On paper, sports don’t get much better than Tuesday night. You had three games in the NBA Playoffs, plus three more in the NHL, two of which were Game 7s. It’s the sort of thing that tests your skills as a sports fan.
What If NBA Players Played In The NHL? A Better Stupid Argument
Each year around this time, NBA and NHL fans choose sides and get defensive about whose sport is better. But can’t we all just get along? Besides, if we’re going to have stupid arguments, we might as well take it to the next level.
How well can you manage a remote? Can you sense when a game’s getting out of hand and it’s time to pull the plug? Can you time each intermission so that you don’t miss a single minute, while also managing to use that time to show human emotion to your significant other? The playoffs aren’t just crunch time for the players. This is when sports fans prove themselves too.
Of course, it’s also when some sports fans get petty and defensive about the amount of attention their favorite sport is or isn’t getting from the mainstream media. Exhibit A, from Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky:
...You can imagine how well this went over with the basketball fans.
It’s totally irrelevant and we probably shouldn’t even waste time arguing about it, but just for the record, the premise behind Barry’s argument is flawed. What does a “real” sports fan do on a night like Tuesday night? Tries to have his (or her!) cake and eat it too.
A real sports fan is terrified to choose one or the other, for fear of missing something huge.
For instance, I watched basketball all night but kept an eye on hockey the whole time. And as soon as the Hornets-Lakers game was getting out of hand in Los Angeles, I switched to Versus to catch the final five or six minutes of the Blackhawks game, which was still close and ended up being one of the coolest hockey games I’ve ever seen.
Does it make me less of a sports fan that I missed almost three periods of scoreless hockey to watch Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant go head-to-head? Or more of a sports fan, because I (pretty much) got to watch the best parts of both games? Point is, REAL sports fans don’t choose one or the other; if at all possible, they choose both.
Speaking of which... the whole discussion got me thinking. You know what I would watch over either playoff basketball or playoff hockey? Basketball players trying to play hockey.
Forget worrying about wins and losses and championships; it’d be the single most entertaining spectacle of the year. Who wouldn’t watch to see Chris Bosh and Lamar Odom try to play in the NHL? So with that in mind, drawing on the hard-earned hockey expertise you can get from playing NHL 2011 on Xbox, I decided to take this a step further. Without further ado, the NBA Playoffs NHL All-Stars.
COACH -- Stan Van Gundy
What can you say?
Stan looks like more of a hockey coach than any hockey coach in the NHL.
GOALIE -- Glen “Big Baby” Davis
Because having a goalie named “Big Baby” would be too good to be true.
Also, he’s so wide, giving him all those goalie pads would make him just about impossible to score on. But there’s more to being a goalie than just size, you say? Well Big Baby’s a former NFL prospect for skills as an offensive lineman, so you know he’s got excellent footwork and balance.
He’s also a freak athlete that was good enough to make the NBA despite serious height limits, so something tells me he’d be just as flexible as any goalie in the league. Mental toughness could be an issue, but the same can be said for Roberto Luongo, and he’s still doing pretty well for himself.
DEFENDER #1 -- Ron Artest
Because there’s no alternate reality sports list that Ron Artest won’t be a part of it. If things had happened differently, Ron Artest could have made it as an NFL safety, a boxer, a pro wrestler, an MMA fighter, a power hitter in baseball, and pretty much everything except golf.
(But wouldn’t it be most fun to watch Ron Artest play golf?)
In hockey, he’d be the ideal enforcer next to...
DEFENDER #2 -- Gerald Wallace
Because we’re long overdue for an NHL Superstar with braids where a mullet’s supposed to be.
And because even though he’s from Alabama and has probably never touched a rink in his life, Gerald Wallace’s unrelenting wave of chaos really belongs on a hockey rink. He’s so reckless on a basketball court that you almost want to make him wear a helmet. Can you imagine if they gave him a helmet and pads, then put him on skates that he didn’t know how to use?
Also in the rotation on defense? Dwight Howard (the NBA’s answer to Zdeno Chara), Nate Robinson (your textbook undersized, ornery little bastard that starts at least two fights per game), Serge Ibaka (finally, someone to break the Africans-in-the-NHL barrier), and Tyler Hansbrough (a lock to foolishly play through approximately 768 concussions in his first year).
LEFT WING -- LeBron James
But in addition, “he just gonna be chillin on one skate”, we should also add that he’d probably be the most badass forechecking forward of all time, a perfect option to set picks and take out defenders on the power play, and... Well, yeah, he’d probably get his ass kicked like every single night in the NHL. Anyway you cut it, the dude has it coming to him.
CENTER -- Chris Paul
He’s probably got the best coordination of anyone in the NBA playoffs, he’s also one of the quickest players in the league, and he’s got God-given playmaking ability that blows your mind. Why can’t he be a better, blacker version of someone like Nicholas Backstrom?
RIGHT WING -- Dirk Nowitzki
Because anyone named “Dirk” that looks like this was probably meant for hockey, anyway:
Plus, Dirk fills a number of quotas here. For one, he’d be the foreign sniper that every good hockey team needs. (It’s either him or Timofey Mozgov). Plus, he’d definitely have the best mullet on the team, and he can almost certainly drink you under the table.
That, my friends, sounds like our starting right winger.
As for the rest of the rotation? We’d fill it out based on comedic potential. For instance, Russell Westbrook and Derrick Rose may be more helpful on the ice, but wouldn’t you rather see 160-lb Louis Williams freezing his ass off, totally freaked out by his surroundings? Likewise, we’d have to include Zach Randolph, Josh Smith, James Harden, and maybe most of all, Delonte West, since A) his reaction to playing hockey would be different every day and B) because the NHL needs more neck tattoos.
Now... Wasn’t this more fun than arguing about the NHL vs. the NBA?
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