Game Notes: Suns @ Raptors, Dec. 5, 2007

Quick thoughts the day after seeing Steve Nash play NBA ball in person for the first time as the Suns whupped the Raptors 136-123:

• Nash honestly doesn’t give two shits whether he scores or assists or not, so long as the offence is clicking. Nash clocked 18 dimes in 33 minutes, and easily could have had five more had teammates hit open shots. He also could have rested for the entire fourth quarter, but for a hint of a Raptor comeback.
• Speaking of open shots, it’s been a damn long time since I’ve seen so many players so wide open from downtown. I had to use shorthand while keeping game notes at the ACC because the pace of this one was so frenetic, and there are chunks of notes that read “Hill – WO – 4 3, LB – WO – 4 3, LB – WO 4 3, NO D!” That translates, in proper English to three wide-open three pointers on consecutive Suns possessions, as well as a little note to remind me — as though Sam Mitchell wasn’t going to remind everyone after the game — that the Raptors’ defence was atrocious.
• Speaking of Leandro Barbosa and his 35-point evening, it’s fair to say that he’s as quick, if not quicker, than TJ Ford, who is widely considered one of the NBA’s fastest players. In fact, starting in the third quarter Mitchell began playing Ford and Jose Calderon together for long stretches (something he only did last year in the very last few minutes, to ensure the Raps had two ball-handlers for an inbounds pass), simply so that TJ could try to use his quicks to keep up with LB. The problem with this is that TJ, much like his teammates, wasn’t so into the defence on this night.
• The Pizza Slice Promo has got to go. There was a period of three minutes or so in the early stages of the fourth quarter (my notes have it beginning with about 11:00 – 8:30 remaining, when the Raptors were down about 20 points and were making a mini-run. The crowd was simply going crazy, booing every call that went against the home team (and loudly), screaming their lungs out for every Raps bucket and generally creating some genuine pandemonium in the ACC. The Raps cut it to 13 before an LB layup and a Raptor turnover essentially swung the momentum back to Phoenix, but the crowd was still into it … then I looked at the scoreboard. Those three minutes of wild enthusiasm? Yep, they coincided with the Raps going from being down 106-87 to trailing 117-101. In other words, the game was pretty much done before they started cheering. It wasn’t a plucky and inspiring comeback they wanted, it was a cheese and pepperoni slice. Ridiculous.
• It was interesting to see Jamario Moon matched up against a much more polished version of himself in Phoenix’s Shawn Marion. Matrix has the same uber-athletic hops and wild athleticism that has Toronto fans falling in love with Jamario, and he also knows when to employ it and when to play within himself. It was a tough matchup for the rook, as he couldn’t just leap over everyone to tip those rebounds out to his teammates. Marion was also hell for him on the defensive end when he wasn’t on the bench with foul trouble, as Moon is used to cheating on his man a bit to come over for those crowd-pleasing blocks. Matrix got a few open looks out of it, but missed a bunch of them. Still, eight points, 10 boards and two blocks ain’t bad for Moony.
• At least the fourth-quarter mini-run brought Canada’s favourite son back out for a curtain call. When the Raps cut it to 13, and were pushing the tempo, Mike D’Antoni had to put Nash back into the game, allowing the crowd a chance to voice their displeasure about his no-more-national-team-basketball decision. Just kidding. They cheered him at the intro, they cheered when he subbed in or out, and if they could have been in the locker room after the game, they would have cheered when he came out of the showers. More power to him, I guess. I’ve made my feelings on that issue known.
• Shawn Marion is very soft-spoken in the locker room. Amare Stoudemire is not. Amare is also a freak of nature when viewed up close and in person. Also, he has so many tattoos I was not sure where to look first. It’s quite a sight.
• The good news is that, after surveying the locker rooms of various basketball teams, I have finally found a player who comes close to matching my chiseled physique. The bad news is that it’s Eric Piatkowski.
• As a final note, unless I have time to add some more later, Joey Graham was awful in this one. He started both at tip-off and after halftime. He did very little with his minutes and, after fouling Amare for a three-point play, getting fouled himself at the other end, fumbling away a loose ball recovery and then taking an unnecessary, hurried shot … he found himself yanked after just two minutes of the second half. Bad Joey. Very Bad. Get well soon, Andrea and Chris. We can’t beat the good teams without at least one of you.

Why does Stevie Nash get a pass from Canucks?

(Disclaimer: I would never hate on Canada’s greatest basketball talent. I have nothing but love and respect for Steve Nash. He’s incredible — as a player and as a person. But there is something about his latest decision that bugs me.)

So … Steve Nash won’t be playing for Canada’s senior men’s national basketball team when it tries to qualify for the 2008 Olympics this summer. He won’t play in the Olympics if they happen to qualify, either. Probably, he’ll never play basketball for his country again.

