The NBA's Pantomime Villainy and the Chicago Bulls

The best parts of Face/Off are when Nicolas Cage, playing a heroic FBI agent who had his face swapped with his sworn enemy using biotechnology and Windows 95, realizes that he has become, to the outside world, his own archnemesis and the only way to cope is to adopt his enemies' criminally insane behaviors, thus becoming what he hates-- and to show this internal emotional conflict by making extremely Nicolas Cage faces.  This also describes what the Chicago Bulls have done this offseason to their bewildered fans.

It was not enough for Gar Forman and John Paxson to send the faces of the team to New York and subject Bulls fans to maniacal Joakim Noah dunk screams in the hated uniform of John Starks and Patrick Ewing.  They also signed Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, the Bulls' own archnemeses.  Every time Wade grabs at his eye imploring the refs to call a foul or Rondo sourly walks away from Hoiberg in the middle of a timeout and then gets in a tiny scooter and just drives home in the middle of a game, Chicago fans will instinctively start to boo them only to realize they are on the Bulls now and so they are forced to imitate Cage's simultaneous weeping and maniacal leering out of sheer confusion.  

Travolta is clearly doing an impression of a maniacal Cage for most of the movie while Cage 
has to pretend to be a reasonable man forced to impersonate a maniacal Cage so the effect is 
like Being John Malkovich where all the leads are just maniacal Nicolas Cages making this face 
and blowing up vehicles at each other for 138 minutes.

The qualified Per Synergy Sports basketbloggers can explain better than me how Wade and Rondo make no sense for the Bulls.  Neither fits with Hoiberg's pace and space philosophy that exists on a chalkboard somewhere in the bowels of the Advocate Center.  Wade shot less than 16% from three last season; Rondo does not seem willing to shoot under any circumstances and appears to be modeling his game on the time Ricky Davis futilely shot at his own basket to get a triple double.  It has been about two weeks since Gar Forman justified the Rose trade by claiming the Bulls would get younger and more athletic. Now, he has acquired two players in their thirties with a history of knee problems.  But that is immaterial.  The Wade and Rondo moves are disasters because they the are two of the Bulls fans' most hated NBA players and I hate their jerk faces.

Rondo's crimes against the Bulls date back to the epic 2009 Bulls/Celtics playoff series when he threw Kirk Hinrich into a table like a professional wrestler and bludgeoned Brad Miller about the face.  A wobbly, dazed Miller could not hit his free throws.  Compounding the humiliation, the primary video evidence of the hit has been uploaded by a person named "patsfan000026" with NOT FLAGRANT superimposed on the bottom of it in such an obnoxiously-implied Boston accent that my computer has become infected with a virus and screams about Tom Brady being railroaded at random intervals.  Rondo managed to quit on a playoff team in Dallas so egregiously that they pretended he was injured.  His time on the Sacramento Kings, less a basketball organization than a boiling cauldron of insanity, climaxed with an ejection for screaming homophobic slurs at a referee.

The most interesting subplot on the Bulls this season will be the ways that Rondo manages to psychologically break Fred Hoiberg, who coaches with the intensity of a substitute math teacher.  Perhaps Rondo will humiliate Hoiberg in Connect Four in front of the entire team.  Perhaps he will convince Ol' Fred that everyone on the team is growing mustaches in November and then when Hoiberg walks into the advocate center as the only person with a mustache he is greeted by pictures of Ned Flanders plastered to the walls with a legend that says "HOIBERG."  Maybe Rondo will re-edit Hoiberg's game film, switching out the coach's beloved inspirational '80s movie scenes for horrifying Cronenbergian body horror while Hoiberg yells C'MON YOU SAID YOU NEEDED FINAL CUT PRO FOR FILM STUDY at him.

Benny the Bull disdainfully showers Rondo with popcorn when Rondo 
was injured and therefore forced to hurl insults at the Bulls on a regional 
television broadcast

Wade has, as far as I can tell, never used a part of the arena to attack Kirk Hinrich.  Nevertheless, he earned the ire of Bulls fans as the ringleader of the hated Heat.  Wade feuded with the Bulls when they had Ben Gordon and Ben Wallace and he feuded with Derrick Rose before Rose's knees disintegrated like the guy who drank from the wrong Holy Grail.  Wade's sins are more prosaic than Rondo's.  He flops.  He moans at officials so operatically that opponents easily dunk on the next possession because the NBA doesn't allow players to assign ghost players to defend while they are berating Scott Foster.  More than anything, Wade has existed as a very good player on a team that consistently beat the Bulls for more than a decade, the grossest basketball evil that can be committed against a team.

