Diss Guy: Monta Ellis
At some point — not quite sure when it happened — people (on social media) began saying that Milwaukee Bucks combo guard Monta Ellis “have it all”. No, it doesn’t make a lick of grammatical sense, and it never made its way into my rapidly expanding lexicon of socially appropriate hashtags. But people insisted on it; that Ellis “have it all”; that his skill-set is so massive and varied that he can basically fulfill any role on the court (as long as that role is appropriate for a 6’4” player).
But the simple fact of the matter is that Monta Ellis does not really have it all, at all. Indeed, superficially, Monta’s career is rounding into shape. He just finished his first (and perhaps last) full season as a Milwaukee Buck. He was the hub of the team’s helter-skelter offense, and he got the green light from two different head coaches to let it fly for the good of the 38-44 playoff squad. He’s nearing his first summer of free agency, where he can either decline his player option and enter the market unrestricted, or can exercise said option and earn $11 million dollars in the last year of his $66 million contract. There isn’t much wrong with this picture, if you look at it closely, slowly and deliberately.
Yet Monta has a lot to prove these days. While his former team has definitively moved on from him, and from the “culture” he brought to the team, he’s in something of a holding pattern, professionally and holistically. Reports came out yesterday that Ellis nearly came to blows with Bucks forward Larry Sanders at the end of game three of their doomed series against the Heat. Ousted coach Jim Boylan made mention of“strong personalities” that controlled the Bucks’ locker room, among whom Ellis is assumed to me a less-than-magnanimous member. And to top it all off, other rumblings appeared to hint that prospective new Kings owner Vivek Ranadive was taking a flyer out on Monta in an effort to reunite him with Keith Smart in Northern California (and Kings fans: if your new owner not only wants Monta, but wants to keep Keith Smart, well, your battle isn’t quite over yet).
Perhaps the best part about Monta is that, though he’s been in the league eight seasons, he’s still very young, and still has a bevy of options in front of him. More than that, it seems likely that Monta is not in the mold of Jamal Crawford (pre-Hawks) or Ricky Davis, who were content to accrue numbers on forgettable, terrible teams. Monta clearly likes to win, and wants to win. And as a free agent combo guard whose scoring skills have been proven, Monta Ellis has an opportunity to really reinvent himself and become a useful asset for a team looking to add points to a system. In that scenario, it’s unlikely Monta is a starter. But isn’t that compelling? Manu Ginobili, Jarrett Jack, Jamal Crawford and J.R. Smith and Jerryd Bayless have all proven the worth of shoot-first guards who have playmaking abilities. Many different teams could — and should — use Monta in that role, if he’ll have it.
Here’s to Monta not having it all, but rather, just enough.
Miss Guy: Magic Johnson and his Merry Band of Ninnies
It’s not often that a group of studio analysts can actually ruin a product. The game is bigger than the men (almost exclusively) who we watch dissect the proceedings. We can easily turn the television off and move on with our lives without getting too worked up about the tightly manicured comments of tall men in suits. But last week? Too much. Just too much. After LeBron James was announced as the 2013 KIA MVP (note the foreshadowing) during halftime of the Grizzlies-Thunder game last Sunday, the ABC/ESPN guys (Magic Johnson, Michael Wilbon, Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose) were tasked with breaking down King James’s historic fourth MVP. Simmons and Rose offered some standard-issue platitudes, but then Magic dropped the bomb:
“I’m in disbelief…Chris Paul and Blake Griffin has more commercials than LeBron James. I can’t believe that. In all my 35 years, I’ve never seen an MVP, back-to-back winner … not have any endorsement deals, not have any commercials on TV? Every time I look at the TV, I never see any LeBron James commercials.”
Magic and crew would return to this bizarre point in the post-game show, collectively scratching their heads about why the four-time MVP couldn’t get any endorsements. This was what passed for analysis. It was, in no uncertain terms, the nadir of on-air basketball in a studio, at least in my lifetime.
Now, others have done the necessary work pointing out that yes, LeBron is in plenty of commercials, so Magic need not worry. We get a full helping of LeBron during many commercial breaks, whether we’re watching basketball on television or not. It’s also interesting that Magic took Blake and CP3 to task for being in commercials when he is the co-star in some of those commercials. But it’s also worth remembering that Magic’s incredulous realization carries a deeper significance for superstars (which Magic certainly was).
Consumerism and commercialism are an essential aspects of professional basketball. Furthermore (as I have argued) a superstar is an individual whose skills become marketable across multiple markets and platforms. It’s part of the reason why Dwight Howard is considered to be transcendent while Marc Gasol and Joakim Noah struggle to make All-Star teams, or why Chris Paul maintains his seat as Best Point Guard while Steph Curry and Ty Lawson chew anxiously on their mouth guards. The amount one is seen does make a difference. Though it came out wrong, Magic was being honest.
Some of the awards this year have had a strange disconnect with the present proceedings of the NBA (though perhaps no more than any other year). George Karl and Masai Ujiri’s awards stand oddly next to their early first round exit, and the relative strength of their already competitive team. The lone MVP vote for Carmelo Anthony in the face of one of the most incredible regular season seems puzzling as well. It’s hard to know how the voters define “valuable”, or any other fairly subjective concept, in order to cast a vote on it.
But the fact that commercials do play an important role, as Magic correctly states, is as disappointing as the quality of analysis delivered that day.