Turning on my team

March 25, 2008


Sometimes, fanhood can be difficult.

I’ve been rather silent all year in regards to my beloved Pacers, laughing stock of the league and second worst situation in all of basketball (Thanks, Knicks!)

Yet, here we are. Less than a month from the end of the season. The postseason hunt underway. And the plucky Indiana Pacers, fresh off of a four game winning streak, are just half of a game out of the playoffs.

The playoffs!

It should probably come as no surprise that I’ve counted them out all season. It’s just not working anymore. Jermaine O’Neal is a shell of his former All Star self. Fans are treated to a barrage of inexperienced and underwhelming players every night. Even supposed bright spot Danny Granger has taken his chance to shine and flushed it down the toilet, averaging just 18.9 points and 5.9 rebounds per game, even with his team scoring more points than anyone in the Eastern Conference outside of Orlando.

But now, here they are. Eleven games below .500. And sniffing at the playoffs.

And here’s the dilemma. If they make the playoffs – if they somehow sneak in and rest themselves firmly at the eighth seed – they’ll be facing the Boston Celtics. The amazingly rejuvenated Boston Celtics, the team poised to bring home the title for the first time since Larry Bird wore green, since before Jordan was a force, since the last power trio graced the Garden’s parquet floor.

The Boston Celtics. The team I’ve taken on as my team of destiny, rooted for and crossed my fingers for and prayed to the basketball gods for. The team that caused me to cheat on my beloved Pacers.

So that’s the trouble. The Boston Celtics vs. the Indiana Pacers. One love verses another. On one hand, I should root for my team – my scrappy upstarts, my fledgling group of misfits – to go all Golden State on Boston’s ass and upset the Chosen Team.

On the other hand, there’s Kevin Garnett. Paul Pierce. Ray Allen. Three superstars that deserve rings. A foregone conclusion to make the Conference Finals, if not win it all. A team that’s infinitely more fun to watch.

If the Pacers make the playoffs, and they face the Celtics, is it okay for me to root for the wrong team?

Is it okay for me to turn my back on an almost guaranteed loser, to root, for one series only, against Reggie and Rik’s team? If only for this one time. If only to see KG get his ring. If only because the Pacers have given me so little to root for over the past three years.

Yeah. It’s okay. But still, I feel so horrible even thinking about it.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be the one wearing Celtic Green, a number 5 jersey covering my shame, a paper bag over my head. And when the Celtics win, the bag will come off.

I’m just afraid the smile never will.

——————

(EDIT – The Pacers just lost to the Hornets and now sit between one and two games out, dependant upon how the Hawks and Nets do tonight. Maybe I won’t have to worry about this at all.)

Tags: Basketball, Indiana Pacers, Sports |

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Jump ball

October 30, 2007


Another year.

Another basketball season.

Another 82 games of excruciating horribleness.

Another season of rooting for the Indiana Pacers, my arbitrarily chosen team, picked because I loved Reggie Miller and held on to because I still love Jermaine O’Neal.

But this team - the one that was just two wins away from an NBA Championship in 2000 and the only one to ever knock the Jordan-led Chicago Bulls out of the playoffs between 1991 and 1998 - is in horrible shape. Bad trades. Bad personnel. The loss of a great leader and a culture still reeling from The Fight and The Retirement.

The Pacers could be the worst team in the league this year.

Or, they could surprise the hell out of everyone and succeed. They have some of the tools - a bright young forward in Danny Granger, a new energized coach, a lack of distractions and a multiple-time All Star in O’Neal. I hope they do. I hope they’ve filled a team with under-the-radar talent that can at least make a playoff run and prove everyone wrong.

Either way, I’m happy. I’m not watching basketball for just the Pacers this year. I’m watching basketball to watch basketball, to enjoy the game and hope for classic match-ups, great games and spectacular performances. I’m watching LeBron as he tries to follow up a tough NBA Finals. The Suns as they try to leap to the front of the Western Conference. The Spurs as they try to repeat. The Mavs as they try to put last year behind them.

