The NBA has finally decided after years of trying to be too smooth for smooth to get in touch with its inner lunatic, and we love the league for that.
This past fortnight has provided the final proof that the league has embraced the slogan "Where WTF Happens," capped off by Thursday's announcements that Ricky Rubio has decided to kindly to tell the Minnesota Timberwolves to take a hike through Are You Nuts National Park, and that Ron Artest -- honest to God, Ron Artest -- is going to become the new Trevor Ariza.
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| Just part of the wild offseason: LeBron's supporting cast now includes The Diesel. (Getty Images) |
It's like David Stern held a company picnic for all 30 teams and spiked the keg with psilocybin just to see if he could make Charles Barkley whistle in admiration. I mean, next to this, his reality show with golf pro/potential suicide Hank Haney looks like a season of Nova.
We have often suspected that the NBA had more serious rogues in the executive suites than they wanted to admit. Oh, the players were wingy enough, but the suits wanted to be considered dignified and logical and guided by economics rather than emotion.
Then the 2009 season ended, and they all dropped trough together.
OK, the Yao thing wasn't slapstick as much as it was one more bad deal in is what is becoming the Waltonesque career of the new millennium. If his career really is over because his feet could not carry him to glory, he will have the greatest what-if story in modern sports history, better than John (What If He Fought Off His Vices?) Daly and Terrell (What If He Didn't Keep Touching The Third Rail?) Owens.
But the rest of it turns into a towering monument of greed, absurdity, revenge, silliness, obstinacy, impulsiveness gone mad, and gin abuse.
Well, we're guessing that gin is involved at least peripherally in a couple of cases. The rest of it is just brain bubbles shaken to full effervescence.
And amazingly, the Knicks, your go-to team for pants-dropping hilarity, haven't done anything yet. And neither has Mark Cuban, except of course when he declared jihad on bad bloggers.
We applaud this madness, of course, because the NBA had sort of stalled in its attempts to seem like the ultra-controlled, buttoned-down indoor alternative to the NBA. The final act seemed to be Bryant's fourth ring, in which his seven layers of self-absorbed control were in full evidence from the opening round to the Finals.
But right after that, it all went to hell, with the empties flying out the driver's side.
It's hard to know when it turned, although we suspect Shaq got the party started when he decided to congratulate Kobe with one breath and decided to attack him from LeBron James' flanks with the other. It was almost as if he had declared war on sanity right then and there, and the rest of the league fell out right behind him. Like World War I with floppy shoes and drop-seat overalls.
Even if Artest is the last act for awhile (which we bet isn't so, since we still have faith in the Knicks and Cuban), this is still the kind of offseason the NBA should give us every year. They saw that Kobe was going to be the defining figure of the offseason, and decided to go Def Comedy Jam in response. And we thank them.
Until tomorrow, of course, when Dennis Rodman declares he is making a comeback -- in Oklahoma City.
Ray Ratto is a sports columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.