At the very least, the Wade move has backfired on Pat Riley.  Riley, a basketball innovator who invented advanced strategies such as telling Anthony Mason to elbow people and telling Alonzo Mourning to elbow people, has been irritating Bulls fans since the 1980s.  Now Riley has seen his carefully-cultivated Miami family narrative upended by a power play gone awry, which should give him something to think about as he sinks into the hair gel sarcophagus he sleeps in every night.  Miami has cap room, but it will be useless if Riley's hard bargaining tactics scare off potential free agents.  It is at the very least gratifying to imagine Riley striking out with big name free agents and then angrily feeding some flunky to the shark he keeps in his mansion to use as a metaphor for winning.

A threatened Riley instinctively displays his Championship Ring the way a startled lizard 
deploys a skin-fringe or puffs itself up by inflating gaseous sacs

Sports fandom represents, at best, a crude pantomime of emotions for fans.  Players can be gone in an instant, teams removed at the stroke of a pen, and all of the billions of dollars for pyrotechnics and jumbotrons and irritatingly peppy people walking around asking a seven year-old to name their favorite player for a t-shirt and television networks and guys in suits who are paid unfathomable sums of money to scream KEVIN DURANT IN MY OPINION IS NOT MAKING A MAN'S MOVE, KEVIN I AM LOOKING AT YOU NOW AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED, CHAGRINED, I AM GOING TO THROW HARD-BOILED EGGS AT YOUR FAMILY KEVIN and absolutely all of it is completely and utterly devoid of meaning.

Stephen A's speech threatening Kevin Durant is the funniest thing that has ever been on television

We can accept that and yet we will turn on a Bulls game to see the sneering face of Dwyane Wade and disgruntled surl-mugging from Rajon Rondo and wonder how this all happened. And when the Bulls play the Knicks next season, against Joakim Noah and Derrick Rose, we'll all feel as if we've seen the faces swapped, the tenets of basketball villainy undermined, the United Center filled with doves.  In an entertainment product as insane and capricious as professional sports, perhaps the most reasonable way to cope is to make Nicolas Cage faces and embrace the chaos.

Pre-Bowl Anticipation

The New Year's showdown against Auburn is looming for the Northwestern football team. You can get into the spirit by spray-painting your possessions purple, vandalizing any Bo Jackson billboards you come across, and learning the 1929 Wildcat song through sheet music and lyrics that somebody has inexplicably put on Ebay so you can make sure each one of your yows is pitch perfect.

As the team gears up for the trip to Florida, the news is obviously stagnant, aside from the usual reminders of Northwestern's bowl futility. In a shocking change of pace, the Chicago media has been dominated by Notre Dame Intrigue, which now features torchlit booster meetings, clever use of improbable doppelgangers, and stair-bound swordplay (incidentally, there's a factoid that you always get on tours of medieval fortresses and the like about spiral staircases being designed for the advantage of right-handed defenders in sword fights which naturally brings up the question of how many staircases they could have had in the House of La Russa). The college coach swapping procedure seems designed to force false denials and betrayals that seem more at home in the Congress of Vienna than in, say, South Bend, Indiana.

The Duke De La Russa signals for a
lefty staircase to optimize the matchup
between his stalwart guard and
marauding invaders

In any event, there is something extraordinarily unsavory about a coach who changes jobs for whatever reason before finishing the season. No one likes a demoralized team rallying feebily around a lame-duck coach, especially in a BCS game. The situation badly needs to be injected with some semblance of rationality and sanity, so here is a workable solution: Teams may not hire another team's coach until both teams have finished bowl play. In return, the team firing its coach is allowed to literally run the coach out on a rail or parade him through town in one NCAA-sanctioned medieval punishment device as disappointed boosters pelt him with offal. In addition, schools would almost certainly circumvent the rules to make sleazy under-the-table offers to other coaches before bowl season, which will maintain the vital levels of sleaze, dishonesty, and hypocrisy that currently fuel college football and keeps pitchfork-wielding journalists employed.

