Photo by Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images

Ugh, Shaq. By now, you’ve almost certainly read his latest stupid attempts to needle Dwight Howard, saying it would be a “travesty” if Howard left Orlando. Which is immediately ridiculous, because, you know … Shaq did that.

I’m not the first person commenting on this story, but this latest little whine has taken my Shaq hate to new levels. I’ve never enjoyed Shaq because I can’t stand his constant insecure posturing, his disingenuous media manipulation or his inability to coexist with anybody taking even a modicum of attention from him. But for some reason, I really think the casual fan is still fooled by Shaq’s act — I find it impossible to believe that anybody in 2012 thinks Shaq is actually an enormous jokester who just can’t help shooting straight, but it seems as if a lot of folks still think that. It’s baffling.

I find Shaq’s fascination with Dwight doubly frustrating because it’s just so obvious how threatened Shaq feels by Dwight, which is ridiculous. Look, I love Dwight, and he’s a more balanced player than Shaq ever was, not to mention an even more incredible athlete than young Shaq, but he’s clearly not currently as effective as Shaq was in his prime. Again, I am definitely NOT saying that Dwight isn’t an historically effective player, but good God, you guys remember what Shaq was capable of, right?

For him to spend his retirement trying to distance himself from every talent who also draws media attention is pathetic, and it makes me wonder what the appeal of Shaq’s persona is. Seriously — what about Shaq as an image or personality has grown his fan base? He doesn’t “just win;” he constantly ran his mouth and was frequently out of shape or clearly not trying. His biggest single advantage — being an enormous human — isn’t something you can seem to cultivate by scheduling post-loss shooting sessions in opponent’s gyms.

In fact, it seems like Shaq is at least as insecurely image conscious as LeBron, as periodically lazy as Rasheed Wallace and as preternaturally gifted as any one ever. Isn’t that the recipe for people seriously hating an athlete? Didn’t he play for like 13 teams in the last 3 years of his career? Isn’t he the single worst and least funny television analyst on an otherwise entertaining and insightful show? What is going on here?

I guess I’m willing to fall back on the standard explanation of the viewing public conflating decency as a human with the ability to win basketball games, but it seems like Shaq would’ve done more than enough to undermine that. I’m actually a little puzzled by this. Why don’t more people hate Shaq?

INTERMISSION

Bonus footage of Magic Shaq stomping on Tokyo, shaping whole worlds in the chaos of his wake.

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Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images

Well, that does it, y’all. I’m officially terrified to write anything about this year’s Magic team. Seriously. They win five straight games and I write about how hopeful I am? Time to lose four straight! If I despair over the losses and the obvious roster shortcomings? Let’s beat the best team in the league! At this point, I’m like Cool Hand Luke toward the end of the movie, sobbing at Dwight Howard’s feet and begging him to please not hit me again.

It’s impossible not to be made to look silly about this team. Keeping this in mind, I rewatched the Heat game from Wednesday night, to try and decide whether that win was representative of the season — volatile, highly variant, ultimately winning brand of basketball — or an outlier, the product of guys simply getting hot at the right times.

I gathered the high school debate team that I keep in my basement, posed them this question, and what follows is the transcript. The affirmative side is represented by a likeable multicultural team captained by an attractive and cheerful girl who has gained early entry to Wesleyan for cultural studies. The negative side is a bunch of sneering Aryan Draco types who will be finance majors at Brown.

OPENING STATEMENT: THE ORLANDO MAGIC ARE NOT BASICALLY CRAPPY; THEIR VICTORY OVER THE MIAMI HEAT WAS REPRESENTATIVE OF THEIR TEAM QUALITY

Affirmative opening statement: No less a poet than Nelson Mandela once observed that Twitter and a 24-hour news cycle have completely warped sports fans’ perspective and expectations. Whereas random variance and occasional losses once were processed semi-rationally (in every market outside of New York), the speed at which commentary moves now demands fans make opinions after every game — thus, every win guarantees a championship and every loss a failure.

