Basketball
The free-agent fandango
NBA and NHL players are switching teams willy-nilly, money is flying, and in nine months it'll all mean something.
This is a great time of year. Hot weather, barbecues, kids blowing their fingers off with fireworks. And it’s always nice to be reminded how much money you don’t make when various NBA and NHL players sign contracts for figures like $65 million and $39 million and, one of my favorites, $40 million.
It’s free-agent season in the NBA and the NHL, and the personnel movement is dizzying. I can’t follow it. My approach is similar to the advice Bob Uecker gave about how to catch a knuckleball, which was to wait till it stops rolling and then pick it up. I wait till the fall and see where everyone landed.
Do I need to know before then that Baron Davis has reportedly signed with the Los Angeles Clippers? I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing around Halloween other than predicting the wrong team to win the NBA championship. What color pajamas Baron Davis is going to be wearing starting then isn’t real high on my list right now.
Finding a tourniquet for my fingers is way above it.
Davis signed the $65 million contract. It’s a five-year deal, so the average is $13 million a year. That works out to $158,536.59 per game if Davis plays in every one, which if he does would be a bigger upset than the Clippers winning four straight championships to one-up the Lakers.
I like to break down these monstrous numbers every once in a while to really get a handle on how big they are, because being sports fans we get inured to numbers like 65 million. We start talking about how the local team can get this or that player “cheap,” which in the NBA might mean $7 million or so, and I think we forget what an incredible number 7 million is, even though most of us don’t have to think too hard to realize we’ll never make that many dollars in our lifetimes.
So Davis’ reported average salary for the Clippers over the next five years will be $3,302.85 per minute, even the ones he spends on the bench, or on the sideline. And that’s about $55 a second. Two-tenths of a second left in the quarter? The Clippers won’t be able to catch and shoot. They can only score on a tip-in. And in the time it takes the ball to travel the few inches from a player’s fingertips to the basket, Baron Davis will make 11 bucks.
Not begrudging anybody anything here. Just marveling.
Elton Brand has opted out of his contract with the Clippers and will test free agency, but if he resigns with the team, and Davis stays healthy for the second time in the last seven years, it’s a legitimate playoff contender.
And the playoffs start in only nine months!
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com. Facebook / Twitter / Tumblr More King Kaufman.
The futile search for meaning in “Linsanity”
Real fans aren't shocked at the sight of an Asian-American star. The hype is just New York being New York
(Credit: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz) About two weeks ago, my son asked me how a team with an imposing lineup like the New York Knicks could possibly have a losing record. “Because they have no point guard,” I said. They played like strangers. Either nobody wanted the ball or everybody did. Long intervals would pass without the Knicks putting up a decent shot — although being NBA players they often made enough bad ones to stay close.
Well, as the world knows, they have a point guard now. The feel-good story of Jeremy Lin, the underdog Chinese-American player from Harvard, has made NBA fans of millions who scarcely know the 24-second clock from a goaltending call. Here’s hoping they stick around, because it’s a heck of a show. Meanwhile, how about if we dialed down the ethnic sensitivity meter until the kid settles in?
Continue Reading CloseArkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons.
What everyone gets wrong about Jeremy Lin
The NBA star does not transcend race. Instead of upending stereotypes, he owns them -- unapologetically
Jeremy Lin (Credit: Reuters/Adam Hunger) Last week, I wrote a Salon essay about my experiences with racial bullying growing up in northern Minnesota; particularly, a pair of girls who decided to sing “ching-ching-a-ling” and pull their eyes into slits when they saw me in seventh-grade gym class. It was painful to write, and — from the responses I received — pretty painful to read, especially by anyone who had experienced bullying. Thus, it felt almost as if counteracting forces in the universe were acting to promote Jeremy Lin’s farm-team-to-bench-to-global-superstar ascent in the basketball world. Finally! Being Asian American was cool, not something to be bullied over.
Continue Reading CloseMarie Myung-Ok Lee’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and she is regular contributor to Slate. She is the author of the novel Somebody’s Daughter and teaches creative writing at Brown University. Find her on Twitter @MarieMyungOkLee and on Facebook. More Marie Myung-Ok Lee.
David Brooks: “I have heard of Jeremy Lin”
Is it an "anomaly" for a professional athlete to be religious? (No)
David Brooks David Brooks had to write a column about something, and his deadline was fast approaching, so he glanced at the sports page and saw something about New York Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin, and he was like, yeah, that works. Next stop, most-emailed list!
Lin is a point guard who rocketed to near-instant celebrity when he came off the bench and had a series of monster games, dragging the Knicks to a .500 record while their two biggest superstars were sitting out games. His celebrity then became a “mania” in part because he’s Asian-American and a Harvard graduate, two rarities in the NBA. It also obviously doesn’t hurt that he plays for the dominant team in the nation’s biggest media market (also it’s the fallow period between football and baseball). That’s basically the whole deal, and if you’d like to learn more read Andrew Leonard’s account of the early social media explosion and Alexander Chee’s take on Lin and Asian-American identity. Whatever you do, don’t read David Brooks’ take on the Lin phenomenon, because David Brooks doesn’t understand basketball or social media or race or religion or American society in general.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
Rooting for your own kind
Jeremy Lin shows that we like to cheer for people who look like us -- and there's nothing wrong with that
Why so excited? (Credit: Reuters/Mike Cassese) Lin-sanity has broken out all over the world. The kid nobody in the NBA wanted, from an ethnic group about as associated with the NBA as bullfighters are with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, had just broken Shaquille O’Neal’s league record for the most points in his first five games as a starter. Adoring fans are holding up signs saying “To Lin-finity and beyond.” The Lin-ternet has broken under the strain of millions of tweets, many of them featuring even worse puns than “Lin-ternet.” Sports Illustrated put him on its cover.
Continue Reading CloseGary Kamiya is a Salon contributing writer. More Gary Kamiya.
The Jeremy Lin show
America's conversation about race has been mostly black and white. An amazing Knicks point guard changed that
Fans of Jeremy Lin hold up signs during the second half of the New York Knicks/Toronto Raptors game on Tuesday. (Credit: Reuters/Mike Cassese) I have never cared about basketball, ever. Not once. Yet inside of the last two weeks I have learned what a point guard is, what he does and why it matters. I had a roller-coaster night Saturday, when I wanted to watch a New York Knicks game for the first time, then learned that a squabble between Madison Square Garden and Time Warner has left about 1 million fans without MSG Channel (including me). I didn’t even know how to start finding a bar with the game on — something I’ve previously resented, in fact — so I contented myself by watching the video diaries on Lin’s YouTube channel.
Alexander Chee's essays have appeared at The Paris Review Daily, The Morning News, n+1 and Granta. He is the author of the novel Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. Find him on Twitter @alexanderchee, on Facebook, or at his blog, Koreanish. More Alexander Chee.
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