Poor Man's Commish » funny

The importance of text messaging in basketball

poormanscommish — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:01:57 +0000

Running a myriad of leagues, tournaments, and even being captain of my own rec team, I have found text messaging (and unlimited at that) to be an indisposable technology. Perhaps the most frequent text message that I need to send is the one that goes out right before the refs motion the teams to the circle for tipoff — to perhaps more than one recipient, mind you — as follows: “Where are you?!”

I don’t know how team captains in my leagues and tournaments can manage their players without text messaging.

And it appears that even NBA teams need it, despite any well-thought-out restrictions on having cellphones on the bench.

Here’s a gameday example, amidst the recent altercation in the Chicago Bulls organization. With all the NBA’s glitz, glamour, and cutting-edgeness, for once, in lieu of the ubiquitous cellphone, wouldn’t Vinny Del Negro have killed for an old-fashioned corded phone like they still have in baseball dugouts?!

“The most recent flap over Joakim Noah’s playing time was Friday against the New Jersey Nets, and it proved costly to the Bulls as they chased the final playoff spot in the East. [Head coach] Del Negro sent assistant coach Lindsey Hunter to ask [general manager] Gar Forman if he could play Noah late in a close game with serious playoff implications. Forman contacted [Executive Vice President] John Paxson, who green lighted Noah exceeding his minutes. But Del Negro didn’t get his answer until the first of two overtimes. Meanwhile, the Nets’ Brook Lopez converted an offensive rebound in the final seconds of regulation and the Nets won in double overtime.”

Read the whole article at: Source: Chicago Bulls’ Vinny Del Negro aggressor not John Paxson – ESPN Chicago You might also like:

Perpetrators in dreamleague? Never! ;-)

poormanscommish — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:50:44 +0000

Funny post appeared in TrueHoop today: Sneaking a suspended player on the court in a teammate’s uniform. If you’re too lazy to click, it starts with a Turkish player in his country’s top pro league. He gets suspended for fighting. While he’s serving the suspension, in an upcoming game he and his coach conspire to have him put a subpar teammate’s jersey on and sneak into a game! I’ll let TrueHoop top it off…

he was only detected…after a rival team noticed suspiciously good statistics for Tufan Ersöz, the player whose jersey [Cemal Nalga] was wearing

Sneaking players in dreamleague? Never!

I said this was funny, but at the same time, it brings up some serious issues concerning fair play.

To the other Poor Man’s Commishes out there, I guarantee you this will happen in your league, if it hasn’t happened already.

I hate to admit it, but every season in our dreamleague rec leagues, this also happens. Once again, we have evidence that what happens in the pros, happens in dreamleague!

In Dream League’s Bay Area league, we have over 125 teams spread across at least ten separate divisions. Often times, participants choose to play on two teams in separate divisions, something which we can manage, although everyone realizes the risks when we start our trademark double-elimination playoffs, which can mean a doubleheader for any team that loses and gets bumped down to the Losers Bracket of their division (think about it, a doubleheader for 2 teams can equal 4 games in one day for one guy!).

Anyhoo, playing for two teams in separate, disparate competitive divisions is no problem. But guys will still play on another team from the same division!

The main reason for doing it is because your team doesn’t have enough players to field a squad, and would rather not forfeit, even though our rulebook states that you can grab any random dude off the street to fill a spot (as long as it’s still the regular season and you don’t have more than three players who would be of a caliber in a higher division).

But sometimes, guys just want to win, and they’ll cheat to do it.

And every time they do it, they perpetrate as an impostor. The guy who is playing on the other team in the same division will have his name written as someone else’s on the scoresheet.

Usually, this happens in our lower divisions because in the higher divisions, everybody pretty much knows each other after a couple seasons (kinda like the close-knit player community in the NBA), and you really can’t get away with it. But in the lower divisions where we have more turnover of teams, people can get away with it.

As a Poor Man’s Commish, perpetrating is very hard to police, but we’ve gotten to a point where all my scorekeepers know who’s on what team, and any new players playing on more than one team in the same division would stick out like a sore thumb.

Which means the only time people get away with this is when the player is a non-factor. But if he played a good game and the other team has a sneaking suspicion that they’ve seen this really good player on another team that they played earlier in the season, then all hell breaks loose.

Which means this is just such a stupid thing to do, even though your first inclination is to categorize it as a “white lie”. You can get away with it, but you don’t realize how easy it is to get caught! And when you get caught, it’s bad. We actually have a rule in the Bay Area league now where if this happens, it’s an automatic forfeit and a $25 fine to the team.

