Nate Robinson To Defend Slam-Dunk Title
A lot of Knick stuff over the 3-day weekend, including 3 games. I’ll write about the games tomorrow, but for tonight just something fun:
The NBA announced Nate Robinson will be in this year’s slam-dunk contest, defending his title. Actually, although this is just a fun little side-show, Nate has a chance to make history. He’s already won the contest twice (as have many other players), but no one has ever won it THREE times. Who’d’ve thunk the Knicks would have a chance at historical greatness this year? Yeah, yeah, so they might not even make it to the playoffs, but if Krypto-Nate wins, ain’t nobody able to take that away from us. …Okay, okay, so nobody would even want to take such a frivolous award away, but we’ll take what we can get.
The dunk contest will have one new part to it this year. And no, it’s not that LeBron will participate (even though he promised he would last year). Hold on a sec, there’s an article about him being a scaredy-cat… right here. If only he was like Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly in the “Back To The Future…s” so that if we called him chicken, he’d have to compete to prove he wasn’t yeller (that’s “yellow” in cowboy-speak, in honor of the third “Back” being set in the Wild West — man, this is a long, dumb tangent). Oh yeah, so the new component is that so far only three players are in the dunk contest (Nate, Gerald Wallace of the Charlotte Bobcats, and Shannon Brown of the Lakers). However, during halftime of the rookie/sophomore game, two players (Eric Gordon of the Clippers and DeMar DeRozen of the Toronto Raptors) will have a dunk-off to see who gets the final spot. Yeah, it’s nothing too exciting.
Y’know, I just had an idea. If they really wanted to do something like that, they should have dunk-offs between every team, now, leading up to the All-Star game. It’d be pretty fun if during halftime of the regular season games now, each of the two teams submitted one player and they have a dunk-off. Whoever wins goes onto the next level. Think of how much fun and drama that would create! Highlights on Sports Center every night as we get closer and closer to All-Star weekend, winnowing out the weak from the strong. Then fans would come into the All-Star Weekend with favorites who they’ve been watching. Like as someone who lives in LA, all the Laker games are shown on tv, so I’ve seen them a bunch. And Shannon Brown is a phenomenal athlete who’s had some crazy dunks. But for the rest of the world, they don’t know Shannon Brown from James Brown. However if they got to watch him compete in dunks week after week, he’d get a huge following and people would turn on the dunk contest just to see how their boy Shannon’s doing.
Man, I sure can babble. This was just supposed to be a two-sentence thing, followed by video highlights to get you psyched up. Well, let’s get to that now. A couple of my faves in this mix, beside the dunks from the contests, include the 5’8″ Nate blocking 7’6″ Yao Ming, him crossing-over Jose Calderon so badly that Calderon literally ends up on his butt, and another move where he steps back, totally freezing Steve Blake, then zooms right past him.
Enjoy.