Victim of Racism
I'm a brehette
OT in London (@Orlando).
Put Some Hornacek On Our Game: 2016 New York Knicks Offseason Thread
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Victim of Racism
I'm a brehette
Orlando loses. Now it looks like NY is a game behind both teams (who seem to be tied) for the 8th. If this is wrong, someone let me know: NBA.com - 2015-2016 Conference Regular Season Standings
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Victim of Racism
I'm a brehette
What do y'all think Conley is worth and why?
mvp_status
Superstar
not trying to bring hate or anything into yall's thread, but melo doesn't really deserve to get the start over Drummond.
I know Drummond will make it in anyways, but a guy averaging 18/16 should get in. Oh well, Melo should still be fun in the game.
Both players are making the team regardless of who starts
Jim Cavan3 hrs ago15 min read
(Matt Cunningham, NBAE via Getty Images)
A Little Over Sixteen Hours With Kristaps Porzingis
The legend of Kristaps Porzingis has captivated hearts and minds on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, The Cauldron shows you KP like you’ve never seen him before
(Editor’s Note: Only some of this is true. Mostly how certain words are spelled.)
Ifinally get a text a little after 10. Kristaps Porzingis — Knicks rookie sensation, hardwood icon at 20, minor-canon Grimm’s giant spelled to life — requests I meet him at the team’s White Plains practice facility at 3 AM. Five hours from now.
“Did you forget the 1 before the 3, and then replace the P with the A?” I message back, hoping perhaps his normally ironclad English temporarily betrayed him.
“No. 3am,” he pings instantaneously. “Right after beef and cabbage.”
Fair enough.
It’s barely been two clock laps since the Knicks departed Chicago on the business end of the Bulls’ 108–81 pistol-whipping, a performance low-lighted by a franchise record eight fourth-quarter points. With a matinee melee against Atlanta slated for Sunday, most Knicks are content to Netflix-and-chill. (Or, if you’re Derrick Williams, threesome jewelry theft and chill.)
“Chill,” Zinger knows not. There is basketball, more basketball, and plunging calories down his neck. These, as I will soon find out, are the lone raisons d’être of this enrapturing roundball renaissance man.
(Marc Serota, NBAE via Getty Images)
He was kind enough to prop the practice-facility door open with a picked-clean cow femur. From within the corridor the unmistakable slap of leather on hardwood pats in the distance. I follow the din down the hall and into the gym, kicking a second door-jammed femur bone aside and letting the latch click behind me.
It is cavernous black.
“Hello? Kristaps?” I implore in the blind.
“Hey!” a voice, now mere inches away, responds. At once I feel a hand groping the top of my skull. I assume he’s looking for my hand.
“Kris. Jim Cavan. Great to meet you,” I say, shaking his monstrous mitt at an angle akin to a Tomahawk Chop. “Do you usually practice with the lights off?”
“I have to wait for the Lighting Bureau to turn them on. It’s usually around six.”
“Oh, yeah, you can just flip the switch whenever you want here. There’s no energy rationing or anything.”
There’s a seconds-long pause.
“No shyt!” Zinger exclaims, grin unfurling so wide I can hear lips draping over teeth.
“Hold on,” I say, stumbling back towards the door and, upon reaching it, feeling along the adjacent wall for the switch. The gym buzzes to light. There, anchored at the free throw line, donned in full road regalia, is the largest human being I’d ever beheld.
“Hey!” he beams, his eyes darting around like a two-year-old in Toys ‘R Us. “You’re sure the Bureau won’t mind?”
“Positive. Keep practicing. We’ll worry about the interview stuff later.”
This pleases Zinger, who promptly presses on with the weirdest training regimens this side of Bikram yoga. This unfolds as follows:
- 14 free throws (14/14)
- Catch-and-shoot drill featuring court-length chest passes off the opposite wall, caromed so as to hit him in perfect rhythm for a series of 75-foot jumpers (19/21)
- Hodgepodge of aerobic stretches he later tells me were gleaned from Finnish-dubbed Richard Simmons videos
- “Latvian Suicides”: Similar to standard suicides — free-throw line and back; half-court and back; three-quarters court and back; full court and back — but via traditional Russian squat dance instead of running
- Pull-ups from the top of the backboard
- Remove each floor tile and rearrange so as to invert the court
- Eight laps (skipping)
- 12 wind sprints (ice skates with blade covers; dragging facility refrigerator)
- One-handed dunks (29/50)
“Interesting way of packing on the protein,” I say as he unfurls the first flesh bat.
