face of each franchise is a power forward more renowned for their finesse than their actual power games.

And both teams have underachieved terribly, with Dallas making history by exclusively losing to an 8th seed, and exclusively losing to a 7th seed, since the inception of 7-game series in the first round. On paper they always fool you into thinking they can really get it done. This season, with the addition of Haywood and Butler, they looked better than ever on paper, but the story was the same. Fundamentally, this team comes from a starting point of not being built for playoff …

King of Babble On

I was in NYC 25 years ago, walking through Central Park, when I came upon one Mr. Spoons. He was an old guy in a lavish outfit, playing the spoons like only someone named Mr. Spoons could. He could play six sets of spoons at one time. A veritable spoon orchestra held within two manic hands. Really though, it was just a bunch of clickity-clack. But the guy’s passion shone through the nonsensical performance. I almost saw his name in lights above his head, in place of the felt marker on the cheap cardboard sign propped up at his feet.

I remembered that day in Central Park while listening to the endless rattling-off and babbling on of Bryan Colangelo’s season-ending presser. I wish I could still be that fan so easy to convince that the “gloom and doom” is exaggerated. Actually I never even needed to be convinced of it in the past. I always looked to the positives all on my own, even through some of the worst years of this franchise. But this season the positives just made the end result that much more infuriating. So telling me that for almost half the …

Giving Up on My Team (and Reality)

OK. So I was fooled. Yeah - no big surprise. I mean I am the Fossil Fool after all. But to think I actually thought Bryan Colangelo had some idea what he was doing. What kind of a fantasy world was I living in?

Even though the season isn’t over just yet. I still can’t help but have the feeling that it was over before it began. There was Hedo and Bosh getting hurt in the summer and then missing camp. Then there was Reggie Evans getting injured. Boom. It was as good as done. Or at least that feeling started to creep into my consciousness. But I should I have felt a twinge of false expectations in the air before that, when Colangelo guessed that Reggie Evans would be the biggest surprise of all the newest acquisitions, not for his defense, which he figured we would all expect to be good, but for what he thought was a pretty good offensive game.

And then there was the moment of greatest unease early in the schedule. It should have been nothing. Just a statement thrown out there. But after months of Triano stressing defense, and stubbornly …