Paul Pierce Is The Motherfucking Truth

So said Shaquille O'Neal.

(So say we all.)

Pierce's career to date has been this weird mixture of respect and neglect; he's quite possibly the most ignored of the acknowledged superstars over the past ten years. This is a potentially transformative moment for him; Bill Simmons has commented a number of times that a victory in these Finals probably puts Pierce in the top 75 all time (more on that idea later) and probably elevates him to a Hall of Fame lock, as opposed to the borderline career he's strung together to date. He's already managed to transform his legacy simply by virtue of hardiness and longevity: in the Waning Jordan era, there were a number of players who emerged clearly in his mold, big physical 2/3s (remember that, back in the day, Jordan was big for a 2) who presented themselves as all-court scoring threats. None of them were exactly like Jordan (the most explicitly Jordanesque style going is Championship Dwyane Wade, who I'm not comparing in terms of skill, but in aesthetics resembled the 80s Jordan whose game was entirely based around screaming to the basket) but they all had their own spin on his legacy of dominating performances from the wing. There were a number of clear also rans - Jerry Stackhouse, Michael Finley, et al. - but four obvious elites: Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady, and Pierce. Bryant was the troubled wunderkind, then and now the most clearly talented. I'm sidestepping the Bryant/Jordan comparisons, but in terms of offensive skill, Bryant's game is - and has been - more complete than any single era of Jordan's. 80s Jordan didn't have Kobe's jump shot, Second Threepeat Jordan didn't have his explosiveness to the hoop. Bryant's trouble - all of these guys' trouble, perhaps - is in his well documented attitude, the inability to channel Jordanesque fury and competitiveness and contempt for his lessers into a motivating personality rather than an alienating one. Vince Carter was the most physically gifted, unstoppable in his driving attack, but completely unsuited, psychologically, to the exploitation of his own gross talents, and his retreat into a dodgily motivated, injury prone, wincing also-ran has destroyed the legacy of a once promising career. McGrady is maybe the most overtly tragic, if for obscure reasons. The most compelling of these guys, for my money, when he was on, the late Ralph Wiley once wrote a wonderfully weird column in which McGrady was, via extended metaphor, turned into the Kwisatz Haderach from Dune, and he was right: McGrady was a master of the Wierding Way, understanding possibilities before they unfolded, and mystically putting himself in just the right spot to exploit the defense. McGrady's best moments came when his lazy eyes were half closed, ripping you for 35 points seemingly in his sleep, seemingly without effort, all lanky grace. McGrady's fall from this height is harder to understand than Carter's - injury prone as well (except with legitimately troubleesome back injuries, not tweaked groin after tweaked groin), but clearly troubled, depressed, gloomily talking about quitting basketball, unable to win in the playoffs.

In 2001 or 2003, Pierce probably would've been ranked the least of these four superstars. Today I think he's clearly the second, after Kobe but ahead of Carter and McGrady, brighter stars who are flaming out. Pierce's style is the least glamorous, the least commonly photogenic, but all the more captivating for me because of it: I wrote previously that one FreeDarko commenter called his game "slovenly", but another more charitably captured the same essence by name-checking Legend of Drunken Master. His game is herky jerky, stutter steps, speed changing, surprisingly earthbound for an NBA superstar. Undoubtedly this is one part of Pierce's physical durability (the other part being his previously mentioned toughness); he's not so dependent on elevation and explosiveness, more dependent on a deceptively methodical way of lurching towards the basket, trying to setup either (a) his low-elevation fadaway, or (b) a wat to get his man into an advantageous position, trapped on Pierce's hip, where he can then bully his way to the hoop or use the leverage for one of his incessant spin-moves. I dig the more accessible, human-esque, method of Pierce's game, the exploitation of more everyday qualities (his relative bulk and strength) to compensate for a lack of more overaweing gifts. If I find McGrady at his best to be magically transcendent, Pierce is the negative image of that, a relatively mundane approach to the game elevated to its highest iteration. By comparison, Vince Carter at his best was pure physical power and ability, and Kobe at his frequent best is a completely intelligible mastery of every aspect of the game; both are impressive but neither is as personally inspiring to me as McGrady's best or Pierce's.

(Aside: for reasons passing understanding, as a young boy during the beginning of the Celtics' fallow years, I rooted for the Knicks. I cannot rationally explain this, but I've decided to retcon it as a preternatural appreciation, beyond the ken of my immaturity, for Patrick Ewing's stoically workmanlike game, just endless tonnage of effort and sweat poured forth in service of basic fundamentals and a turnaround jumper. College Ewing was a fearsome freak, but Pro Ewing was just a man putting on his hardhat and going to work with the ever diminishing collection of tools he had available. No wonder Hakeem Olajuwon destroyed him [and all comers]. I probably recognize something similar between Pierce's game and Ewing's.)

Plus there's Pierce's personality (sorry for the alliteration): moody, a little arrogant, self-described as bipolar in what was presented as a joke but probably wasn't. There's something petulant about his bad side, the side that feels disrespected or unloved, but I'm drawn in recognition to, if not the specifics, the general outline of his moodiness. He can be a hard guy to like, as a fan, and - like Rasheed Wallace, like Allen Iverson - I find that attractive. Not to mention that his darker attitudes set the stage for his chest-pounding elations in hard-fought victory.

