Ever since I watched the Netflix docu on Frank…I haven’t been able to get his songs out of my head. If you haven’t seen the film…you must. Bravisimo! ***** That’s five stars for those of you Okies not in the film industry.
The weather is brutal in Deer Creek and headed for even worse. I’m thinking wine, lots of Italian food these next several days…and the best of Frank and Tony Bennett.
This song is dedicated to Lu Dort, Kenrich, and Mikey Muscala for their excellent effort in this year of tanking. I just wanted them to know there will be light at the end of the tanking tunnel.
Your effort and professionalism is appreciated at the okthunderground.com studio.
When we get knocked down in life…we pick ourselves back up and fight for those six inches of life in front of us every day.
Don’t look now but the tanking Oklahoma City Thunder have dropped to 10-14 and down to the 14th position in the Western Conference standings. If they had started this earlier they would possibly be in the No. 15 slot ahead of the sublime Minnesota Timberwolves.
Another good loss on Wednesday night as the Thunder with only eight players hung with the Lakers who had both LeBron and AD on the floor for this game.
Give these eight guys credit though—they played their asses off. I have complete respect for that. I genuinely do. This is what life is about…getting knocked down and pulling yourself back up.
It’s hard to watch some of this because it comes off as depressing in that this process wouldn’t even be taking place if the Thunder had just made the decision to stay with Sabonis, Jerami Grant, and Oladipo as their core.
But I guess to Presti’s somewhat credit he showed loyalty to Russell Westbrook kind of like the Trump crazies in Oklahoma display their daily self-abusing fealty to Donald Trump no matter how many white policemen he either kills or maims in the name of law and order. There’s an analogy there somewhere.
Suckers and losers…they’re all over Oklahoma if you keep your eyes open and take mental notes. These people not only doubled down on the likes of Donald Trump, but these people will continue to triple and quadruple down on the likes of Jim Inhofe, and the James Lankford types.
James Lankford…I’ve called the Christian youth minister’s office eight times to date to talk to him about his political soul—eight times I’ve failed to get past his aide who answered the phone. But I do get the generic emails.
I do hope the Thunder basketball team is able to stay here though because the state needs more to cling to beyond OU football. OU football is going to be lit next season. Saben…bring your Big Boy Britches. This will be the most talented OU roster since the 2000-01 national championship squad.
Back to the tanking Thunder.
To me the best transaction Presti ever made was the Serge Ibaka to Orlando deal for that bundle of players, but for whatever reason Sam Presti didn’t want to stay committed to that train of thought.
Operation Bongo is what the Thunder might become if they’re not careful. It makes me sad as someone who has lived in Oklahoma this long. It’s almost like the basketball team is a micrososm of the Oklahoma state government which is still working on becoming the last state in the union to update its driver license photo with a passport process.
To me…the Thunder coming to Oklahoma was supposed to be a sign of the state as a whole saying goodbye to being one of the dumbest in the nation and growing up. Instead…it appears the state has doubled and even tripled down on challenging Alabama and Mississippi for that honor. Smart humans ostensibly should learn from their past….and grow just a little. George Wallace and Richard Nixon…even those two grew after their transgressions….to limited extents albeit.
The Thunder are losing now, but they’re losing the right way if that makes sense. From the get go of this season I’ve proclaimed my hoops love for Lu Dort and Kenrich Williams…which I feel good about as we head into deep dive tank mode now in mid February.
Lu Dort and Kenrich…I love you guys. Please don’t ever let them change you. I’ve been a grinder my whole life. I love you. I do.
These guys play hard. Even more to the point…what’s left standing of the Thunder overall currently plays hard. I have to respect that as someone who has been around sports my entire life. I don’t like losing though when you didn’t have to take this course when you had Oladipo, Sabonis, and Jerami all on rookie scale deals.
This is clearly a season hoopswise where I’m much more intuned to OU basketball and Cade Cunningham and his draft class.
