BREAK THEM ANKLES

The Slam Dunk Contest was about as exciting as I expected: mildly exciting. Based on his second-round performance (or, more specifically Dwight Howard's second-round performance), Nate Robinson actually deserved to win this time. Of course, the first round was completely screwed/much more better. Rudy Fernandez was incredibly shorted, in my opinion. His dunks weren't flashy or exciting, but they were damn difficult, which is why he took the full two minutes plus one of his two extra attempts to make his second dunk.

Either way, the formatting was really the loser in the competition. Even I could get a decent dunk going if I had two minutes and unlimited use of props (and then another two attempts). I feel like they should be given two attempts, and that's it. Nobody ever scores highly after multiple attempts anyhow.

Speaking of formatting, the Skills Challenge needs a freestyle segment or something. It would potentially have some of the same problems as the Dunk Contest, what with the judging and all, but it might work.

H-O-R-S-E, or G-E-I-C-O, as it were, looks like it might work too, but it looked like (from the limited clips I saw) most of the shots were just long jump shots. H-O-R-S-E could, theoretically allow for more creativity than the Dunk Contest, which, I think, is meant to be the "creative" portion of the weekend.

The All-Star Game, itself, was good for about a half, ironically the first half. I was surprised at how many of the players seemed to care during the first half of the game. After that, it was pretty clear that Kobe Bryant was significantly better than the rest of the players, at least for that night.

(Speaking of Kobe, the best NBA news of the weekend was probably this commercial. Bryan and I found it on Xbox Live, but you should be able to find it on that page. It's definitely worth the watching.)

Kobe deserved the MVP award, which he ended up splitting with Shaq. I feel the hand of David Stern behind this share. Despite Kobe's performance, Shaq was the much more marketable entity last night, first, as the Big JabbaWockee and, later, as an extremely active, but often out-of-place Jack-of-all-trades in the game. He was entertaining. But, the NBA clearly stands to benefit from the Shaq and Kobe reunion ending like that. David Stern is, I'm sure, actively aware of that fact.

My next blog may be a game blog that I write during Wednesday's NC State/UNC game because I want to ask my students to write a blog while watching TV. Admittedly, I don't do the game blogs as well as Bill Simmons, but they can still be fun.

By the way, Pittsburgh/Connecticut is tonight.

So, I've had this blog finished for about two hours now, but haven't posted it yet because I've been reading my old MySpace blog, which I still find hilarious. I mentioned last time that I don't know why that blog was funnier than this one tends to be. And Bryan and I talked about it a little over the weekend. He pointed out that my audience has changed, which is clearly true. My MySpace audience consisted of about 5 people. Now, theoretically, I'm read by more than that.

But that only halfway explains it. I think I've figured it out though: in the old blog, I would write about things without really explaining them at all, but it worked because I knew that everybody who read my blog knew what I was talking about – usually sports. Now, I have no idea if that's true, so I feel like (a) I spend more time explaining things and (b) I don't write about as many random things as I used to (because then I'd have to explain them). But maybe I'm wrong here.

Of course, one of the benefits of blogging is that I could use links to explain things, instead of explaining them myself. So, maybe the problem is that I'm not using links that effectively, ostensibly because I'm not as tapped in to the news as I was when I was in school for journalism. So, maybe that's involved too. Don't know.

QotD:

Ankle insurance or Zoom Kobe IV?

My take: Ankle insurance. I'm not always wearing shoes, and I need to know that my ankles will always be protected.