U MAD, ADRIAN?

On Tuesday night a shorthanded New York Knicks team lost 96-93 to go down 0-2 in their first round playoff series against the Boston Celtics.  The Knicks had to play the entire game without Chauncey Billups and a majority of the game without Amar’e Stoudemire

If you were wondering how the Knicks were able to keep the game so close without the services of Billups and Stoudemire, look no further than Carmelo Anthony’s stat line: 42 points, 17 rebounds and 6 assists.

If you are a sane, rational person you will probably look at that stat line and say, “Wow, Carmelo really played great!  He sure did his best to help his team win!”

If you are somewhat insane and brutally illogical, however, you probably have a lot in common with Yahoo Sports columnist Adrian Wojnarowski.

 "Where's my oat meal! I've got a column
to write!"

Following Tuesday night’s game, Wojnarowski penned this column, which I like to imagine was written on a roll of toilet paper in between bare-handed bites of cold oat meal and shouting matches with disembodied voices.

In his column Wojnarowski argues that ‘Melo in fact failed his team on Tuesday night, first by making wrong decisions on the court, and second by offending some kind of imaginary honor code during his post game press conference.

Wojnarowski begins by taking aim at ‘Melo’s apparently bankrupt soul:

“Once again, he still doesn’t understand that a superstar’s code calls for different disposition when a losing playoff night is over. Whatever he’s done, it isn’t enough. Let everyone else praise you, but the superstar doesn’t take bows when his team is down 2-0 in a series where he ended one game missing 10 of 11 shots.”

It’s hard to imagine a more quintessential example of sports writing hackery than the invocation of the “superstar’s code,” which Wojnarowski claims that ‘Melo violated by not brow-beating himself during his postgame press conference.

Wojnarowski wanted ‘Melo to act a certain way during his press conference, and the fact that he didn’t does not make him a bad person, it just gives Wojnarowski a reason to be a nattering twit.

In Wojnarowski’s world, ‘Melo’s comments were proof that he does not grasp the “superstar’s code,” which is itself a meaningless, abstract ideal that is the construction of curmudgeonly sports writers who want desperately for the games they write about to mean whatever the hell it is they want them to mean.

There is no such thing as the “superstar’s code.”  There is no governing law of basketball that demands that players of a certain skill level conduct themselves in a way that sports writers deem acceptable. 

I’d wager that if you asked Wojnarowski what the “superstar’s code” was he’d just babble something similar to, “GURGLE…Larry Bird...GURGLE, GURGLE…Michael Jordan!  Team Play…GURGLE…ULTIMATE SACRIFICE!”

It’s not real; it’s a fucking figment of the collective imagination of a bunch of self-righteous dudes with lap tops.

So to sum up, Wojnarowsk is mad at Carmelo Anthony for making an imagined slight against an imagined code of conduct.  Seems reasonable.

Once he’s done gnashing his teeth over ‘Melo’s post game comments, Wojnarowski goes on to have a hissy fit over ‘Melo’s decision to pass the ball to a wide open teammate in the final moments of the game.

Down 94-93 on his team’s final possession, ‘Melo received the inbounds pass near the elbow and was quickly double teamed by the Celtics.  ‘Melo quickly passed the ball to Jared Jeffries, who was wide open under the basket, who then decided to try and pass the ball to a cutting Bill Walker rather than taking a shot.  Jeffries pass was intercepted by a rotating Kevin Garnett, and the game was essentially over.

Wojnarowski thinks that this sequence is evidence that ‘Melo is a coward and a big fat dummy.  Of course he does:

"...he made the safest possible play to ultimately deflect criticism, the one that deep down he knew would free him of blame when it predictably crumbled."

I can barely even stand to address this statement, wherein Wojnarowski is essentially claiming that ‘Melo's decision to pass the ball to a WIDE OPEN teammate in the waning seconds of a close game was not a basketball decision, but rather a PR decision.  I think the intense idiocy in such an assumption is pretty self-evident and does not really need to be parsed out, but yeah, it’s really stupid to say something like that.

Which brings us to Part II of Stupidest Thing Written in this Batshit Column, in which Wojnarowski claims that Jeffries failure to lay the ball up or make a clean pass to Bill Walker is somehow ‘Melo’s fault.

“When the ball leaves your hands for Jeffries, what he does with it is your responsibility. That’s how it works…Melo needed to let everyone else celebrate this magnificent performance and hold himself to a higher standard, a superstar’s standard. And that isn’t going, ‘Hey, I gave the ball to a lousy player, who made a lousy decision so how’s that on me?’”

Look!  It's Jared Jeffries!

Oh, ok.  So instead of defending his decision to pass the ball during his press conference, ‘Melo should have said something like, “Yeah, it’s totally my fault that Jeffries didn’t lay that ball in.  I should have known better than to pass it to a worthless piece of shit like that.  In fact, I’m surprised the mongoloid didn’t just drop to the floor and start dry humping the basketball right there!  Next time I’ll be sure to shoot over the double team.”

I wonder which clause of the “superstar’s code” that would fall under?

The simple truth is that ‘Melo made a routine basketball decision.  He was double teamed, and his teammate was wide open under the basket, thus giving him what appeared a better chance at scoring than ‘Melo had.  There is nothing inherently wrong with ‘Melo’s split-second decision to pass the ball, things just didn’t work out the way he had hoped they would.  Sometimes in life and in sports things just don’t work out, and we don’t always have to go searching for some greater meaning in these moments.

Which is really what’s so aggravating about Wojnarowski’s column.  He can’t just let the game be, he has to go digging within its crevices in search of some sort of revelation with which he can construct a narrative about ‘Melo’s shortcomings as a person and as a basketball player; and when there was no meaning or revelation to be found, he made one up.

Maybe, just maybe, there really isn’t anything to be said about this particular game other than a very good basketball player played very well in a very exciting basketball game that his team ultimately lost.

That's a column I would like to read.

Feel free to contact the author of this post at leyt345 at gmail dot com