Hit by a Pitch

Photo by Garrett W. Ellwood/NBAE via Getty Images

Today, the Denver Nuggets traded Nene to Washington.

From a basketball perspective, this doesn’t really bother me. The thing with Nene is that he never lives up to his potential. I mean, really, dude is huge. He should be going hard in the paint (sexy!) on, like, almost every play. If he drives to the basket like he really means it, with his size and power, there are very few guys in the NBA who can stop him. The problem is that more often than not, he doesn’t do this. He plays lazy a lot of the time.

I understand it’s a delicate balance for a guy like Nene. He’s strong and powerful but, despite his gigantic, sexy contract, he’s not a superstar and he never gets superstar treatment from referees. He gets called for ridiculous fouls. So to some extent I understand when he wants to lay off and take it easy. On the other hand, it frustrates the hell out of me because damn, nobody is going to stop him if he really goes for it, you know? He had an awesome game the other day and I was all, yeah, more like that! But it never happens on a consistent basis.

Although I’m not upset about this trade from a basketball perspective, I am disappointed from a hot-guy perspective. Seriously? Nene is quite possibly the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life. Gorgeous. Stunning. I mean holy hell dude is smokin’ hot.

And don’t get me wrong. I don’t watch sports because I want to see hot guys. I watch sports because I love watching sports, and watching sports is what I do. But I’m not gonna be mad when, as a side benefit, I get to check out remarkably attractive men while enjoying sports.

So I’ll miss Nene because he’s, like, the hottest guy ever — hotter than my boyfriend Jon Garland, and if you know anything about me, that’s really saying something.

It’s not the most exciting bracket of all time (I did think about going crazy with VCU or MSU, but just couldn’t do it), but here is my official 2012 bracket. Good luck with your picks!

I just . . . um . . . I . . . um . . . it appears I have been rendered speechless by what I’m about to share with you.

If you don’t know, Danilo Gallinari is from Italy and plays for the Denver Nuggets. As we speak, the ink is drying on the 4-year, $42 million extension he just signed with the team. He’s also on my fantasy basketball team, which appropriately and lamely is named the Galloping Gallinaris (in my defense, it’s only named this because I was totally messing with the guy who kept trying to trade some dude I’ve never heard of, a melted Snickers bar, and a bag of Fritos crumbs for Gallo, but goddamn if I didn’t know better than to take that deal).

Danilo Gallinari also apparently has some killer dance moves, if by “has some killer dance moves” I actually mean something else entirely. I hate when people post videos and tell you to watch them, really, they’re hilarious, but that’s exactly what I’m doing here even though it fills me with the existential angst that results from doing what you hate people doing. I’m not only speechless, I’m also incapable of conducting myself in accordance with the standards to which I hold others. I hope you’ll forgive me, though, because I make the party start.

Much love to @nuggetsnews for bringing this to the world’s attention.

Next time I go to a Nuggets game, I’m going to bust out the Gallinari.

I am so not going to become one of those people who talks about Tim Tebow all the time. I promise. I wrote my post about why I hate him and figured I’d be done with it. Since then, a few things have happened. To wit:

He has not fizzled out and gone away. Today as I was driving home from the gym, Mark Schlereth was on local sports radio saying something to the effect of, “Yes, I believe that Tim Tebow is in fact touched by the hand of God.” That is not an exact quote but I swear it’s close. I’m starting to worry that the world is so far up Tim Tebow’s butt that it’s going to get out of control. Maybe one day, Tim Tebow will lead the Broncos to the Super Bowl. He’ll eclipse John Elway as the golden boy of Denver sports. Eventually, he’ll become mayor and replace the entire school board with his pals who will implement a strict creationist curriculum complete with frequent teacher-led prayer and homework involving Tebowing in various locations around the city. We’ll have to either move to a suburb in which we wouldn’t mind living, which would be ?????, or somebody would have to quit working so we can homeschool. Eventually Tim Tebow will become the governor, at which point we’d, I don’t know, move back to Illinois because at least their governors are a kind of crazy I can understand.

Then there’s the most jacked thing I’ve ever seen on the internet. Today I was checking my @ replies at Twitter and saw this:

The link takes you to a story on Yahoo! sports about how some dude — okay wait, this is one of those instances I learned about from a short man who wore way too much cologne in high school creative writing class, where I should show instead of telling. So here you go.

Sorry about my language and allcaps here, but WHAT IN THE EVERLOVING FUCK?!! WHAT IS THIS?! HOW DO WE LIVE IN A UNIVERSE WHERE THIS IS POSSIBLE?

I mean, Tim Tebow is a centaur? I think he’s holding a cross in his hand? He might or might not have a head inside that helmet? And Tebow Time? “[I]n a font like you’d see on the cover of a children’s book about an enchanted princess or maybe on a bottle of horse shampoo,” as MJD, author of the Yahoo! post observed? With such a delicate loop in the b? A centaur? As a Sagittarius, can I be extra offended by this? Tebow Time? Really?

The mental distress I’m experiencing as a result of viewing this image has rendered me incapable of writing in anything other than questions? I just can’t even? ?????

Today, Mike Leach was hired to be the football coach at Washington State. Do you remember the time he blamed poor performance on the “fat little girlfriends” of his players?