I’m watching new rookies with phenomenal hype. I’m watching superstars in new locales, All Stars in new roles and role players in new races for starting minutes. I’m watching Kevin Garnett find a renewed sense of excitement in a basketball-rich city, and I’m watching Kobe Bryant as the pieces fall apart around him on that basketball-rich city’s biggest rival.

With the Pacers slotted to be horrible, I’m free to accept it and enjoy the game for what it is. And with a new digital cable package, I’m free to watch 85% more games on TNT and ESPN. So if the Celtics are playing, you’ll know where I’ll be. Or the Warriors. The Cavaliers, the Suns, the Spurs or the Mavs. The Pistons. The Bulls. You know where I’ll be.

Another year.

Another basketball season.

And finally, a chance to be a fan of the game. Not just a fan of my team.

Tags: Basketball, Indiana Pacers, Sports |

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Nearly nowhere to go but up

October 17, 2007


Pacers = 29.
Well, it could be a long season.

I’ll post something about my beloved Pacers as the true beginning of the season looms closer, but until then, check out the current ESPN NBA Power Rankings. Mark Stein (along with his committee of one) has knocked the Pacers down to 29. The Timberwolves, who I followed while living in Minnesota - and for whom I still have a warm spot in my heart - are ranked just below them, at 30.

Both teams are lower than the Clippers. The Clippers - the NBA’s portrait of complete ineptitude, a team that has made the playoffs so rarely in its history that they have a special guaranteed time share in Cabo San Lucas throughout the month of May.

The Pacers have won their first three preseason games - rather convincingly, actually. But that’s preseason.

Let’s just hope that the two teams don’t swap spots. I’d hate to see the Pacers wallowing even lower than the Timberwolves.

It could be a long season.

Tags: Basketball, Indiana Pacers, Sports |

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Loving the losers

October 10, 2007


How does a person continue to follow sports when it seems that at every turn hides another loss?

It begins to wear on you. It’s true. This Dolphins season has been less than savory. After starting out 0-5, the Dolphins are causing must of us who root for the team - for whatever inexplainable reason - to give up hope.

And not just for this yea. The future looks bleak too. With a defense that averages 52 years of age and one of the worst offenses in the history of football, there’s really nowhere to go but up.

Unfortunately, we can’t help but think “up” is a long ways away. We’re not floating close to the ceiling here, fighting to break through. We’re in the floorboards, a tell-tale heart just scratching to make it above the floor again.

The funny thing is that, after a while, you begin to embrace losing. I’ll forever root for the teal and orange, no matter how outdated their uniforms look and how many quarterbacks it takes to get a win, but I find myself rooting for losses, cheering for the difficulty of defeat instead of screaming for a win. The Dolphins are the only team to go undefeated throughout a season. Could it be that, 36 years later, we could see another unheard of feat - the totally defeated season?

The extremes are easy to root for. There’s a gamers high that is often associated with winning. It permeates all of sports - an aggressive loss of inhibition that causes fans to lose touch with reality and claim their squad the greatest. And at the opposite end, there’s a feeling of release. The games ultimately don’t matter - the stress of backing your team is dropped, and you can be a lovable loser, pitied by your friends and understood by your opponents.

Winning is stressful. It’s hard on fans. Losing, however, is expected. It’s easy. It’s relaxing to settle, so settle we must.

No - the real difficulty is being right in the middle - the .500 club, the win one, lose one (or even worse - win six, lose six) territory. This the territory of the Minnesota Twins. And this is the territory of my beloved Pacers - a team that has settled into mediocrity after several years of contending. Now, they’re an also ran - too good to get a decent lottery pick, but too bad to ever even sniff the playoffs.

