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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TrueHoop: Baron Davis

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Ever since TrueHoop got assimilated into the Borg that is ESPN.com, there hasn't been one single post where you could just forward to your friends without further debate. After all, TrueHoop was supposed to be the facilitator of stories, where one thread could explode into a much bigger, well-rounded, knowledge-enfused medium with the help of its valued commenters. Now in the ESPN cube, you can't so much as make an educated guess as to what to type into your URL box to get there (what's with the "myespn-dot-go-dot-com" nonsense?) -- this is just the tip of the iceberg and Poor Man's Commish promises to make a full frontal assualt on TrueHoop's Borg assimilation in the future.

But let us not digress. Baron Davis has truly been playing like a perennial NBA MVP lately, in the most important games of his career and of the modern era of his franchise, against the best team in the NBA which has the consensus real MVP on its team. If you were watching last night in the closing moments when BD hit a clutch drive-and-fade swish, then surgically dismantled the proud Mavs' defense by finding Andris Biedrins for a dunk-and-one, you were sitting there shaking your head in disbelief of how good he his. The number of highlights this guy had from just this one game approached Michael Jordan's level, making it a similar sacrilege to leave your seat from tipoff to final buzzer.

Alas, there's really nothing to add, no extra comment to make about TrueHoop's post, "The Baron of Davis".

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Watch racial stereotypes run rampant when Yi Jianlian gets drafted

I guess I'm kind of glad this happened, even though it knocked out a whole day's list of other to-do's. This stuff opens your eyes. It makes you wiser, stronger, more appreciative of each person's individuality. I'm glad I spent a whole day thinking about it.

Today, our otherwise-revered TrueHoop, written by Henry Abbott, made the following bullet-point post:

• Footage of Yi Jianlian making a bunch of dunks that look to me like they would likely be blocked, or stolen on the way up, in the NBA.

For the 100+ teams and players of those teams currently playing in our SF Bay Area and New York Asian American leagues, you know the feeling already.

It's kind of like the hoops blogger (Bill Simmons? Chad Ford? Henry Abbott himself? Honestly, I can't remember where I read it) who said in response to the major uproar following the Vegas All-Star Weekend in which arrests and violence were referenced strongly with the African American and hip-hop community:

[Reminder: I'm paraphrasing by memory here.] "I couldn't tell you if an African American, with corn rows and baggy pants, approaching me on the street is really a gangsta or a student at UPenn..."

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UPDATED: See comments
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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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All-Star violence and Tommy Davidson

There's a rather hot debate in the NBA blogosphere right now, summed up best by TrueHoop, that doesn't paint a beautiful picture for the Average Joe (or Poor Man Commish) to attend All-Star Weekend. It also reaches into the problems of violence in American society, with which we've previously compared to Iraq.

Interestingly, in this month's issue of Black Enterprise (which has a terrible archive search section where I couldn't find a link to the article), comedian Tommy Davidson was profiled by Kenneth Meeks. Davidson disclosed his very profound beliefs and passion in life to try and fix these very ills...

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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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Charles Barkley opens the door to the Iraq at home

Thanks to TrueHoop (and no thanks to TNT.tv or NBA.com which gave no indication there were NBA telecasts on Monday), Poor Man's Commish saw this...

Charles Barkley from TNT last night: “If (Dr. King) were still alive today, as a person who preached non-violence, would he be disturbed at all the violence we have going on in the black community? It does a great disservice to Dr. King with all this black on black crime going on in our communities.”

Remember, I wrote back in the first dreamBlogue entry that I would delve into the scariness of the numbers that our very own James Love fell victim to.

I've been waiting to find the right time to bring this up and thanks to Chuckie, now is the right time...

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Walt "Clyde" Frazier, my new hero

The SportsBusiness Journal (subscription needed) came out with a great interview with Walt "Clyde" Frazier today, with respect to his new book "Game Within The Game". He's pretty much on point with everything and the timing of this interview is impeccable given our blog entry on Saturday about the European vs. American system.

Here are some of the more profound excerpts and notes from which a lot of us can learn...

• First off, he was the first player to sign a sneaker deal (with Puma in 1971) -- much respect, let us "ballaz" and "sneakerheads" alike tip our hat and listen to what he has to say...

