The NBA so far (Part 2)

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We continue examining the NBA at the halfway point with part 2 of our look at the NBA so far. In the last edition (click here if you missed it) we ranked the bottom six teams, today we continue with our list by taking a look at teams we ranked from 24th to 20th. As explained in part one, the four of us ranked each team (from 1 to 30, first place getting 30 points, second getting 29, and just like that until the 30th team got only one point) and combined our results to produce our rankings. The rankings take into account both how well the teams are playing, as well as their chances to win a title. Without further ado, I will lead part 2 off by talking about my favorite team.

24. The Sacramento Kings

A long time ago (at the start of the season), I talked about how the lack of passers on this team would probably affect their chances of success. 38 games later, with a 12-26 record it turns out that no, you can not win many NBA games if you do not have players who are willing to fill up the 'assists' category instead of the 'points' and 'field goals attempted' categories. To make matters worse, the Kings basically hit the reset button on their re-building plan when they fired Westphal. While I do agree with the move, I hate the fact that the new coach (Keith Smart) is basically making the same mistakes that Westphal did. A young team like Sacramento should be focused on giving out lots of minutes, wins be damned. There is no excuse for Cousins to be averaging less then 30 minutes a game (link). What the Kings are doing instead is letting guys like Donte Greene, and John Salmons eat up valuable minutes that Jimmer and Isiah Thomas could really use. For what? So the coach can have a few extra wins on his resume? Keith Smart is not a long term solution, the team should have had him be an intern while trying to find an established head coach. If no established coaches are available, then keep Smart for the rest of the year. Needless to say, the first priority for Sacramento this off-season should be to find a point guard (this is where I hope for Steve Nash or Deron Williams), then find a coach that can and will be there for a long time (Mate McMillan would be ideal, but I would give Jerry Sloan a call to see what he is up to these days). Constantly firing head coaches for not winning with the youngest team in the league is a recipe for disaster. At this point, Sacramento almost assuredly will not make the playoffs, especially in the always competitive Western conference. With a deep draft and free agent class looming, Sacramento is poised to add to their young nucleus and the future looks bright. Speaking of future, this Sacramento Kings team will, in fact stay in Sacramento and have a chance to thank the city and the fans with some good basketball. I was incredibly happy when I heard the news, even though I do not live there, I have watched enough Kings basketball to tell you that those Sacramento fans are incredible and do not deserve to have their one pro sports team taken from them. Now that the city has done its part, it is up to the team to hopefully reward it with a title. I will be there every step of the way supporting this team that is the reason I love basketball so much. I would write more, but we have 23 other teams to get to.

-Daki

23. The Phoenix Suns

It’s been a long time since Steve Nash came to Phoenix and reinvigorated the franchise, only to continuously lose to San Antonio in the playoffs. Ever since Stoudemire’s departure to New York, Phoenix hasn’t been the same team. They gave the Lakers a good run in the playoffs, mostly because J-Rich reverted back to his Golden State days by hitting threes all over the place. They finished under .500 for the first time in the Nash era last season, and it’s not looking any more hopeful for them this year. If you take a look at their starting 5, you’ll notice something that’s fairly uncommon in the NBA today. Two of their starters are 38 and 39 years old. Nash has kept in incredibly good shape and is still a premier point guard, but unfortunately is not on a premier team. Grant Hill’s ability to still have an impact is in part because he was rested the whole time while he was injured back in the early 2000s. Regardless, Phoenix is still a tough team to beat. Their record may not show this, but Phoenix is a streaky team that can put up ridiculous offensive pressure on their opponents. With the addition of Gortat, who is having a career year (in part due to Nash), Phoenix improved its center position over last year, but with streaky players such as Dudley and Frye,Phoenix isn’t going anywhere this year. Once Nash leaves and Hill retires,Phoenix will have a chance to rebuild, but as of now, they’re not a playoff team, yet they can still offer their opponents a tough challenge. It’ll be interesting to see where Nash chooses to go in the upcoming off-season.

-Jovan

*Editors note: Marion and Beaubois for Steve Nash, come on David Stern, let's make it happen!

22. The Milwaukee Bucks

Nobody wanted to write about this team so ended up with them since I had the last pick in our “draft”. The Bucks are really not that entertaining to watch but they have a young “point” guard in Jennings who broke out this year as one of the best scorers in the league. The reason I have quotations on point is because he plays nothing like a point guard, but rather more like Allen Iverson. Other than him it’s the same old Bucks. Bogut gets injured again so Gooden steps in and has a great run and everyone is sick and tired of Skiles, resulting in a very inconsistent rotation. The one surprise this year has been Ilyasova, who is the best rebounding small forward in the league. I doubt this team makes the playoffs and will probably be stuck in mediocrity for the next few years.

