17. Oh-for-Annum: The View from New Jersey

Blazer fans hate the Lakers and pretty much hate their fans. They think Laker fans are superficial and loudmouthed and ignorant.

Laker fans don't give a crap about the Blazers or their fans. When forced to ponder the subject, a topic upon which they do not ordinarily spend time, they are apt to declare that Blazer fans are overwrought and obsessive — if not certifiably crazy.

While the Portland Trail Blazers have found themselves on the losing end of a couple epic confrontations with their colleagues from SoCal, there really isn't any natural reason for these two franchises to see the other as anathema in these days of three Western Conference Divisions.

Blazers v. Clippers? Blazer fans have no fire in the belly there. Blazers v. Suns? Nothing.

I think we all understand the historical origins of the rivalry — but why does it persist in the minds of so many Rip City partisans? Laker fans have moved along, why not supporters of the Blazers?

And why do these two fanbases see their others in such a different light?

My own view, a gander from the sparsely populated netherworld between the two camps, is that the mentality of typical Portland fan is akin to that of the average Southerner at the end of the American Civil War. The Confederacy may have been vanquished on the field of battle by the inevitable crushing inertia of greater population and superior industrial power, sure, but though defeated many Southerners made a blood oath to never forgive and never forget the wrongs and humiliations they had suffered at the hands of the victors.

Losing the big battles to THAT TEAM has likewise stuck in Blazer fans' craws.

This neo-religious fervor has been passed on through the generations by the Blazerites, to the point where Oregon children will spontaneously boo Los Angelino Andre Miller for admitting that he harbors some affection for his old California home team.

Blazer fans have stewed and brooded and celebrated every partial victory over the Lakers as a manifestation of some sort of divine promise of God to His Chosen People, an indication of the inevitable redemption and salvation to soon be realized through athletic retribution. They long for the Final Triumph over the purple-clad hordes as a ultimate righting of all past wrongs.

By way of contrast, Laker fans — laid back as they are — have been witness to this bubbling cauldron of frothing liquid loathing for year after year after year. The drone has been unceasing, but to them also incidental — the mild annoyance of a dripping faucet. Laker fans have collectively rolled their eyes and dismissed the Blazer Cult as a bunch of sectarian wackydoodles, dressed head to toe in Bhagwan Red and spouting nonsensical prophesies of the holy war against an opponent who frankly couldn't care less.

That's where the two groups of fans are coming from...

But what of this stereotype of Laker fans as superficial and ignorant?  Are they, on average, as self-satisfied and clueless as the Blazer crowd believes them to be?

Yeah, sort of, I suppose... Taken as a group, they couldn't be anything else.

I'll expand upon that next time around...

Hot Damn!

I think I've got a working title for JScot & BlazerFan1's new reality TV series (coming this summer to Fox)... You know, the one where they take a never-ending road trip across America, visiting soup kitchens and women's shelters during the day, and dressing in purple satin bathrobes and getting arrested by fat policemen for soliciting random passersby to do naughty things in the back seat of their Ford Pinto™® at 2 am........

"Beauty and the Beast."

Just try and tell me that would not be a ratings bonanza...

Channel Surfing.

Tuesday, Nov. 24.

Golden State Warriors (4-8) at Dallas Mavericks (10-3).

Okay, there are 5 really tough teams in the Western Conference this year, pick your own favorite order: Lakers, Nuggets, Blazers, Suns, and Mavs. This matchup with the wittle wussy Warriors on their home floor seemed like an easy win to the Large German Man and his North Texas cohorts. Silly them.

Warrior Head Coach Nelson missed this one, home in Oakland with a case of pneumonia. Also out of action was more than half of the Warrior team, with 7 guys plus a D-leaguer granted by hardship in uniform and 8 guys wearing catchy civilian threads. And it was worse than that: Corey Maggette was was actually a decoy on the bench — tweaked and unavailable. The Warriors wound up playing just SIX guys!!! (When's the last time that 3 guys went 48 minutes in a regulation NBA game?)

On the other hand, the Mavs were without Shawn Marion, Josh Howard, and Erick Dampier — three very major pieces of their own. But still... SIX guys!!!

Dallas made like Portland did in the last Warriors contest, racing out to a quick 13-5 lead. The Maverick announcers were smug: how could this undermanned grouplet of no-name shrimps, with the thoroughly non-intimidating Mikki Moore and Vlad Radmanovic as their so-called Bigs, possibly compete?

