Denver Nuggets My Second Love, Could Learn From My First

My first hero created my first love. Boxing.

Basketball runs through my soul and every fiber of my being.  I decided to love basketball because pick up boxing wasn't something you could do everyday.

Growing up as a kid, I did whatever my big brother did.  He loved boxing so I loved boxing.  I find the sport to be the pinnacle of all sports.  No matter what sport you talk about, we always use boxing to make an analogy of what the highest level of competition demands. Slip up on the hoop court and you might go down 10 or 20 points.  Slip up in the ring and your ass is on the line for real.

At the highest level of basketball, the comparison's to boxing become apparent as the contact can feel like boxing without fist. A few may have the defensive skill like Floyd Mayweather, but even he gets  hit.  Inside of you must be a sadist who craves this sort of pain or you will run from it when it's time to deliver it yourself.

Not every player is capable of composing himself to hit big shots when big shots are needed. Some players are not even good to have on the floor if the game is too tight, but every player on the planet has the ability to battle like a boxer.  I have won plenty of games without winning the boxing match within every game of basketball.  I have lost games when I lost both of these battles, but I am convinced that in the war to win hoop games, you need to always win the fist fight.

The Denver Nuggets don't really have to get better at basketball right now.  They have proved that they can get looks and play defense even if they are inconsistent with both.  The Nuggets need to become better fighters.  They must learn to take a punch and counter. They must bob and weave and jab a lot and realize that you have to take the fight out of the judges hands, which means if you keep it close, you'll need some luck.

The practice before the 76'ers loss, Coach Shaw said the competition got so fierce that his guys were at the edge of fighting one another.

 At least they've got it in them.

The Emergency Care Scare Is Another Example of All-In Politics

The latest update on ObamaCare Scare 2014 is that the poor people who used to jam up the plumbing by getting sick and waiting for expensive (unpaid) emergency room care are now using Medicaid but still going to the emergency room.

That's the crisis.

Of course, the Emergency Care Scare is just the latest angle in trying to destroy a law before it gets started.  To achieve this goal they are referring to RomneyCare statistics to show how poor folks never seem to conform to the use of Primary Care Physicians (PCP), but continue going to urgent care.  It's true. Medicaid statistics support this finding.

That's it.  Poor people won't stop going to urgent care.

They add that this problem creates a demand on the emergency room system and that emergency room treatment is more expensive than scheduled visits in a doctors office.  That is true too.  Even if we now have less unpaid care overall, it would be better to have less emergency room care overall too.  Of course some of these emergency room users are just regular people who hate going to the doctor, but the point (if not the fear) is still valid.

Now the real story.

Barack Obama creates a sour flavor in the mouth of those who never wanted him in the first place.  Those who did elect him might have grown old of the taste, but if you never voted for him, the flavor is rancid. Conservatives trapped in this game have spoken themselves into a matrix.

How do you change the conversation around a broken  healthcare system when you rejected the only functioning model in America? The only other ideas are too drastically different from the one you let Obama cherry pick from your hands leaving no smooth move towards anything agreeably better.  Every attempt to shine a new light on functional failures in a law that hasn't yet begun only helps this law avoid traps in the end. Conservatives are shooting bullets that keep turning the heads of people who otherwise would ignore this stuff.

Unless of course the unimaginable happens.

The philosophical corner that conservatives are fighting out of demands an all out effort at this point.  The party has attached it's next several electoral victories to the death of a law.  Any success of this law will spell the death of the conservative agenda, which does not include a plan B.

Republicans are all-in against ObamaCare.  No matter what the cost.

Andre Miller's Suspension Explains Nuggets Dysfunction

Dare we say implosion?

Well I won't.  Not yet.  But when I  caught the news feed that Andre Miller had been suspended for behavior detrimental to the team (yelled at the coach on the court for not playing him), I was not shocked at all.

Don't get me wrong, I was totally shocked that it was Andre who was involved.  I can't even call him Miller, because he has carried Nuggets fans into some big time scraps over the years and he always made me glad that he was on my side.  His decision making is special and it has extended his career further than Allen Iverson got to go. But Kenneth Faried displayed similar sentiment a few weeks back and is just now working back into the grace of the coach. At the time, I was shocked that it was Faried who is a well mannered young player.

 If Dre' has revolted, others have as well and I think I saw another sign of more to come.

Sometimes when you watch cameramen capture things on the court, it seems like haphazard actions.  When you respect that they are professionals you realize that very little is haphazard.

I was watching the end of the 76'ers loss and the cameraman zoomed in on Nate Robinson talking to a player from the other team longer after a terrible loss.  The intensity of his conversation added with some finger pointing towards the Nuggets coaches seemed odd to me (and the cameraman) so I mentioned it to my wife.

I also mentioned in my last post that the Nuggets don't even finish one full quarter with a consistent style of play.  If Brian Shaw can't find 5 guys with the same motivation's than it explains what we've all been looking at.

Shaw may have too many coaches that are like him; up and comer's who might actually get a sniff sometime soon, especially if the Nuggets do well.  That can be a good thing or a curse if  too many strong willed opinions are flooding the head of the team.

During time outs, I have always noticed that some of the coaches, especially Melvin Hunt, seem to take a role that is too vocal before the head coach has a chance to address the issue. Each game, Shaw has to step further and further out onto the court to separate himself from the other coaches during time outs.  Hunt is the key carry over from George Karl, so there may be something to that.

No one is more excited about the upside of this team than I am.  The identity that they teased us with had a nice face to it.  They haven't found that face in some time and a team without an identity is always reflective of leadership.  Shaw could have a bright future in coaching  that won't make it till the end of the season if he can not figure out this web that is weaved around his team.