Sam Presti, you may not know it, but you’re on the clock just like Kevin Costner was in Draft Day when he played the fictional general manager of the Cleveland Browns.
That was another analogy…. that no one in Oklahoma will get or ever get in my lifetime.
My answer to this question is unfortunately…no. The party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt sold its soul in a transactional deal with the devil to get three Supreme Court Justices, individual and corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and a slew of executive actions which all leaned towards moving America back to the 1950’s when nostalgic white America was at its apex following World War II.
It was a robust four years for Koch Industries and the late Sheldon Adelson. Not so much for many of the white Americans who brand the MAGA ball caps and shirts when they’re killing and assaulting police officers at our nation’s capitol.
That is the answer to the question above. How unforunate for so many whites who voted for Trump their net worths and standard of living didn’t have their needle move so to speak with all of this transactional whoredom taking place these past four years.
I’ve been in Denver with my wife for four days spending time with our grandchildren. I stayed off my blog, didn’t watch a minute of cable news, didn’t watch an NBA game.
I did watch OU beat Iowa State and unfortunately watched O State’s abysmal effort in Lawrence, Kansas. I’ll get to my Cade Cunningham Journal in a day or two.
We watched the Super Bowl, played with our grandchildren, ate great food and had a very peaceful family time. My son has it setup where you can summon Alexa and in a second have Frank Sinatra cooing throughout their home. How cool.
We watched the Netflix docu film on Frank Sinatra and then we watched ten of the Dave Letterman special interviews he did for Netflix. Those interviews were great. I loved the interviews.
I read from cover to cover the two Time magazines which covered The Insurrection which was clearly an act of domestic terrorism….and the Time magazine which covered the Biden inauguration.
But I specifically made a point to not watch any cable news.
So…the ‘trial lawyers’ made their opening statements yesterday in the second impeachment trial of the human junk bond whore Donald Trump.
Let’s be clear…this will not be a trial. It will be a political formality… to be more specific a facade of American justice for all the world to witness.
The prosecutors have no chance to win this trial in spite of the abundance of evidence which will prove Donald Trump incited this riot which turned into murder for all the world to see.
Donald Trump went even further than shooting someone in broad daylight in Manhattan. He killed a police officer and assaulted mutiple other police officers in broad daylight and would have kidnapped Mike Pence and perhaps Nancy Pelosi if things had gone better for his treasonous army.
I mean even for the Trump white base this was something special.
What do you Trump cult followers think would have happened if blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, American Indians or Asians had stormed our nation’s capitol and killed and assaulted police officers?
I’ll tell you what would have happened…they would have been shot. That’s exactly what would have happened.
So—I’m not sitting here thinking justice will be served in the United States Senate over the next week or so.
For justice to be served there has to be a legitimate jury… and unfortunately for America it appears we have forty-four GOP senators who are so completely absorbed in their own political self preservation in future GOP primaries the crimes. The evidence will have no bearing on their vote at the conclusion of Donald Trump’s second impeachment ‘trial’.
What a potential Super Bowl we have in front of us…defending champ Mahomes vs. GOAT Tom Brady playing in Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.
The NFL screen writers could not have written this any better.
How ironic…. when Tom Brady was in New England…Boston was the city of champions. Now it’s Tampa Bay on the cusp of becoming the City of Champions with the Lightening hoisting the Stanley Cup, the Rays making it to the World Series, and now the Bucs in the Super Bowl.
This Tampa team was waiting for Tom Brady. The defense is solid. the receiving corp is excellent, the run game is good with Fournette and Jones.
All the Bucs needed was a QB who didn’t throw three interceptions a game like Jameis Winston. I would even wonder if a QB like say Matthew Stafford or Deshawn Watson could have taken the Bucs this far. I don’t think so. Winning at Lambeau would have been tough for QBs with little post season success.
