james.soriano

And he should play.

The Wizards should not bench him and tank the rest of the season for hopes of winning the Lottery. In principle, that goes against everything that sports stands for, not to mention a shame to guys like Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler, who still show up, give their best effort every night, and take responsibility for the losses.

But even pragmatically, the Wizards don’t necessarily have much to gain by purposefully losing.

Theoeretically, they have a 25% chance of getting the top pick if they get the worst record. But in the 24 years that there has been a lottery, the worst teams have only gotten the top pick four times. In actuality, that translates to around 17%, which is a pretty bad deal if you keep on hoping for a good lottery pick when you could do so much more with the GM actively making moves for better players in the offseason.

In fact, sometimes to lose out on the draft is to win in the long run. Case in point: 2007 Boston Celtics, who had the second worst record that season, and should have gotten the second pick in the Draft. Instead, they got fifth. That prompted them to trade the pick to Seattle for Ray Allen, which initiated the deal that would land KG in Beantown.

That next year, they won the championship.

If they had gotten that first pick, though, do you think they would have traded away for Ray Allen and KG? No, they probably would have kept their young core and drafted either Greg Oden or Kevin Durant. Yay, more lottery.

But more importantly, it’s about Arenas gaining confidence in his knee. He has to know whether it will hold up, especially in game situations. You don’t get that from pickup games with undrafted free agents, or fullcourt workouts. If he knows his knee won’t tank on him, that will give him the confidence he needs for another breakout season next year. (It’s not gonna happen this late in the season; they’ll bring him in slowly for sure.)

And God knows how much I’ve missed Arenas. He had game to back up his swag. I want to see that arrogance back. I want to see him hit some clutch shots. I’m almost hoping for an Arenas game-winner tonight against Detroit.

If he shows premature flashes of Agent Zero, though, I’m buying his shoes over the summer.

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 24 September 2008 Issue (Page E-3)

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Last Sunday, while everyone was out watching the Ateneo-La Salle game in Araneta, I was over at a blockmate’s house with a couple of friends doing some academic work. This, however, did not change the fact that by four in the afternoon, all of us were seated around the big-screen TV, watching the game intently, sharing its highs and lows with all the other fans in the Big Dome. We had ceased being productive.

The game was a bit of a mess. The game was excruciatingly slow in the first half, and there were too many fouls and turnovers throughout. About the only thing that was amazing in this game was the defense, and even if you’re a fan of the sport, this is usually quite hard to appreciate.

But the game wasn’t completely devoid of good points. One of these good points was Ateneo’s 6”7 center Rabeh Al-Hussaini, who had 31 of Ateneo’s 69 points to go along with 9 rebounds. The MVP candidate’s play showed why Ateneo has been on top all season.

During the post-game analysis, my blockmates and I were talking about him in particular. “Ano bang height niyan?” one of them asked. “six-foot-seven,” another of my blockmates answered. “Mga kasing-height ni Michael Jordan.”

That remark, I think, illustrates why the Philippines and basketball don’t fit each other very well.

In our country, basketball is something of a national fixation. We play it on the streets, buy the jerseys, and have an entire channel dedicated to it on cable. This obsession tends to be both utilized and fueled by media. For example, basketball players are treated as celebrities, performing various other functions ranging from TV host to commercial model. When you think about it, these people aren’t just selling products or TV shows. In effect, they are also selling basketball, being “ambassadors of the game”. Maybe this is why every teenage boy, at some point in his life, must have wanted to be a basketball superstar.

While I myself also subscribe to the basketball culture, I don’t understand how things came to be this way, or indeed, why they should be.

For one thing, we put in so much money and effort into basketball when it’s something we can’t be competitive at internationally. Height, of course, is the big issue here. In other countries, the height range for big men would be around six-foot-ten to over seven feet. For smaller players like guards, the average height would be at around six-foot-four to six-foot-seven. Here, Rabeh Al-Hussaini, who stands six-foot-seven inches tall, is already a big man. Our big men are about as big as the small guards of other countries.