-Igor

21. The Cleveland Cavaliers

The biggest question entering the Cavs’ season was: how will Irving fare against NBA competition? I thought he would okay, but nothing spectacular…. but I was way off. He’s been the best rookie this year and probably one of the better middle class point guards. He’s shooting just under 50% from the field on the year, over 40% from 3 and over 85% from the line. Such efficient numbers are hard to find in the NBA, especially for a rookie point guard. He might be able to lead this Cavs team to the playoffs (unlikely but it would be interesting). I have to give a shout-out to Varejao for playing excellent this year before going down with an injury and Jamison who’s still playing at a high level on the offensive end. What the Cavs need to do is to get rid of their old guys for next year, add some more pieces around Irving, and hope that Tristan Thompson turns into a decent 2-way player

-Igor

20. The Utah Jazz

Utah started off the season strong, surprising most fans and viewers, but the Jazz seem to have come to earth with a current record in the.500 range since early February. They’ve had a similar experience to the Phoenix Suns, in which the last good season they had was in 2009-10. After struggling in 2010, and having Jerry Sloan resign as head coach, and in addition trading Deron Williams to the Nets for Devin Harris (who hasn’t played well since his first year in New Jersey), they fell below .500 and finished the season losing 10 of their last 13 games. Jefferson has been playing well this year, but Utah has had numerous inconsistencies from their players, including Millsap, Miles, and especially Harris. One positive for this developing Utah team is the improved play from Hayward, who is showing great potential and may prove to be the spark they need to make a playoff push. Of course, Harris is going to have to step up as well because you can’t make the playoffs with as tarting PG who does not shoot or average many assists. Utah proved in the beginning of the season that they have what it takes to be a playoff team, but as other teams have improved throughout the season, the Jazz hit a bump in the road and need to regain momentum if they want to make the playoffs.

-Jovan

Igor was slated to write about the Warriors next, but being a team he particularly likes we decided to give him more time to work on it. Next time: teams 19 to 14, as we finally hit some legitimate playoff contenders.

The NBA so far

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As promised here is our (delayed) All-star break feature on the NBA. What we decided to do was rank the teams (sort of like a mid-way point power rankings) in order of how they have played so far, as well as their chances for winning the title. Four of us ranked the teams from one to 30 with the last place being one point, second to last being two points and so on. here is the first part of our list, these will come in chunks then we will do a big article for the elite eight. We also divided the teams by doing a draft for the rights to write about them, because anytime you can do a fantasy draft for anything you have to do it (it makes things about 100 times more fun). Anyways, here is our first installment of teams, starting with number 30.

30. Charlotte Bobcats (4 points)

Four voters, one point per last place, you can probably guess which team we had unanimously in last, ladies and gentleman your Bobcats! (Cut to MJ whiffing on an easy putt). To be fair, they chose a hell of a year to suck, Anthony Davis is a beast and could form a solid foundation for any franchise. I am giving as much effort to this paragraph as the Bobcats have given to their season, so there.

-Daki

29.The Washington Wizards (9 points)

Quick. Name the Wizards head coach... If you guessed Randy Wittman you’re either a cheater (very possible), a die-hard Wizards fan (impossible), or Randy Wittman (possible). The Wiz head coach has been as irrelevant as his team excluding John Wall this year. Washington came out of the gate to a very slow start (2-15) and got Flip Saunders fired as head coach. This surprised no one because how much do you think guys like Andray Blatche and Nick Young worked out over the lockout? Not a lot. Since that time the Randy Wittman led-Wizards and John Wall have stormed all the way back and are now in the East’s playoff race!! Ok not really, but they have been slightly better going 5-13 since Wittman took over. The Wizards do have some form of weird entertainment value as they’ve somehow managed to create a team mostly made up of ‘the guy you don’t want on your basketball pick-up team’ guys. You know the guy I’m talking about. The one who is insanely lazy on defense, turns the ball over with no care and thinks he’s one hundred times better than he is. That’s basically the entire Washington roster other than Jan Vesely (plays the game the right way but is just very raw) and Wall who is the one redeeming quality of the Wizards. Last year’s rookie of the year has seemingly gotten better in every aspect of his game and seems like a Derrick Rose Lite at this point in his career. Wall seems to have the demeanor in some games of a prisoner counting the days until his sentence expires. Funnily enough this is basically what Washington has become. Quick random theory on this; what if Wall did something to Stern pre-draft that David is making him pay for in his first few years in the league. After ‘The Veto’ we all know the commissioner has great control over things so why put it past him? Insane? What’s more likely? That David Stern is punishing John Wall for something he did or that someone thought the supporting cast of Andray Blatche, Nick Young, JaVale McGee, and Rashard Lewis’ corpse was a good idea...?

