Extreme Makeover: NBA All-Star Saturday night edition
You know how every Halloween you stumble across a big bowl of candy corn at somebody’s party and get really excited as you envision diving into it and experiencing sweet saccharin nirvana? And then you actually eat a piece, are reminded that candy corn is overly processed and disgustingly textured garbage, and then proceed to spend the rest of the night looking at your reflection in the bathroom mirror wondering how everything went so horribly wrong?
That’s my relationship with the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, and by extension all of All-Star Saturday night. Its premise sounds so cool!
The best players in the world getting together to showcase their limitless talent, moving with the ball, stroking the three and flying through the air with a proficiency that the rest of us can only dream of, what could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, everything. Every year I tune in thinking it’s going to be can’t-miss TV and instead I get approximately 4,771 missed jams and a final between Glenn Robinson III and
Oh shoot, wait a minute, they changed his default settings right before the contest. His new name is “Derrick Jones, Jr.” Look I know the ratings usually speak for themselves, but if the Bleacher Creature’s voice has any weight to it at all, something needs to give.
I’m sure the event is plenty exciting in person, but there are better things to do with my time at home then watch unoriginal dunks at perspective-distorting angles while Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal jabber incoherently about whether or not “it’s ovah!”
Baseball is tradition
I’ve established my position on baseball writers before. By and large, they’re a pretty darn dumb group of guys who cling to their whitewashed and nauseatingly nostalgic vision of the game like Linus holds onto his blanket. I don’t ever want to be like them! And yet here I am, about to criticize a proposed rule change in MLB because it violates tradition, for shame.
This rule change, which will purportedly be given a test run in the minor leagues this season, would place a runner on second base at the beginning of every extra inning as a means of expediting the game.
Joe Torre, MLB’s chief baseball officer, is purportedly a big fan of the change. Why? Why??? Baseball is supposed to be played without a clock and have an indefinite ending, that’s one of the many unique quirks that makes it so charming and different! What would even happen with that runner if he doesn’t score?
Do you just have to keep bringing in new guys to pinch run or do we have to completely change the rulebook concerning who is eligible to enter the game, maybe create an entirely new position called the DR? This is just a monstrous affront to baseball as we know it and I don’t even know why the hell it’s happening!
I get that nobody actually wants to stick around for a 19-inning game but those happen what, two or three times a year? The vast majority of extra baseball is over in the 10th or 11th, and that extra half hour is usually pretty riveting! Please, for the love of God, let’s make sure this change never occurs at the major league level.
Kyrie Irving may be smarter than us
Wake up sheeple! Kyrie Irving believes the Earth is flat, and he wants more people to get out there and do their own damn research instead of being shills for academia. Draymond Green tends to agree, citing the fact that if our planet was round, we would all fall off.
Shit.
How come nobody ever thought of this before? Where’s my phone, I need to call Neil DeGrasse Tyson.