One approved coach humiliating device would be the pillory,
used here against highwayman and convicted perjurer John
Waller in this 1732 engraving where enterprising mob members
re evidently pelting him with mice. According to the Newgate
Calendar,"This profligate wretch, Waller, to robbery added the
still greater sin of accusing the innocent, in order to receive the
reward in certain cases attending conviction" and he was also described as an
"abominable dealer in human blood" which also seems like a phrase
that has escaped the lips of Michael Buffer at some point

NORTHWESTERN IS A NATIONAL BASKETBALL JUGGERNAUT

The Wildcats are an astounding 10-1 heading into a Big Ten showdown with Illinois after holding on against Stanford and beating Central Connecticut. As reported in this article, flabbergasted Central Connecticut coach Howie Dickenman labeled Northwestern as one of the top three teams in the Big Ten and claimed that he will now refer to Carmody's version of the Princeton Offense as the "Northwestern Offense" before stopping to hand out a bunch of Gobots and Mr. Pibb to disappointed youths.

It's a good thing that the Wildcats are winning with the Chicago Bulls squandering last year's playoff momentum by turning into a truly awful basketball team. The season's futility climaxed in an epic, NBA-record 35 point choke job against the equally inept Sacramento Kings that will almost certainly end with Vinny Del Negro pretending to sell computers out of Frank Constanza's garage.

Brad Miller was unable to get his vengeance on the Kings for forcing him
to participate in a misguided Evil Sheriff Day promotion at Arco Arena

PACIFIC INTRIGUE

This week's New York Times had a fascinating story on the Pacific island nation of Nauru and its game of high stakes diplomacy. Nauru became the fourth country to recognize the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia along with Russia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Nauru evidently did not have the struggle of the peoples of the breakaway regions under the boot of Georgian oppression in mind, nor a desire for general world-wide recogition of Nauru as a contry that exists. Instead, Nauru claimed $50 million of aid from Russia's Department of Whimsical Foreign Affairs. Times Reporter Ellen Berry describes the Russian reaction as not quite a diplomatic coup:

The news provoked waves of mirth from Russian commentators, some of whom broke down the per-capita cost of lobbying various nations to recognize the enclaves: roughly $3,500 a head for every resident of Nauru, $100 per Venezuelan, $200 per Belarussian, etc.

Of course, this is not Nauru's first endeavor in the aid-for-recognition game. Nauru earned $130 million from China by refusing to recognize the independence of Taiwan in 2002 (I have no idea how this happened, but I like to imagine an uncomfortable confrontation at the U.N. where someone gets a face full of martini) only to stab China in the back three years later by reestablishing relations. These incidents of micro-treachery stem from economic issues instead of the more pleasant rationale that Nauru's foreign relations department is filled with people who run their foreign relations strategy based on the board game Diplomacy, where it is far more satisfying to betray people for no apparent reason than to watch your flank from an unexpected attack from the relentless Ottoman war machine. These diplomatic moves, as well as other strategies such as providing disreputable offshore banking and accepting aid from Australia to take in their unwanted refugees, are part of a strategy to make up for the drying up of the phosphate supply that powers the Nauru economy.

Nauru achieved independence in 1968 under President Hammer DeRoburt, as noted on this helpful Late Twentieth Century Hammer Achievement Chart:

On this graph, the X-Axis represents time and the Y-Axis general
Hammer progress in HAUs (Hammer achievement units) with data
points demonstrating key Hammer moments: president of a pacific
island nation, home run king, hard-boiled, mustachioed detective,
parachute pants enthusiast

Nauru is not the only troubled country in region. Consider Palau, a fellow Mircronesian island, which spent the 1980s embroiled in murderous controversy over the ratification of the Compact of Free Association with the U.S. that would end trusteeship on the island. In 1985, its first president, Haruo I. Remeliik, was gunned down outside of his home, leading to the arrest and conviction of three suspects related to his oppostition which was later overturned, as detailed in this New York Times article as well as an excerpt from Embattled Island: Palau's struggle for independence by Arnold H. Leibowitz. A later investigation led to the conviction of Remeliik's former Minister of State John O. Ngiraked for aiding and abetting the assassination. Meanwhile, other investigations focused on bribery and intimidation surrounding the Compact ensnared president Lazarus Salii-- in one incident, a party of government employees including Salii's own assistant had a frank exchange of bullets with an opposition leader's house. As the net closed in on him, Salii died in 1988 of gunshot wounds in an apparent suicide as noted in this chaos filled excerpt from a section of the Europa World Year Book that can be easily confused for the back of a Graham Greene paperback.