So it’s odd to find myself torn between rooting for wins and rooting for losses. The Pacers are as vanilla as you can get - a boring team with a new coach in a lame division. They’re already matched up against two Eastern Conference powerhouses - the only two remaining, actually: Detroit and Cleveland. They have little chance of making a splash.

And I’m trying hard not to give up, already, before the season starts. But, even though they won their first preseason game tonight, I can’t help it. I’m already expecting the worst.

It all started with Michael Jordan. Being a Chicago Bulls fan was easy. As a kid, I picked a team that had a chance to win the championship. And just like that, they won it. I was spoiled, thinking my team always had a chance, fooling myself that the opponents held some sort of spell over my team when I knew they had no shot.

And, when I realized what I had, I gave it away. I stopped watching sports and found myself drawn back into different teams - new favorites; no more Cardinals - now it’s the Twins; no more Bulls - now it’s the Pacers.

Those decisions have brought me heartbreak. The Pacers were very close for a while. Very close - several Conference Championships and a Finals appearance. And the Twins, well, they’ve created some amazing second half heroics in recent years.

But regardless of the surges they’d make, they would ultimately came up short, leaving me exhausted and somewhat betrayed. My lucky card never came in; my wishes never came true. The photo finish I always dreamed of is still just that - a dream.

So you’ll have to forgive me. It might be hard to watch a loser. But it beats going through the tulmultous ups and downs that accompany a mediocre team’s season - the maybes and the could haves and the almosts.

It’s easier to just accept loss. At least the only place my expectations can go is straight up.

Straight from the basement to the floor.

Tags: Baseball, Basketball, Football, Indiana Pacers, Miami Dolphins, Minnesota Twins, Sports |

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Sports with blinders

September 17, 2007


The Oldest Box ScoreMay 19, 2004. Sacramento Kings at Minnesota Timberwolves. NBA Western Conference Semifinals, Game 7.

Kerrie and I sat in an Old Chicago in Sioux Falls, surrounded by Timberwolves fans, blasted out by cheers and pummeled by the sound of thunder sticks. The Timberwolves won the crucial game, 83-80. The score sounds ugly. The game was exciting.

The Wolves went on to lose to the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals. That same year, the Pacers lost out to the Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals, thus barring my team’s entrance to the Finals for the first time since 2000. It was a summer of near misses in NBA basketball. High expectations, crushed.

The real significance of the game, however, is personal. That night, sitting there in front of a television that was hung from the ceiling, nursing several beers and inching closer to my goal of World Beer Tour completion, I watched a sports contest all the way through, from start to finish, uninterrupted, with my full, unbridled attention.

I haven’t done it since them.

I’m a sports fan poseur.

I don’t watch sports. But I’m a sports fan.

I’m attached to the words and numbers that create the bare bones of a sports contest. I’m latched on to the box score that serves as a numerical blueprint for reproduction of the game. I know names, not people; stats, not performances. I’m ashamed, but yet, I’m comfortable with it.

I don’t watch sports with an attentive eye. I have them on, sure, and I watch them for the most part, but I’m always focusing on something else. And, realistically, even those times are rare, what with the low level of television time I afford myself. I find that I don’t need to watch an entire game to get the gist of the contest. I listen to sports radio and get the blanks all filled in.

I’m a sports fan dedicated to the standings. I celebrate wins without seeing a pitch, a throw, or a single basket. I receive text messages and lament losses without even knowing how the loss transpired or if it was even a good game.

I live my sports life through newspapers, much like those years before Sportscenter lived, listening only to snippets on the radio, yet knowing enough that Pat Neshek should have been voted into the All Star game.

I’ve seen only two highlights from the Dolphins this year. I’ve watched only about 20 complete innings all Twins season. I’ve been known to go until the first nationally televised game without even knowing the play by play of the Pacers’ wins and losses.

