Youku video for those in China after the jump.
So the NBA All-Star game yesterday came down to the final shot. Big deal. Anyone can make basketball entertaining when they’re among the best players the world has to offer. A much tougher task is to make basketball entertaining when you’re not blessed with seven-foot wingspans and 40-inch verticals, just a regular guy persevering through the marshes of life with the rest of us: earnest, hard-working, perhaps even talented, but not superhuman like Dwight Howard, freakish like Kevin Durant, or LeBron James like LeBron James.
I submit for consideration: the Chinese Basketball Association’s All-Star game last weekend. Oh yes, we are entertained.
The first sequence, involving five turnovers in 32 seconds and one hilariously missed two-footer, you’ve already seen. (Actually, a lot of people have seen it — elaboration forthcoming.) But almost as good are the parts that begin at the 2:54 and 3:32 marks, at the end of which you can clearly hear about 6,000 people laughing out loud.
As a fan of the CBA, I do feel bad about posting the above, so please consider this my apology to everyone involved: I really thought you guys did your best.
p.s. Last week, I noticed I was getting pageview from a David Roth post over at the excellent The Classical. Roth mentioned he found my first video — “The very worst basketball sequence ever” – “via Kelly Dwyer at Ball Don’t Lie.”
Kevin Dwyer at Ball Don’t Lie (Yahoo!), in his article, embedded the video while giving a “thanks to Kurt Helin from Pro Basketball Talk for the pinch-hit hat-tip.”
Kurt Helin from Pro Basketball Talk said “Thanks to Sportando for finding this.”
Sportando? Not even written in English.
But it’s quite possible that the original YouTube video’s first influx of visitors came from none of those places, but rather, Russia/Eastern Europe. And according to YouTube stats, it looks like the first embed was in Lithuania, at tritaskis.lt. If anyone wants to tell me what the featured comment “ovo nije kosarka,ovo je LOŠarka hahah” means, I would be very happy.
The All-Star game happened in Guangdong.
I’m in Beijing.
Consider this a love song to the Internet.