A guide to Palau intrigue from left to right: Remeliik, Salii,
Ngiraked, the inevitable Walken intervention or Walkentervention
as it is known in the mercenary business

With the football team poised for its first New Years Bowl since 1996 and the basketball team on the precipice of hope against hope for the gossamer chance at making the NCAA tournament though there's still a long way to go let's not jinx anything before we get into the high-flying excitement of Big Ten baseketball season, it's an exciting time to be a Northwestern fan. And with the rest of the non-hockey Chicago teams breaking new depths of incompetence (I will be ready to discuss the concept of Carlos Silva in 2010), the Wildcats are essentially the only game in town leading perhaps to Chicago fans recognizing them as a legitimate home team and getting some locals into the stands to the cheer on the team with a furious intensity that is slightly unsettling. If not, perhaps a generous gift from the Athletic Department can earn some recognition overseas.

Badgers, Bowls, Basketball

Last week's cliff-hanging thriller against Wisconsin to clinch an eight-win season, fifth place in the Big Ten, and set off wild bowl speculation by Henry Bienen's most elite unit of bone diviners (while Bienen has retired from Northwestern in order to serve as Vice Chairman of Rasmussen College, Inc. and chair the executive committee of the UFL as the only man who can control Tim McGarigle's terrible vengeance upon ball-carriers, BYCTOM sources reveal that he remains in charge of NU's secret department of all sports-related occult activities-- for example did you know that the Rebecca Crown Tower turns purple after Wildcat victories not through the use of cheap plastic veneers that are not quite purple as it appears but through a terrible ancient sorcery).

Bienen, shown here in garb reserved for academics and the black arts, prefers
divination by oracle bones, as preferred in Shang Dynasty China. Thankfully,
Wikipedia's page on divination has a helpful section on other types of divination
that may be used for bowl projection-related purposes that you can do in the privacy
of your own home or coven including tasseomancy (by tea or coffee grounds),
rhabdomancy (by rods), hydromancy (by water), and gastromancy, which apparently
involves divination by using ventriloquest techniques to convince people that sounds
made by the stomach represent the voices of the dead

The 33-31 thriller continued Northwestern's trend of turning Ryan Field into an impenetrable fortress against invasion from the north, which I chalk up to a clever ruse luring Wisconsin into a false sense of security by flooding the stands with red-clad fans in a move that can best be described as a Reverse Trojan Horse after several blows to the head and exposure to mild psychotropic substances. A road team has not won in this unfortunately not annual contest since the 'Cats claimed the crazy double-OT thriller in 2000.

Bucky Badger certainly ranks tops in the world-wide Badger Mascot ratings, just
above Fulham FC's Billy Badger, shown here delaying the start of a half with his
break-dancing antics, and this generic badger costume described on this website
as the way to have a "fierce, spunky badger to represent your team, school, or
business" although it is unclear what business would be rushing to purchase this
badger unless its mission statement specifically involved terrifying children or
rival board members

Though Northwestern's bowl position is technically in the air, consensus seems to point towards the Champs Sports Bowl in Miami. The bowl selection process seems less rife with intrigue than last year, although I do enjoy that speculation about bowls involves the fact that Wisconsin has been to Florida too many times, a theory that posits that corporate executives who choose bowl pairings operate not unlike a cabal of warlords collaborating on an evening's gladiatorial festivities and dismissing teams with a "send them away they no longer amuse me" gesture.

Penn State LB Paul Posluszny looks to the Capital One executive
suite for guidance on a sack during this 2003 bowl contest

RAISE THE BANNER FOR THE C.I.T. CHAMPS

With all of the doom and gloom surrounding the basketball team after the Ryan and Coble injuries, the young Wildcats have been lining up to take over games. After a tough loss to Butler, the best team in the state, Northwestern rebounded with a 31 point explosion by "Juice" Thompson against Tennessee State and 22 from freshman Drew Crawford against Liberty University in the first round of the Chicago Invitational Tournament. But it has been all about John Shurna in the C.I.T.-- the sophomore led Northwestern to an upset against Notre Dame in the second round of the tournament with 25 and 8 against the nationally ranked squad. Northwestern's 1-3-1 zone stifled Irish All-American and possible anthropomorphic tree trunk Luke Harangody and limited Notre Dame to 31.7 percent shooting. And just like that, the switch on Northwestern's basketball program has been turned back to feisty. Just look at this typically understated post from nusports.com that does not have a byline but was written by someone who is clearly being mentored by Skip Myslenski:

Mark Twain once stated that, "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." The same holds true for the Northwestern men's basketball team.

