Lombardi's_kid_brother

I forget where I heard it, but someone pointed out that this is no longer just among active players. Kobe was not involved at all with the Lakers and went several years without going to games until his daughter apparently expressed an interest in it. But it seems like every player in the league had had a conversation with him in the last three years. In the old days, Magic and Bird had to become coaches or executives after they retired to maintain an influence. Now, it seems like there are dozens if not hundreds of informal advisors all over the place driving the culture. My theory is that this is why the NBA in the 90s got weird for a while. Bird, Magic, Jordan etc grew the game and made everyone rich. And then the Colemans, Webers, and all the 18 year olds came into this Candyland where teams still only had two or three assistants and the old guard was not interested in mentoring anyone. I imagine any young player who reached out to surly competitive psychos like Bird, Jordan, or Isiah were either told to F off or had some weird psychological game played on them. Magic was the one guy who sorta set the template, but he's Magic so he always wanted to give his advice on camera somewhere and possibly have it sponsored. I think Lebron probably carves out an hour a day simply to text "Keep Working" to 50 different guys, probably going into the high school ranks at this point. And this is why you can never really stop Super Teams and stuff like that. If you and I had played against each other in AAU, had been seated in the green room together on draft night, texted three times a day, and trained with each other in the summer. Eventually, one of us is going to say, "Hey....we should team up and take over the league."

Nothing. This is a bad idea.

Life is weird. As I was eating breakfast yesterday, I wasn't thinking, "Lamar Odom is going to make my wife cry in the next 24 hours." Also, has anyone checked on Meta?

By the way, the path to NBA greatness now seems to go through the Olympic team. With Kobe's death, all the stories are coming out about how Lebron, Wade, and their peers spent a summer with Kobe with realized what they had to do in practice/training. Zion will get his summer with Lebron, and if he's smart, he will show up to the next training camp in the best shape of his life. Zion has rolled out of bed and been twice as good as everyone he has ever played with his entire life. Even at Duke. That's probably still the case to some degree in New Orleans. But the cool thing about the modern NBA is that all these guys know each other and practice together in the off-season. He'll get his Oympic team experience. He'll get his summer in LA with Kawhi, And he'll learn hopefully. I honestly think that the NBA culture has evolved to a point where the Derrick Colemans of the world really don't exist any longer. Even someone as great as Barkley....you wonder...what would his career have been like if he spent a summer playing pickup against Bird and Magic instead of, I dunno, eating pork rinds and watching Mama's Family. And I think all these guys are aware of this. You know Lebron James has spent every moment of the last 12 years or so pondering his "legacy." He absolutely is picturing a moment when he hands the Finals MVP trophy to Zion in 2030, and Zion says, "That summer in Tokyo with this man is really what made all of this possible" while Lebron does the whole "Pass on what you have learned, young man" routine.

My daughter went to Harden's basketball camp a few years ago. And to his credit, he was there for every minute of it and was running drills with the kids. He would also do something insanely athletic every 15 or 20 minutes just to keep their interest. Point being, NBA players in real life are difficult to process. You look at Harden on the court, and he seems like an average-sized dude who seems slightly out of shape next to everyone else. You stand next him by a water fountain and he is one of the largest human beings you have ever encountered, seems as wide as he is tall, and even through a t-shirt seems like a fitness model.

I was thinking about this last night. What made Kobe fascinating was how legitimately odd he was. Most black NBA stars are not relatively privileged teenagers who grew up overseas and spoke multiple languages. He was weirdly uncool. Except he had a single-minded drive and focus where he decided that the culture would accept him as cool. His nickname is the great example of this. How many NBA veterans suddenly announce to the world that he has given himself a new nickname? And one stolen from a movie at that. I was way into the baskeball blogosphere when that happened, and everyone found it hysterical. And yet, slowly over time, we all not only accepted "Mamba," we embraced it. Because unlike a million other celebrities, Kobe was not going to back down to the jokes. When the news came across my phone yesterday, my first thought was "Mamba, no!!!" I have a daughter Gigi's age, and the most fun I have with her is sports tournaments. She's quirky and is now way into archery. She and I are going to College Station next weekend for a tournament. If something would happen to us on the way, my wife would mourn me, but she would never get over the loss of our daughter. I can't imagine what Vanessa Bryant is going through now.

When's Season 9?

A casino/stadium combination is not the craziest idea I've ever heard. I do find it hard to believe that the NFL has already signed off on this though. I guess it also triggers the question, "How many gambling options does the DC/Baltimore region need?"

I like it. The one thing this team has not had is a major child abuse scandal.

Shoulda hired Norv.

We are going into a draft with a front office that is probably going to be fired after the draft. Perfectly normal.

Up front, Rivera is a quality person and a pretty good coach. So this is no criticism of him. As always with the Redskins, it's the way things are done, not what is ultimately done. And this feels a little Zorn-ish right now. In that instance, Dan went out and hired coordinators before he had a coach in place. So that was weird. In this case, it seems like we have a staff without a front office in place. And we're not going to sort that out until later. What does that? To me, it means that after arguably the worst season in a pretty miserable 20 year run, Dan still doesn't know what he actually wants the team to look like or how he wants it to function. "Well, we'll figure out this other stuff later." The number one problem in this organization in every era has always been a lack of accountability. Even under Gibbs, there was always this debate of "Who signed that guy?" where sometimes we would be hearing, "Well, Greg Williams is responsible for that dude being here" or "Bugel wanted him" or whatever. It just seems that we are still in a situation where whoever the person who hangs out with Dan the most is going to be the person making all the big decisions. And we may not even hire that person until the summer.

Has no one replaced Harry Dean Stanton's head with Norv Turner's in that scene from Red Dawn? Avenge me!!!

You don't go 1-15 and then hand the team over Teddy Bridgewater.

Complete Tight Ends don't see free agency. They are just way too valuable right now.