Knitting and model making of course.

Here's a video of Big Baby Davis watching "Dunks of the Week". Click the Big Baby Davis tag below to see some more BBD awesomeness. I love this guy.



Via Simmons

If you thought I wouldn't post a video Big Baby Davis made of himself dancing to a rap song, you don't know me at all. AT ALL.



Thanks, Jake!

Didn't see a whole lot of crazy from Rasheed Wallace this year. He actually didn't do much of anything until the playoffs. After they were over, he wanted to talk to referee Joey Crawford. Anyone know more?

Ranking Pro Sports Franchises.

Michael Lewis checks in with a profile of player Shane Battier and statistical whiz kid Daryl Morey. Some nuggets for you:

The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby... — each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved.

[Interesting because this is a virus caused in part by Lewis' book Moneyball]

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one...[In football] the players most famous for being selfish — ...Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.

...A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist...He’s racing down court for an open layup, and...he passes it back to a trailing teammate...the likelihood of scoring...declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much...Dikembe Mutombo, Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous for blocking shots, “has always been the best in the league in the recovery of the ball after his block,” says Morey, as he begins to make a case for Mutombo’s unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even to Dikembe there’s a selfish component. He made his name by doing the finger wag...And if he doesn’t catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the finger wag. And he loves the finger wag.” His team of course would be better off if Mutombo didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his finger wag...

It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly.

“I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”

In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers.

One other interesting point in this article is that the Rockets gauge which teams in the league are looking at data the same way they are by how that team plays the game. I wonder if this causes them to over think aspects of the game, though, if they think there opponent is smarter than it is.

Big Baby Davis was in a minor car accident today on the Mass Pike, and I am resisting as hard as I can making a crying joke.

After my post last week about Big Baby Davis crying, the fine fellows at Perk is a Beast jumped into action to make a "Cry Celtic Green" T-Shirt. Apparently the Stern mafia is on their ass so if you want one, get it soon. (This is a play on Bleed Cubbie Blue in case it's not clear.)

Big Baby Davis isn’t afraid to cry and I, for one, thinks this reinforces the aura surrounding my favorite basketball player. Do you think I could get a green t-shirt that says "Cry Celtic Green" on the front and "Davis 11" on the back (like the back of a jersey)?

This is kind of weird. Maybe that's why they call him Rip?

Celtics guard Ray Allen joined Michael Jordan and several other NBA stars, including Rip Hamilton, in Las Vegas before training camp to take part in promotional work for Jordan's Jumpman brand. Allen said he talked to Hamilton about his fingernails, which prompted Allen to wear an arm sleeve against the Pistons in the playoffs last season. "He was saying how when he saw me come out the next game with an arm sleeve on, they started laughing about it," said Allen. "And then I said, 'Look, man, I'm wearing an arm sleeve because . . .' And then I picked his hand up and looked at his nails. And his nails were way out. He said, 'Man, I didn't know I cut people up like that. People tell me all the time that I need to cut my nails, but I don't know what I'm doing.' I told him, 'Come on, dog, you know why you're using them.' "