David Stern to Kobe and LeBron: Please don’t turn your backs on me!
Like Shaq shooting free throws, NBA Commissioner David Stern is shitting a brick. All season long, it’s seemed a foregone conclusion that the renewal of the Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers rivalry last year would be followed by a marquee match-up of the league’s two biggest stars, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, in the 2009 NBA Finals. The Commish was no doubt creaming in his suit pants just thinking about it. The same goes for the folks at Nike and Vitamin Water, who’ve been churning out ads playing up the superstar showdown. That’s a lot of cream, and now somebody’s going to need to mop it all up, because Carmelo Anthony’s Denver Nuggets are knocking Kobe around in the Western Conference Finals like they want to pay him back for that Colorado rape trial and Dwight Howard’s Orlando Magic have pushed the Cavs to the brink of elimination in the East and made it look like King James got his crown from Burger King.
With a Cavaliers-Lakers Finals in doubt, the NBA suddenly has to scramble to sell alternative match-ups that are about as sexy as Chyna with a raging case of (manly) female gonorrhea. Though we enjoy seeing Puppetmaster Stern squirm when the magnets in the balls and his team of crooked refs fail to determine the outcomes of series, Complex wants other sports fans to know that all is not lost! Check out 5 awesome story lines that a commercial announcer could play up in an overly dramatic voice should LeBron or Kobe or both fail to make it to the trophy round. Keep the cream alive!
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Kobe may want to light it up, but these aren’t kind Nugs, bro.
All year, sports pundits have been predicting that the Los Angeles Lakers would repeat as Western Conference Champions. Pardon us, but Complex doesn’t wash in purple and golden showers. That’s right, Kobe Bryant’s Lake Show is about to get canceled by Carmelo Anthony’s Denver Nuggets in the NBA Western Conference Finals.
We could provide myriad basketball reasons for this “upset” in the making, like L.A.’s inconsistent soft-batch style or point guard Chauncey Billups‘ infusion of calm, clutch shooting and leadership to Denver, but we’ll leave that to the professional sports reporters. Complex’s rationale is not based on hard data or statistics or other such nonsense, but on the priceless gold nuggets we mine in our minds. We pick winners like you pick boogers, so bet that mortgage money on it by the time the Lakers and Nuggets put the tip (off) in you tonight…
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Carmelo Anthony can’t always bite his tongue when authority figures piss him off.
The Denver Nuggets have suspended star small forward Carmelo Anthony one game for an “in-game transgression” that occurred during his team’s 100-94 loss to the Indiana Pacers Sunday. The Nugs won’t say exactly how Melo transgressed, but Rex Chapman, vice president of player personnel, had this to say Monday: “There is a code of conduct that we take very seriously, especially from a leader and co-captain. Carmelo knows this and regrets what happened. He is a very competitive person and made a poor decision in the heat of the moment.”
We think what Chapman meant to say, if initial reports are to be believed, is that coach George Karl tried to pull Melo out the game and the Olympian with the gold medal essentially told him to fuck off by refusing to leave the court. If this is the case'and when has the rumor mill ever been wrong?'it’s just the latest instance of an NBA player openly defying his coach in the middle of a game. For more of these classic power struggles, check out Complex’s five most memorable acts of in-game NBA insubordination…
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