The 'Cats went on to defeat Iowa State Cyclones in the tournament championship game, avenging themselves against teams named for violent natural phenomena after last year's NIT loss to the Tulsa Golden Hurricane. Shurna again led Northwestern with 23 points to claim the tournament's most outstanding player award and serve notice that injuries have not ended the Wildcat season, as Bill Carmody continues to assail opponents with a seemingly limitless army of skinny white guys that shoot threes.

This factory churning out malnourished forwards has replaced the Former
Yugoslavia as Carmody's primary recruiting ground

Sure, the Chicago Invitational Tournament is not exactly the Final Four, or even the preseason Chicago-area tournament in the best of possible worlds, but it is also the first trophy a Northwestern basketball team has won in recent memory. The young 'Cats went through two legitimate teams, and it looks like the hoops program is in good hands with the Shurna and "Juice" tandem until the return of Coble to menace the Big Ten.

HIGHLIGHTS FOR CHILDREN

Fortunately, the Big Ten Network managed to muscle in on the game which means that there are video highlights available for the Notre Dame and Iowa State games, the latter featuring an ending so exciting that it evidently derailed the overmatched announcer enough to expect chastising from an unexpectedly materializing Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Online sports highlights have become a crucial part of the twenty-first century sports fan experience, so it is important that they are done properly. The NFL did its highlights best at first, short recaps of every game narrated by a stern-voiced announcer and punctuated by jaunty music taken from albums of free use music used to advertise summer camps in the 1980s. They replaced this system several years ago with radio calls, and now offer either radio calls or the catastrophic result of an NFL board meeting where a misguided executive decided that there are people somewhere in the country that actually want to hear Deion Sanders talk for an extended period of time. Sure, the video quality is better now and streaming more efficient, but does anyone actually believe that this is better than this?

Fortunately for Bears fans, Chicagobears.com puts out its own highlight reels narrated by John Spindle who dips into a proper NFL-level of hyperbole to describe the Bears's lackluster efforts:

For Chicago, and primarily their defense, four days of soul-searching had led to this night, no help was on the way, no cavalry was coming, only they could change their course, only they could give the people reason to believe again.

Unfortunately, the Bears have provided mainly highlights for other teams' defensive backs and wide receivers, but as the late John Facenda would have possibly said, it is better to have watchable football highlights, even if they are of Jay Cutler throwing around interceptions the way that Natty Bumpo would spray buckshot into Native Americans and the French.

BYCTOM fully supports any voodoo programs that resurrect John Facenda to
save NFL.com highlights on the belief that his dulcet moans would be better
than the current setup which is like trying to watch football while being
serenaded by a veritable chorus of Menards Men

The NBA is even worse, as someone has evidently pumped some sort of amphetamines into their drinking water supply to the point where their highlights are essentially 90 seconds of random basketball activities and nicknames when all I want is a vague idea of how the Bulls are playing and whether or not Brad Miller has reason to raise his arms in triumph.

The new goal of this blog is to become a clearing house for victorious Brad
Miller images

NBA Playoffs

The Bulls ended their epic seven game series against Boston last Saturday night in a disappointing conclusion to a series featuring overtime in four games and only two games that did not end in the final seconds. The most ridiculous game was Game 6, featuring three overtimes, Ray Allen's 51 points in a losing effort, and Noah's insane coast to coast dunk over Pierce with the requisite Joakim Noah banshee shriek. For a recap of Game 6, NBA.com turned the game over to its ace Foley artists Gary Payton and Chris Webber.

The Passion and Redemption of Brad Miller

The Bulls played well against a Celtics squad that had lost their defensive anchor and emotional leader Kevin Garnett, who was reduced to launching into hysterics on the sidelines and practicing his Street Fighter II victory poses. They also showed that they were a young team on the rise, with a nucleus featuring Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah, Tyrus Thomas, and first year head coach Lloyd Braun.

Vinny Del Negro's coaching strategy
depends on the twin prongs of serenity
and insanity

TELEVISED BASKETBALL

Basketball is one sport where playoff basketball actually attracts playoff-caliber national announcers. Locally, things do not often work out as well, such as the time the Bulls brought in Scottie Pippen as an analyst despite the fact that his low-timbred mush-mouthed delivery occasionally ventures into Sling Blade levels of incoherence (although nothing will ever top the time that Shannon Sharpe went into battle against the phrase "Billy Volek" during one of his spittle-drenched scat solo highlight narrations). The greatest Scottie Pippen moment of all time, however, is this astounding Mr. Submarine commercial from 1991, where evidently someone swapped out Pippen's script with a Christopher Walken version that had all of the punctuation removed.

this is one six footer I can't handle one on one ladies let's
have a party

For one of the games, I found myself subjected to Tommy Heinsohn's commentary from the Boston feed. Home team announcers are by definition homers at varying levels of obnoxiousness, but Heinsohn was maddening to the point that he would only accecpt a Boston foul if a scythe was prominently involved, a practice that can be best assessed using the BYCTOM Homer Announcer Tolerability Scale.