Matter of fact, this happened last Sunday! I know that the “crimes” committed are usually out of competitive desperation, but the problem with it is, you leave your opponent in a precarious situation. It makes everything uncomfortable and, quite frankly, wastes the Poor Man’s Commish’s time in trying to get all the facts and make everybody happy.

My solution for last Sunday is to fine the team that knowingly picked up the illegal player $25. That team still lost their game, so issuing a forfeit changes nothing in this case, but I would’ve reversed the win/loss, had they won.

Moreover, the second team must also bear responsibility for having this player as well, because their opponent was the one that claimed they were given a raw deal having to play against a good player who played for another team already. So it ended up that the second team beat the opponent that protested. On top of that, the second team had no idea that the player had illegally played for the first team.

Because the perpetrating player was supposed to be on the second team anyways, I’m not going to issue a forfeit on the second team in their win against the team that protested. However, we do have $5 fines for egregious unsportsmanlike technical fouls and what the player did was equivalent to two technicals.

Therefore, I have given the second team the choice of accepting a $10 fine, equivalent to a double-technical, and letting that player continue playing with them — the team that he’s supposed to be on — or accepting a one-game suspension for that player.

Again, the first team (the perpetrator) got fined $25 and would’ve received an automatic forfeit had they not still lost.You might also like:

Poor Man’s Commish spotted in Doritos commercial

poormanscommish — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:13:16 +0000

(Click image to view commercial.)

Soooo, about that commercial… Well, Poor Man’s Commish is in it!

Actually it’s just a “spec” commercial, meaning they’re submitting it in a contest for Doritos.

If it wins, it will be shown during the Superbowl next February.

More on this later, as I’ve got some behind-the-scenes stuff to share, but in the meantime…

Click on the image on the left or goto http://www.crashthesuperbowl.com/#/video/5458
Wait till the upload number counts up from 0 to 100
Click “Skip Intro” on the bottom right when the television screen comes up
Enjoy!

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Hear this B.S. out (Bill Simmons, that is)

poormanscommish — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:33:00 +0000

Bill Simmons.

One of Poor Man’s Commish’s jobs is to not only pass on stories that happen in Dream League and that could only come through a hoops commish, but also things that other places may have missed. Like something that makes you ROTFL or LMFAO. Take Bill Simmons, for example. (Btw, thanks to JoJo Pierce for teaching me those acronyms last year.)

Over the years, it has gotten increasingly more difficult to read Bill Simmons’s columns. They are just too long (kinda like my blogposts, but I’m working on that, I assure you — not to mention, they’re still one-fifth of Simmons’s rants). Then came the podcast. Since I don’t live in that wonderful Concrete Jungle where you must walk and take a subway everywhere, I didn’t have an iPod and therefore had no clue as to what this fuss about podcasts was all about.

But dude is funny and his latest two-part NBA Preview for 2009-10 (both Part 1 and Part 2) is a blast, worth the long read. Now, remember, here on Poor Man, we have a penchant for the following…

Learn more as a student of the game. Simmons is a smart fella. He has amazing insights to all things basketball.
Rags to riches. He was a poor man once, too. Took his blog to the stratosphere. I love self-made wealthionaire stories.
The business of basketball. Even your garden variety weekend warrior is a business (duh?), my friend! Incidentally, it was this business that has recently caused me to delay my one-blogpost-per-day goal. To understand how the Earth spins in terms of capitalism and the seven deadly sins of human beings, to take a microcosm of that and apply it to the world of basketball, results in basketball enlightenment.

So here are the parts that had me ROTFL and LMFAO…

(We did learn a lesson from the troubles of Beasley, Delonte West and Stephon Marbury: Neck tattoos are to pro athletes what nape-of-the-back tattoos are to women. In other words, they’re a red flag. A big one. For an athlete, it seems to mean, “I am going to do some really strange things — you know, like putting a painful tattoo on my neck.” For a woman, it seems to mean either, “I’m easy” or “I needed to figure out a way to fit in with the other women at the strip joint.” Either way, red flag.)

Phil: Hey, he told me himself — “Tell Kobe to call me when he gets to six.”

Kobe (eyes narrowing): He said that?

Phil: Yup. He said he can’t even take you seriously until you win two more.

Kobe: Really?

Phil: Yup. That’s why we need Bynum right now. The Pechonkamappadosa tribe has a phrase for this called, “Kakaboomaka.” It means, “To share the credit without giving up credit with those who matter.” I just want to build his confidence up and save your legs. We put a ton of miles on those babies these past two years — 208 games. This is good for you.