“This is for my iron,” he mumbles through the bloodmeal. “Protein is at lunch.”
“More beef?” I guess.
“Naw,” he says. “Salmon heads.”
It’s just past 8 A.M. when the workout winds down. Being both the Sabbath and a game day, the facility remains — beyond the callisthenic circus inside the gym — completely empty. Having gathered his snacks and wares, Zinger leads me out and towards the exit still sweating through his practice gear. It’s scarcely 30 degrees outside.
“You don’t have anything warmer?” I inquire with alarm.
“All my shirts are at home,” he says.
“…What about a coat?”
“No goats. Only room in the apartment for chickens.”
Seconds later a car pulls up. Two cars, to be exact: a mid-80’s Volvo station wagon (brown) hitched to a nondescript, low-lying pickup bed (white). In the back, on a pair of spare tires, sit brothers Janis and Martins. The four of us exchange quick pleasantries — they in Latvian, me with a smile and wave.
“You can sit up front with my dad,” my subject offers. “I ride in the back.”
As I reach down for the passenger handle I notice a pair of hands astride the steering wheel.
“Other side,” Zinger says as he folds himself through the door and into the seat-less center of the cabin.
I enter the car from the opposite side to find Kris’ father, Talis, at the helm of our mutant vessel, Jon Secada cracking softly from the speakers.
“Hello,” I say through a reaching handshake. “Jim.”
This briefly confuses Talis, who gazes back at his son crumped like a lawn chair behind him, before looking back at me. “Jim?” he asks, pointing to the building from whence we came. “This Jim!”
Kris, sensing the miscommunication, snakes forward. “He’s just learning English,” he says, before offering his dad a brief explainer in Latvian.”
“Ah!” Talis cries. “Yames! Yames! Hahahahahaha!”
This is followed by a hearty slap to the shoulder. “Hello, Yames. Let us have necklace.”
“Breakfast, Dad.”
“Ah! Breakfast! With Yames! Ha!”
With that, Talis disengages the parking break, throws the beast in first and guns the gas through a blast as loud as a Howitzer, black soot billowing out the back like some putrid cauliflower cloud. Even from the right side, Talis operates his Frankencar with surprising aplomb. The whole scene fascinates: This multi-million-dollar athlete, 20 years old and at the front bookend of his earning powers, being chauffeured around in a smoke-spewing deathtrap, power steering as much of a luxury as one-button teleportation machine.
“Did you bring this car with you from Latvia?” I yell above the drone of the diesel engine.
“No,” Kris responds. “My mom built it.”
(Steve Dietl, Syfy via Getty Images)
For all the Spartan menace of their family truckster, the Porzingis’ White Plains, N.Y. apartment is, by all outer feel and façade, sophisticated enough. A smidge small for a clan of Viking-blooded brobdingnagians, perhaps. But classy nonetheless.
We other four in tow, Kristaps keys open the domicile’s door. The smell of cooked fish fills the threshold, followed by a handful of floating feathers and a chorus of clucks.
“Sorry for the mess,” Zinger says, herding the nervous avians into a nearby broom closet. “We’re getting a second apartment soon — right next door.”
“For your family?”
“For the chickens.”
We spill through the entryway and into what I make is the living room. Between the scores of incongruous posters and life-sized Fatheads — all of them dedicated to NBA legends past and present — there’s scarce a crack of paint in the wall. It’s as if an entire family had been décor-blackmailed by their secret-harboring teenager.
“Baron Davis,” I say, noting one of the forementioned Fatheads. “You know he’s thinking about making a comeback?”
“I know,” Zinger says. “He’s texting Melo all the time asking if he’ll accidentally shove Calderon down a flight of stairs.”
Looking around, I turn to see Ingrida Porzingis smiling through a faint plume of kitchen steam. From behind the dividing wall between the two rooms Ingrida lifts a pewter ice bucket pocked with salmon heads.
