Bill's NBA offseason tardfuckery, part 1

To the commenter from last post asking me if I saw the Deadspin thing with the dunk contest participant responding to Bill, why yes, of course I did.  All that needs to be said is that if anyone is surprised by Bill 1) not knowing the name of a common hairstyle worn predominantly by black people and 2) picking the very unremarkable and only white entrant as the winner of a dunk contest, they shouldn't be.  Anyways, come along with Bill on a memorable revisiting of one of the 250 greatest comedies of the 1980s.  Just wait until you see which Midnight Run lines he associates with which NBA offseason storylines!  You'll find yourself laughing out loud while also (nodding)!

"Marvin! Marvin! Look out!"

One of the movie's best running jokes (Jack Walsh repeatedly tricking a rival bounty hunter into turning around so Jack can sucker punch him) goes to the Thunder, who keep allowing their title chances to get sucker punched because of their irrational love of Kendrick Perkins. 

OH MY GOD IT'S PERFECT.  GUY GETTING PUNCHED = TEAM WITH QUESTIONABLE ROSTER MANAGEMENT SKILLS.  HOW DOES THIS MAN SO SEAMLESSLY WEAVE SPORTS AND POP CULTURE TOGETHER?  HE'S A MAGICIAN

Have you ever impulsively bought a piece of furniture you didn't really need — like a coffee table or something — 

No?

and within three weeks, you begrudgingly realize that it doesn't fit in with everything else in the house?

No?

And that you blew it? And should stick that dumb purchase in the garage, where it belongs? But you get all stubborn about it, so that coffee table lingers in your house for an extra three years before you finally suck it up and do something about it?

"Hey, do you ever do that thing where you spend a bunch of money on a beautiful but useless thing, but then end up holding onto the thing when you should just chop it up and use it for firewood in your beautiful fireplace in your beautiful Brentwood mansion?  Happens to me all the time."  Christ, what a fucking asshole.

(That's why I still find it bizarre that they didn't shoehorn Perkins's deal into that Harden trade. And, hey, here's an idea if you're worried about money — don't move from the 14th-biggest TV market to the 45th-biggest TV market.)

Look, I hate the Thunder and I'm sure Clay Bennett is a gaping asshole.  But that was kind of the point when he bought the team, no?  It wasn't "I'm buying this NBA team, and also, hey, maybe a move to OKC would be nice," it was "I'm buying this team so I can move them to OKC."  So that last sentence is kind of worthless in the context of this paragraph.  One of these years Bill will stop bringing up the Harden trade/Perkins contract, and the world will be a better place for it.  It's like the interplay between those two decisions and the effect they had on the Thunder is the only mildly nuanced thing he's ever figured out in his entire life, so he has to jam the fact that he knows how it all worked down our throats every fucking column.

(By the way, I don't know why the guy who plays Marvin didn't become, at the very least, the star of a funny sitcom, and I don't know if he's That Guy Who Played Marvin Dorfler or That Guy Who Played Billy Rosewood's Partner.

Earlier in this same column (from my last post), Kid Show Business enlightens us:  Some people never find the right part, and there's more luck involved than you'd think.

Four paragraphs later:  I CAN'T BELIEVE THINGS DIDN'T WORK OUT FOR THAT ONE GUY WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THAT

"I'm gonna tell ya something. I want this guy taken out, and I want him taken out fast. You and that other dummy better start getting more personally involved in your work, or I'm gonna stab you through the heart with a f----ing pencil."

To Larry Legend again — 

He already spent a whole paragraph (not copied/pasted here) crediting Bird for every win in Pacers franchise history, writing War and Peace and the invention of the airplane.  But sure, how about some more reminders that Bird used to play for Bill's favorite team?

he quickly dumped every recent Indy move he didn't make (D.J. Augustin, Gerald Green, Miles Plumlee), and he didn't even have to stab GM Kevin Pritchard with a f---ing pencil. Much respect to Larry's Pacers 

That's what their uniforms should say next year!

for assembling a legitimate contender despite (a) the crippling aftereffects of the Artest melee, 

Holy Jesus on a pogo stick, are you fucking serious?  THAT HAPPENED ALMOST NINE YEARS AGO.  The day after the suspensions for that incident were handed down, if you told a Pacers fan "Don't worry, you'll have a good team again by 2012 or so, they'd say to you "I sure as fuck hope so."  Crimny, why don't you just credit him for overcoming the difficulties associated with the ABA/NBA merger while you're at it?

(b) everyone in Indiana turning on the team and professional basketball in general, 

Again, this happened in 2005.