-Luka

28. The New Orleans Hornets (11 points)

Who would have thought that David Stern would make Eric Gordon sit out a large amount of games (probably the season) so the Hornets would get a top pick to add to the young core of players they have? The foundation they got from the Clippers in the now famous 'veto' suddenly does not seem so bad when you add a top pick. It is also incredible that Stern convinced the Hornets to play Kaman again so that they could raise his trade value exponentially (My theory: he tells the refs to treat him like LeBron) and maybe add another valuable building piece. Of course I am only speculating, there is only a 50% chance that what I wrote about Stern is actually true. Anyways, the Hornets are in full out 'tank the season' mode which will eventually spark the debate talking heads have every year: how do we prevent this from happening? There really is no way to prevent it, but what I would do is have the bottom eight teams play a tournament with the winner getting the number one pick. I will expand this idea in a future post, this is not the time or the place.

-Daki

27. New Jersey Nets (17 points)

The main news that has been surrounding the Nets this year has been the potential acquisition of Dwight Howard that will be concluded in the next few weeks. I won’t talk about this trade anymore, but rather focus on the Nets’ season up to the half way point. Deron Williams has been their star player and seems to have overcome his wrist injury issues by putting up a career high in points per game (21.7, including a career high of 57 tonight!). However, his assist numbers are the second lowest of his career and this is probably because of the inability of his teammates to score. Luckily for the Nets and Williams’ assists, Brooks Lopez returned about a week ago and has made an immediate impact on the offensive end. Outside of these two, MarShon Brooks and Kris Karda..I mean Humphries are the only other players worth mentioning. Hump is his usual self grabbing ever offensive rebound off his missed layups and Brooks is a young player with lots of potential (as I mentioned in mine and Luka’s Rising Stars mock draft). The Nets are struggling this year and I don’t expect anything to change unless they do acquire Dwight or another big name player to keep Deron and make an impact in the NBA when they move to Brooklyn next year.

-Igor

26. The Detroit Pistons (21 points) 

Remember when the Detroit Pistons were one of the best teams in basketball? It wasn’t too long ago and yet it seems like an eternity. Back in those days the 5 Piston starters were all all-star caliber players, Joe Dumars was considered one of the best GM’s in the NBA and the palace was rocking each and every night. How the times have changed. These days only 3 pieces remain of the mid-00’s Piston glory days. Tayshaun Prince, Ben Wallace, and Joe Dumars. Each a shadow of their former selves (I still think Prince could be a serviceable player for a title contender. He is wasting away on this team though). Wallace’s game was never going to get better with age (his post game makes Dwight Howard’s look like a mix of Olajuwon’s and McHale’s) but it is the decline of Dumars that has ultimately doomed the Pistons. Weird free agent signings for even worse contracts combined with one of the most confusingly crafted rosters in the league have set up Detroit for the type of success they’ve had over the last few years. Very little. This year the Pistons are simply one of the league’s bad teams with a few bright spots on the floor and on the sideline. The hiring of Lawrence Frank was an inspired one since everywhere he’s gone, he’s proven he knows what he’s doing. Of course anyone is a massive upgrade from John Kuester who was the first coach to my knowledge to have a legitimate mutiny performed on him (seriously, the players refused to practice and everything). On the floor the Pistons have one of the most under-appreciated, least-talked about young stars in the game in Greg Monroe. Monroe has been a force this year averaging 16 and 10 with 2 assists and a steal per game. If he can continue to develop in sync with some of the young guys he has around him (Jerebko, Knight, Stuckey) the future of the Pistons could be much more promising than their present. As for the time being though they’ll just have to settle for being known as the team that gave Charlie Villaneuva and Ben Gordon a combined 90 million dollars. 

-Luka 

25. The Toronto Raptors (23 points) 

It’s been a tough year for the Toronto Raptors. Bryan Colangelo didn’t make any significant off-season moves, the players he did bring over have underperformed, and to top it off, Andrea Bargnani has been out for most of the season with a calf injury. It’s unfortunate because with the defensive leadership of Dwayne Casey (the only good move Colangelo made), Bargnani was finally showing up on both ends of the court. Nevertheless, the Raptors still have a better record than three of the Eastern conference teams, and they’ve had numerous close games against better teams that were lost due to poor execution in the final minutes of the games. The Raptors have been battling inconsistency all season (ie. Demar DeRozan and Jerryd Bayless) and they don’t have a true leader, but they have still managed to function as a team and challenge stronger opponents. With the players the Raptors have, that’s still somewhat of an accomplishment. The season won’t end any different for the Raptors. They’re probably going to stay a bottom 8 team in the NBA, and hopefully Colangelo will draft a player who will make a significant difference for this long-struggling Raptors team.