Of course, the Warriors came storming back, because that's what they do. Small and speedy, they get to the rack, like three Aaron Brookses, but better. If you think you can beat that by matching with your own Small Ball jumpshooting team (hello, Coach Nate!), well, hey, you're welcome to try — and lose.

The Mavs survived their worst quarter, the 1st (they are 18th in the NBA with a -1 point differential in the opening frame this year), finishing with a narrow 2 point advantage. By halftime, Dallas had doubled that margin to 4.

Then Maverick Head Coach Rick Carlisle did the big naughty by going with 3 guards to start the 3rd, attempting to play Small Ball with the masters of Small Ball, and Golden State promptly roared out on an 8-0 run.

Stop me if you've heard this story before...

The Mavs seemed to have things in hand with just over 6 minutes to go in the game, their lead back to 9. But in the amount of time it would take a portly middle-aged gentleman to waddle to the bathroom and then shuffle to the kitchen to pour himself another beer: a Golden State 3-pointer, a loose ball foul on Dallas, and a couple missed jumpers and it was a tie game.

We can say this for sure: Small Ball Warriors > Small Ball Mavericks. Warriors 111, Mavericks 103.

New York Knicks (3-10) at Los Angeles Lakers (10-3).

After it was over, I wrote a pretty decent one-line review in the Silver Screen & Roll game thread. I would directly quote the original, 'cept I used a little barnyard language (understandable, if you saw the game). Therefore, with a tip of the bowler to Thomas Bowdler, I present the Bedglerized version:

"Well, that was a pretty boring, methodical dispatching of a stinky opponent — complete with yet another Bench Fail..."

Yes, another Bench Fail! How many does that make?!? PJ once again had to reinsert Kobe Bryant (this time with Ron Ron) into a blowout game due to the abject failure of Vujacic, UPS, and Adam Morrison to hold a big lead securely. Morrison finished the night Minus-15, on 0-for-1 shooting, further confirming his title as The Worst Player in the NBA.™® Not that anybody is counting.

It's lucky for the Laker bench that Los Angeles isn't 1937 Moscow, otherwise there would have been harsh raps on front doors at 2 AM. Arrests would have been made by the organs of State Security, accusations flung that the uniquely misnamed "Bench Mob" effectively constituted a "counterrevolutionary Trotskyite organization of wreckers and saboteurs," endangering valuable Socialist Property (the limbs of Comrade Kobe) through their cleverly feigned incompetence.

After a couple months of interrogation by means documented by Solzhenitsyn and replicated by Bush & Co. at Guantanamo (isolation, sleep deprivation, food manipulation, use of hot and cold rooms, stress positions, physical and mental abuse, serial interrogation), the hapless role players would have been accorded a ten minute pseudo-trial in which their coerced admissions would be used against them. Then they would have been led off one by one to the prison cellars and shot in the nape of the neck by a NKVD officer with a small caliber handgun.

In recognition of past services, LO and Shannon might have "got away" with 10 years in a forced labor camp in Siberia, where they would have starved to death during World War II. Yes, friends, that is a very dark vision for a rather bad game...

No, far better for them that this is 2009 America, where these guys are multimillionaires with celebrity girlfriends. Lakers 100, Knicks 90.

Wednesday, Nov. 25.

Dallas Mavericks (10-4) at Houston Rockets (8-6).

One good thing about the NBA is that when you get you butt kicked at home by a 4 win team with just 6 players, you get to go visit one of your arch-rivals the next night to get it kicked again.

The first time out by Dallas Head Coach Rick Carlisle after 2:32, in the face of a quick 11-2 lead put up by the hustling, defensively-oriented Rockets. Dirk Nowitzki decided that guarding Luis Scola was strictly optional, and he was voting no — with disastrous results.

Then the Rockets went ice cold and Dallas kicked it on, blazing with a 32 to 8 run to end the 1st Quarter, flipping their double-digit deficit to a similar surplus. The Houston commentators, including some guy name "Drexster" or something like that, were hating the Rockets' defensive effort in particular — the play-by-play guy calling it "the worst defense he had ever seen," or something to that effect. No arguments here.

That was about it. The Mavs maintained a 10-ish/15-ish lead throughout before blowing things open in the second half of the 4th before a shocked Toyota Center crowd. The Rockets are a hustling bunch of undersized role players. They need to swing a deal to swing a scorer. Too bad for them, Stephen Jackson is already gone. Mavericks 130, Rockets 99. Ouch.

New Jersey Nets (0-14) at Portland Trailblazers (11-5).