I love sports. But I don’t know why I don’t take the trouble of watching them. I mean, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been at work and someone has come up to me to talk about a previous night’s game. I know all of the key plays. I know who won. I know who scored, and what it means, and how the standings are lined up and how the playoffs are falling into place. But when he says “Did you see that play?” I simply shake my head and avert my eyes.

“No,” I have to admit. “I didn’t see the game.”

I don’t know why – I’m fine with it any other time. I simply don’t make time to watch the games; they take too long and are riddled with boredom and long winded commercial breaks. To me, seeing sports live has ruined the feel of a television game. I’m so easily distracted while watching it on the small screen. I don’t get the same feeling I do when in the Metrodome or at the Arena.

So I live my sports life through stats, scouring the standings and adding up home runs and comparing scoring averages instead of watching the subtle footwork and guile and teamwork that makes sports fun.

I haven’t watched a single television game straight through. For over three years. I’m a poseur. A fraud. A fake. A sports fan with no sports, a paper champion, a slave to the reporters and a cause for worry.

But to me, I’m okay with it. The 1910 baseball season wasn’t televised. Only your local team was heard on the radio. And sports were still as rich as they are today.

It makes me think – what is it about sports that’s important? Is it the physical act, the actual movement of sport and the visual aspect that encompasses nearly every television at some point in time? Or is it the underlying story, the results and the hard facts and the relationships that aren’t even brought out during the live event. Is it the act or the result that’s important?

And if the act’s what matters, why is so much focus placed on the results?

Tags: Indiana Pacers, Miami Dolphins, Minnesota Twins, Sports, Television |

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Playing patsy with the Pacers

April 25, 2007


The 2001-2002 Coach of the Year is stepping down. Rick Carlisle – the one man that made sense out of three disastrous Pacers seasons – is no longer coaching.

The report says he’s stepping down. I have a hard time believing it was that easy. We all know he was being pushed out. Welcome to the NBA Coaching Carousel.

I don’t care what reports say. Rick Carlisle isn’t stepping down on his own accord. I don’t know anyone as young as Carlisle and with as much bad luck as Carlisle has had that doesn’t think they can keep going. I don’t know any coaches who, this early in a coaching career, hang it up, who can afford to miss the paychecks and are willing walk away from coaching under a good friend, where the coach/GM relationship is as tight as could be.

Or maybe we’ve been lied to all these years. Maybe Bird has soured on Carlisle. Maybe Donnie Walsh let Carlisle come on as a favor to Bird. Maybe Carlisle has felt enough pressure to succeed with some of the least talented rosters in all of sports, rosters that have been driven by potential, not results; the future, not current success.

Here’s what I know. I know that Rick Carlisle took a talented Indiana Pacers team to the brink of the Finals during his first year of service, where he came up against the team he had just left – a juggernaught Detroit Pistons team that no one believed in but everyone feared. I know that the next year his plans were torn apart because of the hot-tempered screwball that many know as Ron Artest, thanks to a brawl that threw the lineup out of whack, causing Carlisle to use about 16,000 starting lineups throughout the year.

And the year after that, Carlisle found himself staring down the barrel at another Artest blow-up, this time a self-induced team suspension as a result of a trade request. He was traded, eventually, and a gimped-up Peja Stojakovic was brought in on a rental basis. All of us Pacers fans rejoiced for a month or so, happy to have the Artest Train Wreck out of town, then watched Peja take his services elsewhere – to New Orleans, of all places.

And then this year. We trade to get Al Harrington - a player we let go on free agency just a year before, giving up our draft pick in the process. And then we trade him again, along with gun-brandishing Stephen Jackson, to Golden State. In the meantime, we get two horrible contracts and two of the whitest players in the league. We lose 11 straight. If we could go three games without someone being a complete and utter distraction, we might have hit .500.

Has more bad luck ever happened to a good coach? What’s next? Jermaine O’Neal breaks his leg two games into the season? Mike Dunleavy snaps and starts waving a gun at mid-court? Jamaal Tinsley misses half of the Pacers’ games? (Whoops – that last one hits a little too close to home for him.)