(c) being a small-market team that could never pay the tax under any circumstances, 

That's like 24 out of the 30 teams in the league.  GOOD JOB LARRY, WAY TO WORK WITHIN THE SAME CONFINES AS PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE ELSE

and (d) never picking higher than 10th. Degree of difficulty there: 9.89 out of 10. Now if he can only convince Paul George to switch to no. 13 so we can call him PG-13. Come on. How hard is this?

We have covered that last part already.  It wasn't funny three months ago, and it's not funny now.

"Can I at least have some French fries?"
"I said no, pecker breath, now shut up."

One of my favorite throwaway exchanges goes to my favorite throwaway revelation of the summer: George telling Slam Magazine about the time Larry Legend showed up for a Pacers practice, "picked a ball up that had rolled over," then "rolled up his sleeves and made about 15 in a row and just walked out like nothing just happened," adding, "We were speechless. We didn't know whether to keep shooting or just to end practice. It was sweet, man." The Legend!

There are people that think Bill Simmons is a great sportswriter.  If you know any of them, push them under the next steamroller you see.

"SERRANO'S GOT THE DISKS! SERRANO'S GOT THE DISKS! SERRANO'S GOT THE DISKS!!!"

The flimsiest plan in the movie (Jack Walsh somehow talking the FBI into trying that crazy airport plan to catch Serrano, then pulling it off) goes to David Stern's flimsiest plan, which could be summarized like this …

1. Allow the Sonics to move to Oklahoma City (and ruin basketball in Seattle).
2. Don't allow the Kings to move to Seattle (so we don't ruin basketball in Sacramento).
3. Keep Seattle open as an ongoing threat to every other NBA team that doesn't get an arena deal done.

Again, like Clay Bennett is a huge piece of shit, David Stern is also a huge piece of shit.  But let's give him a sliver of a benefit of a doubt and think that, hey, gee, maybe Stern worked overtime to keep the Kings in Sacramento because he learned from his mistake with Seattle.  Maybe he didn't want to be the guy that "killed" basketball in two cities.  It's pretty lame to see a guy not repeat his past actions, actions for which he was excoriated, and then say "You're a flip-flopper!"

In other words, Stern turned Seattle's NBA situation into Los Angeles's NFL situation — a lucrative potential market that helps the league more if nobody ever actually moves there. 

Keep that tinfoil hat fastened securely to your head.

Seattle owner-in-limbo Chris Hansen was willing to badly overpay for the Kings and didn't get them. You would think the league would jump at this and say, "Wow, we gotta get this guy a team! What about Milwaukee or Charlotte?" Nope. And he's not getting an expansion team, because the other 30 teams would never give up an extra fraction of their TV rights — 

If they gave one up for the Bobcats, they're capable of being convinced to give another.

what do they care if Seattle has a basketball team or not? This situation sucks. I hate it. The Seattle SuperSonics should exist.

AND SHOULD HIRE A VP OF CAWMAWN SENSE!!!

As for De Niro, his iconic roles will always be Raging Bull, The Godfather: Part II, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Heat in some order; Midnight Run slips through the cracks because it's a comedy. Just name me another actor who could have pulled off everything that went into Jack Walsh, a beaten-down, sarcastic, cranky, charismatic, volatile, chain-smoking, has-been Chicago cop who always makes you feel like there's a heart beating behind every F-bomb and every menacing threat. He's a hard guy to like and you end up loving him.

Hollywood Bill strikes again!  Can I think of another actor who could have pulled that off?  Well, I don't know.  I might DIE trying to think of one, that's a pretty HARD question.  Not even BRUCE Banner climbing the WILLIS Tower would have enough strength to think that deeply.

I apologize for using that very trite device to reveal my snarky answer.

Finally, here's his attempt to squash his beef with Doc Rivers.  A beef that can be summed up by Bill saying "I KNOW YOU BETTER THAN YOU KNOW YOURSELF, FAMOUS PERSON" and Doc saying "Whoever Bill Simmons is, someone shut him up before I shut him up myself."

The day after we exchanged barbs during the NBA draft, Doc and I talked for 45 minutes on the phone and agreed to disagree on how the Boston thing ended. He truly believes the Celtics didn't want him to come back or pay him all that money as they were rebuilding. I don't buy it, as I told him — I thought that they didn't want to pay him that money once they believed he didn't want to be there. Also, I told him that I thought he didn't want to rebuild for a third time, and that the thought of coaching a contender and starting fresh in Los Angeles — where he gets to pick his own players, no less — was overwhelmingly enticing for him. He actually agreed with that. He just doesn't think he quit on the Celtics — he thinks the situation ran its course. So it's a he-said, he-said thing. 

No, you fucking dolt--it's a "he lived it, he is only pretending to know anything about it" thing.  What a clueless dickface.