It’s NBA season, and I desperately need to stop dicking around and pick a team to follow.

Here’s a brief history of my basketball fandom. When I was a kid growing up in southern Virginia, I loved the Charlotte Hornets. They were the closest team to me, purple and teal were in because The 1990s and Larry Johnson was helping Eddie Winslow win basketball games on ‘Family Matters’. For whatever reason (Alonzo Mourning in big, flashing letters) I drifted away from the Hornets and had a brief love for the Golden State Warriors before moving on and going to college and not caring about sports for a few years.

Eventually I moved to Cleveland, and you know how that story goes. OH WOW, THE CAVALIERS! LEBRON JAMES IS GREAT HE WILL BE WITH US FOR shit, my heart. I was prepared to give up basketball forever, but now I’m the editor-in-chief of a comedy sports blog, so I can’t. I loved basketball before, and I can love it again.

Right now I’m living in central Texas. That means I’ve got three NBA teams within a reasonable driving distance, four if you count New Orleans, and actually seeing the team play occasionally is important to me. This is where you come in. After the jump I’ve provided a handy poll, and I’d like for you to choose a team for me to love, drop down into the comments section and explain why you chose them. Next Friday I will consult the results of the poll and the comments section arguments and reveal which team I’ve chosen to love, then cover them incessantly for the rest of the season. Sound good? Good.

Choose wisely!

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Yesterday, in perhaps his most prolific artistic contribution to society, our forefather Matt Ufford introduced us to Philip Rivers with a mustache, and it might be the only thing on this planet that makes King Laserface even remotely endearing at this point. Seriously, I just dropped his ass in a fantasy league for a bye week tight end. I’ve been starting Carson Palmer over him, and I’m winning because of it, that’s how little Rivers is worth right now.

Yet here we are, Thursday Night Football only a few hours away and this is the juicy cow pie that the NFL is offering us – the San Diego Chargers vs. the Kansas City Chiefs. This is like the exact opposite of a Monday Night Football game. Hell, this is lower than Tuesday night MACtion.

Philip Rivers. Matt Cassel. It’s Thursday Night Football in America.

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Lost in all of today’s hubbub about the Heat looking like they’re already prepared for the NBA Finals, the Lakers looking like they’re already approaching a Kobe Bryant mopefest and Kevin Garnett needing a big hug was the fact that as of yesterday, we can no longer make jokes about LeBron James not having a ring. Indeed, the fun is officially over. As you can see above, the self-proclaimed King has his new ring and some sweet championship slippers, too.

Of course, we can still make jokes that he still has to win “not 1, not 2…” but it’s all lost the fun, especially now that he made that commercial with all of those kids that aired every 9 seconds during last night’s game. We get it, LeBron. You’re a champion now, and we should all completely love you. And as long as Garnett keeps playing the a-hole villain, it just might happen.

Anywho, on to tonight’s games…

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It had been rumored for some time that Kevin Durant was going to ignore the precedent set by so many NBA players before him and try his hand at the rap game. A lot of us thought it was a joke because we watched the trailer for Durant’s film debut, Thunderstruck, and we figured someone close to the Oklahoma City Thunder star would tell him to chill out with the non-basketball stuff until he had a few rings and hundreds of millions of dollars. After all, you either need to be a champion or a complete lunatic to qualify for NBA-player-turned-rapper status. Unless you’re Tony Parker, because he gets the “Eh, he’s French” exemption.

But speaking of lunatics, it’s Stephen Jackson AKA STAK5 that has brought Durant to our ears on his latest mixtape, “Jack of all Trades”. Durant appears on the track “Lonely at the Top”, which is an anthem for all of you who are affected by the haters out there. According to our friends at The Basketball Jones, LeBron James will also be featured on a STAK5 track, but we’ll have to wait for the album’s full release to know if that’s true.

Until then, here’s Durant’s long-awaited debut…

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Details are still trickling in regarding last week’s random night club brawl between the posses of Chris Brown and Drake, but what we do know so far is that Brown and his people have already been to the police and told a tale that makes everything sound like it’s all Drake’s fault. What we also know is that everyone involved in this stupid story is a total uber-douche, from Brown to Drake to dudes who rips their shirts off in clubs to Rihanna’s magical unicorn vagina.

But now we also know that France’s Olympic basketball hopes were very close to going down the crapper, because Tony Parker was also up in the club, getting popped in the eye by the flying projectiles.

“I was there with a bunch of friends when a fight broke out. They started to throw bottles about… I got it all,” Parker told a news conference.

“The cornea has been touched. I can’t do anything for seven days… But I was lucky. The injury won’t prevent me from competing the Olympics in any way,” he added. (Via Reuters)

It will take a nuclear Armageddon to stop NBA stars from hanging out with rappers, especially when a guy like Parker is both of those things. But hanging out with Brown is really the lowest rung on the ladder for a basketball player. I could name 100 hip hop artists I’d rather hang out with than Brown, including Coolio, Biz Markie, Snow, and MC Serch.

And I don’t hate Brown just because he beat the crap out of Rihanna or because he encouraged people to perform physical violence on Cher or because his music is drenched in autotuned sewage. Wait, no, those are precisely the reasons I hate him.

"Haha, call the game balanced... that's fresh."

I made myself a promise before both NBA Conference Finals series began – do not get caught up in the officiating blame game. Right off the bat, with the Boston Celtics down 2-0 to the Miami Heat, I had a daunting task of getting through hundreds of Tweets and Facebook statuses during each game, as people blamed the officials for bad plays and terrible calls. My refuge was the incredible Western Conference Finals, of which I expected solid, entertaining basketball to define the series.

For the most part, that was true. But even last night, as the Oklahoma City Thunder procured the misery of Seattle sports fans with the Western Conference title, the refs couldn’t escape the blame, which is sad because this series was an instant classic. Most notably, it was that unlovable old curmudgeon Joey Crawford who once again set the gold standard. If you’re unfamiliar with Crawford, he is, more than likely, the worst official in all of sports.

That’s a bold claim, I know, because I watch baseball more than anything and Joe West is horrendous. But you can’t watch a single game that Crawford officiates without throwing your hands in the air and saying, “What the f*ck!” at least once. And if the NBA wanted to shed the stigma of being a rigged league with the dirtiest refs, David Stern would fire Crawford. It’s not like Stern hasn’t recognized how awful Crawford is in the past.

In the meantime, I want to celebrate the absolute worst thing about a sport that I love so much with this small sampling of his finest/most horrendous career moments. (Add your favorite omissions in the comments because God knows there are hundreds more.)

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