Really, does anyone out there actually think that any of this was Carlisle’s fault – that after four years of trying to coach the crap that Donnie Walsh and Larry Bird had thrown together like some kind of has-been player casserole, Carlisle was somehow to blame?

Through a year of adversity, Carlisle coached a playoff team that somehow made it to the Conference semi-finals. Carlisle made Eastern Conference contenders of a team without its second best player and no viable scoring options. Through injuries, Carlisle kept the Pacers competitive.

And though boneheaded moves, horrible judgment and moronic choices, Walsh and Bird threw it all away, every time. Now, we have one bright spot: Danny Granger. That’s it. Everyone else has worn out their welcome or proven worthless to the team, unable to pull teammates together in some semblance of a professional outfit.

Jermaine O’Neal needs to go. Jeff Foster needs to go. Jamal Tinsley needs to go. Everyone on the team not named Danny needs to go. After four years of steady decline – prompted by the brutes and scrubs that upper management has put together – Larry Bird needs to go. Donny Walsh needs to sell the team to someone competent – someone willing to spend and choose great players and attempt to create a great team again.

Out of everyone, there’s one person who really DIDN’T need to go.

Rick Carlisle. He’s the only thing that kept the team together. And now he’s being shoved into the role of patsy.

It’s too bad. I had high hopes for the next season – a cleared out roster and a new direction, a focus on the young players Indiana could get and a sharp drive from the old days of boring, brutal basketball.

Now I can’t. I’ve been let down again. I’ve lost nearly all respect I had for my favorite team. I’m ready to jump off of the ship, to swim to better luxury liners – the ones that cater to the fans while fielding a competitive team. Because I’m starting to have a hard time recognizing this team – my favorite team in all of sports.

None of that was Rick Carlisle’s fault. But he’s stepping down anyway. I’d be surprised if it was of his own accord. All I know is that some team is going to pick up a great coach. And the Pacers are going to regret letting him go.

Tags: Basketball, Indiana Pacers, Sports |

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An ode to playoffs

April 24, 2007


Steve and Dirk, a long time ago.

When Dirk Nowitzki was a rookie and Steve Nash was freshly traded to the Mavs, the Dallas fans mercilessly booed them.

They booed Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash in Dallas.

Can you believe that now? After two MVPs for Nash and a nearly inevitable one for Dirk this year?

I just read that in a fantastic article about Dirk and Steve in Sports Illustrated. And it reminded me of one thing: It’s playoff time in the NBA.

This is more than just an excuse to post a picture of rookie Dirk and sophomore Steve. With the Pacers out for the first time in years, I’m ready to fully appreciate everything that the games will bring - the uncertainty and the sure-shots, the tremendous match-ups and star players. I’m ready for another Mavs/Suns series. And I’m ready for one of the two teams to finally step up and win it all.

I’ll admit — I’ve been a little lax in my Pacer fan-dom this past year. After all, they didn’t give me much to root for. It’s been all about watching these two new style teams - the new 80s Lakers and Celtics. The Mavs and Suns could play every night of the season, and it would be fine by me.

If I can’t watch, I’ll at least follow every shot, every dunk, every no-look pass and thundering alley oop, every botched play and drastic recovery, every launched trey and every clanked free throw. Baseball won’t get interesting for months. Football is a season away. This is it — the end of my personal sports season, the twilight of the year, when everything comes together.

The World Series is a teaser. The Super Bowl is like an All-Star Game. The NCAA Tournament, my personal playoffs, rife with intensity and worked to perfection. The NBA playoffs — the ultimate ending.

This is what it’s all about. I’m kind of totally excited. Bring on the action. Bring on the spectacle of my favorite sport at a time when everything counts and everything is brilliant.

Bring on the playoffs.

Tags: Basketball, Indiana Pacers, Sports |

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