Shaq traded to Suns! Marion headed to Miami.

What the fuck?  I mean seriously, whereas Pau Gasol’s trade to the Lakers was seen as a terrific move (for the Lakers) this blockbuster trade has NBA fans scratching their heads and saying wha-huh?  Check it.  The Suns run and gun play has been their their style for the past few years, especially with Steve Nash and coach Mike D’Antoni on board.  The past three seasons have seen them reach the finals and semifinals of their conference, with each playoff going down the wire and destined to be replayed on classic NBA.  But they never made the finals, and now they’re slowing down their game by trading Marion and Marcus Banks for the aging diesel, reminiscent of Golden State signing up Chris Webber’s bad knees recently.

Sure this gives them a legitimate 5 and Amare can go back to being the 4 that he really is, but adding Shaq to the Suns is like letting the air out of the fastest car in the world or shooting a sprinter in the kneecaps.  Even if Shaq gets healthy, I don’t see that this will be good for the Suns.  But on the bright side, Dwayne Wade won’t want to kill himself after every game anymore.

Pau Gasol traded to LA!

Wow.  Just, wow.  Everyone had their eyes on Jason Kidd and where he might go, and then the Lakers pull this one out of nowhere.  The ramifications of this are interesting.  The Grizzlies were supposed to have a banner year this season, with Gasol teaming up with best friend and Spanish teammate Juan Carlos Navarro and a new coach in Marc Iavaroni to help the struggling team back on its feet. No dice.  The Grizzlies are 13-33, last in the Southwest division.  So management had to make a decision.  Stick with Pau for one more year, or trade him while he’s still a hot commodity and build for the future.  They decided to trade.

While this can only be good news for the Lakers, what with Andrew Bynum out for a few more weeks/months, the Grizzlies seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, with Kwame Brown, rookie Javaris Crittenton and two first-round draft picks for Gasol. I think they also got the rights to Pau’s brother Marc, but I don’t know the details of that.  In any case, once Bynum is back, the Lakers will be a force out in the crowded west, and the Grizzlies will have to do a bit of  soul searching again for a few years before they can find a star to ride to the playoffs once more.

Number 2, baby!

Woohoo! After being stuck at number 3 for almost a month, I finally took the number 2 spot in my fantasy league thanks to monster games by Hedo Turkoglu and Brendan Haywood.  I only have a slim 100 point lead over the dude in 3rd place, so I’m gonna enjoy this for as long as it lasts.

This is why I love Gilbert Arenas

Cause the man speaks his mind, and while it’s really just him spouting his opinion, there’s enough truth in it to make it sting a little. He takes it out on kids on the NBA these days, refusing multimillion dollar contracts cause they think they can get better, or that they deserve better because so and so player is getting more than they are. Two things that he makes a point of which I think are entirely true:

• Don’t worry about what other people are getting, because they’re in a different situation from you
• What’s the difference between 12 and 13 or 14 million dollars?

I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, maybe I’m just not imaginative, but after you breach that 10 million dollar mark…for a year’s worth of playing ball…I dunno man, what’s the diff? What are you gonna do with all that money anyway?

Work in progress

This is what I do when I need to relax and draw something other than aquatic mammals.

This is after 20 odd minutes. I was wondering why it looked so soft and fuzzy, then realized I was painting with soft brushes. This is how long I haven’t been “painting” in photoshop.

After 20 to 25 minutes or so, he’s looking a lot sharper, but you can see his left arm (your right) still looks a little soft because that’s where I left off when I started getting lazy. I’ll finish him up sometime this week. This is based on concept art from the Chronicles of Riddick game, which is totally badass.

On a side note, the trade yesterday didn’t pan out as well as I’d like, with Jose Calderon and Andris Biedrins having decent games, but Brendan Haywood having a monster game after a 2 point/rebound outing. His performance this last game means guaranteed minutes in the Wizards’ next outing, but I honestly don’t know who I’d replace for him.

Blockbuster trades

Well, not so much a blockbuster, but a pretty big trade nonetheless, and one I’ve been itching to do for days.  I’ve been pushing my “bang for buck” philosophy lately and just had to get my hands on Hedo Turkoglu.  However, the only way to get Hedo would be to let go of one of my studs, Baron Davis.  This wouldn’t make sense as a one on one deal since BD still outpoints Hedo regardless of his efficiency, so a larger deal was in order: enter Andris Biedrins and Jose Calderon.  Both guys are cheap overachievers, and  when combined with Hedo, their total point output is 1512.  Now aside from Baron, I’d been meaning to ship out two relatively underperforming players int he form of Udonis Haslem and Brendan Haywood, who combined with BD have a point total of 1435.

