Ten years later, revisiting Darko Milicic

Interesting piece in Slate on 2003 NBA Draft bust Darko Milicic.

"[Jason] Kidd was magician in New Jersey", says ESPN's Ian O'Conner (but I'll always remember the 1993 game against Duke.)

Jason Kidd announced yesterday that he is retiring from basketball. Ian O'Conner wrote a great column about what Kidd meant to the New Jersey (now Brooklyn) Nets as a franchise mired in what could have optimistically been called 'mediocrity' at the time. This is also a bittersweet moment for me as a fan.

I first saw Jason Kidd single-handedly defeat the defending national champion Duke Blue Devils in the 1993 NCAA tournament. What amazed me was this is a guy playing on a highly competitive level the way I liked to play on the playground (with much less success): pass first, pass second, no-look pass third, and then maybe shoot the ball himself. As great as other great point guards have been (John Stockton, Magic Johnson), no one played with the same flair as Jason Kidd. The only recent player I've seen come close is Minnesota's Ricky Rubio, who is also one of my favorite players in the league today.

For all his off-court troubles, Jason Kidd has been a fun player to watch over the years and his retirement makes me feel really old, especially since I have very fond memories of his game against Duke, which is posted below. ENJOY!

Kevin Johnson's 1994 playoff dunk over Hakeen Olajuwon

Yes, this is the current mayor of Sacramento, California. In his previous life he was the All-Star point guard of the Phoenix Suns. I remember watching this dunk in the 1994 playoffs (I was a HUGE Phoenix Suns fan back then) and randomly came across it again today. It's not everyday you get to see a 6'1" point guard go up over a 7'0" center. He even nails a three-pointer at the end of the video clip too. ENJOY!
Of course, thinking about dunks and reading an article in the latest Sports Illustrated this morning about Glenn Robinson III led me to look for this dunk from the 1994 NCAA Tournament, when his father, Purdue's Glenn Robinson, dunks on Kansas's Greg Ostertag. All Ostertag could do after that was walk over and shake The Big Dog's hand.

Jeremy Lin puts the ball in Asian Americans' court | LA Times

Great column that starts out with a very important fact:

"In the Asian American community even third and fourth generations must contend with being treated as perpetual foreigners. So it comes as no surprise that they have embraced the big pop culture bang that created "Linsanity" — a force that already has turned long-entrenched cultural stereotypes on their heads and made the Ivy League-educated point guard the most visible Asian American in the country, if not the world."