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Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

G-Fafif Nov 06 2012 10:26 AM

Anthem alert! [youtube:2b37o4e1]1vOTN2-dRJc[/youtube:2b37o4e1]

G-Fafif Nov 16 2012 05:55 AM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Marvelous profile of Brooklyn's own Marv Albert -- with an appearance by former Mets broadcaster Steve Albert -- from Grantland, on the occasion of the former Dodger office boy's first-ever Brooklyn broadcast (which turned out to be a win over the Celitcs...first Brooklyn-Boston game, I suppose, since 1952). OK? Let's join young Marv Aufrichtig, in Brooklyn, around 1957 … The Aufrichtig brothers — Marv, Al, Steve — had a ritual. After dinner, they'd walk from the dining room into the living room and close the door. They'd turn on whatever baseball game was on TV. And then they'd turn the sound way down. They placed a table in front of the television. Marv, who was the oldest by six years, took a seat on the right. He did play-by-play. Al sat in the middle. He was in charge of a sound-effects record that replicated crowd noise. Steve sat on the left. He had two price-marking pencils from their father's grocery store, and when he hit the pencils together, the sound mimicked the crack of a bat. The Aufrichtigs would begin … broadcasting. In front of the boys was a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder, which captured every word. They did this almost every night. After a couple of innings, they switched places. Their two-story house was in a neighborhood called Manhattan Beach. It's an odd little suburban corner of south Brooklyn, where the streets have British names like Oxford and Amherst. The Aufrichtigs lived at 178 Kensington. If you walk half a block north on Kensington, you run into a channel thronged with Russian fishermen. Walk half a block south and you find a big park with basketball courts, and beyond that, the Atlantic Ocean. Max Aufrichtig, Marv's dad, was a Hungarian American who owned a grocery store. He liked the Dodgers. His wife, Alida, preferred music. It was Alida who answered the phone one day and found Stan Musial on the line — Marv, posing as a journalist, had called Musial's hotel and left an urgent message. The three brothers often think about why they spontaneously decided to become sports announcers. First they offer the Failed Athlete Theory. Meaning, none of them were Connie Hawkins. Al Albert — who later became the play-by-play man for the Nuggets and Pacers — says Marv "left his lethal 7-foot jump shot on the courts in Manhattan Beach." The Aufrichtigs also offer the Brooklyn Theory. Which is that they saw their home borough as a sports arena in need of announcers. Marv would peek out the small window of his second-floor bedroom onto Kensington Street. If a roller hockey game happened to be in progress, he would begin to call it. When the weather was lousy, the Aufrichtigs would stage a "rain delay" and replicate network time-fillers. (The raindrops hitting the overhang of their basement door added authenticity.) They had a Ping-Pong table in the basement. "Two of us would play," Marv remembers, "and the other would be a play-by-play announcer. It's kind of sick." An imaginary announcers' booth might have been a standard brotherly project, like a pillow fort, and forgotten the next day. Except the Aufrichtigs took the next step and started listening to their tapes. They heard Brooklyn accents. R's were added and deleted. "Russia" became "Russier," and "park" became "pawk." This was no good. The New York airwaves could accommodate southern twangs (like Mel Allen and Red Barber's), and the local sportscasts could hire ex-Giants who were still learning how to talk. But an outer-borough accent was somehow too local, too provincial. This is why the Bronx's Vin Scully and Brooklyn's Al Michaels — yup, him — now speak with an untraceable smoothness. "I think I've lost most of it," Marv says of his accent. Whether that's true or not, you see how hard he has worked at it. The listening sessions on Kensington Street, then, were also diction lessons. "We would critique ourselves," says Steve Albert, who's now the play-by-play man of the Phoenix Suns. Steve pauses, as if he's remembered something. "I'm like 7 years old at this point!" As a teenager, Marv got a job at 215 Montague Street working for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a gig he earned after appearing on a radio show, All-League Clubhouse, as a child panelist. As a "very significant office boy," Marv managed the giant public scoreboard the Dodgers kept atop the building. The cool thing was, Ebbets Field became his new arena for fake broadcasting. On game days, Marv hauled the giant Wollensak tape recorder onto the bus in Manhattan Beach. The recorder was about the size of an accordion — only klezmer bands suffered more for their art. Marv hoisted it onto the subway. Then up the stairs to the employee side of Ebbets Field press box, between home plate and first base. From there, only a thin wall separated Marv from Vin Scully, the Dodgers play-by-play man who'd replaced Red Barber in 1954. "He had this different, mellifluous voice — it was almost poetic," Marv says. "What I admired about him was the preparation of anecdotes." At every game, Scully would deliver prepared anecdotes to Brooklyn, and Marv, who was 16, would deliver prepared anecdotes into a tape recorder. "I'd usually have a friend or one of my brothers as a color commentator," Marv says. One of the color commentators was the forefather of Gus Johnson. He screamed. Finally, Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley sent word that the fake broadcast team needed to move. Marv and his team relocated down the right-field line.1 "We didn't have quite the same vantage point," he says. He kept broadcasting. Marv estimates he "called" at least half of the 77 home games the Dodgers played in 1957, their final year in Brooklyn. After the games, Marv would wait for Scully to clear out. Then he would enter the broadcast booth. It's tempting to make something mystical out of this — Marv and Vin, sharing the same turf. But Marv was not mystical. Marv was practical. He gathered up the commercial scripts Scully had read and then dropped on the floor. On Marv's next "broadcast," he'd read them, too. h/t bmfc1 for the link

