Poor Man's been-there-done-that veto: Kevin Durant

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I don't blame Stephen B. Snyde. We had just seen the Utah Jazz, led by an unstoppable Carlos Boozer inside, beat our Warriors. Then we saw the same Jazz get beat up inside by Tim Duncan, who ended up eliminating one of the few teams that could hang, the Phoenix Suns, who had Amare Stoudemire in there to try and neutralize Duncan. So of course, we figured that you had to take Greg Oden with the first pick.

Come to think of it, I'm not so sure. Two big discoveries for me have made me jump ship. Big time...

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The Greg Oden of pro hoop bloggers is... Greg Oden!

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[From Stephen B. Snyde for Friday tidbits...]

We've said it before and we'll say it again: Rod Benson is the Kevin Durant of pro hoop bloggers (ballaz gettin' paid to play and sharing their thoughts on a blog).

Witness the last two hoop-related entries by Benson where he...

• Reveals the inside secrets of the Wizzonator as it relates to NBA drug testing (do a "find" with your browser on "Wizzonator" to jump to the funny part), and
  
  
• Lies to a whole host of airplane passengers that he played on the Sacramento Kings, all to get an exit row seat (do a "find" on "Sacramento Kings").

Where Benson is Durant, even Paul Shirley recently started to produce like the Greg Oden of pro hoop bloggers, with his comedic rendition of trying to Cassanova a pretty Spanish hoop fan while first prefacing that Spanish girls look less like Penelope Cruz and more like "female versions of Tony Parker."

But, no! Shirley cannot be the Oden of pro hoop bloggers. For the Greg Oden of pro hoop bloggers can only be...

GREG ODEN HIMSELF!

Yes, Oden has a blog. And it's not that bad. The funniest bit so far was about his trip to Nike headquarters...

I saw a guy with a Ohio State shirt and I got hype I was like thats amazing someone who loves Ohio State then once i saw 30 more people with the same shirt I was like hold up not all these people like Ohio State, but its ok.

One 7-foot question though: Why does Greg Oden need this YardBarker.com thing? The man could make serious ad money by having a blog all to himself. Of course, it's gonna be relative small change, but at least hire your friends to run the blog or something and basically rain some easy earn for your homies.

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Durant = playoffs, Oden = conference finals

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[From Stephen B. Snyde...]

Poor Man's Commish doesn't usually let me argue about NBA teams and what they should do, because normally we like to leave the rantin' and ravin' to the myriad of blogs out there, but when I brought this up, he didn't think anybody had touched on it, at least not the way I'm about to.

Now that Portland and Seattle are #1 and #2 in this year's deep NBA Draft, which will lead to this year's best Vegas Summer League ever, you have to be asking yourself: Greg Oden or Kevin Durant?

Ballaz everywhere will, of course, lean towards Durant because we can all "be like Kevin". You have to be much taller than everybody else around you to be like Greg. And it's hard to pass on a guy who scored 30 ppg in the college format. What if Oden is to Sam Bowie as Durant is to Michael Jordan?

But haven't we seen enough in the NBA Playoffs this year? You look at the Warriors and you go, "Plenty of swingmen. They need a Carlos Boozer, Kevin Garnett, or Elton Brand. They need a tall guy in the middle who can score, rebound and draw defenders to kick out." You look at the Suns and you go, "Something's wrong with the system. The Spurs closed down everything and let Amare Stoudemire get his. The Suns need another Amare." You look at the Spurs and you go, "Who the heck can guard Tim Duncan and not be forced into a double-team?"

Now, there are plenty of teams that merely need a Durant to get to the playoffs. Or a Yi Jianlian, who is simply a freak-of-nature inside-out pick a la Dirk Nowitzki. In fact, we've already seen the better playoff teams neutralize opposing fives made up of mini-Durants (think Leandro Barbosa and Stephen Jackson in their team systems) and, of course, MVP Dirk.

Remember, it's a team game. Granted, Durant maybe can disrupt a Jazz, Spurs, or Pistons defense enough to significantly alter their pack-it-in styles. But that seems like more of a risky prediction as we sit on the verge of the NBA Finals these next couple weeks.

If you want any chance of getting to the conference finals, you must pick Oden.

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Dish on Yi Jianlian makes it good to have Insider today

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[Believe it or not, I actually compare Yi Jianlian to a dreamleaguer...read on!]

If you're a fan of Yi as we are, today's ESPN Insider article by Chad Ford makes the Insider subscription worth it (even though we got ours at a major discount, ha!).

Ford witnessed workouts by Yi over two days in LA and had rave reviews. Here are some samples, for those of you blocked out of the Insider wall...

• Don MacLean (former UCLA star and current trainer for Nick Young, draft prospect out of USC): "Have you seen the Yi kid yet? That kid was amazing."
  
  
• Joakim Noah, who was also training in LA, about Yi's workouts: "Something to behold. Where did that guy come from?"...

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Team China in 2007 Vegas Summer League

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Guess who's playing in the 2007 Vegas NBA Summer League? Yeah, yeah, we knew about soon-to-be new NBA players Kevin Durant and Greg Oden already, but how about a new team?

Perhaps as part of the recent NBA-China partnership, according to the NBA Summer League website, the Chinese National Team will be playing in the league this summer! It's probably a good deal for Team China too, getting valuable experience against top-notch talent one year before the Olympics.

Based on the modified look-and-feel of the site, the NBA appears to be taking over management of the league, as there are no more references to the league's founder, NBA coaches' super-agent Warren LeGarie, who had hinted recently (I can't remember where I read it) that the NBA could be aiming to do just that.

