Kyrie Irving did a terrible job listening to his parents, Steph Curry broke yet another record (surprise!), Mike Conley lost his best and only sane friend on the team, and the Suns, now in full tank mode, have seller’s remorse. Cue the theme music, it’s time for the Pic and Roll!
Kyrie Irving Never Listened To His Parents
What’s the one thing your parents always tell you before you go to bed – besides “I love you.” Most hear, “Goodnight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.” When you’re little, you really have no idea what this means. Bed bugs are not mosquitoes, bees, flies, ants or spiders – insects (or arachnids) that are part of our ordinary lives. They are little more than a vague concept, even imaginary. Our parents tell us to beware of them, but they don’t tell us what the hell bed bugs are. Which is a good thing, because if they did, no child would ever sleep again.
Bed bugs are not imaginary. They are very real, very annoying, and nearly impossible to get rid of. They multiply like rabbits on Viagra, crawl on your entire body, unseen and unfelt, biting all the while. You’ll wake up, think you’ve had a random acne outbreak, and ignore it. That only works for so long until you remember that acne never itched like these dots do, and hey, there’s more of them today than there was yesterday. It’s at that moment that you’ll realize your parents weren’t just giving you some nursery rhyme every night, they were asking you to heed a very real warning.
The silver lining for Kyrie Irving, who did not heed his parents warning and let the bed bugs bite him in Oklahoma City, is that he does not have to get an exterminator, new mattress, and maybe (definitely) brand spanking new bedroom furniture. The bed bugs were in the Oklahoma City hotel, which isn’t enjoying this bit of negative press (Ed. Note: but thanks for the emails, exterminators of the world).
Mike Conley Is Surrounded By Psychopaths
Mike Conley will face one of the most important decisions of his life this summer. As a free agent, he can leave the Grizzlies for potentially greener pastures, or he can stay with the team that drafted him as they slowly shed their Grit N’ Grind ethos. All signs point to Conley remaining with the Grizzlies and his best friend Marc Gasol, who re-signed with the team last summer. But that decision won’t come for another few months. Until that time, Conley has to deal with a more pressing matter: surviving the rest of the season without Gasol while playing with what could be the most combustible team in the NBA.
The Grizzlies traded Jeff Green to the Clippers for a first round pick and Lance Stephenson at the trade deadline. So, for those keeping score at home, the Grizzlies’s roster now includes Stephenson, Matt Barnes, Tony Allen and Zach Randolph. None of those players are known for their long fuses, and when one of them goes off, it could ignite a chain reaction the likes of which we’ve never seen. Of course, we could be wrong. Randolph has little patience for buffoonery, and could actually be the steadying Stephenson requires. Conley shattered his freaking face last year in the playoffs, which brought unimaginable pain. The migraine that comes with dealing with his new teammate might be worse.
Sam Hinkie And Ryan McDonough Star In “It Takes Two To Tango”
Ryan McDonough wants a mulligan. Last season, after his grand experiment – signing Isaiah Thomas to form a three-headed point guard hydra with Goran Dragic and Eric Bledsoe – failed in pretty dramatic fashion, McDonough traded away both Dragic and Thomas. One year later, Thomas is tearing it up in the Eastern Conference as an All-Star, and the Suns are collapsing in on themselves as the season’s most disappointing team. McDonough’s since recognized the error of his ways, admitting that trading Thomas probably wasn’t the best idea. In other words, to paraphrase George (G.O.B.) Bluth, “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
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Who knows if keeping Thomas would have changed the Suns, or at least kept them competitive. The real mistake might have been signing Thomas at all and simply expecting three ball-dominant guards to just make it work, somehow. Now the Suns are firmly where everyone expected them to be when McDonough initially took over: the dregs of the NBA, headed straight for the lottery. As bad as they are, though, the Sixers are still worse, and they have the Lakers’ protected lottery pick, which they acquired from the Suns at the deadline last year. As the saying goes, it takes two to tanko.
Performance Of The Week: Steph Curry’s 51-Point, Record-Breaking, Just-Another-Day Performance
This is getting ridiculous. At this point, we might as well just call it “Stephlight of the Week” seeing as how he dominates the headlines. This week, Steph broke Kyle Korver’s consecutive-three-pointer record, nailing a three in his 128th-straight game. Up next, Saturday night, he set the record for the most three’s in a season, a record which Steph already holds, and he tied the record for the most three-pointers in a game, the DAY AFTER he had hit 10 of them.
Oh yeah, he hit a game-winner that caused Twitter, and even fellow NBA stars, to self-combust in a seizure of hyperbole.
He’a an alien sent to our Earth to dominate and devour our greatest sport.