Heinsohn is highlighted on the scale, which becomes more untolerable towards the business
end of the pitchfork

Heinsohn's infuriating ranting at least resonates with Boston fans, which is much more important to his job than not rankling Chicago fans watching on any illegal stream available, even if it is pro-Celtics or broadcast in one of several possible Slavic languages. And no matter what he does, he probably will not inspire the universal ire of Tommy Smyth, who is, according to this Guardian article, "possibly the most hated football commentator in history." Smyth, whose hoary bald pate has become the face of ESPN's soccer coverage, evidently spends most broadcasts buzzing around a match like a buzzard ready to pounce in with his despised "bulge in the old onion bag" catch-phrase every time a goal or goal-like situation has occurred. For this, he receives letters wishing his mother had had him aborted and even a death threat from a particularly vengeful Australian.

Smyth's over-the-top Irish accent has also made him few friends with Irish ex-patriates who take exception to his brogue, such as Cass Crockett, a co-founder of an anti-Smyth site, who claims that "In each of the years that he's left County Louth, his accent has gotten stronger to such an extent that he's now 94% angry leprechaun." Another Irish critic claims that his accent is "more embarrassing to expats than either Riverdance or the Celtic Woman show."

Other US soccer bloggers have called Smyth "Beelzebub's handmaid", a "pathetic and insulting blight", a "garbage commentator", a "ridiculous clown" and "the biggest tit on the air" who talks "incessant drivel" and "utters inanity after absurdity after stupidity". Others also opined that Smyth commentates as "if he is watching the game through an aquarium" and that he "needs to be tied to a goal post for Juninho to practise his free-kicks on".

Jubilant crowds celebrate the firing of Tommy Smyth. Incidentally, there's an excellent story
by Boston Globe reporter Brian Rogers investigating Hasselhoff's role in the fall of the Berlin Wall

PLAYOFF PRESENTATION

Although TNT has paid proper tribute to playoff basketball by allowing the husky histrionics of Marv Albert to resonate in 5.1 stereo, the playoffs do not feel right without an over-dramatic story narrated by Bob Costas followed by Roundball Rock and then an overhead shot of the arena accompanied by a Marv monologue about Jazz fans wondering if Karl Malone will come through in the clutch. TNT made an attempt with a highlight package using the ubiquitous orchestrated version of the theme from Requiem for a Dream that has spread like a plague across the sports highlight landscape, but it is bereft of overwrought narration and therefore unacceptable. Here, for example, is how NBC brought us Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals between Chicago and New York that not only rips Enter the Sandman, but also the phrases "Call it the Knicks worst nightmare" and "Headlines like these make it more than a game--it's personal" out of the Stallone movie trailer handbook.

My favorite of these is from before Game 1 of the 1996 Finals against Seattle, where Pippen and Kemp's showdown to determine the best hi-top fade in the NBA was so dramatic that an NBC producer picked up a red phone and dialed up the most dramatic theme music possible.

NBC took its musical cues from Detlef
Schrempf's haircut and his menacing demand for
Dick Bavetta's pants, jacket, and motorcycle

Do NBA broadcasts deserve a modicum of restraint and taste, or do they benefit from going into Adam West Batman territory from time to time when a series demands it? Can the overdramatic NBC style work in the twenty-first century or does it belong in the dustbin with pump sneakers, snap bracelets, and movies where the fate of the world rests in the curly locks of Jeff Goldblum? Perhaps mid-1990s basketball broadcasting can only work on mid-1990s basketball issues.

This summer, NBA on NBC presents
Carr vs. Robinson: This Dog is Only
Big Enough for One of Us
((in stereo where available))

The answer to these questions is perhaps unknowable, but the path to enlightenment surely involves an unholy combination of Nicolas Cage's maniacally vacant intensity, a series of increasingly hilarious clips from what is apparently a real movie, and a British interviewer's intrepid dedication to A Flock of Seagulls.