Don't forget how deep a draft this year is going to be! And can you picture Yi Jianlian going up against his former comrades?

Well, this just reinforces the probability that dreamleague will be hosting a tournament there to coincide with what's going to be the best Vegas Summer League on record -- probably the tail end, July 14-15.

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Afflalo doesn't watch American Idol

[From Stephen B. Snyde for Friday tidbits...]

While Kevin Durant, Greg Oden, and Mike Conley, Jr. (and Joakim Noah last year) are/were all weighing regrets about leaving their cherished college lives, Arron Afflalo's on the first train outta UCLA. Ah, to be The Man on campus. But not just any campus, we're talking UCLA, the mecca of college hoops -- almost guaranteed Final Four, these days (!). Not to mention the weather and surroundings in Westwood ain't all that bad either.

To leave that for, what, maybe getting picked in the 2nd round (via Chad Ford, ESPN Insider subscription required). And if he doesn't get picked, that's it, because as Ford points out, it's his 2nd and last try at the NBA Draft; he can't return to UCLA.

The more you make it appear you want something, the less those who have it want to give it to you. Hasn't Afflalo learned anything from watching Sanjaya Malakar and his "victims" on American Idol?

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Sick-ass adidas Kobe IIIs

Seems we've been talking a lot about shoes lately, with Jason Kidd's new Nike ad and the reference to Phil Knight. And now that Kevin Durant is turning pro, a $40 million-or-so deal (just like Kobe Bryant's) with Nike is surely right around the corner.

So I was randomly researching stuff recently when I came across the adidas Kobe IIIs shown in the picture above, which were never released because Kobe jumped ship. Maybe you knew this already, but I had no idea how sick these are/were. And let's not forget that the now-defunct Kicksology.net raved about the performance of Kobe I. If they released the Kobe III (or whatever they'd call it), I might have to jump ship myself, being a loyal Nike wearer since the Air Force III followed by the Air Revolution followed by -- well, I could go on for days. And no, I'm not a sneakerhead. That's a little pet peeve of mine that I'll save for a longer rant on dreamblogue someday.

Here's the link to the Kobe III for close-ups and a short explanation...

http://www.kobe8bryant.net/shoes.html

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Rod Benson's still fillin' it up

Unlike last time when we compared Rod Benson's prose to that of Kevin Durant's hoop skills, we now have located a Yahoo Image of Rod.

[Aside: dreamleague now has its own Average Joe rendition of the trouble with public restrooms, courtesty of New Yorker Mike Owh.]

He is more than deserving of his own celebrity photo. His "blog shooting percentage" is incredible. That is to say, I haven't found another hoops blog in which the number of worthwhile posts is so high. TrueHoop led me to Benson, but Benson ranks higher than even TrueHoop.

Btw, TrueHoop recently got bought out by ESPN. I wouldn't be surprised if Benson was next. His stuff is that good.

Here are some more great tidbits off his last couple blogs, which curiously are not easily found on www.toomuchrodbenson.com and must be painfully dug up every now and then on his DraftExpress.com URL...

• "Other than that it was a pretty uneventful evening aside from officially meeting one of the cooler guys in the league, Mateen Cleaves. I take back what I said about his head being big, with a hat on it looks proportional."
  
  
• "A pretty good-looking girl I know has an away message that says 'So I met the owners of the Palms, they invited us to their party, where we met D-Wade and his crew who invited us to THEIR party!' I’m sitting there thinking 'Great. Now D-Wade has her in his ‘5’, I’m blown out of the water…I don’t even have T-Mobile.'"
  
  
• "I tell 'Q' this story and he kind of nods and laughs a little. I'm thinking how can he not be more impressed? Then he pulls out a cigar that I guess costs more than a Playstation 3 and tells the story of how he got it. Dammit, it was wwayyy better than my stupid story."
  
  
• "If Berkeley were really an ocean I’d be like Sebastian from 'The Little Mermaid' whereas if I was in Vegas I’d be closer to Nemo from 'Finding Nemo'."

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Rod Benson is the Kevin Durant of pro hoop bloggers

All you Cal alums will love this. Yeah, we know the pic is of Kevin Durant, but we couldn't find enough of Rod Benson's...

TrueHoop recently directed us to a funny inside look at 6'10" NBDL player and ex-Cal star Rod Benson and his encounter with a 300-lb. woman at a club.

A few clicks later, we found Rod's rant on his blog www.toomuchrodbenson.com, where he complains about The Trouble With Being Tall:

...The urinals are only half of the story. The stalls happen to pose an even bigger problem. The idea with stalls is that they are designed to limit the visibility of two people in neighboring toilets. All your really supposed to see is the boxer-pants-shoes pile that covers the ankles of the person next to you. The average person can basically do whatever they want once they close that stall door because they essentially disappear. I, on the other hand, am visible the whole time until I sit down. It never feels comfortable staring at some guy washing his hands as im getting situated in the stall. What if its a hot day and I want to take my shirt off? What if I smell the place up real bad and I want to kind of escape without being seen? Impossible. My whole head and shoulders are above the stall level...In this photo, taken at my eye level, I see right over the stall with ease...

With due respect to the many praises of the blogs of Gilbert Arenas and Mark Madsen, if Paul Shirley was heretofore the Greg Oden of hoop bloggers who are or were playing professionally somewhere, then Benson is the Kevin Durant of the hoop blogosphere.

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