6 Thoughts
1) Grinding road loss against a top five NBA team. Too much size - Orlando dominated the boards and shot 20 more free throws than Miami. No complaints - Miami couldn't get inside. Either Wade made a jumper, or they didn't score. It is hard to see Orlando winning the East - if they lack something it is one electric athlete who can create his own shot off the dribble. But Dwight Howard is a tremendous force inside, they surround him with quality three point shooters, and defend very professionally. I don't think they can beat Cleveland or Boston in a 7 game series, but they are clearly the next best team in the East. Which might also make them the third best team in basketball, although I would put Lakers 3, Orlando 4.
2) Dwyane Wade didn't even really try to go to the basket - he 16 made of 29 jumpers, essentially. Dwight Howard is a significant deterrent, and Wade showed more respect for him than he does any other big man in basketball. After three quarters of avoiding him, he finally challenged Howard with a runner early in the fourth quarter and sure enough, Howard got up and tipped it away. He just turned 23 years old - that's ridiculous. http://www.footworkshop.com/Dwight%20Howard.jpg
3) Good looking rookie on Orlando: Courtney Lee. Good size for a shooting guard, good lift on his jumper, mature defensive game. Worth mentioning that he spent four years in college, and is older than Dwight Howard. He's a player, though. He's a potential starter, though probably not a star.
4) We at Dos Minutos take the occasional shot at Shawn "Bad Santa" Marion's offensive skills. But he is terrific defensive player - the best on Miami. And though he came to Miami with a reputation as a malcontent, he seems to play hard every night, and there have been no reports of trouble with him in the locker room. Watching him, he seems to be a bit of a space shot - relaxed and smiling, but not that engaged with the world around him, including teammates. Harmless spaciness. Tonight's pregame milling around, though, showed a whole new Matrix as he held a warm and engaging chat with Magicians Rashard Lewis and Hedo Turkoglu. They could have been the Three Goofy-Looking Musketeers the way they palled around. We at Dos have never seen Shawn so happy. We racked our brain to think of a connection between the three of them - they are all forwards of roughly the same age who played on the West Coast - so maybe they are just friendly from past battles. It seemed like more, though, especially when halfway through the game Marion bit on an upfake from Turkoglu, landed on him for a foul, and immediately apologized, to which Turkoglu responded by briefly caressing Marion's face. I haven't seen that in a while. These guys are really friendly.
5) Speaking of close friendships, Bad Boys with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence is playing at the Dos Hacienda right now. Those two guys were gay, right? That's the whole point of the movie, right? It is like Chasing Amy, only they stopped the movie before the embarrassing scene where Affleck tries to convince Jason Lee to have sex with him, right?
6) Okay, so a lot of people have been asking what the deal was with the Skins game between me and Sammy Davis Jr. First of all, it was a long time ago: I was a teenager, and Sammy was still alive. My uncle was a teaching golf pro who worked at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, where Sammy had a contract to perform several weeks a year. One time I went out to visit my uncle, and while he was working one morning, I was hitting balls on the range. Who shows up a few spots down from me but The Candyman himself. I didn't want to interrupt him, but after a few minutes I wander over and kind of wait for him to take a break, and I say to him, "Mr. Davis, I just want to tell you what a big fan I am, and how much your music has meant to me and my family over the years." Which was a total lie - I was 16, I liked Van Halen and the Stones. Anyways, he looks at me for a second and just says, "Shit, kid - do you wanna play?"
So, of course I take the offer and we go out to the first tee and we decide to play Skins, $10 a hole. I couldn't even afford that, but I thought I could take the guy. Three holes in, the guy is spraying balls all over the course, I have two skins, and I can see him getting frustrated. That's when he starts kicking his ball out of bad lies when he thinks I'm not looking. For like two holes I let it ride, then he makes a ridiculous putt on six to win a skin and, worse, cocks his finger at me and gives me a "Gotcha!"
So I am, like, Nice putt, but on eight I see him kick out of a bad lie again, and as we are walking up to the green I'm like, "Dude, that is uncool to be kicking your ball." And he is like, "what are you talking about," and I'm like, "Fuck, Sam, I've seen you do it like 5 or 6 times, just cut the shit."
So then we get in to it a bit - he is like, "you didn't see shit, kid" and we go back and forth until I kind of lose my temper, which is where the story gets controversial. He claimed - with a couple of corroborating witness who were playing behind us - that I used the `N' word. That's unthinkable - I would never do that. But if I did, it was only because he was so full of crap and made me totally lose my cool.
Anyways, years later we could look back on it and laugh, although he was a such a bullshit artist that he would never admit to changing his ball positions. Whatever. I prefer to remember him for the music, and for being one of the few devout black Jews...