It is always dangerous to begin a sentence with the words "Mike Rice and I..." Well, I suppose, upon further reflection, that the sentence "Mike Rice and I got drunk and decided to go bowling" isn't particularly wrenching. Then again, I haven't really seen Mike Rice bowl drunk, so maybe that is quite dangerous indeed. Nevertheless, here it goes:

Mike Rice and I were about the only two Blazer fans in Oregon who were really worried about this game. And we had good reason to be, it turned out.

I paid a little visit to our hapless friends from New Jersey the previous evening, when they were fighting nobly — and well — against the mighty Denver Nuggets during the first half of that game. We've all seen really crappy basketball before, right? I mean, hey, the Blazers have already played the Minnesota Timberwolves three times... THIS was not crappy basketball, this was a hard-working, albeit overmatched, team going toe to toe on the road with one of the top two teams in the mighty Western Conference.

And then, after the inevitable happened and the Nuggs blew it open at the end, the desperate coach lit a hot little flame under the hineys of his desperate team.

This game had "uht-oh" written all over it.

It was a tough fight, tied as late as 54-54. Things were never really in doubt, but also never really secure, until about 90 seconds remained on the clock. Going in, I predicted "within 10 points." Almost right — that turned out to be the exact margin of victory for Portland, who was led by Greg Oden with 18 points in his Regularly Scheduled 25 minutes of action. Blazers 93, Nets 83.

P.S. Sacramento is gonna get their asses handed to them on a platter. Bet the ranch on that.

Now let's whip out that old tool kit and take a look at the Popcorn Machine GAME FLOW SUMMARY and see what we can see, shall we? Please do take a moment to click that link, OK?

Observation 1: A wire-to-wire lead for Portland, which is always good for the old blood pressure.

Observation 2: A bit of a surprise that PG Devan Harris was used so sparingly. Then again, he just had 6 points in over 24 minutes of action, so he's probably still finding his legs.

Observation 3: What a game by Brook Lopez. Dwight Howard who?!?! Ten points in his first shift, to account for nearly half of the Nets' 1st Quarter offense. Ten points down the stretch to make a game of it. 32 points in all, with a game-high Help Value of 17.

Observation 4: Greg Oden played nearly the whole 4th Quarter. It's hard to argue with a coach's preference for doing that rather than playing him the whole of the 2nd Quarter and seeing him foul out in the 3rd. That's what would have happened, you know... Oden scored 9 points in the final frame, the same number of points as the team's new Mr. Big Shot, Ruuuuuuuuudy Fernandez.

Enough of that, now watch some video...

The Crazy Canucks who are responsible for delivering upon the universe THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD are taking the day off for American Thanksgiving, so you'll have to make due with yesterday's dose — just in case you missed it...

And finally, the real point of this exercise, snippets and links from around the blogosphere.

Due to editorial restrictions here at BE, I'm going to have to play this a little differently this time around... We'll see how it works, I'm learning as I go here...

(1)

Nets Give True Effort But Lose Again

by Fred Kerber, New York Post

Kerber turns the knife, likening the potential win total of the Nets in their 82 game season to that of the Jets in their 16 game season. He indicates the team "battled, fought, clawed, dug in but ultimately, lost."

"It's hard to sleep at night. We're kind of starting to lose belief in the team when we get to the fourth quarter," said Devin Harris (six points), who came off the bench for a third straight game — he will start tomorrow in Sacramento.

"It's like we have nothing left when the fourth quarter comes. It's buckling down and doing what it takes to get the win. We've got to figure that out."  *  *  *

(2)

Nets Won't Go Outside Organization If They Fire Frank

by Fred Kerber, New York Post Nets Blog

PORTLAND - Someone, somewhere — no doubt in the bowels of the Andrea Doria or something — once claimed that often you have to go to Hell and make a U-Turn before a situation gets better.

So the Nets have to be well past half-way to Hades, right? Something has to give, right?

For the moment, nothing is planned. No head will roll. For the moment.

"I don't anticipate anything," said team president Rod Thorn who is holding out the slimmest of hope that the flood waters suddenly will recede. * * *

(3)

New Jersey Nets Hit 0-15 After Falling to Portland Trailblazers, 93-83

by Julian Garcia, New York Daily News

Garcia cites the Portland turnaround from its 21 victories in 2006 as an example of how quickly an NBA franchise can right the ship but sees the Nets as continuing their downward slide this year. He quotes Head Coach Lawrence Frank as crediting his team for battling hard, but indicates this is "not good enough."