For me the Tampa run game is the key to this game….can the Bucs as they’ve done in three straight playoff games control their offensive line of scrimmage.
That’s what I have circled in red. Can the Buc O-line keep Chris Jones in check enough so he can’t tee off on Tom Brady?
Last year when the Chiefs scored twenty-one straight ponts late to defeat the Niners 31-20 … I thought the key to the game was George Kittle. Could the Chiefs keep George Kittle in check? The Chiefs did and came on strong late in the game after struggling for three quarters.
But Tom Brady isn’t Jimmy G…no way, no how.
The other key to this game for me is can Tampa’s secondary hold up ‘enough’ to keep Tyreke Hill, Travis Kelce , and Hardaman somewhat under control. Thirty-one to twenty-eight points for me is holding the Chiefs ‘somewhat’ under control.
The Bucs are getting 3.5 at home with Tom Brady. Tampa has made this run to this game as a wildcard winning three straight on the road.
I love Mahomes, but I’m going Tom Brady to win his seventh Super Bowl in what we hope is a great football game.
Hope everyone has a wonderful Super Bowl party. I can’t believe we won’t have a Budweiser Clydesdale commercial for this Super Bowl. I’ll have to post one of my favorite Clydesdale ads.
2013…my favorite Clydesdale ad of all-time. In a battle of the Harbaugh Brothers …the Ravens prevailed over Colin Kaepernick and the Niners by a 34-31 count.
It’s Black History Month and I given some thought on what I want my entry to be on my blog during these incredibly devisive times.
Let me begin with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King on racism in America… ‘Nothing in all of the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientous stupidity.’
I took the time this winter to read three books on race in America so as to in a sense make sure I was being objective on the issue of racism in our country. The first two books were both written by Isabel Wilkerson.
The first book… The Warmth of Other Suns was published in 2011 and won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction. The book through three true life characters depicts how three black people from the South decided they could no longer abide by the Jim Crow laws and decided to migrate to other reaches of the country.
Two were male, one was female. The first male was a doctor from Lousiana who migrated to Oakland to start a new practice he never would have been allowed to pursue in Louisana. Even after obstacles in California he eventually broke through and became a celebrity physician when Ray Charles of all people became one of his patients.
The second male was a college dropout from Florida whose own father made him quit college because the father felt it was a waste of time for a black man to have a college degree in the South at the time.
This man became a citrus picker in Florida who finally decided he had to abandon the South because he started a union for the black citrus pickers in the South and began receiving death threats for being a labor organizer. This man migrated to New York and became a lifetime employee of the railroads where he helped underground blacks from the South do as he had done in his own life.
The lone female was Ida Ma the wife of a Mississippi sharcropper. She and her husband finally left the South as well and migrated to Chicago to start their new lives.
The story of the Warmth of Other Suns is told through the prisms of these three characters.
It took Ms. Wilkerson close to a decade to write this book and you’ll undertsand why if you read the book. Her research is meticulous.
Her second book Caste is a current New York Times non-fiction best seller as well. It was No. 1 for quite a while in fact….even in Oklahoma—which gives me some flicker of hope. Just a flicker mind you.
Caste was written in response to Donald Trump from his creation of the Birther movement in the South to disgraceful overt racism during the course of his presidency.
The book paralells racism in present America to Nazi Germany to the caste system in India. It is a highly provocative book for certain. I’d love to discuss it sometime with Bill Gates on a podcast if he would stop wasting his time on CNN.
Above is a linked audio segment of the opening of the book as Ms. Wilkerson narrates from a scene in Germany as facism is taking hold in its early stages.
I think you’ll find the narration chilling because it hits so close to home to what is happening in our country and certainly to what happened on January 6th in our own nation’s capitol.
The third book which made my final cut is the New Jim Crow written by Michelle Alexander. I’ll feature that excellent book next week as I continue Black Historty Month on my blog.
