Trail Post - A Portland Trail Blazers Blog

1. Be Dwight Howard.

2. If being Dwight Howard isn’t possible, be Nate Robinson.

3. If neither is possible, kiss your ass goodbye. You’re done before you even started.

Rudy got screwed last night, and screwed badly. Dwight Howard had a total of one Dwight Howard-worth dunk last night (the bounce off the side) and the rest was artificially-inflated garbage. Dude, it’s pretty easy to dunk on a 12 foot rim if you’re reasonably athletic and 7 feet tall. He only needs a vertical leap of 24 inches. Yawn. If Nate Robinson did it, I’d be impressed.

And the Superman schtick is just lame. It was lame when it happened last year, and it was even worse this year. It hit its all time low when Nate whipped out the kryptonite uniform. Why doesn’t the NBA just save the entire Denver and Portland fan base some trouble and just not have Rudy or JR Smith in the competition? We waited all day Saturday, through yet another intensely forgettable Shooting Stars Challenge (everyone’s favorite event to watch 50 year old ball players struggle to hit half-court shots), the event where point guards take fifteen damn attempts to put a basketball through a hanging tire that is imprinted with PlayStation ads, and then the worst three-point contest ever. I’ve never seen a winning score be less than 20. Then when we finally see our players, they get hosed. Nate Robinson jumping off a dude for a dunk got the same as Rudy throwing a behind the back pass off the backboard for a dunk. The same as Rudy taking an alley-oop off the back of the backboard for a dunk. It’s not the fact that it’s rigged that I don’t like. It’s the fact that they did a piss-poor job of it.

Congrats, NBA. You put together the worst All-Star Saturday ever, and you shat on two of the league’s best franchises.

(However, if this was a clever way to have LeBron come out of hiding and join the festivities; MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.)

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