This post is long enough now, so I'll return another time to the idea of one more victory - meaning an NBA championship - magically pushing Pierce into another historical category.

Seriously, I Don't

Like people, that is.

To wit.

Sigh.

Stereotypes

I just drunk dialed my DAD. To discuss a sporting event. This is, almost certainly, the clearest evidence to date that I am an American with a Y chromosome.

GO CELTICS.

That Kind Of Guy

So Alex Kozinski may need to recuse himself from overseeing that porn/obscenity trial out in California because it turns out that he, too, has access to the pr0n. While public figures' attempts to explain why they had certain materials sitting around on their computers are often awkward and strain credulity (see: Towsnhend, Pete and child pornography), his tale of saving images sent to him that he found interesting or amusing does seem at least marginally plausible. More to the point, it's not as though he was distributing these files; what the story makes clear is that he had a personal website which he also used as storage space, and someone merely did the guesswork/backtracking on the URL to see *all* the files he had uploaded. I do wonder, though, if this sort of awkward public gaffe is going to largely disappear over the next two decades. There does seem to be a qualitative distinction between being an older person who has developed strong facility and comfort with computers/the internet and a person of my generation (or younger) who has entirely grown up with them and is completely fluent in their use and social implications. I'm fairly forthright about the fact that I look at pornography, but if I were a semi-famous authority figure with a oublicly accessible website that used my real name, I wouldn't keep potentially embarrassing material anywhere near it.

[UPDATE: When I wrote this post I promise (scout's honor, really) that I hadn't seen this post, which connects the Kozinski matter above and the Cargol matter below. Also, I learn that the newest information available re: Kozinski is that one of his kids is actually saying "Wait, y'all, that was my stuff," which might better explain why the elder Kozinski said he didn't remember uploading those pictures. This actually makes Kozinski look really good, since he was quite prepared to take responsibility for something he may honestly not have done. I should reiterate that I don't actually care about the pictures or who looks at them, just the perceived impropriety and the not-avoiding something publicly embarrassing. Also, I'm not exactly sure what age the younger Kozinski is, but apparently I'm wrong on that whole "people closer to my age and younger won't be prone to this sort of technology-related gaffe, we'll have other gaffes instead" business.]

There's also, in what's actually not related news, this. This is all over the net right now, I'm mostly putting it here as a public service to my few loyal readers who might not see it elsewhere. Owen Cargol, who was the "head" (I didn't actually see whether his title was president or what have you) of the new American University in Iraq, resigned because someone bothered to notice that in 2001 he was forced to step down as president of Northern Arizona University because of allegations that he grabbed a university employee's genitals while in the locker room, among other sexually inappropriate behaviors. (A commenter at Yglesias' notes that the list of "applications for the job of head of a university that gets mortared can't have been all that long," which is probably true.) During this prior event, Mr. Cargol apparently defended himself thusly in email (again!):

[I am a] a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.

To crib a line from a widespread tall tale at my alma mater: Buh-SCUSE me, motherfucker?!?!? Now, I'm, shall we say, a physically expressive guy. As I got older I intentionally cut down on the amount of physical contact I initiate with friends (both male and female) because I don't want to make them uncomfortable. But at heart I'm very much a "give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back...squeeze-your-hand...[even a] pat-your-thigh kind of guy." What I'm not, especially, is a "rub-your-belly" kind of guy. I can see it, I guess. I have no clue what "cheek-your-face" means - nuzzling? Hmm, that's a little over the top. I do admire, though, the way he slips the more egregious ones in there along with the innocuous, as though to say they're all the same; there's a brazenness that does remind vaguely of Kozinski's whole "What? - these pictures? Well I guess some of them could be considered pornographic. And, you know, I certainly didn't intend to keep them around!" schtick, which is amusing because it elides the whole "keep them around after what, Alex?" question. But who thinks he can really get away with including "grab-your-balls...pull-your-dick"? Or perhaps the right question is: "Who the fuck taught this guy inter-male locker room behavior?" I think it's clear that he wasn't socialized the same way most of us are.

What I Saw

Two games that I was excited by but walked away feeling like the Celtics got lucky wins. The fourth quarter of Game 2 was the Lakers' best stretch of basketball so far in the series, and they made a 24-point deficit evaporate like ... something wet evaporating someplace dry and hot.

There's been a lot of whining about the free-throw disparity in Game 2, and I fully admit that, especially in the first half, the Celtics were the recipients of some bogus calls. The idea that the game was fixed in any purposeful way is horseshit, though, as can easily be seen by some of the incredibly egregious calls that the Lakers got in the second half: Vladimir Radmanovic taking four or five steps on a breakaway dunk, Lamar Odom saving a possession by bouncing the ball off of P.J. Brown's face when Brown was already on the ground and halfway out of bounds. The Lakers have had the benefit of egregious officiating in previous series, and I'm sure some bogus calls will go their way in L.A. The other thing is that the "points in the paint" stat gets shown up as misleading, because even though the Lakers did well by that traditional mark of aggressiveness, it's only a proxy measurement, and three-foot jump shots and an array of hook shots != aggressive. The Celtics went to the basket harder, period.