And that’s okay. He’s getting a pass. He’s busted his ass for Canada in the past, does more than his share of outreach work and — thanks to his back-to-back MVP awards — is the greatest ambassador for the game this country has had since Naismith.

Still, it’s a good thing for Nash that he doesn’t play hockey.

If Steve Nash were a hockey player who, at age 33, was perhaps no longer a spring chicken but was otherwise in the prime of his athletic career (he’s on pace for a career high PPG average this season, and still leading the NBA in assists, of course), do you think he would get such an easy pass from Canadian fans when announcing he planned to skip the Olympics?

Not a chance. Imagine, two months before the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City … Mario Lemieux, Joe Sakic and Steve Yzerman (at the time 37, 33 and 36 years old respectively) call a press conference:

LEMIEUX: Good morning. We’ve come here today to announce that the three of us will not be playing for Team Canada in the upcoming Winter Olympics. For me, it is simply too much hockey. After returning to the NHL less than two years ago, I have been playing hockey non-stop, and a two-week break would really help my body to recover for the stretch drive. My back is not strong right now and I need all the rest I can get. I am sorry — but I just can’t do both.

SAKIC: While I may not be as old as Mario or Steve, I have been playing full NHL seasons, as well as frequent extended playoff runs, since 1988. The Colorado Avalanche have a shot at the Stanley Cup this year and I plan to lead them in the playoffs. I simply can’t risk my body — though I’ve been lucky enough to be healthy throughout my career — in an Olympic tournament at this point. I just can’t do both.

YZERMAN: I’m also nearing the end of my career, and while I may not have recovered from cancer like Mario courageously has, at this point I am basically playing on one good leg. The Detroit Red Wings’ management team has stacked our roster with hall-of-famers and our fans expect nothing less than the cup. It’s my job to bring it to them. At this point in my career, I just can’t do both.

Imagine, for one moment, the reaction of the average Canadian hockey fan to this press conference. Not pretty, right? Would that picture to the right have been taken in the weeks that followed? And if it hadn’t, who would have taken the blame? Would ridicule and scorn be sufficient? Or would we be talking drawing and quartering?

We takes our hockey seriously, y’all.

Yet it wouldn’t have been unreasonable at all for these three great and respected athletes to have made that sort of announcement. In fact, all of them had a better case for missing those Olympics than Nash does for missing the upcoming Beijing games:

• While the Salt lake City Olympics happened in the middle of an NHL season in which all three were captaining their respective teams (Sakic and Yzerman were both leading teams expected to vie for the cup, much like Nash’s current situation in Phoenix), the Beijing Olympics — as well as the qualifying tournament — will happen in the summertime, when there is no season to interrupt and eight months to recover before the next playoffs. The NHLers had six weeks of regular season hockey separating the end of the Olympics and the start of the playoffs.
• Steve Nash has a bad back. No secret. Guess what? Mario Lemieux’s back problems were worse. Mario needed someone to lace up his skates for him in the latter half of his career. Joe Sakic, it’s true, was relatively healthy. Yzerman, however, would not have been lying had he begged off by saying he was playing on one leg. That story is well documented. Two of those three had better cases than Nash to miss the tournament due to injury.
• Had Yzerman, Lemieux and Sakic missed that tournament — while the outrage and disappointment of Canadian fans would have been severe — there wasn’t exactly a shortage of capable players to step in and fill the holes in the lineup. Perhaps no one with their leadership credentials would have been available (there WASN’T really anyone else with those kind of creds), but Joe Thornton, Brendan Shanahan, Paul Kariya, Jarome Iginla and Scott Niedermayer were not exactly also-rans. In comparison, Steve Nash is by far the best player Canada could hope to have on its national basketball team. After him, we have only the newly-Canadian Samuel Dalembert and the always-absent Jamal Magloire — no one with skill anywhere close to residing in Nash’s lofty stratosphere.

But Nash isn’t playing, he isn’t really apologizing for not playing … and we’re all okay with that.

Perhaps we’re so blown away by the idea of a little, white point-guard from British Columbia leading his team to an NBA championship that we’ll forgive him his absence from a team that — even with him and all his prodigious skill — would be lucky to sneak past the round-robin portion of the Beijing games.

Perhaps we just like the guy so much that we’re willing to let him do what he wants with the few years of elite-level play he has left. After all, as I said above, he is as good a person as he is a basketball player.

Perhaps — and this one, at least, is true — a berth in the Olympic basketball tournament wouldn’t mean nearly as much to us as a country as that Gold medal in Olympic hockey that we’d been denied for 50 years. Perhaps we just don’t care enough about hoops to demand the same dedication from our ballers that we’ve come to expect from our puckheads.

