Archive for the 'Just For Fun' Category

16 years later, music historians generally look back at 1994 as a time of major changes to the cultural landscape -- the death of Kurt Cobain, the arrest of Tupac Shakur, Green Day breaking through into the mainstream, etc. They also consider it the end of the so-called "Golden Age of Hip-Hop", the genre's most innovative and artistically-fulfilling era. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1994 also marked the release of B-Ball's Best Kept Secret, a "compilation album released by Epic Records that featured NBA players performing songs with hip hop artists". With the likes of Brian Shaw, Dana Barros, and Jason Kidd on the mic, is this the album that led to the Golden Age's end? Or was it merely the final ray of brilliance in the Era? You be the judge:

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Yesterday, I outlined the setup for a fantasy league of sorts -- the Basketball League of Amazing Benchwarmers (or BLAB, after the indomitable Uwe Blab). In a nutshell, BLAB takes some choice scrubs from the past and gives them their own 6-team league, headlined by team captains Greg Kite, Larry Krystkowiak, Kevin Duckworth, Kurt Rambis, Joe Wolf, and Paul Mokeski. The season is 30 games per team, and outcomes are determined by the career Win Shares per 48 min. of the players on each roster (randomized a bit using the players' seasonal standard deviations of offensive and defensive WS/48). The top 3 teams in the league table make the playoffs, with the eventual winner taking home the prestigious Uwe Blab Championship Trophy.

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In case you missed it earlier this week, on Sunday I posted a link to a blog that paid tribute to 5 semi-random 1980s journeymen with surprisingly devoted followings on Facebook. A friend passed the link to me with a question about which additional players I'd like to see homages to, so I opened up the question to the readers here at BBR. And you responded with a lot of great names, to the point that one commenter suggested I create a team of these forgotten non-stars. But I want to take this tribute one step further -- I want to create an entire ficitional league out of these guys, and call it "BLAB", short for the Basketball League of Amazing Benchwarmers (Uwe Blab didn't make any of the rosters, but we obviously needed to immortalize him somehow). Here are the initial rules I laid out for the league:

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Okay, this is awesome... It's a post from Andrew Sharp of SBNation about the greatest feuds in NBA history, and while the current Pierce-Richardson dustup (which apparently stems from Q-Rich's recruiting visit to Kansas almost 15 years ago) leads the way, he also delves deep into Rodman-Malone, LeBron-Deshawn, Randolph-Patterson, and more. My personal favorite, though? Ha Seung Jin vs. Nenad Sinanovic, hands down.

Let's play the feud!

(Hat tip: TrueHoop.)

My buddy Brent sent me this link today, and I had to share it with the world: from Frumpzilla, 5 bizarre Facebook groups you, as a fan of trivial NBA history, should join just for the hell of it... In other words, Facebook "appreciation societies" devoted to Greg Kite, Larry Krystkowiak, Kevin Duckworth, Kurt Rambis, and Joe Wolf. And believe it or not, but according to the article there's actually a turf war brewing between Kite and Krystkowiak's groups! (That's right, backup big men from 25 years ago can still stir up deep emotions in their respective fan bases.)

Of course, those 5 aren't the only journeymen who deserve "preservation status" on a site like Facebook. Brent asked, "What groups would you propose be amended to this list? Those that you personally know of or would like to create?" Bill Wennington came to mind (the Greg Kite of his era?), but I think I'm going to open this one up to the readers... For which historical bench players would you create a social media group whose membership numbers are completely disproportionate to the player's talent level?

Today is the last day of the 2010 regular season -- and in honor of that, here's a list of each franchise's all-time W-L records on the official final day of the NBA regular season:

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Over at Uni Watch, Paul Lukas has been posting some fun "uniform tweaks", new uniform concepts for (mostly baseball) teams. He has presented some basketball ones, of course, but since I created a ton of NBA & CBB uniform re-creations in MS Paint a long time ago, I thought I'd try my hand at some tweaks, redesigns, and "fauxbacks" (aka "a retro-ish uniform that is clearly meant to evoke a particular design from the past but does not quite duplicate that design faithfully, sometimes due to laziness or inattention to detail, sometimes intentionally") in an ongoing series here at the blog. Some of them will be bad, I admit that going in. But some of them will hopefully be cool, or at least different. And if you have any of your own, I'd love to post them as well, so hit me up with an e-mail and send me what you've got.

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the final round of the WhatIfSports Most Dominant Playoff Tournament, featuring the 1993 Chicago Bulls, the 5th seed in Pool B, and the 2005 San Antonio Spurs, the #9 seed in Pool A. The Bulls got here by beating the dominant 1996 incarnation of themselves in a grueling 7-game series that pitted Jordan vs. Jordan, with the 29-year-old MJ coming out on top. On the other side of the bracket, the Spurs cruised past the 2009 Lakers, holding Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, & Lamar Odom to a combined 39 points in the 5th and deciding game of their semifinal series. So now, without further ado, it's time for these two great clubs to battle for the title of 2010 Most Dominant Playoff Tournament Champion...

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Most Dominant Playoff Tournament: Round 4

Results from the Tournament's Final Four, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

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Pools A & D, Round 3
Pools B & C, Round 3

Results from the 4rd round of the tournament, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

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