Unless you’re really into sincere ignorance and conscientous stupidity—you’ll close your eyes at some point and realize we’re all the same with the same dreams and aspirations….even in Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Sigh.
Hope you enjoy the audio book video excerpt and read a good book during Black History Month.
What a night for the short-handed Thunder. No Shai or George Hill and Dort was limited to nine minutes due to knee soreness.
Who in their right mnd would have picked the Thunder to win this game?
No one.
Some great performances tonight….Kenrich Williams with 19 points and +24 in 23 minutes. Diallo with 16 points, 9 rebounds, and 3 steals. Darius Bazely with 18 points and 12 rebounds. Theo Maledon with six steals on a night when he went 2-12 for the field. Some gritty performances by the Thunder role players.
I know most of us wanted a loss, but you can’t lose them all. You have to pick up the pieces and move on to the next two games against the worst team in the West in the Minnesota Timberwolves. After these two games the schedule gets brutal.
But I’m happy for Kenrich Williams. This shows what hard work and tenacity can do for you.
The video above is actually from the Thunder blowout loss to the Rockets the other night. Observe how hard Kenrich plays regardless of the score.
Again, a loss would have been nice, but I’m happy for the young guys in this season which still has fifty-two games left.
When guys play hard for 48 minutes basketball is a fun game to watch.
We do it all at okcthunderground.com. Around the world of sports, politics, economics, and entertainment. It’s a shame Ted Turner’s deal doesn’t have this type of breadth. Just because Trump left the White House in disgrace doesn’t mean I won’t be following him in his new role as President of the Palm Springs HOA.
I’ve been president of an HOA before…tough, tough gig.
Good luck with that one, Donald.
Death by lethal injection would be preferable. Head on a swivel, buddy.
It was announced the Thunder are moving their recent 17th pick in the first round to their G League team so as he can develop in a comfort zone more to where he is right now as a basketball player.
I would just start feeding him would be the first thing I’d do if I were Presti. Lots and lots of food. But as far as the shooting problems we’ve witnessed from Poku with the flat trajectory of his shot…we’ll see.
I mean…this is the same franchise which never figured out how to get Andre Roberson to make free throws. Never developed Steven Adams’ shot from outside of the paint. Never turned Cole Aldrich into a stretch big. Never really made any sense of why they drafted Josh Huestis. And never figured out Russell Westbrook’s woes with shooting the three ball other than enabling him to shoot more.
Kevin Durant already knew how to shoot. Same with Harden.
Serge Ibaka would be the outlier if you remember how awkward Serge was Year 1. Serge actually developed a shot with the Thunder.
So now this is that same organization thinking they’re going to teach this kid how to shoot?
I find this to be an interesting thought of sorts.
Here’s my interesting thought for the day for Sam Presti moving forward…why not draft players who can shoot already?
Why is it you draft players in the first round who can’t shoot?
But to Presti’s credit his second round pick Theo Maledon has a shooting stroke of gold. I know some of these Mr. Pillow- Trump crazies in Oklahoma are thinking Maledon is the next Tony Parker instead of in reality being the next Eric Maynor or Reggie Jackson…but the kid has a nice stroke and would seem to me to be a natural for the Sixth Man slot next season if the Thunder don’t piss away their away their two first round picks this summer.
But in defense of Presti …he did try his best last season to make that deal with Miami with Chris Paul going to Miami and Tyler Herro coming to Oklahoma City.
So what does Poku do well?
He runs well. His rebounding is fine. His defensive footwork needs work, but so does every other Thunder player not named Dort and Kenrich. His passing and vision are pretty good. His freakish long reach is a dream for deflecting passes in lanes. So those are the positives.
Now …just make sure he’s getting nourished and see if you can add some trajectory to that shot of his or tell him to mitigate the three from his shot selection.
He seems like a nice kid. I hope he can garner some confidence in his game in the G League and start playing at both levels as the Thunder begin to get serious about tanking in the coming days.