Either way, Steve Nash is getting a free pass. Does he deserve it? I don’t know. He has my respect, as both an athlete and a human being. But he’s only 33, there sure seems to be a lot of life left in him and I know that if he was a hockey player I wouldn’t even ask him if he was planning on playing in the Olympics. I would expect him — as the best at what he does in our entire nation — to be honoured to wear the red and white.

But apparently, because he wears sneakers instead of skates, a lot of us don’t feel that way. Why is that?

The top 10 basketball commercials

For some reason — perhaps better marketability, more urban cred or just because the players are so much cooler — basketball commercials are, without fail, always better than those featuring athletes from other sports. Football players tend to be too cheesy, baseball players have a distinct lack of personality, and while I love the ‘fastest game on Earth’, hockey players are, well, nice guys who can’t really act for shit.

But basketball commercials — most of them — never fail to entertain. Here are the top 10 commercials featuring hoops stars. Argue about the order in the comments.

10. Chuck vs. Godzilla — What more needs to be said? They’re about the same size now, too, so maybe they should have a rematch…

9. MJ vs. Bird — The Showdown. I remember loving this commercial when I was about 13 years old. I’d planned to rank it higher, but watching it now … it just seems stilted. Bird was never a great actor to begin with (although the ‘no dunking’ line is gold) and him and MJ don’t really have any chemistry. The whole thing just seems kinda overdone and cheesy, like everything McDonald’s did in the 90s. It does get points, however, for the music and outfits. I think MJ rolled Will Smith while he was coming off the ‘Fresh Prince’ set.

8. Steve Nash and Ali G — “No disrespect, but you is Canadian, so you don’t even speak English.” Nash is too earnest and good-hearted to be a truly funny guy, but he makes an absolutely perfect straight man. And his flat-out ‘No’ just sells the whole bit. I could stick all four of the Ali G promos on here, but we’ll go with Steve, because we have a soft spot for him.

7. AI and Jadakiss — This one makes it on here because they let Iverson rap, and Jadakiss is great, and it’s all shot in black and white … and it’s the perfect way to sell one of the best — and at times, most controversial — players in the league. Everything about this commercial works for AI. You couldn’t do this with Duncan (too traditionally good and respected), Nash (too white), LeBron or MJ (too corporate) or anyone else really. AI’s the only superstar baller in the L who can get down on a track with Jadakiss and not have it sound contrived.

6. Air Force Ones, 25th edition — “Together we stand, divided we fall/ United we form Voltron and take on all…” Another reason that basketball commercials are consistently better than those from other sports? No other sport has a genre of music so perfectly married to it as hoops n’ hip-hop. When the beat blends with the ball, the result is almost always moving. This clip is a perfect example.

5. Steve Nash — “If you wanna be good, you gotta practice.” Yeah, we’re biased, but Nash is just awesome, his work ethic is inspiring … and video of L’il Nash is priceless. The only commercial on this list that loses points for being just a tad too cute.

4. Astronautics — MJ feat. Spike Lee. We dissed MJ for his wardrobe above, but without him, the basketball commercial as we know it wouldn’t exist. If you’re ever bored, type in Jordan and Nike and Mars into youtube and watch them all. Some of the first hints of both MJ’s off-the-charts marketability and Spike Lee’s filmmaking greatness. “Do ya know, do ya know, do ya know?”

3. Vince Carter — Nike Shox. My hatred for Vince burns deep, and I can’t see it ever expiring. He quit on his team, disappointed a whole city of fans, weaseled his way out of town, sulked, whined and generally transformed Toronto from his city to a city united against him. There was a time though, when happy-go-lucky VC and his otherworldly hops owned the NBA. It’s in that spirit that I am able to watch this outstanding clip — with music that perfectly matches the feel — and grin like Air Canada was not grounded on the tarmac of my heart for evermore.

2. Charles Barkley — “I am not a role model”. As always, Chuck says it before people even realize it needs to be said. This commercial aired in 1993, and it’s still worthy of viewing today. Also, Chuck gets huge props for writing the ad copy for his own commercial. This one is all him, and it stands the test of time.

1. “MJ — “Let your game speak”. The blueprint for so many of those overwrought, yet awesomely powerful, basketball commercials of the last five years. There’s a moment in this clip when the viewer realizes what’s going on — that this is a montage of the next generation coming up paying tribute to their hero — and, even though I now know it’s coming, it sends chills down my spine every single time. This commercial is gorgeously shot, too. You can also take it as a metaphor for the influence MJ has had on the commercial game. Think of the classical music and gorgeously shot slo-mo/pictures of the current “Where Amazing Happens” campaign and others like it.

Disagree? Did I forget one? Let us know below.