In the few days since I’ve been back in Cashville, there have been a flurry of questions thrown my way: How was your summer? What’d you do? Excited to be a senior? (Hell no! This means I’m a real person with real responsibilities in about eight more months. Have you ever seen how excited business school students are to be back in a college environment? I have, and it does not have me juiced to enter the real world.), etc. Along with these typical back-to-school questions, there have been some that are a bit more specific to my interests, Vanderbilt football and the NBA. I have discovered that, while mere months ago my responses regarding Vanderbilt’s likely record this season and the probability of an NBA season were very positive, no doubt the result of the beginning of summer and the Grizzlies’ great playoff run, they have become increasingly pessimistic. Vanderbilt will not win more than three games in my current estimation, and there is no chance that we will have an NBA season this year.
There are a number of my past experiences and personality faults that I could heap the blame for this increasingly gloomy outlook upon, such as not experiencing a winning football season until I was eighteen, the Bartman game, or my being a generally negative person. However, with the radical change in my attitude, between May, when I was writing about how optimistic I was about sports in general, and now, when I’m back to bitching about everything, there can only be one true culprit: David Stern and the NBA lockout.
With every passing day, Z-Bo’s legs are getting older, and his vertical leap is losing millimeters that he can ill-afford to spare. He’s arguably our city’s biggest sports star, and he’s not exactly going to drop 60 points in Rucker Park or create headlines about potentially playing overseas. Therefore, with every week that we are unable to heap praise on him for carrying the team, being a good dad to his daughter that sits a few rows behind the bench, and having a generally amiable and attractive personality, the probability that articles about Z-Bo and drug-related incidents appear in the CA increases.
This was going to be our year, we were going to have excitement around the franchise from June until October based on practices, summer league games, and Tony Allen’s tweets, be a very good team all season long, and eventually make a deep run in the playoffs. We have a very small window of opportunity with this team until veterans start noticeably aging, young supporting-cast talent gets bigger contracts elsewhere, and the front-office reminds us that they are just as capable of drafting Hasheem Thabeet with the second overall pick as they are signing Tony Allen and Z-Bo. We have this very small period for potential success, and Stern and Co. are in the process of sealing our window shut as tight as if it were in a Vegas hotel. I have no solution in mind, no suggestions to make, only less hope, a growing despair, and a kind of hopeless frustration whenever I see lockout news.
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