The second quarter of the Miami game on Wednesday showed that, even with obvious roster shortcomings, the Magic have assembled enough talent to compete with anyone in the league. They scored their points on either excellent perimeter ball movement or as the product of outworking the other team in the post. They were able to absorb the impact of their recently porous defense, allowing Dwyane Wade 500,000 points on unmolested layups, and still win. Their greatest advantage, Dwight Howard, was both productive in himself and as a means of drawing attention from other players, resulting in excellent spacing and a metric ton of rebounds.

The above stated facts have led me to conclude that the Orlando Magic are not basically crappy, and that their victory over the Miami Heat was representative of their team quality.

Negative opening statement: I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said that even a broken clock is wrong twice a day.

We have long known the Magic can shoot well enough on any given night to beat a good team, but their method is simply not sustainable without more talent. Magic fans’ hopes rest on Ryan Anderson, who looks like a waterlogged Ben Affleck. Even if the team can occasionally catch lightning in a bottle, it’s foolish to have any long-term hopes for this team, because Dwight Howard is an enormous fickle infant, and unless the Magic reconciles itself to its essential crappiness, it will not rebuild enough to make up for the inevitable loss of Dwight Howard.

Affirmative rebuttal: People who refer to the Magic with singular possessives are intellectualy insecure twits. Ryan Anderson does not look like Ben Affleck.

Negative rebuttal: He does. He really does. If you made a moon bounce version of Ben Affleck or one of those sponge creations that children add water to to make enormous superhero-type deals, but if it was Ben Affleck. It should also be said that Otis Smith is still the general manager in Orlando, for whatever that’s worth.

Negative closing statement: Jason Richardson starts for the Orlando Magic. Chris Duhon plays for the Orlando Magic. There is no backup center, except for occasional minutes from Glen Davis. Anderson, the team’s second-best player, might actually be slower than most spry cater-waiters. It is obvious the Magic are sort of crappy.

Affirmative closing statement: We are forced to basically concede that the Magic, as presently constructed, are sort of crappy. We understand that Jason Richardson plays as if he literally does not have knees, but rather straight and frail rods for legs, like fluorescent tubes. We understand that Chris Duhon, during the start of the Magic’s run on Wednesday, literally dribbled into a crowd of three Heat players seemingly out of sheer will, before unaccountably hurling the ball straight into the backcourt. We are forced to confront that Hedo Turkoglu alternately looks like a genius or a lazy uncle who will not put down his Po Boy to hand you the remote.

However, they do still have enough talent which is used uniquely enough to win against anybody when they catch a ton of breaks. The Magic are a good team. Or, at least, to actually quote actual Ernest Hemingway: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

VERDICT: Those kids in the negative are SO POMPOUS! Affirmative wins, though it be added to the resolution that Ryan Anderson does look like a very meaty Ben Affleck.

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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

I’m sure you guys care an awful lot, but after weeks of deliberation I have decided that I am in fact going to watch the Super Bowl. It’s not merely that two of my four least favorite teams are playing, it’s just that over the past year, I’ve lost most of my love for any football game in which the Packers don’t play.

The NFL has become such a bloated procession of hypocrites and idiots that I sort of feel forced to stop watching. If you’re going to just troll the bejeezus out of me with continuing excessive idiocy, at some point, I have to stop proving you right about how much viewers will tolerate garbage being stuffed down their throat, you know?

I’ve always hated the announcers, but John Gruden constant referring to every player with a preceding “this” (“This Jason Pierre-Paul is really special” or “If you’re coaching Joe Flacco, you have to tell him to explain that facial hair”) has taken my rage to new levels.

The video replays are maddening; there is no more intellectually stultifying way to spend three minutes than staring at a referee’s butt while former professional idiots on the other side of the split screen spend four minutes going over a touchdown catch like a crime scene.

I hate how the football media so relentlessly drums up faux masculine outrage — I know we’re all “warriors” or whatever, but not even a literal bantam rooster would be so insecure as to care what fat Rex Ryan said about them for the 374th straight week.

Finally, the league’s hypocrisy over player health has become too much for me. They care so much about player safety that they want to add regular season games! And it’s not that football is systemically violent as a product, it’s just that a few angry dudes break rules at a faster rate than we can fine them! I will stick to basketball, thank you very much, where we are blessedly free of racially driven policy controversies and commissioner fans accuse of rigging the outcome of league events.

So basically, I’m watching because the people in my life already think I’m enough of a tendentious prick. I heard on the radio today that not only will Kelly Clarkson be singing the national anthem, but that something called a Blake Shelton will be singing “America the Beautiful” and I thought to myself “Thank God I won’t be watching.” And then the face of everybody I’ve known since high school appeared in my vision and said “Dude, it’s the Super Bowl. You really are always like this, aren’t you?”

So I will watch and hope that everybody on the field but Hakeem Nicks is killed in a fan riot over a forty minute replay review.

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It’s time to have a society intervention, friends. A sickness has blossomed into an epidemic, and unless we do something, it may become a permanent problem. I’m talking about “S**t Girls Say” and all of the spinoff videos that have forced me to unsubscribe to otherwise decent friends on Facebook. The first one, very funny. But it wasn’t funny because it was ludicrously overspecific, self-referential and had a narrow appeal. In fact, NOTHING IS FUNNY FOR THOSE REASONS. THEY ARE THE REASONS THINGS ARE UNFUNNY. The first video succeeded because that guy was such a talented comic actor.

After that? I chortled at “S**t Black Girls Say.” I grudgingly clicked on “S**t White Girls Say to Black Girls.” Now? S**t Bartenders Say? S**t People Say to People With Tattoos? I swear to God somebody asked me last weekend if I had seen “S**t Gay Guys Say to Their Cats.” Because I have not watched it, I assume gay guys talk to their cats the same way I do. I do not talk to my cat about being straight, I talk to him about whether he wants some kibble and why he has crapped all over the mat in front of his litter box. “Hey, Bojangles, I sure love women, and I sure don’t have quips about clothing products,” is a sentence I have never spoken.

Together, friends, we can end this, and we can go back to a world where really dumb Ryan Gosling tumblrs are the only stupid meme. He is very, very handsome, everybody, but Typography Ryan Gosling is not funny.

My cat’s name really is Bojangles, and he is obese. Gradually, Magic Basketball readers, I reveal little slivers of my life as we grow more comfortable with one another.

GAME OF THE WEEK

Celtics 91, Magic 83
Boy, it sure is a good thing I didn’t publicly write that I was willing to excuse Monday’s suckfest because the Magic seemed so resilient. It suuuure is a good thing I did not publicly state that I was starting to believe in the Magic’s fortitude and chemistry. It SURE. IS. A. GOOD. THING. That the Boston Celtics did not win without Rajon Rondo TWICE IN ONE WEEK. My trying to stay objective about the Magic is not because of ethics, it’s because I hate them and they are stupid every time I try and think otherwise.

INTERMISSION

A MOUSE SNORING. OH MY GAHHHHHH!!11

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AP Photo/Charles Krupa

Ah, last week, ‘twas so very long ago. Back in those distant, sunnier times, the Magic were as foals, tottering around in the warming naivete of the new season, kicking their legs and just beginning to grasp their potential as thoroughbreds. It was in those carefree days that J.J. Redick told the Orlando Sentinel, “I like our team. We have a chance to be the best team I’ve been on in my six years with the Magic.” It was a lovely thought, the hopefulness of youth giving itself full, gilded voice until, on Monday night, the Magic played the worst offensive game of the franchise’s history. And now, a week after Redick uttered those charming, misguided words, we know in the harsh glare of hindsight that he might actually be right?

Readers of mine here at Magic Basketball will know that I have been wary of this team from the jump. Astute ones might even accuse me of severe, myopic grouchiness. I wrote at the start of the season that I didn’t think this team could surprise me. I wrote as late as last week that I still think the Magic are better off trading Dwight. My idea was that I was wisely insulating my rationality from my fannish impulses, and that years of organizational incompetence would force the other shoe to drop. I’m not writing today to fully reverse course — my pride prevents such a thing — but the past week has shown me some new things about this team, things I ordinarily don’t even look for as a viewer.

First, we have to discuss Monday night’s game. As one shot after another bricked off against Boston, I was watching with the same sort of morbid self-satisfaction an engineer might feel when he watches a shoddy bridge collapse. All of the conventional wisdom about the team seemed to be coalescing into a dispiriting beat down; I was prepared for days of internet commenters caps-shouting LIVE BY THE THREE, DIE BY THE THREE and talking about how this team isn’t tough because Dwight Howard isn’t tough, and so on and so on.

At around the third quarter, I was ready for every nonsense piece I thought I’d read about the next day, such as “Does Dwight smile too much?” or “Can Dwight ever play with enough of an edge to become really elite?” What I’m saying is, it was an emotionally fraught loss, because it seemed like the worst-case scenario we all could have seen coming was finally happening. The Magic were in a crowded part of their schedule, and the strength of the opposition up to that point had inflated the quality of the team. By the final horn, I was expecting that all of my worst predictions were coming true. But that’s the thing about this sardine can of a season. A single week contains about a twelfth of the team’s total schedule, and assumptions can be challenged pretty quick.

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Photo by Rocky Widner/NBAE via Getty Images

Today is a happy day for me, the culmination of a dream I’ve had lo these many weeks. Or two weeks. This is the week, dear readers, when you stepped up to the plate and offered me not two, not even three, but no fewer than FIVE emails to answer. So dedicated am I to encouraging y’all to participate in the majesty that is Magic Basketball Weekly, I will address all of the emails I received. Which is to say that I will skip my weekly rant to open the column and I will delve right into games of the week.

GAMES OF THE WEEK

Nuggets 108, Sixers 104
Wizards 105, Thunder 102
Spurs 85, Magic 83
I am the cheapest person in the entire world, and for this reason, purchasing NBA League Pass for the first time this season was like getting a volunteer colonoscopy, especially given the fact that it was NOT DISCOUNTED AT ALL for the shortened season. All that said, on Wednesday night, I watched, within five minutes of each other, three of the most exciting finishes so far of the season. It ruled, and it was completely worth getting League Pass. Let me also say this: it completely sucks that the Magic did not beat the Spurs, but I am the sort of rationalizing, mincing, emotionally weak fan who consoles themselves by saying: “If it was that close on the third night of a back-to-back-to back without Turkoglu, I’ll take it!” See? Moral victories! There’s a reason we give them to six year olds!

Jazz 106, Nuggets 96
I feel like the Jazz are trolling me. I hate them. I always have. They are boring and they have a dumb name and for a billion years they had the boringest coach who has ever lived. I can not disassociate the Jazz from decades of hearing television honkeys bloviating about RESPECTING THE GAME every time Jerry Sloan’s crooked nose was shown. I don’t know why they can’t just go away and start sucking like logic says they should. Almost nobody on their team is good, and watching Raja Bell play basketball is like the first time you see your dad being unable to open a pickle jar. It’s depressing. You want me to talk about how much of a mouth breather Enes Kanter is? No. I won’t, because they don’t deserve this much thought. Go away, the Jazz, because you’re pretty decent.

Rockets 90, Hornets 88
I guess I have no idea what the appropriate three letter abbreviation/airport code deal is for New Orleans. Is it really NOLA? Isn’t that just slang for the sorts of fratdoofs who say HOTLANTA? Anyway, the Rockets are like the last good guy left in some art-house war movie, the sort of movie that sets you up for a happy ending where Mr. StrongJawButKindHeart is going to get the girl until WHAM! Right before the credits start, StrongJaw is killed, and Serbians or whoever are traipsing over his body. LIFE IS POINTLESS, THIS MOVIE IS SO SMART. That’s the Rockets.

INTERMISSION

Okay, fine. Quick rant. Dubstep sucks. I hate it. I will confess that I don’t usually get into music that is primarily experiential — i.e. more about the club than the living room hi-fi — but still. It’s sort of exactly what dorky kids who want to have a subculture where they can be cool and piss off their parents would design. WHOA BROA, SKRONKY BASS. DROP THAT SKRONKY BASS, BRUH. THEY’LL NEVER UNDERSTAND US. It isn’t even usually satisfying bass! It sounds like how when I was a little kid I used to blow into cardboard tubes and go durrdurrdurrdurr but also if somebody was trying to fix a zipper next to me doing that. Now, as always, because I am an insufferable elitist, I do have a couple of Metacritic-approved dubstep albums. Like Burial. (Srsly, guuuys, the sampling has so much organic soul behind it hurrhurrhurr). And I understand that I’m supposed to like James Blake, but that just seems like Chris Isaak with a sampler. Two first names on both of em, same pretty boy warble voice. Anyway. I hate dubstep!

Bonus stupid dubstep!

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AP Photo/John Raoux

Well, here we are. The Magic are winning, and there is no end in sight to the Dwight Howard saga. In some ways, this was the least likely scenario, as it sure seemed as if Orlando’s roster and Dwight’s disposition would make this season like getting a root canal. Such was my prediction, anyway. And yet, the Magic have continued — in some ways, rediscovered — their proficiency as a regular season team, and that is going to raise the question.

Should they keep Dwight no matter what this season?

Let me say, first off, that I’m not wondering whether Dwight Howard should choose to stay. I’m wondering whether it makes any kind of decent sense to hold on to Dwight and use the team’s current success as their best argument for keeping him. I know it’s the route a lot of fans would like to see the team go, but so far, the Magic as constructed with Dwight Howard on the team do not seem to have a compelling enough argument to risk trying this approach.

Going forward, the team’s approach with Dwight is all about risk management. Any of the popular choices — trading Howard for young players and picks, trading Howard for Andrew Bynum, holding on to him through the season — carry some risk and some reward. And of those three options, I think holding onto Howard is still the highest risk/lowest reward proposition.

With a trade for young players, the risk of a terrible team, which is high, is mitigated by the almost certain reward of stocking Orlando’s talent pool with players who will learn the game from Stan Van Gundy. With a player like Bynum, the medium risk of a bad team is offset by the reward of having gotten something back for your franchise-sized void while having the Lakers absorb a bad contract (Turkoglu). In the final scenario, the unknowable risk of Dwight’s leaving is offset, or not, by the potential reward of the team staying at its present level. Of course, the team’s present level, while enjoyable to watch on a nightly basis, is hardly worth risking having nothing to show for Howard’s departure.

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AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

Every morning on my way to work I listen to this awful local radio show called Bob and the Showgram. I think every town has one of these shows, where some fat-sounding man alternately wheezes and yells into a microphone while slack-jawed cronies occasionally pipe in with nonsense. It’s racist, homophobic, misogynistic and I CAN’T STOP LISTENING TO IT. Don’t get me twisted, it’s not that I like it — I hate it with the hot fire of a thousand hells — but for some twisted reason I can’t pry myself away.

I know that provoking me is the entire reason these fools make any money, but because I am the worst person in the entire world, I grind my teeth and white-knuckle my steering wheel every morning so that I can feel superior to these people. Which I am. I am way superior. I would enjoy the content of NPR so much more, but because of some sick pact I have with my inner loathing, and also because I have like sixty more years to wear socks and Tevas and listen to women loudly smack their lips over chanterelle mushrooms into a microphone (isn’t that what they do on NPR?), I keep listening to the Showgram.

I feel the same way about a Hack-a-Shaq or Hack-a-Dwight defense. Aside: can we never again say Hack-a-Dwight? It doesn’t even rhyme, which was the whole reason in the first place for the Hack-a-Construction. Morning shows should be fun, but Bob and his sick warped, awful cronies have made them miserable. AND YOU ARE JUST LIKE HIM, MARK JACKSON. THE DISEASE IS INSIDE YOU.

Basketball games are supposed to be a fun and acrobatic celebration of human accomplishment, and not a seven hour suckfest of me wondering why Dwight Howard can not keep his elbow at a consistent angle over his head. It becomes a reductive, Dadaist torture, wherein I am forced to contemplate an miniscule, asinine movement over and over again until I am reduced to weeping on my sofa.

Mark Jackson, you are better than this. You are supposed to be fun and wacky and sort of dumb — you are not supposed to be one of those Bellichickian win-at-all-costs bots. Basketball is a game, for entertainment, and I do not think you are as smart as Greg Popovich for fouling Dwight Howard eleventy jabillion times. The only reason I still like Popovich is because he has taken projecting misanthropy to new, hilarious levels.

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Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

If you’ve followed Orlando’s season to this point, it’s been impossible to miss the coverage of Jameer Nelson’s slump. Certainly his poor play has been noticeable on the court, but even more striking has been the differences in reaction he inspires. Some observers look at Jameer and see a solid player mired in the valley of statistical inevitability — he’s just missing shots. Other observers watch him and swear there’s something off, that he needs to attack more and look for his own shot. He’s the basketball version of that rock teachers in movies keep on their desks. You know the one that Feeney types from Boy Meets World-esque shows always have: it’s black on one side and white on the other, so two people can be adamant about seeing different colors until we ALL LEARN A LESSON ABOUT PERSPECTIVE. Or something.

This isn’t really a new phenomenon with Nelson. Magic fans have long been divided about him; one subset of fans see him as a frustrating potential engine of the team, a guy who simply needs to focus to regain his All-Star form, while another set of fans has seen him as just better than average, a solid starter but by no means somebody to carry the team. It’s unclear who is right, or whether anybody is. Is there a good Jameer or a bad Jameer? Exactly how much can we expect?

For starters, I looked a few of the numbers from Hoopdata (I would prefer to say I “crunched” some numbers, but Hoopdata pretty much just lays ‘em all out for you). I looked at his 2008-2009 pre-injury numbers and his current season numbers, using these two as his respective peak and valley. Take these with the usual sample size disclaimer, since even the ’08-’09 season was cut short for Nelson by his labrum injury. The first time I looked at the stats, it seemed like Nelson was more or less doing the same things during his best and worst times, that he was just missing shots, per Rob Mahoney’s argument. A closer look, however, reveals some telling things about the aggression of Nelson’s play.

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Sloths are my favorite animal. They have been for years. Science has shown them to be both the cutest and most bro-some of all God’s creatures. Let me hit you with some sloth facts: They grow moss on them, because they chill so hard. Sometimes, if their babies fall out of a tree or something, they just completely let it slide, because getting out of your tree would harsh everybody’s vibe.

Once, when I was at a party, this completely awesome bro came up and asked a group of my friends — he was totally earnest, and even seemed a little bit worried — if he was chilling too hard. Sloths are the James Joyce of chilling too hard. They have stretched the art form of chilling to its natural limit, and have achieved a sort of referendum on the very idea of chilling at all.

So, naturally, when I saw this adorable sloth documentary popping up on every girl I know’s Facebook wall, I was thrilled, right? Wrong. I am not looking forward to adorably disgusting sloths becoming the new lolcat. I do not want to see a bunch of sorostitutes capering about with their sloth desktop backgrounds, or see a million “Daily Cute” Twitter blasts with pictures of sloths. Keep your pandas, internet cutesy people. Take your otters. But leave me my sloths. I liked them before you. I was the first person to appreciate the cuteness of mossy, negligent animal parents. That’s right, I’m hipster trolling you about sloths. I was into them when, like, nobody knew who they were, and you’re just about to get their sell-out album.

Which is exactly how I feel about the Denver Nuggets. Listen, the Nuggets are adorable. They have a young, small point guard and an old sort of fat one who would make an excellent buddy cop movie. They have a cleaner-shaven, European Val Kilmer playing small forward. Ty Lawson and Kenneth Faried even sort of look like sloths (come with me on this, I’m not taking no for an answer). And they play such fun basketball. Oh god, they’re so fun. And, like sloths, the whole world is waking up to how awesome the Nuggets are. I’m not happy about it.

I’m not happy about the Nuggets becoming one of the hot topics for the season. Do I want to hear people for eight months yelling about how, if you adjust for pace, their defense is way better than conventional wisdom suggests? I do not. Do I want to read advanced shooting percentage breakdowns that take into account the Denver altitude? I do not. I want them to keep being the only team my girlfriend likes — because she likes the word “Nugget” and pronounces Nene’s name “ninny.” I want them to continue to play 40 players every game. I do not want their glorious ragtag weirdness to be scrutinized for effectiveness by every corner of punditry; I just want to let them keep being rad.

Like sloths, it is up in the air whether the Nuggets are the most “effective” animal when it comes to keeping your babies in trees or winning playoff games, but also like sloths, the Nuggets are willing to continue being awesome regardless. So the Nuggets are like sloths. I hear what you’re saying, though: “But the Nuggets are fast, and sloths are slow!” And to you I say, shut up. This is important to me.

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