I promised you a crazed Nick Van Exel rant, and by golly are you gonna get it. The gall, the nerve, the chutzpah, the fuckin' balls on this guy...

I mean, you know the Sam Cassell celebration dance, the one where he makes a big shot and cups his hands widely below his shorts to show everybody how big his testicles are, the one he copied from Isuro Tanaka and Pedro Cerrano in Major League 2?  That one?  

Well I think Nick the Bic actually has the gynormous testicles that Sam I Am only pretends to have.  Perhaps that explains why opposing guards can blow by him like a pylon - Nick has to run very gingerly out there, lest he bruise his masterdon testes.  

It occured to me today, that if George Bush and Sam Cassell had a love child, it would be Nick Van Exel: A ballsy, tremendously unathletic and uncoordinated shoot first point guard who's not good at anything but saying things that piss off everybody.  And no matter how many people tell him he sucks and he's a moron, he's convinced that he's right about everything and God wanted him to be a Spur.  

I mean..how do you explain this quote?  

"With me, to be effective, I need to be playing. It's hard for me to justify anything I'm doing playing spot minutes."

"Four for 23? Man, that's one game for me."

If I read that right, then NVE thinks the problem is that he's not playing enough minutes and that if he were up to him, he'd scrunch up all his magnificent crapiness thus far through eight playoff games, and poop them out in one complete chewing tobacco blended with burnt hair smelling tour-de-force exhibition of horrid shooting, or as I like to call it, "The Antoine Walker Special."

But wait, there's more!

"I just need to take the shots that are good shots," he said. "I'm not being aggressive enough. I'm passing first and attacking second. I've got to get my mind frame right going into the game, and that (shooting) will take care of itself.

And why shouldn't he want to shoot first instead of pass.  HE'S ONLY A POINT GUARD.  You see Pop?  You see what happens when you give Tony Parker free reign to do whatever the hell he wants out there and lavish him with praise for it?  The backup far less talented point guards on your bench think they should play that way too.  

Being a shoot first PG only kinda sorta works for two people on the planet, and they're AI and TP.  In a completely unrelated coincedence the former missed the playoffs and the latter is getting his lunch handed to him by a team smart enough to give him the jump shot and cut off his driving lanes.  I agree with Matthew with this much..if anybody, I repeat ANYBODY thinks we're gonna repeat with Tony being our first or second best player in the playoffs, they're on some seriously powerful drugs.  

But I told myself I wouldn't pick on the wee rapping Frenchman today.  Not yet.  Besides, it's not like YOU KNOW WHO has been lighting it up either.  

So more NVE quotes...now it gets good.

"Four for 23? I'm not concerned about that. I haven't had good looks, so I'm not really concerned about that at all."

Say it with me everybody...If you haven't good looks, then why are you shooting at all?  If you're never open, then shouldn't you be zero for zero with an assload of assists?  Huh?  

I saved the best line for last.

"I'm going out there and being aggressive when I'm out there, no matter how much time it is," he said. "I say that very easily, but most nights, I don't do that. I just go out there and play like a robot.

So he is being aggressive, but he's not.  He's an aggressive robot.  They have a word for such a creature.  It's called a Decepticon.  And since Van Exel is a whiny good for nothing punk, from now on I will be addressing him as Rumble.  

Anybody remember Rumble?  He was the little cassette guy that was really dumb and weak, but he popped off a lot, and he could cause earthquakes.  Earthquakes cause things to get broken.  Me watching NVE play ball for the Spurs also causes things to get broken.  So Rumble it is.

Picture this in a black Spurs 31 jersey...
http://www.geocities.com/the_shattered_looking_glass/rumble.html

Anyway, in the end, Rumble is just a basketball player, and you expect most athletes to be selfish and not too bright and to say selfish and not too bright things.

That's why they have coaches right, to guide them to the right path?  

Well the most depressing quote of the day came from Pop...

"Nick's a playoff player, and I'm going to stick with him," Popovich said. "That's all I'm going to say."

Hey Pop, you know who was another playoff player once?  Bill Russell.  He was the shit every May.  Why don't you sign him up then?  

Rumble was a decent player once.  And I could look at Tom Cruise without thinking he was a lunatic once.  Times change.  

Please Pop, I beg of you.  Beno or Brent for backup PG.  I don't want Rumble out there any more unless the refs let us play with towels instead of basketballs.  

So that's my rant about He Who Shall Now Be Referred to as Rumble.  

As for actual game strategy stuff, count me among those who agree that we need to do to these guys what we did to the Suns.  Last year we let Amare and Nash get theirs and Bruce completely shut down Marion.   Well here, Dirk is their Amare and Howard is their Marion.  Instead of Bowen holding Dirk to 18-22 pts, I'd rather have him hold Howard to 6-10 pts.  Dirk's defense is going to stink regardless of how hot he is on offense, but The Big Bug is the kind of guy who'll be crap on defense if he's crap on offense as well.  

So yeah, let's do it.  Let Nowitzki launch the biggest German offensive since 1942, I don't care. We just gotta shut down everyone else and make them lazy on defense.  If anything we should try to run and gun them, make them revert to their old form.  Once they stop playing defense, even for 10 minutes, it'll be too hard for them to start again.  It's not a muscle memory type thing for them yet, they're still relatively new to it.  They can't switch gears to different styles of play two or three times a game like we can.  

Shut down the Bug, and shut down their 3s, and we'll be fine on defense.  

On offense?  Simple.  Give the ball to Manu and set some fuckin screens!