NBA News...

One of the stories that dominated the weeks I spent away from the blog was the free agent bonanza of the summer of 2010. It was finally here, and the pundits went bananas. Sports news consisted of mainly one question-"Where will Lebron land?"

During the time my computer was down, I resorted to listening to sports talk radio to kill the boredom-specifically ESPN and WFAN in NYC. Yes, it took all of 5 minutes to get sick of these characters with their incessant over-analysis. The amount of actual reporting was minimal-the amount of conjecture was what dominated the airwaves to no end. No one really knew anything, and if you know what sports talk radio is like, the less these guys know the more they talk AS IF they know.

These morons hung on every word sputtered by the equally clueless Chris Broussard of ESPN. He seems like a nice enough guy. He certainly isn't an obnoxious, grating, self-promoting blowhard like his fellow colleague Steven A. Smith. But it turns out Steven was the one who got it right way before the new "Big Three" signed with the Miami Heat. Smith is the type of guy you love to hate-loud, opinionated, and seldom right. He's been drubbed out of Philadelphia, got his show "Quite Frankly" yanked out from underneath him and was unceremoniously bounced from ESPN. But his prediction put him back on the relevancy radar, and he's doing well at Fox Sports. So props to Steven A. for resurrecting his career with the only bit of reporting during this time that turned out to be true.


Broussard, on the other hand, was going in the opposite direction with his commentary. He had the Chicago Bulls as frontrunners since April, but had no hard evidence to back this assertion. He simply did what you and I were doing from the comfort of our couches-he analyzed the amount of cap space they had, looked at the players they could potentially surround James with and went with the prediction, but put it forth as a prediction based on intelligence gathered from "sources", or so he said.

But this conjecture passed on as fact wasn't the most nauseating aspect of his commentary. It was how he kept mentioning Joachim Noah as if he were the next Bill Russell. The guy is actually a light-in-the-ass version of Anderson Varejao without the offense. He's as good as he is because he really does give it "110%", a physical and mathematical impossibility until you see him play. If he doesn't play with the volume turned up to eleven every night, he's a goner in this league. Straight-up. He is the ultimate over-achiever. If he were three inches shorter there would be nowhere for him to play in the NBA. And despite his propensity towards smoking weed, he's not that fucking high all the time that he doesn't know it, so he seems hell-bent on capitalizing on the situation. Let's face it, at his height what the fuck else is he good for? Kudos to Noah for being aware of his limitations and conducting himself accordingly by maximizing the time between now and when he would have to go out and get a real job.







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