Colorado Displays Pioneer Image With New Pot Law

I was driving down the street the other day and I heard this really odd commercial about the NBA legend and superstar Julius 'Dr. J' Irving.  The commercial talks about how he loved the game of basketball as a young person, but it didn't always love him back.  Rebounding and jumping came natural, but dribbling and shooting with accuracy were a struggle.  But he stuck with it and eventually became Dr. J, the legend.

Makes you want to go get a fifth of Crown Royal doesn't it?

When I discovered that this was a Crown Royal commercial, I started to wonder what the future of spokesperson work will look like in the weed industry.  Is this campaign one for  Snoop Lion to do all by himself, or will the day come when we have Blake Griffin reminding us how he could't dribble too well, but boy could he get high?

They still ban cigarette ads on television, but they've got plenty of roadside billboards with hot women or cool cowboys to encourage a puff or two.  I would like to think that our debate over the ethics of marijuana would lose some steam given our hands in the cookie jar of casino's in the mountains or lottery tickets and cigarettes and liquor and pharmaceutical drugs, which are turning doctors into pushers.  We spend billions on marketing all of these vices and very little discouraging the addictions that feed each industry. If weed can feed the need in our struggling schools, I would rather tax usage that already exists instead of finding new revenues to fight addictions and still have our schools struggle with funding.  Better students build better people.  Better people build better families.

Simply put, morality is best achieved with stronger families not stronger laws.

I am Colorado (the unofficial ambassador in fact) and I watched the whole process of this law.  I signed the clipboard in front of the grocery store every time they organized to force this issue to the next ballot in Colorado.  My first thought was, damn.  You can actually force a popular vote with a bunch of grocery store signatures?  It instantly felt like the government of the people stuff that we learned of in school.

This law came in multiple steps and did not succeed right away, so for some time I assumed that it might struggle to get through, and it would be more about criminal prosecution for possession, not retail shops.  I'll admit that I did not realize that California had already paved the way with it's medical marijuana industry, but I can't imagine that even those pot pioneers expected to see Colorado destroy the Prohibition of Pot so quickly.  My home of birth is a place of pioneers also, and no one is ever called a pioneer for a movement that becomes forgotten.

Rocky Mountain High....... Colorado.  (Any John Denver look alike's out there.  I've got some marketing ideas to pitch to you).

Nuggets Learning The Trustworthiness of Success

If any Nugget fan gained a sense of hope from the toe to toe pug fest with the Heat, they should make sure they aren't drinking the pepsi (so to speak).  These Nuggets could be good, but have no confidence so they are rendered awful as a result.  It's a head game not a floor game thing.

Ty Lawson realized that he was touted for an All-Star bid somewhere in the middle of the 7-0 win streak?  When you are sharing the ball and guys are moving and cutting and working even when things don't go well, success comes.  Not always in wins, but the Nuggets may have succeeded without winning against the Heat and won but not succeeded during the streak..  The Nuggets had a chance to beat the defending champions.

In the process, you hope they took a picture of what worked and why it worked. You hope they took notes from the Heat about how to keep it close and trust each other to succeed in the end.  The Heat never cared how the Nuggets played because they expected to win when it mattered.  The Heat do not believe that any team is willing or able to do what they will do to win in the last minutes.

Brian Shaw has to clean off his gems to see which one's truly sparkle and which one's might be fools gold.  We thought Randy Foye was a false gem but he came alive against the Heat.  Foye actually penetrated and passed without massive turnovers, finishing at the bucket on a few nice drives.

Teams that share the ball never seem to pass too soon or kick it out too late. They always seem to place the pass in the shooting pocket. These Nuggets don't.  These Nuggets never even maintain a full quarter of any one style of play.  They remain fairly close in most games even though they always start out every game slowly.  The problem they keep experiencing is that when you chase from behind, you had better know how to close.

Closer's are important, but only when you expect to need one.  If you share the ball and trust in the confidence of each other you rarely need a closer in the end.  Wilson Chandler and Ty Lawson are both still too shy to rip hearts out at end of games, so we have to try another approach.

Tonight, the Nuggets play the Philadelphia 76'ers in Denver. Philly has a closer (Evan Turner), but little else.  The Heat game was a positive to the psyche which should counteract the negative impact of a long losing streak.  Both will conspire to make this game a close match late and another chance to demonstrate our floor game and our head game.

For Believer's Only: Satisfying That Deepest Want

The notion that removing want from your speech can eliminate want from your life is reasonable in thought but impractical when you consider the nature of language and the demand of communication.

 How can I even dream about not using the word WANT when I already use it so much without realizing it?

Our world is full of desperation and lack. The word want or wantonness is one that represents this lack.  Even if we do not have everything we would like, are we truly in the desperate state of lack? You will be if you declare it to be.

Upon discovering the true meaning of WANT, we become keenly aware of it in our speech, and of  the appropriate manner in which to use it.

For example:  As we watch our kids killing themselves and others in the same schools that all of our kids have to go back to, and we turn our focus to guns forgetting all of the dead kids and the surviving one's as well, it makes me WANT us all to remember our kids and stop arguing over guns.

I Shall Not Want

Cars and trucks and motorcycles and boats and houses and ice cream with cake are things we all would like to have.  As we confront the trials of life, we discover that love is all we need. Removing wantonness from your heart doesn't make the word disappear but elevates it to a higher level of importance when you do use it.

Only then can you truly satisfy that deepest WANT, whatever that is for you.


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