Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Pooh's All "I Don't Know Why" Team

What I consider to have been my best snark of all-time has probably been lost to antiquity and/or overflowing mailboxes. In about 1997 I sent my anti-All NBA 1st, 2nd and 3rd teams to a group of friends. Mainly it consisted of me ripping on players I didn't like for whatever reason. If I remember correctly, the first team was Alonzo Mourning, Christian Laettner, Mario Elie, Vinny Askew and Greg Anthony. Aside from Zo's rehabilitation, that's still an eminently hatable 5 if you ask me.

Anyway, this all came back to me as I was reading a thread on Free Darko and the name "Oliver Miller" kept coming up repeatedly. I thought of my "anti" team not because the Gargantuan O would have been on it, but rather he is the anchor, almost literally of my Anti-Anti team. Guys I like for no real good reason...

PG - Alvin Williams. If you shrunk Chris Webber by about 20% he would look just like Alvin. Of course, you'd need to shrink Webber's game by about twice that. Though at this stage they have the same (gimpy) knees.

SG - James "Hollywood" Robinson. Anyone who was a T-Wolves fan in the mediocre 'first round and out but we still have Kevin Harlan and TrentTucker as out announcers' days had to love Robinson. No lead, for either team, was ever safe when Hollywood entered the game during garbage time. I can neither confirm nor deny the fact that he was chooing 3.5 packs of Big League Chew at once any time he was on the floor.

SF - Jalen Rose. For one incident. When the Pacers were playing the Lakers in the finals a few years back. Rick Fox (6th man of my Anti-team, to be sure) was trying to get into J-Rose's head to rattle him or whatever, by playing extremely physically and talking a bit of trash. At one point Rose just looked at him, looked away, and started laughing. When interviewed after the game, Rose said something along the lines of "We all know Rick is a pretty boy, but he was trying to get all hard with me. Which I thought was funny. So I laughed." Suck it, perm-boy.

PF - Eduardo Najera. I honestly think he's a player who's talents have been underrated everywhere he has been. I badly wanted the Wolves to sign him. They chose Mark Madsen instead....

C - Big Ollie. Great hands, good passer, did everything well when his weight was under about 320 (remembering he's about 6'7"). When his weight was higher he did dumb things like give Kevin Johnson a hernia when KJ tried to pick him up after Ollie stumbled his way to a big play.

1 comment:

Mr Furious said...

I gave up on the NBA ten years ago, but until recently was still a rabid college hoops guy. That's faded a bit over the last couple years, but I remember thinking Najera was balls-out at OU.

An easy guy to like.