Kobe: Lemme think about it.

(Kobe leaves. Phil turns to Shaw.)

Phil: This is too easy.

And you know what else? It’s fun to have teams that you hate. I hate Sasha Vujacic’s hair. I hate the fact women like Luke Walton. I hate their uniforms. I hate when Pau Gasol gets excited and does that thing where he barks with his hands at his sides as his ugly beard drips sweat over everyone. I hate not being able to hate Derek Fisher. I love being able to hate Kobe, who has brought me more hateable joy than anyone else this decade. (But damn, is that guy good. I do respect him.) I hate Laker fans who show up for Clipper games and only start making noise when the Lakers go up double-digits. I hate the fact D.J. Mbenga has a publicist. I could go on and on.

I would hope that Lakers fans are OK with this. I would hope they hate the Celtics just as much, for reasons that are just as personal to them. That’s what makes the rivalry great — we hate them, they hate us, and somehow, the hatred is deepening, in a good way. After all, it’s just sports. I don’t REALLY hate anyone. (Well, except for Vujacic. If he was crossing the street on a crosswalk, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t run him over, but I would definitely glance around to see how many people were looking before I made a final decision.) So that’s what makes me so happy that the Lakers added not just the black sheep Kardashian sister, but … Ron Artest

Be careful where you walk, Sasha!

With that and the fact that sometimes I have to do a fair amount of driving, which allows me to take some time listening to the B.S. Report podcasts (long live the Palm Pre!), I have decided that I will be posting interesting tidbits from the SportsGuy’s latest podcasts.

They’re kinda cool in that there’s no structure to the podcast.

He and someone else just talk and cool basketball subject matter appears as the conversation twists and turns. Someone else will have to fill you in on those essays he writes for ESPN Magazine, though.

Here’s the summary from Bill Simmons’s two-part interview with South Park co-creater Matt Stone…

Stone and Trey Parker used to do the classic “rags to riches” thing: sleep on friend’s couches and hustle their art as much as they could, until finally getting the big break, which was being cast in the movie Baseketball. [Commish's aside: Mark Cuban used to sleep on friend's couches before becoming a billionaire. Google his blog; his best posts are the ones that harken back to when he was a Poor Man.]
They cram before each episode. The thought of a deadline just makes them work with more passion. Stone says that when he was in college, he’d wake up early and cram the morning of the exam. Simmons agrees in the context of writing articles for ESPN.
LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling has it made. Simmons says he makes like $10 to $20 million per year even having a sucky team.
Stone can’t follow football anymore. Too old. Gets to a point where you can only follow one sport. I feel the same way.
Simmons says the 2005 NBA All-Star weekend was the best one because it was in Denver, the South Park creator’s home metro. Denver was too small for anyone else to go anywhere. Everyone was packed into the same area.
The Hollywood writers’ strike led all the powers that be to reconfigure the infrastructure of Hollywood producing. [Commish's aside: kinda sounds like the NBA referee situation.]
They used to use $25,000 Silicon Graphics machines to do the animation; now those machines are thrown out like garbage. Amazing how technology advances so fast.
South Park has achieved the can’t-touch-this level of Howard Stern or Charles Barkley. They can do whatever they want.
Stone says that you should use money to embolden you. You don’t need to worry about a job anymore. Do the stuff that you want to do. But Simmons says that can also be dangerous like Eddie Murphy, who kind of slacked off and didn’t keep to his bread-and-butter or make his bread-and-butter emboldened. For Stone, that bread-and-butter was Raw, which he has seen about a thousand times.
One new episode of South Park could be about the “look at me” attitude of Harley Davidson motorcyclers. If there was an episode where someone they made fun of would actually kill them, it would be the Harleys. Simmons says: “No, you should go after David Stern!”
They’ve never done an episode about basketball nor did they really think about making fun of the Kobe Bryant Colorado incident.
Simmons: A good episode would be about Michael Jordan being bitter. He’s now “sad”, not happy like Barkley. He can’t turn off the switch. He wants to come back like Michael Corleone.
Simmons: The only reason MJ came back a second time was because when he was with the Wizards, everybody he ran into was lamenting to him that he couldn’t play anymore, when inside MJ was thinking, “Waddya mean I can’t play anymore?” As such, at his Hall Of Fame induction speech, no one was really sure if he was joking about making a comeback at 50. He has the same competitiveness as Muhammad Ali.
A weird comparison to that is Bill Clinton. It’d be like the movie Firefox where he’s chopping wood in Alaska and the higher-ups come and say, “We need you back!” Someone like Clinton would come back in a heartbeat.

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