MFS62 Nov 26 2012 09:45 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Brook - lyn! Brook - lyn! Coming into the season, it looked like the team had a decent starting five, but the depth was questionable. So far, the bench has been one of the team's strengths. Should make for an interesting season. Later

seawolf17 Nov 27 2012 08:53 AM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Drove past the Barclay's Center (like an idiot -- thanks, GPS) en route to the Bell House last night. What a visually striking building!

sharpie Nov 27 2012 10:08 AM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Saw Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler there the other night (yes, this should be in the "live and sweaty" thread but I'm not writing about the music here). The sound in the arena is great as are the sightlines. The ushers were alarmingly nice for NYC and the food, while punishingly expensive, is provided by local vendors. Now I want to go to a Nets game.

Vic Sage Nov 27 2012 12:37 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

The Nets bench: C.J. Watson / Brooks, Stackhouse / Bogans / Evans / Blatche I agree; they've been surprisingly effective. While I figured Blatche had a chance to be helpful, and Brooks is a young shooter with upside, the rest are marginal or broken-down veterans. I still don't think most of them will prove to be quite this useful by the end of the season.

A Boy Named Seo Dec 01 2012 06:52 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Man, I like watching this Nets team. They're pretty balanced, great team D, Lopez is a stud, and Williams & Johnson don't seem to have played their best ball yet . Sharp-dressed, too. Pre-season if someone asked me if the Nets/Knicks or Lakers/Clips would have a better combined record, I woulda never taken your dudes, no offense.

Kong76 Dec 01 2012 07:12 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

It would have been more ballsy to name them the NY Nets. But no, the Russian billionaire and his English Bank needed a gimmick and they called them the Brooklyn Nets. Whatever.

A Boy Named Seo Dec 01 2012 07:16 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Was NY Nets ever on the table?

Kong76 Dec 01 2012 07:40 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

No idea, really. This is a NY Net: They got the Oakland Raiders playing in those unis. Should have changed the name, as suggested by some.

A Boy Named Seo Dec 01 2012 07:53 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

I think contemporary throw-back uni nights should include the shorty-shorts.

Kong76 Dec 01 2012 08:02 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Agreed

Ashie62 Dec 02 2012 06:23 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

They will always be the NJ Americans

Kong76 Dec 02 2012 06:52 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Brooklyn Raiders

G-Fafif Dec 06 2012 09:03 AM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Dr. J's Nets days celebrated at the Brooklyn Game. In his five years in the ABA, Erving averaged 28.7 points per game. In 11 NBA seasons, he scored 22.0 a game. But his field goal and free throw percentages were almost identical. He was the same player when he came into the NBA. He just couldn’t steal the show as often. The ABA merged with the NBA after the 1975-76 season, and because there seems to be so little footage of the ABA, most of the magnificence of Julius Erving during those five years, is lost to the imagination. In a sense, Dr. J remains forever young in his ABA form. He grew his hair – his afro – bigger, which was more common at the time. His hair was grander, so too was his game. His improvisational moves, his hang time and creativity, with all due respect to Michael Jordan, were more spectacular than Air Jordan. For a lot of us who grew up on Long Island – I was born in 1962 – the Nets provided a measure of intimacy that the Knicks, or for that matter, the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Rangers, or even the Islanders, couldn’t.

MFS62 Dec 06 2012 09:18 AM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Thanks for the memories. I bookmarked it. Later

Farmer Ted Dec 06 2012 02:32 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

That Kardashian guy is pretty good, too.

Edgy MD Dec 06 2012 02:35 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Awesome at the reverse layup. Get two or even three defenders to commit to him on the front side of the basket and then do an underhanded finger-roll on the back side even that would roll in sweetly even though he had lost all his elevation. And, of course, that was just one of his signature shots.

G-Fafif Dec 27 2012 12:00 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Avery Johnson, the first coach of the Brooklyn Nets and the NBA Eastern Conference Coach of the Month for November, has been dismissed, and it's still December of their first season as the Brooklyn Nets. Brooklyn: Tough town.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Dec 27 2012 06:24 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

I'm guessing that Prokhorov was getting some serious sh*t from the Abramoviches at the last Russian Oligarchs of Doom meeting.

Kong76 Dec 27 2012 07:14 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Phil Jackson is gonna be richer when the zen dust settles.

Frayed Knot Dec 27 2012 09:26 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

I like that Avery was NBA coach of the month (they have those awards ... really?) for both October & November, and then he doesn't even survive December. I've heard of the coach/manager of the year award jinxes where the guy sometimes doesn't survive the next year, but this kind of turnaround is ridiculous.

MFS62 Dec 27 2012 09:29 PM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Kong76 wrote: Phil Jackson is gonna be richer when the zen dust settles. According to WFAN tonight, his agent said that Phil does not want the job. Rats! Later

Ashie62 Dec 28 2012 12:59 AM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

The Nets will always be the fucked up Nets no matter where they bounce the ball....

The Second Spitter Dec 28 2012 04:59 AM Re: Brooklyn Nets 2012-13

Ashie62 wrote: The Nets will always be the fucked up Nets no matter where they bounce the ball.... Are you Joe Sheehan?