Interesting...

No time today to really collate my weekend tourney thoughts, especially because Sunday's games were, in general, snooze inducing. It's almost as if the teams were as worn out from Saturday's games as we all were.

No, this is simply to pass along a quite perceptive comparison overheard at FreeDarko:



Though, I think the best comparison for Durant is sort of an evolutionary


This implicates one of the subtle ways in which race and basketball are inextricably linked. White players only get compared to other white players. Black players are never compared to white players. (By compared, I should probably say "analogized," since how you come out on the Magic/Bird comparison can probably still get you beat up in LA and/or Boston.) This holds, even for players whose games are "blacker" or "whiter" than their ethnicity might suggest. Jason Williams was only ever compared to Maravich, whereas someone like Nick Van Exel would have been a better match. Similarly, Rip Hamilton is always presented as the heir to Reggie Miller, when really he's pretty much the modern day Havlicheck. And the thing is, this unwillingness to make cross-racial comparison is so deeply ingrained that it took me about 20 minutes to think of the two just listed.