Fab Melo and Why I am Terminally Basketball Dumb
When the Boston Celtics drafted Fab Melo with the 22nd pick of the 2012 NBA Draft I turned to my Dad and spit out one of the hottest, dog-shittest takes this side of Steven A. Smith’s big head.
“We just got our next Bill Russell.”
I said that without a shred of irony. Fab Melo was a Brazilian 7-footer out of Syracuse. He missed the NCAA tournament for being inexplicably stupid. Not like, he got drunk and fought someone at a party. No. Fab Melo was one of the few people that made college sports demand a person live up to the first fifty-percent of “student-athlete”. His biggest NBA achievement was bumping his head on a door frame and I wish that was a joke.
I am going to gloss over the fact that he died because it’s 2018 and I am the captain of my own narrative. This is more about my exploration and resignation that I do not understand what makes a good basketball player.
And this is a hard thing for me. Because I love basketball. And because I love basketball, I feel entitled to know a lot about it. But I don’t. And I have to remind myself this every morning as I airball multiple rolled up socks at my toy rim in my living room. When I draft a franchise in NBA2K, my team is always projected dead last. I can feel the video game desperately attempting to fight against its programming to change my settings to computer-guided auto-draft.
My fantasy basketball team does better when I never touch it. Not even joking: when Yahoo got hacked, the hardest part was that it was the only week my team won. It took cyber crimes for me to be successful. Google how long ago that was. My team, seasons later, has not won since.
And it’s not like I don’t have enough information. I have all the information. I have League Pass. I know all the dork hub websites. I listen to every podcast, I have read all the essential books, and yet I still said that Danny Ainge was a “clown bitch” to my father when we drafted Jayson Tatum instead of keeping our pick and drafting Markelle Fultz. In case you are not up on NBA news, Fultz is currently having a Faulkneresque mental breakdown that has left him unable to shoot a basketball after being a blue-chip talent for — wait for it — shooting a goddamn basketball.
I also did not like current Celtics awesome person Jaylen Brown. I wanted Dragan Bender.
I wanted the Celtics to trade four (!!!!) first-round picks for Justice Winslow. We got Terry Rozier instead. And I hated it. I now have a “Scary Terry” t-shirt, which I equate to bragging about your child you tried to leave on a stranger’s doorstep.
This digital space will never be a place for basketball thought leadership and that hurts. For my future readers: use my sports writing as a time capsule for “zeppelins are the future” style commentary.