-Jovan

That will do it for part one, look for part two sometime this week.

The Comic Side of Things

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Full disclosure: I actually spent more time thinking of how to explain the title of this post then actually writing it. Finally, I settled on 'the comic side of things' because what I will be talking about in these posts mainly stems from comic books, more specifically, comic books about super heroes. Who doesn't like super heroes? In this generation of great super hero movies (Iron man, Captain America, Thor, The Dark Knight etc.) we should recognize that most of the inspirations for the movies came from the comics. I will not bore anyone with detailed character history, but will provide some of my opinions on the chosen content. I should probably mention that I will not be talking exclusively about comic books, but will talk about movies and television shows based on these super heroes as well. In this opening edition I will talk about Batman: Year one and a comic book titled 'Old man Logan'.

Year one is a DC animated movie that examines the first year of Batman and commissioner Gordon's efforts to bring the corruption and crime in Gotham city to an end. Obviously, as it is based on a series of comics it will be different from the movie versions but not unrecognizable. Bruce Wayne still received training from the league of shadows (although it is not directly shown, it is heavily alluded to), Wayne's parents are killed in the same way, and Batman's goal is to make criminals fear him using the symbol of the bat. The voice acting for year one is really, really well done. Bryan Cranston (Malcolm in the Middle, Breaking Bad) and Neil Patrick Harris (How I met your mother) do very good voices for Gordon and Wayne/Batman respectively. The animation is also excellent and the characters look and move very realistically, the fight scenes are particularly engaging and make the fights look authentic. The story itself is interesting and it is always fun to watch any hero in his/her early patrols (for lack of a better word) trying to figure things out and overcoming obstacles. Of course we are treated to some scenes where Gotham's criminals and citizens are describing Batman as an otherworldly being possessing super-natural abilities. I honestly have no idea why I enjoy these so much, but it probably has something to do with making Bats look like a complete bad-ass. My one criticism of the story is that they switch from Gordon's to Bruce's to the criminals perspectives way too often. The story feels like its presented in chunks rather then a smooth ride from start to finish and that hurts it a bit, especially for the non hardcore fans who may be confused by the constantly changing perspective. All in all, the short film is done really well and I would recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, or even has some time to kill.

7.5/10 - Nothing sensational, but very enjoyable and very well put together. Definetely watch if you are a fan of Batman.

The next 'comic side' we look at will be from an actual comic. 'Old man Logan' is about Wolverine 50 years into the future. It ran as an eight issue-long story that ran from 2008-2009. I was lucky enough to read this in one book that just combined the eight issues for convenience, and was also lucky to have had no idea what it was about when I started. This probably made the events of the comic 100x better and more interesting for me. There were instances where I literally stopped reading just to observe the pictures, it was that good. Having said that, I'm not sure how much I should say about it because it might ruin it for those of you who hopefully decide to check it out after reading this. I will leave it at a few things that hopefully will not ruin anything for you and maybe even intrigue you a little. Yes, the story is 50 years into the future and the main character is very much an older version of Wolverine (you would have eventually guessed that from the title). The back story is that the Marvel villains realized that they out-number the heroes 10-1 and decide to organize themselves and just wipe them out completely. Going against all of the villains proves too much and our favorite heroes start getting picked off one by one (this is not shown in the comics much, but the writer has expressed an interest in writing sequels where he would showcase some of the events of the villains assault). The world is then divided among the villains and civilization collapses. I'll let you find out the rest.

9.8/10  - Even for causal fans of super heroes I think this is a must read. The details I described above don't even compare to the ones that happen in the story.

Best Cartoons Growing up III

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Insert everything about the 90s was great caption here

For this edition of 'Best Cartoons' we turn away from animation to live action, with real actors and real props. If you have not guessed from the above picture, today I will take a nostalgic look back at the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.

Man, when I was a kid I could not wait to be up at 8am (for some reason the best cartoons were from 8-10, never knew why) on Saturday morning (amazing how times have changed) to watch this show. Fighting? check. Giant Robots? check. Cool weapons? just look above. Yes, the show was very cheesy, and I get that the plot was kind of repetitive and that the animation of the robots was not the best, but you know what? Who cares? As a kid I never noticed any of those things, the show was fun to watch and that is all that mattered. I wont go as far to say that the 90's edition was the best one, because all of the Power Rangers shows are pretty similar. What the 90's version has on the others is the fact that it is the most memorable and was the first show of its kind. So if you have a moment, hop onto You-tube and re-live your childhood for a bit. Let's be honest, you are procrastinating anyways, why not do it right?