Also, on some other occasion I'll need to write about why I really really like watching Paul Pierce when he's on. Someone over at FreeDarko has described his game as "slovenly," which is creative and sort of on point if you're going to be as ungenerous as possible; this year, as in past years, the playoffs go a long way to reminding me why I actually kind of hate that site and don't know why I keep reading it. And it has nothing to do with the fact that they threaten to become yet another bastion of Boston haterdom, which is the sort of thing I know I shouldn't even talk about because it's like feeding the bully the attention he wants, but it's really not funny. Boston has been incredibly lucky with its sports teams in this decade, any worthwhile fan of the city's teams acknowledges that with equal parts grace and glee tempered by the scars from how bad the city's teams were in the 90s (and how bad the Patriots were for their entire existence, and the whole Red Sox thing). Everyone else is an asshole, Just Like Everywhere Else. (NB: I wouldn't go to the Staples Center to watch the telecast of Game 2 in a Celtics jersey, but Stay Classy, Los Angeles!) Rather than saying more pointlessness in that vein, anyone who thinks Pierce is some sort of a drama queen or intentionally faked his "injury" is insane. The guy went down, heard a weird noise, felt pain in his knee, and was afraid to put weight on it, which he was already doing by the time he arrived at the locker room. I presume he got carried out (instead of one-leg-limping) because his teammates were feeling overprotective. He is guilty of the standard athlete's genuflection to the Almighty in thanking God for sending him an angel to make sure everything was ok - and, all right, I kind of wouldn't be surprised if Pierce was hamming it up a bit *there* - but the guy was afraid and overreacted, minutes later realized that his knee hurt but he could play, and he came bouncing back. He neither invited nor created Willis Reed comparisons (which would be completely inappropriate anyway), and if you think he's the sort of guy who would fake an injury just to get attention and glory, why would he do it in the middle of Game 1, when his team was playing well and the stakes weren't, at the moment, particularly high? And, really, I shouldn't read comments on sports blogs because they are the work of the Devil's dullwitted brother in law, but all the comments like "Pierce went down crying because of all the sand in his vagina" are pretty (offensive, but additionally) silly when directed towards a guy who started all 82 games of the 2000-2001 season, which began less than two months after he had LUNG SURGERY to SAVE HIS LIFE AND REPAIR DAMAGE after being STABBED IN THE FACE AND NECK AND BACK ELEVEN TIMES. (He's also played on after getting a tooth knocked out mid-game, but the stabbing is usually a good trump card.)

Well, there's enough of the defensiveness. I think the Lakers learned a lot about what can be effective against Boston in the fourth quarter last night, and they're going home for three straight games (BULLSHIT), but the primary reasons they're down 0-2 should be as much cause for concern to them as Boston should be concerned that they could have won both these games easily but didn't: their frontline gives away a ton to Boston in terms of bulk and aggression, they haven't figured out a way to get Kobe his points in an efficient manner*, and they haven't devised a scheme that can slow down both Pierce and Kevin Garnett, both of whom are lesser talents than Kobe but even more unguardable in this particular series** despite not pushing to capitalize on that.

* The theory is that a player like Kobe is getting his 24-30 points, no matter what, but you're better off when he scores 30 points on 30 shots than when he scores 24 points on 14 shots. (Then there are the nights when he scores 40 points on 20 shots, but.)

** Kobe is the best two way player in the league and still in my opinion a hair better than LeBron, but the Celtics scheme has been able to handle him even though he's primarily being guarded by Ray Allen, which is not the matchup most people anticipated going into the series (I, and others, presumed the Cs would tag team him with Pierce and Posey); on the other hand, Kobe is always attacking, always looking, always making an aggressive decision. KG is massively disinclined to trade on his physical prowess for more than five minutes at a time, and settles for his (very pretty and quite effective) 18 foot jump shot far too often; even when it's falling, it's the kind of passive concession he shouldn't make. because nobody on the Lakers has the strength OR the agility to keep him from powering his way to the basket. Gasol comes closest, but he's best as a weakside defender coming over to block shots, not remotely suited to the challenge of slowing down a force like Garnett. Pierce, similarly, is just an impossible physical matchup for the Lakers, because in this series he classically falls into a niche: nobody fast enough is strong enough, and nobody strong enough is fast enough. He's not greased lightning by any means, not nearly as agile as Kobe, but his array of stutters and speed changes is more than enough to embarrass the Lakers' bigger defenders, and Kobe - the most logical matchup, and one I saw more of as the series has progressed - simply isn't big enough. They're about the same height, but PIerce is listed at 25 pounds heavier and whatever the truth of the listings it's obvious from looking at them that he's simply heavier and, in the way the matters for basketball, stronger. That his mini-rivalry with LeBron has seen some of his best work is the more impressive because LeBron's much better suited to slowing down Pierce's "big butt and free throws" style of dominance; Kobe's pretty much helpless trying to stop a Paul Pierce postup by himself.