“Yes!” Zinger verbally fist-pumps. “I was worried it was scrod again.”
I’m invited to join the family for breakfast. The rest of us are given lox from a previous catch, along with bagels and grape jelly, a combination Janis tells me is “a lot better than it sounds.” Kris, meanwhile, is left to ravage the heads, which he eats as you or I might a cob of corn.
Save for the globs of charred salmon eye fired with straws between the brothers, it’s as closely knit a family as I’ve ever encountered. Flush with bullion beyond their dreams, most would be content to unwind those ties, if only in brick and mortar. Not the Porzingises. They know they’ll soon have to set their fledgling aflight. So sue them for wishing the latter.
“How are you feeling about the Hawks?” I offer between napkin mush-spits. “Seems like a perfect opportunity to rebound from Friday; to test your mettle a bit.”
Just as Kris began rumbling a quote through his mouthful of sockeye pulp, a door down the hall shut with a bang. No one but me paid it any mind. Either there was a sixth person living here, or someone in the family enjoyed sleeping with freezing air whipping through the windows. Not that either would’ve surprised me.
After a few slipper-wrought shuffles down the hall the figure appeared. It was veteran Knicks guard Sasha Vujecic, naked from the feet up save for a pair of sunglasses and a plastic construction helmet with an anatomically uncanny — and enormous — purple dildo dangling turgidly from the top. Beside him stood a gorgeous brunette, hair askew and wearing nothing but a game-worn No. 18 jersey.
“Oh, hi,” Sasha says, looking the absolute bare minimum of embarrassed. “Is anyone doing laundry today?”
(Reid Kelley, NBAE vis Getty Images)
Talis drops us off on the corner of 31st and 8th at around 10, a full five-and-a-half hours before tipoff. Kris had already changed into game garb, but wisely threw on an oversized hoodie in an effort to shield him from as many handshake-hounds as possible. Despite being large enough walk neck-first into most streetlights, the ploy works, and within minutes we’re safely in the locker room. Rather than beeline for his closet, Zinger takes a quick detour towards the bathroom stalls.
“What, are you showering now?” I ask.
“No,” he sighs. “They made me move my locker to the toilet.”
“That’s some pretty hardcore hazing,” I say, trying to sympathize.
“It’s not so bad,” KP shrugs. “It’s better than Kyle O’Quinn shytting in your closet.”
Indeed.
As we head for Zinger’s pre-shootaround shootaround, we run into head coach Derek Fisher, staring down at an open book with eyebrows furrowed.
“Hey Coach,” Zinger warns as we approach the sweat-suited skipper, startling Fisher and causing him to reflexively throw the book against the hallway wall. As it lands, the cover jolts closed to reveal the title:
Yourgasm: How to Achieve Peak Sexual Pleasure Through Mindfulness. :hface:
“KP, what’s up?” the half-panicked coach says.
“What does Phil have you reading now?” Kris says, oblivious to the up-turned jacket. Like a starving condor come upon a Westward-wagon cholera outbreak, Fisher swoops to retrieve the missive, thrusting it immediately behind his back
“That? It’s uhh, biography. Wilt Chamberlain’s biography?”
“Oh, can I see?” KP says with a glow as he reaches out his hand. “I wonder if it’s the same one I’ve read.”
“Oh, probably. Yeah.”
“… Let me see.”
“Oh, you don’t want this book. I just had a bloody nose not too long ago. Nose blood all over the pages.”
“That sucks. This is Jim, the reporter. Dolan says he’s cool.”
“Got it,” Fisher says, reaching his right hand out for a shake while his left holds tight the sex screed. “Hey, Jim.”
“Hey.”
“Big game tonight, KP,” Fisher adds as he pirouettes around us, back turned all the while. “Get loose.”
“You got it, Coach.”
Save for the hardly audible whir of cycling air, the Garden hardwood is silent, and Porzingis — per usual — is the first one to hit it. Compared to the morning’s grueling gauntlet, his pre-shootaround is relatively straightforward: Armed with a fast-arriving phalanx of rebounders, KP attempts 1,000 shots in a little under two hours.
