Bill Simmons on OJ Mayo, basketball, etc.

[Spurminator]

Some provocative stuff here...

From yesterday's blog:


Down with the OJ Mayo Era

If you missed the McDonald's All-American Game Wednesday night, you missed an appalling 4-for-17 performance by O.J. Mayo, who has a legitimate chance to replace Vince Carter as my least favorite NBA star of all-time before everything's said and done. Really, USC is expecting him to play point guard? That's the worst basketball-related idea since the Pacers teamed up Stephen Jackson and Ron Artest.


Fortunately, the game featured my new favorite incoming recruit: UCLA's Kevin Love, a 6-foot-9 power forward who studied Wes Unseld/Bill Walton tapes as a kid and throws the best outlet pass in 30 years. I've heard about him for months, hoped the stories were true and didn't want to jinx it by saying anything. But screw it. With Durant fleeing to the pros, I'm dumping Texas and jumping on the UCLA bandwagon. , I'd even get season tickets if it were remotely possible to get UCLA season tickets. It's been so long since we've seen a big guy grab a rebound, look down the court and whistle a 50-foot pass to start a fast break in the same motion. I just feel Love will become a revelation for a whole new generation of fans.


As you know, I'm a huge basketball dork and have more than 300 classic games burned to DVD. Other than the Celtics and MJ's Bulls, you know which team is featured the most in my DVDs? Walton's Portland team from '77. Why? Because they were built around a premise that doesn't exist anymore -- a passing big man and quick guards. Every time the other team missed, the guards took off and Walton hit them in stride with a 45-foot outlet. For this reason, they couldn't be stopped -- they were starting every game with 30 free points. Remember, they won the '77 le without a perimeter player who could create his own shot in a half-court offense. That will never, ever, EVER happen again. Unless Kevin Love or somebody like him is involved.


The bigger picture: With Mayo joining a loaded USC team and Love playing 20 minutes away for a Final Four team, that's looming as a dynamite rivalry and the most intriguing media subplot for the 2007-08 season. After all, Love represents everything good about basketball (unselfishness, teamwork, professionalism) and Mayo represents everything we've come to despise (showboating, selfishness, over-hype). If Love were black, this would be a much easier topic to discuss. But he's white. So even though there's a natural inclination to embrace Love's game and disparage Mayo's game -- you know, assuming you give a crap about basketball and care about where it's headed as a sport -- there's also a natural inclination to hold back because nobody wants to sound like the white media guy supporting the Great White Hope over the Black Superstar Du Jour.


So here's the answer to make it easier for everybody: There's room for both guys.


Like it or not, Mayo's style of game resonates with a certain demographic, with his final high school dunk symbolizing the divide between traditional fans and the budding generation that was weaned on Slam Magazine and me-first "superstars" like Stephon Marbury and Vince Carter (neither of whom has played on a 50-win NBA team, by the way). Head over to YouTube and you'll find an unedited clip of the dunk that makes Mayo look like an attention-seeking punk, as well as a heavily edited clip of the same dunk that lionizes it. Is it alarming that a 19-year-old kid throwing himself a halfcourt alley-oop in the final minute of a 40-point win, dunking it, tossing the ball into the stands and getting thrown out of his final high school game, then soaking in a standing ovation could be considered a beautiful moment by some people? Probably not. That's just our culture now. Rappers sing songs with their own names as the chorus. Wannabe celebrities intentionally leak sex tapes to make themselves famous. Rich teenagers make fools of themselves on "My Super Sweet 16" and don't even get that they're the joke.


So O.J. Mayo fits into all of that. It's not a good thing or a bad thing; it's just the way things are. But the sport of basketball is headed for a crossroads of sorts, personified by the fact that Kobe Bryant's recent streak of 50-point games received far more national attention than the incredible Suns-Mavs game two weeks ago. Nobody wants to be the next Steve Nash; everyone wants to be the next LeBron James, the next Gilbert Arenas, the next Vince Carter. Those guys make the most money and get the most magazine covers and commercials. Just look at what happened to LeBron's all-around game when he reached the pros -- blessed with an innate passing gene that gave him a choice between becoming the next Magic or the next MJ, he said "Screw it, I'm going for my points" and went the MJ route. I will always be disappointed about that choice.


Again, it's not a black/white thing as much as a philosophical thing -- we glorify scoring and dunking and allowed an infrastructure in which AAU games and summer camps matter more than high school games. Winning and losing doesn't matter nearly as much as how you did and how you looked. We're seeing the effects in the NBA right now; it's been one of the worst regular seasons in recent memory, mainly because the vast majority of players don't seem like they give a crap. For instance, the Celtics had the youngest team in the league this season. During their 18-game losing streak, nobody ever got kicked out of a game, knocked someone into a basket support, threw a frustrated punch ... , even the coach didn't get kicked out of a game. There was a passive, pathetic, indifferent response to everything that was happening. Not a single person stepped up. As somebody who travels with the team told me, "If you were with these guys every night and saw how little these losses affected them, you'd never want to follow sports again ... the losses just bounce right off these guys."


Why? Because they've been playing 100-plus games every year since they were 14 years old. Because the final score never really mattered for most of those games. Because they were taught at an early age that it's all about how YOU looked, not how your team looked.


To be fair, some guys break out of that mind-set or never get corrupted in the first place. At the same time, it's definitely a mind-set. And it's depressing.


Which brings me back to that McDonald's game. When Mayo bricked the game-winning 3-pointer with five seconds left and soaked in those scattered boos and a few "ov-er-ra-ted" chants, do you think he was more upset that his team lost, or that he would have been the hero if he made the 3? Call me crazy, but I'm going with the latter. Meanwhile, Kevin Love's team came out on top. He finished with 13 points and six rebounds and jump-started at least five-six fast breaks that directly led to layups or dunks. Looking at the stat sheet, you'd never guess that he was one of the key guys in the game. But he was. And that's why I'm looking forward to the Kevin Love Era and preparing myself to hate everything about the O.J. Mayo Era.


It's not a white thing or a black thing ... it's a basketball thing.

[Fillmoe]

eric gordon >>> oj mayo

[pussyface.]

i doubt oj mayo likes his last name too much, considering he's black and all.

[mardigan]

Lebron averages like 7 assists a game and would average more if he had a team, I dont agree with a lot of this guys assesments

[timvp]

Remember, they won the '77 le without a perimeter player who could create his own shot in a half-court offense. That will never, ever, EVER happen again.

'99 Spurs.

Elliott in one point in time could create his own shot, but by '99 he had lost a step and wasn't a creator anymore.