« NBA athletes are big (and tall) babies »

When we placed 6th at the 2002 World Championships, all the American NBA players were supposed to come back and fuse together to become the second coming of the Dream Team at the Olympics.

And then the players didn't want to go to to Athens because of "security reasons."

These are the same players that have connections with drug dealers and drive unsafe SUVs.

The rumor is that one NBA player has said that 80 percent of all NBA players smoke pot. This isn't a racist issue, but simply that a lot of these rich athletes know lots of unsavory characters.

Are they any safer in the streets of L. A. as they would be in Athens?

As Dave Chappelle has said in his stand-up, "terrorists ain't never taken no black hostages." Any Al-Qaeda madmen who make their way into the Athens perimeter will want to murder some white devils. They probably don't even know what basketball is.

Given that, let's look at the team we are sending to Athens:
Carmelo Anthony
Carlos Boozer
Tim Duncan
Allen Iverson
LeBron James
Richard Jefferson
Stephon Marbury
Shawn Marion
Lamar Odom
Emeka Okafor
Amare Stoudemire
Dwyane Wade

Yeah, that's an awesome team—but it's a young team, and they could be so much better. To show how, let's look at a fictional roster of NBA players who won't be going to the Olympics:
Ron Artest
Kobe Bryant
Baron Davis
Steve Francis
Kevin Garnett
Richard Hamilton
Jason Kidd
Kenyon Martin
Tracy McGrady
Jermaine O'Neal
Shaquille O'Neal
Ben Wallace

I'd love to get Strat-O-Matic Basketball to simulate 7 games between these two rosters and see who wins more. If the non-Olympic team wins 4 games, then we are in serious trouble over there! If the Olympic team wins 4 or 5 of these simulated games, then our basketball team didn't improve that much from the team that finished 6th in the world, and lost to Argentina, Yugoslavia and Spain (and the championships were held in Indianapolis—they couldn't even use the home field advantage).

Let me be the first un-American person to say USA does not win the Gold Medal in Men's Basketball in Athens this year. There are a lot of competitive teams out there. There are a lot of superstars who won't be representing our country this year for dumb reasons. At least our team has enough good players that they don't have to ask Raef LaFrentz to play for them again.

Of course, baseball players are even more of babies for not participating in the Olympics at all. They use their amateur athletes to participate, and resultantly the team did not qualify for the Olympics this year. At least the NHL breaks from the season for the Winter Olympics, but it's a moot point because there will be no NHL soon enough.
- posted by Suss @ 12:01 AM | Permanent Link To This Post