While I’ll miss BD’s beard and Udonis’ veteran presence, the point difference means that for almost the exact same amount of dollars the new players have made 77 more points.  This is only points tallied so far though, so it’s not certain that they’ll keep up the output, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

On a side not, I just noticed that all the players I traded out are brothas, and the ones I just signed are all whities.  Curious turn of events, entirely unforeseen.

Fantasy Basketball changes how I look at the game

The premise of Fantasy Basketball leagues is that you’re the general manager of an NBA team and you’re tasked to put together a roster of players that’ll take you to the NBA finals. You’re allowed to draft actual players in the NBA and based on their real time performances in the league you’re given statistics that add up to points. The more points you have the “better” your team is, and thus your spot in the league commensurately increases.

Fantasy Basketball makes watching games a little bit more exciting, if not a little confusing. The players you draft into your fantasy team will actually be playing in different NBA teams, so you may come across games where your players team are actually playing against each other in real life. This leads to situations where I’m cheering for both sides of a game, or even worse, situations where one of my players gets shot off in the face of another of my players and I’m left with a bemused look on my face wondering whether or not I should cheer.

It also leads to untimely shouts of joy after events that normally do not call for such an outburst. In basketball, you usually cheer a good fadeaway or a dunk (or as quinito henson would say, “dunk shot”), but since the league I’m playing in gives more points to assists, rebounds or steals, I quite often find myself reacting to a very minor assist in the most deafening fashion.

I find that my obsession with managing budgets also puts me in good stead, since you’re given $300 at the start of my league to spend on players, and constant retooling is necessary in order to get the most bang for your buck. I have spent many nights up until way past my normal bedtime crunching numbers, trying to get the best value proposition for my team. I made a few missteps in the beginning, but I think my team, the Lower Antipolo Lakers, is finally starting to gain some ground, and I’m currently third in my local league of 8 players, 274th in a larger league of 1896 GMs, and 2516th in the global league of god knows how many people.

Gilbert Arenas wins celebrity blogger award

It’s a curious state of affairs when the blogging superstar of the internets is also an NBA All-Star.  Apparently Gil, Agent zero, the hibachi, whatever you wanna call him, won the Best Celebrity Blogger award Thursday at the 2007 Weblog awards.  Check it out on number 2 of the daily dime.  It’s a sad day for nerds and geeks cause it looks like the jocks have taken over again.  But at least this jock’s got a sense of humor, because when he found out he beat Wil Wheaton of Star Trek fame to be the best celebrity blogger he had this to say:

“When you start beating the Star Trek people, you know you’re somebody.”

Prized Possesion

I used to be an avid Karl Malone NBA card collector back in the 90s, mostly because he was a cheap guy to collect and I was holding out hope that the Jazz would pull it together and win a championship at least once.  No such luck. As long as Jordan was still in the league, there was just no way to stop the Bulls.  That said, Karl Malone is still an NBA legend and a future Hall of Famer, so snagging his rookie card on eBay.ph felt like a bit of a coup for me.  I got an Iverson rookie card as well for a grand total of 700 pesos inlcuding shipping, so all in all not a bad deal.

Collectibles Corner

As anyone who’s known me long enough can attest to, I love to collect things.  Entering my room is like being in the localized version of the 40 year old virgin.  I collect toys, books, comics, cards, just way too much shit to fit into a single room.  My defense has always been “well it’s an investment” but really, it’s not.  Still, I do have to admit that my taste for toys has waned in recent years because I no longer have the shelf space necessary to display them.  So if I get a toy it has to be A) fantastically cheap and/or B) look really cool/funny.  Hence:

It’s a Japanese KISS Ace Frehley SD figure.  How strangely odd an awesome is that?  The packaging totally got me, and it set me back 70 pesos at the toy palace in farmer’s market.  They have some X-men toys from ‘95 and some odd Mad Max stuff too.  Any toy aficionado should definitely check it out.

And on the matter of saving space, I’ve recently checked out some of the NBA cards they have up on ebay.ph, and there’s really quite a few gems there, like these two cards:

The one on the left is an excellent/near mint 1978 topps Kareem Abdul Jabbar card.  It’s was printed out before I was even born!  No idea how much it costs, but really, to find a gem like this in the Philippines is pretty damn rare.  The card on the right is a Marcus Camby/Moses Malone card that’s autographed by Moses Malone.  Moses was THE Malone before Karl came onto the scene, and is contemporary of Jabbar and Chamberlain.  Autographed cards always increase the value of a card, especially since this is one out of a thousand.

I actually quit buying NBA cards around 10 years ago because it felt kind of silly to be paying so much to buy pieces of cardboard with pretty pictures on them.  But after collecting toys for a few years, you kind of learn to put things in perspective.  Besides, at least NBA cards have some relation to the real world, and you can store a whole collection in a single drawer.