Orlando Magic fans have had it pretty good lately. Last year, Dwight Howard led the team to a Eastern Conference Championship before losing to Kobe’s crew. This year, they picked up Vince Carter and have started the season with a 9-3 record making them the third best team in the Eastern Conference. To us, it’s starting to feel like ‘94 again, which brings us to today’s Buy It Now: A vintage New Era fitted that features the Orlando Magic alternate away logo from their Penny and Shaq era. If they keep it up, maybe future fans will reminisce on the Dwight and Jameer era. We’ll see. Keep reading for a detail shot and info on where to buy it now…
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It’s kinda fitting how the covers for the two major NBA video games worked out this year. 2K Sports recruited Kobe Bryant—he of the defending champion L.A. Lakers—to rep for NBA 2K10. As for NBA Live 10? Well, EA Sports enlisted Orlando Magic forward Dwight Howard, the star of last year’s NBA bridesmaids. And that about sums up the state of the competition between the two franchises in 2009-10. The 2K series has dominated basketball gaming for almost the entire decade, while Live has struggled to keep pace.
But don’t count Live out just yet—EA has essentially acknowledged the weaknesses of its recent NBA offerings by proclaiming this year’s edition as the franchise’s comeback. And it looks the part: NBA Live 10 (which drops today on 360, PS3, and PSP) has been rebuilt from the floor up, with more realistic gameplay and sim features as well as “Dynamic DNA,” which wirelessly updates player and team info throughout the season. Over the summer, we visited the EA Canada headquarters near Vancouver to get an early look at Live 10 and chat with its cover athlete. Read on for Dwight Howard’s candid responses to The Complex 7 as well as a look at the Live trailer and Buy It Now links…
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LeBron James should soak his sore loser in an hot epsom salt bath.
According to LeBron James, you can’t be a sore loser as long as you’re really, really competitive (or if, by nature, you’re a winner—who just happened to lose). Got that, kids? Despite what may have looked like poor sportsmanship, His Highness “King James” was just being really competitive when he walked off the court Saturday night without shaking hands after the Orlando Magic beat his Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals. He was merely competing with Magic star center Dwight Howard, a buddy with whom he won an Olympic gold medal in Beijing last summer, by not offering him so much as an awkward ass slap in passing. That was just his will to compete showing when he slipped out of Orlando’s Amway Arena without giving reporters a post-game interview. And if you buy that, we’ve got a Kobe vs. LeBron ad campaign to sell you too.
James is one of the NBA’s biggest stars, so his juvenility stands out, but he’s far from the only grown man in the league to act like a snot-nosed eight-year-old with doo-doo stains on his shorts when things don’t go his way. Not that we blame dudes. All that youth league shit about being a good sport is just to keep the child-on-child homicide rates down. And besides, when you’ve got millions, you can afford to act like you weren’t raised right. In honor of King James’s snub of the Magic, Complex remembers a few of the NBA’s sorest losers over the years…
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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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Tonight the Orlando Magic face off against the Boston Celtics in Game 6 of their Eastern Conference semi-final match-up. The Magic will be eliminated with a loss, and they won’t have just the Celts to battle tonight.
After a Game 5 loss to Boston on Tuesday, Orlando’s star center Dwight Howard criticized Magic coach Stan Van Gundy, saying (of himself), “If you’ve got a dominant player, let him be dominant,” and “I have to get the ball.” This isn’t even close to the first time a player has come out of pocket on his coach, so we decided to detail five recent occurrences and declare winners in When Players Throw Their Coach Under the Bus…
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If you're into streetball-style pick-up games where stars can pull off over-the-top acrobatic moves that are hard to come by in a real life NBA game, NBA Ballers Chosen One is your joint. Think of the title as a next-gen NBA Jam that features the best 65 players in the league and gameplay modes of one-on-one, two-on-two, and one v. one v. one (a.ka. threesome, PAUSE). When we were down in New Orleans for All-Star weekend, the Midway developers repeatedly sonned us using cover athlete (and Soulja Boy-Stan) Dwight Howard, who presents major matchup problems for most of the virtual players. Although Howard is the obvious choice if you're looking to rack up some easy W's, you'll impress the gaming-geeks by wrecking shop with Al Horford of Atlanta Hawks'the game's under-the-radar superstar.
Besides the entertaining arcade style game play, hip-hop heads will enjoy color commentary by Chuck D, and a soundtrack that's was fully scored by hit maker Just Blaze. (Be sure to check our exclusive Just Blaze interview on the game in the June/July issue of Complex.) Ballers: The Chosen One launches today for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. See some screens after the jump.
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