He shoots from every conceivable angle at every conceivable distance. With both hands and one foot (his dominant right). Eyes open and eyes blindfolded with a tube sock. Off one leg; standing on a ball boy’s back; to the ring of the Garden’s famous organ and the recorded sounds of a bear ripping a wounded bobcat alive. He shoots with hands in his face; with broomsticks in his face; with perfectly synchronized farts wafted at his face. He’s slapped; kicked; shot with pellet guns; called Blonde Stalin; and hit so hard with a folding chair he actually fell unconscious for a solid 10 minutes. Then he shoots jacked up on smelling salts.
I counted all 1,000 hoists. He made 912.
It was incredible. Any doubts I’d had about this kid’s long-term potential; however high his imagined ceiling; tempered dreams or deference to curses — shattered. In the nine-and-a-half hours I’d spent with Kristaps Porzingis, he’d basketballed for seven of them. Given his track, tack, and trajectory, any universe where Kris doesn’t leave a knuckle-sized nugget in the pan is that which harbors neither gold nor god nor any good at all. He is Latviathan — nasty, brutish, and tall — and he’s about to fukk your world alight.
Jaw sufficiently scraped off the floor, we trudge back once more to the locker room, where a few fellow Knicks have since arrived. It’s always fascinating to see how a player’s on-court personality translates to their pregame routine, and these Knicks are no exception.
There’s Robin Lopez frenziedly trying to keep alive a shoebox full of Tamagotchi and stomping the resulting dead into metallic dust. And there’s Arron Afflalo headbutting himself in the mirror. There’s Jose Calderon watching reruns of Wings; Lou Amundson, fully clothed, running and yelling back and froth between hot and cold shoulders; Kyle O’Quinn in clown makeup; Langston Galloway eating prunes by the fistful. A kaleidoscope of curious peccadillos filtered through a fast-unifying force of basketball team.
As shootaround approaches, players take leave of their tasks and begin suiting up. Within minutes, Phil Jackson — basketball bon vivant, team President and Chief Opioids Officer — limps through the main threshold. He’s clad in a gray, near-seamless jumpsuit and pink shoes. The room’s gaze casts immediately and silently to him, as an ice-born teepee’s might a weeks-gone medicine man.
“Gentlemen,” Jackson rasps with hands behind his back. “Remember to be present, here, today. Be present in one another, and in yourself. And remember that the earth’s only offering is what the elk saps from the pine tree.”
Just then, a concession worker appears from behind Jackson’s formidable frame.
“Your hot-dog nachos, Mr. Jackson.”
“Thank you, Gwendelyn.”
Without so much as giving proper pause, the Zen master thrusts his meaty fingers into his gleaming Teton of sodium and shovels an outcrop into his mouth.”
“Mmmm,” Jackson emotes. “Don’t let anyone tell you differently. The neon cheese is where it’s at.”
And then he was gone.
(Steve Mack, Getty Images)
On a day when the Hawks’ hangover steam could be gauged from deepest space, the Knicks took care of business, upending last season’s No. 1 seed 111–97 behind Affalo’s season-high 38 points.
Zinger, meanwhile, finished with a modest 14 points (on 5-of-13 shooting) and seven rebounds. Still, the flashes — freakish range, deft defensive instincts, outsized poise — abounded just the same. Following Friday’s jobbing in Chicago, it was the kind of win the Knicks absolutely had to have. Not merely to save their season, but to save a suddenly teetering belief about themselves: That whatever scars and woes last year’s disaster left, theirs was a vessel taut and sturdy enough to turn the tide on its own.
Media scrums complete, I wait for Kristaps outside the locker room. He’s invited me to celebratory dinner with his family at the Cheesecake Factory, and offer I quickly accepted.
“I know it’s a huge menu and all, but do they have enough protein for your diet?” I ask as we shuffle down the curving corridor.
“I usually just pig out on some bones in the car,” Kris says. “That way I only eat one cheesecake.”
“Everything in moderation.”
“Exactly.”
As we round the bend, a sound I’d heard from the locker room suddenly comes into focus. There, seated on precarious-looking stool, guitar slung about his shoulder and case open on the cement beside him, is James Dolan, playing for change like some gin-blossomed subway busker. In front of him stands a boy, no more than 10, sporting a white No. 6 jersey and transfixed in awkward grin.