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Wonder-trail of MJ DKYs Part II of III

As you'll recall from Part I, our brief TrueHoop-YouTube-Google excursion of Michael Jordan Did You Know's began with the 1986 60 Minutes interview where we read the fine print and saw that MJ's "love of the game" clause was addressed to one "Jonathan". If it was addressed to "Jerry", as in Reinsdorf or Krause, we would not have pressed forward.

A Google search on "jonathan bulls owner" reveals an ESPN article from 2003 called "Cashing in on the ultimate cash cow" by Darren Rovell describing how MJ impacted the wealth of other people, with Reinsdorf at the top of the list. Curiously absent from the list: William Wesley, the most important NBA insider no one's heard of, as unearthed by TrueHoop's Henry Abbott.

More in Part III to follow.

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LeBron's global strategy now hinges on playing 1-on-1 with Chinese kid (from Chicago?!)

Our beloved beacon of basketball brouhaha, TrueHoop.com, reported earlier on Tuesday in a line item that LeBron James just "announced" a promotional deal with Microsoft, so I had no choice but to drop everything and embark on a writeup which I was hoping could wait until the holidays.

I put "announced" in quotation marks because this is actually pretty old news. Microsoft has sponsored LBJ's Bike-A-Thon in the past and there's even an insightful transcription (scroll to the middle of the page) of LeBron's budding relationship with Microsoft, through a dialogue between Maverick Carter and a Microsoft executive at an advertising conference not too long ago in late September.

In fact, as you might remember from our dreamleague-wide posts (before we had this blog) on Nov. 27 entitled Chinese Youth with Skillz for LeBron Commercial (scroll almost all the way down), LeBron has been scouring the country for a male Chinese kid age 10-14 with good basketball skills to go one-on-one in his forthcoming commercial with Microsoft...

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Wonder-trail of MJ DYK?'sPart I of III: The so-called "Love of the game clause"

It's amazing how interesting a particular strain of TrueHoop, YouTube, and Google can turn into. So let's surf this nice little wave that is the Internet, the first of a series of Did You Know ("DYK?" for ESPN watchers) nuggets I found on the O.G. Michael Jordan...

It all started when last week, TrueHoop.com came across an old 60 Minutes interview with Michael Jordan from 1986, posted on YouTube. I couldn't help but press the pause button when they flashed MJ's so-called "love of the game clause" up on the screen -- a camera shot of the actual document!

For those of you who grew up in the Magic/Bird/Jordan era, this is like finding the Rosetta Stone or a copy of the Declaration of Independence in your attic -- okay, terrible metaphors, but I think you feel me...

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dreamleaguer breaks finger playing with NBA ball

The previous Sunday 12/3, due to another one of those rich youth basketball leagues that pushed us out of the usual nice main gym, and as the league of the Poor Man's Commish, naturally, we were forced to play in a high school's "auxiliary" (read: "abandoned") gym.

Here, we found out that "auxiliary" really meant the older, dusty building across the way that looked like it could have been used as a set of the movie Hoosiers. The one that got overlooked by the district for earthquake retrofitting. The one even the janitor doesn't have the keys for.

Not surprisingly, we found a ton of dead spots on the floor.

Meanwhile, I had brought one of dreamleague's two new Spalding NBA balls with me...

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dreamleaguer coincidentally adds web hoops fixes/recommendations

By pure coincidence, our new Bay Area dreamleague beat writer, Alec MacDonald, chimed in late Wednesday night with his weekly report. His timing was impeccable, as we were right in the midst of launching Poor Man's Commish's dreambLogue (which was an all-nighter up thru Thursday morning!). Here's his take on the hoops blogosphere, with a few comments of my own...

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TrueHoop.com

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon TrueHoop.com, which is written by accomplished sportswriter Henry Abbott. TrueHoop is widely viewed as the best NBA-related blog out there, and I whole-heartedly agree. Here's why:

• It basically summarizes all of the latest topics around the Association for you...

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Goals and "Ground Rules"

In case you didn't know, we're in the midst of a website revamp here at www.dreamleague.org. Things are going rather smoothly, but when our web guru Big Monkey T said he didn't think we'd launch until March, I just had to scratch the blog itch. After all, I had been commenting on TrueHoop.com with the moniker "DRMLG" for quite some time now...

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