re: Zowee!!!

[bird <birdwl@earthlink.net>]

> From: Rich Davies <rich@daviesdesign.com>
>
> The ride continues.
>
> Nice stuff from Battie, Rodney, Kenny, Delk.

Let me restate the obvious.  Rodney Rogers needs to be re-signed.  Cecil 
was right.  I love this guy.  He gives you scoring and rebounding 
virtually every game.  Always with the big, hustle plays.  The guy moves 
like a cat for all his size.  The only problem I've seen was the tentative 
nature of the long-range shooting early on.  Well, once he was 
indoctrinated into the mysteries of ObieBall, all is well.  Did anyone 
catch that block he had of Robinson down the stretch?  Rogers is like 6'7"
, folks.  That was amazing!  As for the others you mentioned, they are all 
playing well (as is the whole team, really).  Look at guys like Delk, 
Waltah, Strick: they may not play for long stretches, then they come in 
and actually give you something.  Mark Blount was effective for that one 
game.  What more needs to be said?  I mean, my god, it's Mark Blount, for 
all that's holy!  The guy played well!  No one was more surprised than I.  
And take Eric Williams.  No one but Obie knew Williams would mean so much 
to the team.   Still don't see him as a great one-on-one defender, but he'
s not as bad at that as I once thought (or he once was), but no matter.  I 
want him on the court.  He makes the other guys better, and what's that 
you say?  Need a big rebound or a big three-pointer from the corner?  He's 
your guy.

> Lame stuff from the refs.

Yes.  I realized today that the NBA's refs are sliding by on the 
reputation of a "generation" earlier.  Because what Bill Walton said was 
true: the refs are better than they were in the 70's.  Or, really, they 
were better in the Eighties.  Because, let's face it, they sucked in and 
around the Seventies, as a group (with notable exceptions).  Then they 
*were* pretty good back in the day (80's, maybe up to '93 or '94 or so).  
"Good" being a relative term.  Still with the star system, the 
near-codified no calls (Thou Shalt Not Call a Lane Violation), and the 
rest, but more consistent.  More professional.  Would walk away from a 
coach or player undergoing a fit.  Now Steve Javie stares guys down like 
his manhood is somehow involved, which, for all I know, might very well be 
the case.  Anyway, perhaps because of the whole tax evasion housecleaning,
  they lost more than a few good refs with bad financial judgement.  Maybe 
now they're worse than in the 70's.  Hard to tell, as it was a ways back, 
and I'm not *that* old.  It's a hypothesis, anyway.

But we're continually fed the party line: the refs are so dedicated, so 
good, they watch so much tape, the league *requires* them to own a VCR, 
they don't offer preferential treatment, they're so good, they watch so 
much (how much?  *this* much!) tape, ad nauseum.  The question remains, 
then, why they still can't call a fair game about half the time what with 
all this progressive technology at their fingertips and all?

What brings this rant on are two simple calls in the last game.  So the 
NBA wanted to stop guys from jumping under the basket and trying to draw 
the charge.  Well and good.  So they make a dotted semi-circular line 
under the basket.  Good idea, but the dotted line is lame because it's a 
bit like having a dotted out-of-bounds line.  So they make it solid, and 
they put in the rules that if a guy is touching the line, he's "under the 
basket" and can't take a charge.  So why, in the last game, do the refs -- 
twice -- not see that the Pistons player was "under the basket" and call 
the charage on the Celtic player?  I don't know, but I'll tell you what 
they *did* see: they saw Paul Pierce in the air and some Detroit player 
slide on in and draw a charge, they did.

Oh, well, bad form to complain after a win, I guess, but it's bad -- real 
bad.  And that'll end up being bad for the League in general.  I don't 
object to the officials being human and making bad calls, because that's 
going to happen, I just dislike it when they tell me how good they are 
while showing me how bad they are.

I think I got that out of my system.  More Celtic praises!

Bird