“Christ!” Dolan toothily yawps, before turning back to his audience of one. “I call him Christ! Pretty clever, right kid? Haha!”
“Hey, Mr. Dolan,” Kris returns.
“Please, call me Jimmy.”
“Okay, Jimmy.”
“Just kidding. Call me Pappy.”
“Okay, Pappy.”
“Christ, I want you to meet Jordan. Jordan here was the little boy who cried when you got drafted.”
Ever the good sport, Kris reaches down to shake the convert’s hands. “Good to meet you, Jordan.”
The boy, now in the throes of a full-on excitement seizure, musters only a sheepish, “Hi.”
“You know, I still use that video as motivation,” Kris confides.
“You do?” the kid asks, somewhat surprised.
“I printed out your picture. So I could throw darts at it.”
“Oh.”
“I was just giving Jordan here a sneak peak at my new song,” Dolan interjects. It’s about you, Christ.”
“Wow, really? Can I hear it?”
“Hell yeah you can hear it!” Dolan says as he fidgets into plucking position. “It’s called ‘Christ and Isiah, Bible Brothers Forever.’”
“…Okay.”
Dolan slides a few warm-up strums, tunes the capo once, and begins.
“Well one is white, and the other is black… And they’re both my brothers; well that’s a fact, Jack!… And one is a goat and the other is a god… Still trying to figure out the second line here. It’s either gonna be ‘But together they’ll lead our squad,’ or ‘But I love them both so chew my rod.’”
“What’s a rod?” Kris quickly turns to ask me.
“What Sasha has.”
“Oh, okay.”
“And then it goes,” Dolan continues. “’Isiah and Christ, my b-ball bible brothers… ‘They’ll win a title, and then they’ll win another!’”
“Wow, thank you,” Kris says with polite clap. “It’s an honor.”
“I’ll let you know when we open with it at Hard Rock!”
“We’ll, we gotta get to dinner. Thanks again, Mr. Dolan.”
“Pappy.”
“… Pappy.”
Kris quickly turns to the kid, pulling a sharpie from the pocket of his sweatpants and bending down to sign the four-footer’s jersey across the chest. “Stay out of trouble now.”
As the kid disappears screaming down the hall, we head towards the elevator. We don’t make it five steps before Dolan calls after us.
“Hey!” he yells, forcing us to turn and see him pointing the neck of the guitar down at the empty case below. “Even a bluesman’s gotta eat!”
Sighing, Kristaps walks the few paces back, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a quarter leftover from an earlier trip to the Gatorade machine. He tosses it gently into the case.”
“Shave and a haircut, maybe. Much obliged,” Dolan quips with a tip of the hat before noodling anew.
With only the two of us waiting for an upward ride at the elevator, I take the opportunity to ask Kris something I’ve long yearned to pose.
“So what’s Dolan like?”
He considers this carefully, like some burdened son might a question about his cross-dressing, highway-wandering father. Despite his youth, Porzingis’ loyalty is palpable — for family, franchise, and financial benefactors alike. Whatever the court, this is a kid who wants nothing more than to do the right thing.
“… He’s like the cheesecake for vegans.”
The steel door slides open and we each step in. Turning to face back out into the hall, Kris pushes the ground-floor button. As if by some karmic design, the door remains open just long enough fur us hear the now distant instrument’s next opening bars, the first verse coming to a close just as the doors do the same.
“’Everywhere I go I hear everybody say… What you gonna do to make that team play?… Walk across the street at 34th and 6th… Yelling from the cars, ‘Hey, man, fix the …”
Link: A Little Over Sixteen Hours With Kristaps Porzingis — The Cauldron
onelastdeath
Banned
Hopefully we can get PorJesus in over Drummond 
18-20 million probably. I think he can still be a top 8 pg for at least 2-3 more years.
Wargames
One Of The Last Real Ones To Do It
I thought you were talking about CP3..... Conley though
I read Conley gonna be looking for around what Kyrie and Russell are making now. They'll probably demand 25 mill once they're up...
onelastdeath
Banned
the fukk
Miles Davis
Prince of Darkness
Baron done, we need to look for youth