The Nets trailed, 53-46, early in the second half before going on an 8-1 run to tie the game on a Rafer Alston layup with 6:13 remaining in the third quarter.

But Portland's fans showed why nobody has tried to move their team to Brooklyn or Newark, ratcheting up the noise and inspiring the Blazers to take control again. Immediately after the Nets' run, the Trail Blazers scored eight straight points, going up 62-54 on an Andre Miller's alley-oop pass to LaMarcus Aldridge for a dunk with 2:56 left in the third. *  *  *

(4)

NJ Nets Drop 15th Straight with 93-83 Loss to Portland Trail Blazers

by Toshio Suzuki, special to the Newark Star-Ledger

Suzuki provides a lite game recap, emphasizing the Nets' approach to the NBA record of 17 straight losses to start a season.

Coach Lawrence Frank has resisted temptation to give more playing time to Harris and Courtney Lee returning from injuries. Lee and Harris continue to be reserves — and Frank stays reserved in his approach.

"When we first got Vince Carter, he was out for like a month," Frank said, recalling 2004 when his then-star was returning from injury.

"I played him like 44 (minutes) in an overtime game. But I've learned that's probably not the best thing to do." *  *  *

(5)

Nets Battle Blazers But Still Can't Shake Skid

by Al Iannazzone, Yes Network

Iannazzone takes heart that the Nets did not quit against the Blazers, taking care of the ball while contesting shots at the rim and fouling to prevent easy buckets. He believes that if the team builds upon what they did in Portland, they could win in the next game in Sacramento.

"You walk into that locker room, it's like a morgue because guys are laying it all out there," Frank said after the game. "It's disheartening to lose. But if we put efforts like this together we'll break through. Those words might ring hollow." * * *

The Blazers are a good team, at 12-5, and a really good team at home, where they won for the sixth consecutive time. They lead the NBA in field-goal defense and points allowed. The Nets are the lowest-scoring team and have the lowest shooting percentage.

Good defense always beats bad offense. * * *

(6)

Nets Can't Hang with Blazers, Fall to 0-15

NetsDaily.com

Links page with a short recap.

The Nets continued on their path toward history in Portland Wednesday night, scoring just 39 second-half points in a 93-83 loss to the Blazers. * * *

The Blazers shot 50 percent from the field and outscored the Nets 27-3 from 3-point range. Lopez's point total was the highest by a Net center since Sam Bowie scored 34 vs. Houston in December 1991. Shawn Bradley also scored 32 in a March 1996 game.

(7)

Photo Gallery — Nets v. Blazers (120 Images)

by Sam Forencich, Getty Images

 

An excellent group of 120 photos from the Nets/Blazers game.

(8)

Lawrence Frank's Postgame Comments

 (Video)

YES Network

"...Unfortunately, it's like doing training camp in November..."

 

Page includes other video of commentators' postgame commentary:

"I think anything is empty at this point, other than a win..."

(9)

Portland Trailblazers 93, New Jersey Nets 83

by Alleyoop, Nets Locker blog

The Nets just couldn't keep up with the Blazers last night in Portland.

Brook Lopez was a beast for the Nets last night with 32 points, 14 rebounds, 2 assists and 2 blocked shots. Chris Douglas-Roberts also had a solid game with 18 points, 3 rebounds, 3 assists and 2 steals. Trenton Hassell pitched in with 10 points and 8 rebounds in 33 minutes.

The Nets are now a stunning 0-15 on the year.

(10)

Hated Nets

posted by "Jeff1624" to the Real GM Nets message board game thread

Man I have never hated a group of guys as much as I hate those I mentioned earlier...

Sean Williams - Whenever he plays we're 4 vs 5 on offense. For a team that is dead last in PPG, that kills us completely.

Bobby Simmons - Should be an assistant manager for a Burger King somewhere.

Rafer Alston - Kills offensive flow, don't know how many times I've seen him just stop the ball on a fast break. It also doesn't help that he can't score for s***.

Terrence WIlliams - Jumshooter with a broken jumpshot that looks for his shot 1st, 2nd and 3rd before passing it...

Courtney Lee - What does he do again?? He can't drive, can't shoot, can't defend, can't pass and has no handles... * * *

The Bottom Line:

1. This 0-and-15 stuff is really depressing.

2. Nice effort against Portland, but same old, same old.

3. There are no moral victories at this point. There are no brownie points given for good effort. It is past time to win.