The Noise Factor

Yesterday I took a road trip with my brother and his friend down to Ann Arbor, Michigan to catch the Wolverines and Indiana Hoosiers. The game was at 4PM so we knew what was expected out of us to catch the slam dunk contest later on in the evening.

Rewind it back to the night before as I tried to watch the Rookie v. Sophmore game as it was simply a David Lee dunking contest of his own. The game was quite sloppy and it reminded me of intramural basketball from high school, with the exception that kids weren’t throwing it down. Tough to watch so about 15 minutes is all I gave it. Pretty bad when a rerun of “Footballers Wives” takes precedence.

Though the College game was close, both teams should have stayed on the court after the game was over to work on their free throws and jump shots. The sounds of bricks being layed was deafening. It was a hideous display of shooting from both teams that it was unfortunate that there was a winner in the game. The game could be summed up on the very last possession of the game where Indiana had no timeouts left and had 17 seconds left to play. Michigan, who had 2 timeouts left, decided to use one of them. Why? Why give Indiana a chance to draw up a play? That was ridiculous. Nonetheless, Indiana could not capitalize. Why is that? Well after a missed 3-point attempts they grabbed the rebound and the same player went all the way to the 3-point line only to fake the shot, pass it inside with 1 second left on the clock to lose by 3. Yeah, makes perfect sense to try to get 2 points with one second left when down by 3. The Hoosier fans behind me, to my left and in front of me showed their displeasure. And to the guy on my left that kept whacking his hat on the vacant chair beside me: You are 5 foot 5 and with that nose of yours have probably started many fights. Might want to ease up as nobody is intimidated by you or your friend that was a light-skinned Herm Edwards.

After the game the road back home had to be quick. We knew we’d have to stop so we hit up London and watched the 3-point competition and the dunk contest. The 2 reasons why the 3-point contest was better were 1) The dunk contest really wasn’t that good and 2) The 3-point contest could not be fixed. Time to indulge.

I am not sure what contest you were watching, but not only was it a weak showing of the dunk contest but what was going on with the judging? Did someone take the 5 ex-dunk champions into a room and say, “Gerald Green has to win the competition and Tyrus Thomas has to be eliminated in round 1 without question”. I am not here to say that Thomas should have won. That first dunk wasn’t spectacular. However, Green’s dunks were completely overshadowed by the great passes performed by Paul Pierce. The first dunk by Green was average, but the pass made it look great. Thomas’s second dunk was the hardest and best dunk of the night, not to mention breaking the net. However, he got screwed by the judges. Perhaps Thomas’s comments prior to the contest made him a target. Because he had to jump over a guy over 6 foot, barely grab the basketball and slam it home just for a 43 while Green had an easier catch jumping over a guy who’s 5 foot 9. He gets a 47. Makes sense to me! (sarcasm).
But jumping over a 4-foot table gets him a 50. Explain that bullcrap to me.

Dwight Howard perhaps had the funniest spot when he jumped as high as he could to put a sticker of himself on the backboard. Jameer Nelson pulling out the measuring tape proved to make that dunk a near-50. If you give Green a 50 for originality of jumping over a table then give Howard a 55 for jumping higher than anyone else for the sticker. And he was able to keep it up there! That’s much harder than what Green had to do. You telling me a 4-foot table is tougher to jump over than Ben Gordon or Nate Robinson? Who are we kidding?

There are only 2 possible explanations for the final dunk results from last night: 1) The NBA wanted Green to win in order to hype up the next big dunking machine or 2) The judging was just brutal. Dominique Wilkins and Vince Carter weren’t that good yet were the best judges of the night. The other 3 were awful.

Goes to show that I got home in the wee hours of the morning because I sat down for 90 minutes for an unspectacular event.

This is not an accusation of event being ‘fixed’ despite the word being mentioned earlier, its merely a question of why this was poorly judged? We won’t get the answer because what goes on in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.