Dumb & dumber

No, the dude on the right isn’t pictured while dunking, but tenths of a second before the perhaps most embarassing moment of his young pro career. In the words of NBA.com’s recap :“Philadelphia rookie Rodney Carney had both benches laughing after a spectacular miss at the end of the first half. Carney, alone on a fastbreak, tried a hard one-handed dunk only to see the ball hit the back rim and sail back past the halfcourt line”.

Speechless.

The title of this post could have been “Talking about low basketball IQ – again” or “I just can’t root against them – Part II”, because seems this team is doing the same mistakes over and over and making me feel the same way.

So after the unforgettable, historical 74-124 home loss to Houston, that I had the honour to watch live (so I can say: “I was there !!”), we just got whipped @ Detroit, for a 96-75 loss that puts us at a 26-42 (.382) record. I could write many things about playing versus former Sixer Chris Webber & Philly natives Rasheed Wallace, Rip Hamilton & Flip Murray bla bla bla, or the fact that the streak of consecutive Sixers games I watched just reached twelve (and counting… let’s see if I can go on till the end), but instead I prefer to focus on stupidity.

Yesterday night I had the feeling that this team needs to draft SMARTNESS instead of Greg Oden or Kevin Durant. I was impressed by the number of dumb plays I watched. In no particular order:

Two nice streaks…

The first of course is the Sixers streak: six wins in a row, capping a perfect homestand. Sacramento, Phoenix, Memphis, New Jersey, Seattle and yesterday night’s 108-92 win against the L.A. Lakers, that made us rise at a 24-38 record (.387) and 19-20 overall after the Iverson trade.

The second one is in the “Who cares” category for you but very important for me, because it’s the first time I have the opportunity to watch so many consecutive Sixers games. Six in a row, right. Either with the fantastic p2p programs (TVU player, Sopcast, PPmate etc) that broadcast NBA games live or through the URLs of the games that my friend Matteo (aka marco.materazzi.23) kindly posts in a guidos basketball forum every single day. So thanks to his tips I became a sort of an addict, going to sleep at 4 am to watch our boys live or wasting sunny italian sundays to stay home and watch the taped games…

Yesterday night I really enjoyed (live, of course) the Lakers butts kicking, it’s like I was in the middle of that first sellout crowd of the year. It was a pleasure to watch the next All Star Andre Iguodala completely destroying the Fakers, connecting from downtown while being fouled by Kobe Bryant (yesssssss !!!), or seeing Andre Miller taking to school the entire, sad golden-and-purple backcourt to end with 23 points + 8 assists. Damn I like this guy more and more, I knew he’s a keeper !!

If I wasn’t a proud Korver groupie I would forget to mention that he and Sam Dalembert were very effective too. But other strange things happened in this streak, in random order I would like to remind: