If we as sports fans succeed at any one feat in particular, it is that of myth making. We form narratives that call for super-powered heroes to save the game, to save the day, to save the city of suffering fans. Our compulsion with creating larger-than-life figures owes a great deal to another habit exhibited by fans of all sports: self-delusion.

We mislead ourselves all the time. We tell ourselves that changing the channel will impact the outcome of a game thousands of miles away. We swear that owners care about the fans thatpay for season tickets. On and on, such half-truths and contrived dishonesty continue.

Nowhere is this more obvious than on the subject of performance enhancing drugs and their (unquestionable) place in the games we love. For years, baseball fans acted oblivious toward the mounting validity of claims that the game was wrought with cheating.

Fans closed their eyes and covered their ears when confronted with the truth, in a feeble attempt to protect themselves from the reality that players are not righteous demigods who are pure of heart and without fault. They are not immaculate. They are not incorruptible.

Baseball fans have tried to protect themselves from this truth. NFL fans continue to ignore the mounds of evidence pointing towards steroid abuse. The only question left to ask now is: are NBA fans doing the same thing?

It would seem to me that NBA fans everywhere have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion. Players may be deceiving them, but in reality they are only deceiving themselves if they truly believe that no one in the league is using performance enhancers. The probability that at least some players have used PEDs (specifically HGH) is too overwhelming to tune it out forever.

Certainly, I have nothing but observation and a distrusting nature that leads me to this conclusion. I have no smoking gun, no inside sources, no informant that has lead me down the rabbit hole towards this odious viewpoint.

Investigations must happen before anything can be said with any real certainty. Once the facts are had, we can distort them however we choose to. We can play them up, or set them on an angle, or misrepresent them altogether. Sourced, hard information must come before anyone is accused in earnest.

But with that said, please have a look for yourself at photographs of the body types of NBA players in the 1980s compared to those today. Hell, look at those as recently as 2000. There is a very clear trend: players are bigger, stronger, faster, and more athletic than ever before.

Look at Ben Wallace and compare him to power forwards of yesteryear: Kevin McHale, Kurt Rambis, Horace Grant. Gaze at LeBron James and appreciate that he is the size that Karl Malone was in 1998, when the Mailman was the most physically dominant power forward in the game. Examine Dwight Howard next to classic photos of Patrick Ewing and try to explain how improved weight-lifting techniques could account for such changes in growth.

Again, I am not accusing these specific players of anything. I merely use them as examples to prove my point that the public is reliving the lie it lead in 1998, when we were all so enchanted with the Chase for 62 that we never stopped to ask questions. The NBA now features the biggest, strongest athletes it has ever had, yet no one questions this.

What’s more, these athletes are recovering from injury and age in ways no one has ever seen. Procedures that once put a career in jeopardy are now relatively safe. Recovery times are accelerated ten-fold, and players that seemed on their last legs suddenly seem to be as spire, nimble, and healthy as ever. If Dwyane Wade were a baseball player and experienced the sort of career rebirth and physical rejuvenation he has this season after his shoulder and knee looked completely spent 12 short months ago, we would be suspicious. Not so with basketball.

HGH is banned by the NBA, but there is no reliable urine test to detect its presence. Billy Hunter, the NBA player’s union executive director, has said he will let never players be blood tested for HGH.
“My guys are tested enough…We don’t participate in a sport where there’s a need for human growth hormone.”
Really, Mr. Hunter? It might not be in a basketball player’s best interest to recover more quickly from injury, or to increase the density of fast-twitch muscle fiber in his legs?
HGH assists users in becoming bigger, stronger, faster while helping them recover quickly from weight preparation and the grind of continuous stress (like, perhaps, 82 games a year of profession-level basketball). While HGH is produced naturally in the pituitary gland inside the brain, using artificially high levels of the hormone will rejuvenate the body in astonishing ways, aiding healing and slowing the signs of aging.

PEDs may not help a three-point shooter with his accuracy. They may not improve his court vision. Yet it might allow him to recover more quickly from knee surgery. Or to fight off recurring back issues. Or to improve mobility and speed at an advanced age…

Yes, I am not-so-subtly raising an eyebrow at the seemingly-magical healing powers possessed by the Phoenix Suns’ training staff. Lauded as the league’s best operation, they have allowed Amare Stoudemire to recover from multiple career-threatening surgeries quickly, have strengthened Steve Nash’s ailing back considerably, have allowed Grant Hill to achieve level of sustained health he had not experienced in decades, and rejuvenated Shaquille O’Neal to a mobility and fitness level he hasn’t shown since his time as a Laker.

Where there is smoke, there needn’t be fire, but there still might be.

Mark Woods of Great Britain’s Guardian has written at length about how open the NBA’s testing system is to abuse. He has cited that David Stern does not want to conduct a “witch hunt” for players using PEDs, and that the league lags behind other operations in terms of testing and enforcement.

Stern is among those that wrongfully point out that steroids would not improve a player’s game, as the sport is more about coordination and motor skills than sheer power or force.

Yet as a certain point-power forward/linebacker in Cleveland can attest, muscle and strength equals power. To highlight what a serious advantage this is would be redundant.

It has been said that no one can wear a mask for long. Eventually, everything comes into the light, and we see things for what they truly are. If this is the case for the NBA, what is it exactly that we might see? Could it be that, in fact, we are baring witness to the greatest collection of physical specimens this or any other profession sporting league has every seen, athletes so rarely blessed with a combination of speed and brute power that they define traditional positions?

Or is something else happening here? Something darker, something that, deep down in places we don’t like to talk about, we already know if we are honest with ourselves and put aside the great myth of sport that all athletes are saints, that they are all honest, and that they are all noble.

Let it not be that our love blinds us. Let us seek the truth, whatever that may be. Perhaps there is no concealment, and all players are clean. But we must make sure. We cannot let our love for the game continue to manufacture a sense of self-delusion that everything is virtuous and reputable only to justify the trouble we take to follow basketball.

That is not fair, that is not enough. We need just the facts, not adjusted facts.

When Baron Davis opted out of his contract at the last minute late on Monday, it was a shock. It’s not often you see someone walk away from $17.8 million. When it was announced the next day that Davis has verbally agreed to join the Clippers, that was rug swept out beneath the entire franchise. In less than 24 hours the Warriors went from a team looking to rebound from a late season collapse to a franchise in turmoil.

Now all this doom and gloom speech might be a little over the top, but Warrior, fans like myself, have earned our pessimism. After a decade of poor management, awful personnel decisions, atrocious coaching, and some bad luck, the Warriors saddled with an overpaid, under performing roster that had no chance for success. But then something amazing happened, the Warriors made a trade for an all-star player, still in the prime of his career. When they made the Jackson-Harrington for Dunleavy-Murphy swap two years later, it was like they were a different team, a team that could do no wrong¹. It was Baron Davis who lead the Warriors to their first playoff appearance in 12 years, and it was Davis who was virtually unstoppable against the Mavs in the Warriors shocking upset². Davis followed up his amazing playoff performance with what might have been the best season of his career and led the Warriors to their first winning season in decades. Ironically, this season will be marked by the Warrior’s late season collapse and them missing the playoffs. The swan song for Baron in a Warrior uniform will be the second to last game of the season, where Davis sat out the entire second half.

Along with the doom and gloom of Warrior fans, there has been a fairly large amount of hyperbole concerning this deal. Chris Broussard of ESPN made a couple statements in which he seems to be swept up in the moment and not thinking clearly. First he says that the reason Baron is going to LA is $65 million, and that the Warriors didn’t come close to matching this. If Tim Kawakami is to be believed, the Warriors offered 2 years, $28 million, on top of the $17.8 million Baron would have made this year. This would put Davis at $45.8 million over the next three years, which is more money per year than his 5-year, $65 million with the Clippers, and Davis would only be 31 when the deal was over, meaning if he stays healthy, he could have another big payday. The bottom line is Davis left because he wants to play in LA. It’s his home town, and there’s little doubt in anyone’s mind that when Baron’s through with basketball he wants to move into entertainment. He’s already produced a documentary and has a Screen Actor’s Guild card. The second exercise in hyperbole by Broussard is that the addition of Davis and the return of Brand makes the Clippers a definite playoff team. Let’s not forget that this team only won 23 games last year, hasn’t actually resigned Brand yet, and is losing Corey Maggette, and, assuming Brand does come back, Baron Davis, Elton Brand, and Cuttino Mobley aren’t quite Ray Allen, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. It took 50 wins to make the playoffs in the west last year. Looking at the teams in the west the Lakers will probably be even better with Bynum back, the Hornets, Spurs, and Jazz should be just as good as last year, the Suns and Mavs might regress, but shouldn’t drop out of the playoffs, and the Rockets and Nuggets both will still be talented. Combine those 8 with Portland, who should be dramatically improved with Greg Oden playing for them, and the Clippers have a lot of work to do to be a definite playoff team.

The other end of the hyperbole spectrum is all of us doom and gloom Warrior fans. The guys at Golden State of Mind said: “Take away Baron Davis and Chris Mullin and Robert Rowell are quite possibly fielding the worst team in the league.” This is quite an overstatement. Losing Baron hurts, but this is still a team that won 48 games last year. Assuming they resign Biedrins and Ellis, they should also have plenty of cap space to get one of the big name free agents. Tim Kawakami said this roster right now for the Warriors is a 32 win team. I think this is more in line with reality, and picking up an Arenas or a Maggette can go a long way to change that.

This has been a wild 24 hours for the Warriors. Baron Davis is going south, now the question the Warriors must face is which direction are they going in?

¹Alright… so there was the Patrick O’Bryant draft in there.
²Shocking to everyone but me, who watched the Warriors beat the Mavs 4 previous times that season.

Edit: The Warriors reportedly offered Elton Brand $20 million more than the Clippers inital offer. The plot thickens.

This isn’t the first time Weezer has made a clever video- Buddy Holly, Island in the Sun, Keep Fishin’ are similarly come to mind as videos that could have taken YouTube by storm, and Undone (The Sweater Song), El Scorcho, and Hash Pipe all had great videos in their own right. Nor is this isn’t the first time Weezer has made a splash on the Internet- for a long time they have had one of the best maintained and informative web sites on the web, they have a history of releasing MP3’s of songs that are unreleased, works in progress, or old demos from projects that never turned into fruition (I have about 2 gigs of Weezer MP3’s, most of which I got from weezer.com), and Rivers Cuomo was one of the first adopters of MySpace, blogging there as far back as 2004 (back in the pre-Fox days). This video, mixed with it’s internet appeal and a forthcoming album, represents a chance for Weezer to be relevant again.

This may seem like strange statement. It could be argued that Weezer has never been more relevant. Their last album, Make Believe, went platinum. The album’s first single, Beverly Hills, was the second most downloaded song on iTunes in 2007, behind only Gwen Steffani’s “Holla Back, Girl.” The album’s third single “Perfect Situation” was the band’s most successful single to date. It hardly seems like this is a band seeking relevancy in any way, but then we remember that this is Weezer. This is the band that gave us The Blue Album and Pinkerton, horned-rimmed glasses and sweater vests. Make Believe felt like nothing more than a slap in the face to the fans who wanted songs about girls, surfing, and crappy childhood memories. Don’t get my wrong, I love Elisha Cuthbert, but what the fuck is she doing in a Weezer video? If you want any more proof that Weezer has lost it’s core audience, look no further than the nerdiest, most self-indulgent, hipster-centric music website on the internet, Pitchfork, and their scathing review of Make Believe.

That’s why this video gave all of us Weezer nerds a glimmer of hope. It showed that while they were writing shitty songs, and then caving to MTV’s pressure to make their shitty songs even shittier they might be paying attention to all the memes and lulz on the internet that we’ve been watching wondering what the fuck happened to the band that defined our junior high and high school years. Yeah, it’s all stuff that South Park already made a joke about and they didn’t push the bound and include 2 girls 1 cup or go all out and get Rick Astley, but it’s a lot better than anything off Make Believe.

A Theory

Now that the Red Album is out and I’ve listened to it a couple times, I can honestly say that it was exactly what I expected. It’s what I’ve been expecting it to be since 2005. Not because I created an expectation for this album based on Make Believe, but rather because that’s when I saw Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith. Allow me to explain this by introducing a theory:

Theory 1.1 – The Weezer-Star Wars Theory

A general observation about nature that Weezer allbums and Star Wars films tend to mimic each other in their general awesomeness, or lack of said awesomeness.

This theory, much like the theories of evolution, global warming, and plate tectonics, is based on observation and empirical data, and will probably never be rigorously proven. But much like evolution, global warming, and plate technonics, any predictions made based on this theory are almost certain to come true. After watching Revenge of the Sith, I could immediately predict that Weezers next album was going to be better than their previous two, but not quite as good as the decidedly slightly better than mediocre Green Album. I knew this because Revenge of the Sith was better than the previous two Star Wars films, but not quite as good as the decidedly better than mediocre Return of the Jedi. To help illustrate this point, I have mad charts:

Weezer albums

Star Wars films:

The simple lesson to be learned by both Star Wars and Weezer is that if your awesomeness comes from your nerdiness, once you lose your nerdiness and became mainstream and boring,  you can never completely regain your full awesomeness or nerdiness and are destined for mediocrity. In the words of Lester Bangs, actually I’m not completely sure if Lester Bangs ever said this, so in the words of the Lester Bangs written by Cameron Crowe and said by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the film Almost Famous  “You’ll meet them all again on their long journey to the middle.”

I’m probably going to ditch this theme soon. Knowing myself, I’ll probably try to make my own, despite WordPress’s huge amount of free one’s available that are better than anything I could do.

I’m not sold on the title either. But there is no denying this is one of the best moments in the history of film:

So thus starts Drinking Milkshakes. I’m sorry.