Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1699

The Suns
Earl Clark has been sent to the D-League. This is really good because he'll get more playing time there. Hopefully he'll come back with more awesomeocity. It's also cool, because my Earl Clark-fan friend can see him play online, if she wants to.

New JMZ video! I'd like to find video of his dunk. But so far I've come up empty.

I did find this though:


And speaking of video, I'm waiting on video from this.

Other NBA news
It appears that his PR team finally got through to Gilbert Arenas.

WNBA
I never thought of stats as something that were exclusively the providence of men's basketball. Apparently I'm not alone on that, but I am in a very small group of people.

Today marks two months until the start of the WNBA season. It's also 24 days before the draft. So here are two mock WNBA drafts. They both have the Mystics taking a big post presence, which I think would be a great thing. They don't agree on which on, so I guess we'll see.


The Mystics
Last year the Mystics gave a lot of lip service to "creating a culture of winning." I think they got a great start on it, but in case you were wondering what it meant, Swish Appeal is here to help.

The DC Basketcases posted an entry on Saturday that was mostly about the Shock signing Marion Jones but also talked about tomorrow's press conference.

They seem to agree with my theory of it being Katie Smith. My favorite reason is that this picture:












is an awful lot like this one:

Them young girls they do get weary, wearing that same old shaggy dress

In the aftermath of the second and third dunks in a WNBA regular season game, I've been thinking about the reaction of (most of) the (male dominated) media a bunch. So I wrote up (what turned out to be) an angry rant, and thought I'd post it.

First of all, if you watch a basketball game without any dunks and don't enjoy it *because* of the lack of dunking, you don't actually like basketball at all. You should be watching And 1, or better yet, nothing but dunk contests.

If you are among those complaining that the league sucks because they don't dunk? You have no place complaining that they should treat Candace Parker's dunks as a matter of course. That dunking regularly "is how it should be, and shouldn't be celebrated." I have two things to say about this pattern of complaint: a) you will never be happy with women playing pro-ball, and b) people who claim that dunks=enjoyable basketball are *the main reason* that the WNBA and its fans celebrated these dunks (and in part Candace Parker's presence in the league) as a milestone.

You helped set the bar. Many of you are members of the media, and you used that power to help put forth the opinion that basketball needs dunks to be exciting and worth watching. Never mind that this opinion shows a lack of interest in the game itself (regardless of gender). If that's what it apparently takes to make the game more interesting to watch, *of course* the WNBA is going to celebrate Candace Parker's recent dunks.

You can't have it both ways.