For another thing, we pay so much attention to basketball that we’ve come to ignore other sports. In this country, there’s not much room for a career in a sport that’s not basketball, aside from billiards, boxing, and bowling. Besides being unfair to all our talented and dedicated swimmers, martial artists, and other “–ball” players, it also makes you wonder if we have a strange, irrational preference for sports starting with the letter ‘B’.

That aside, I think the worse effect is that some of the sports we’re ignoring, we can actually be competitive at internationally, if we aren’t already. It seems to me that we pay much more attention to how our basketball teams fare in the UAAP than we do about our Olympic bets in taekwondo or archery. While it might be true that we’d give them support when they finally win, let’s face it: any endeavor that aims to win at international sporting leagues requires state support, in terms of both of funding and fan base. Basketball has a lot of this, while our other sports don’t appear to have much, if at all.

Perhaps the funniest thing about all of what I’ve mentioned above is that these aren’t things we haven’t heard before. Despite this, though, we continue to hold on to basketball as our national sport, for better or worse.

But I guess you could also look at it this way: if a sport is just as much about enjoyment as it is about competition, then the fact that we enjoy basketball is what matters.

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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 10 July 2008 Issue (page G-4)

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The 71st season of the UAAP kicked off last weekend with a match-up between the Montagues and Capulets of Philippine collegiate basketball: the Ateneo Blue Eagles and the De La Salle Green Archers.

While the game attracted the most hype, I thought it was a horrible slugfest characterized by missed shots and bad execution. Then again, I guess I could put a positive spin to it and use words like “epic” and “dramatic” to describe what transpired. After all, the teams were neck-to-neck until the final minute, and both sides gave outstanding efforts. In the end, however, the Blue Eagles won it with free throws and a key defensive play.

But it is not so much the result that I want to make a point about.

Rather, I want to talk about the spirit that animated everyone, from players to courtside spectators to spectators on couches. Ateneo-La Salle basketball games are always big events, whose tickets run out as soon as they start selling, and whose courtside seats are well-attended by the who’s-who in society.

Also, the games themselves seem to bring out something special in everyone. Fans of the same school cheer together when momentum is on their side, and get down on their knees to pray when it’s not. People, young and old alike, get on their feet when big plays are made. As one community, you feel either the exultation of victory, or the anguish of defeat. This is when I realize that it is here where the rivalry is at its best: when people come together to celebrate the spirit of competition.

And then, people go too far.

Any good rivalry has an element of respect. Ideally, after a spirited bout, both teams congratulate each other in the spirit of sportsmanship, and all traces of ill will are left on the court. It is, after all, nothing more than a sports rivalry.

Now I’m not saying that these institutions don’t have any respect for each other. Not everyone is a hooligan, and I’m sure that most people who come from either school have their share of friends, relatives, or business partners on the opposite side of the fence.

But I am saying that sometimes it gets a little out of hand.

We claim that the other side won because they paid the referees. We sour grape when one university ranks higher than the other. We reinforce stereotypes we have of people who come from the opposing school, so much so that it’s almost racism. There are instances in which we would prefer that our companies do not hire, or that our kids do not associate with, people coming from the other side. And it is here that I begin to ask myself: all this, for a sports rivalry?

Then again, this seems to be the way the world turns, anyway. The tendency is to discriminate on basis of irrelevant things like sex, skin color, or affiliation. And therefore, it really isn’t so strange that we do the same thing with athletic competition.

But when you think about it, it is precisely our history of making big deals out of differences that has turned our world into the way it is now. Racism still exists because we hold pre-conceived notions of other races. Religious intolerance still propagates because we like to emphasize that we’re on different paths, not that we’re on the same mountain. And the list goes on.

Which leads me to question, why did we have to complicate our lives this way?

Granted, any rivalry has its good and bad sides. And I guess it is a testament to people’s sanity that this one has remained in relatively the same place. But at the same time, some wounds still run deep. What I’m not so sure of is whether there is any real reason why this should still be the case. And it is then that I wonder at the capacity of people to make mountains out of molehills.

But that is not to take anything away from the fact that at its essence (meaning on the court), the Ateneo-La Salle rivalry is still something we can all look forward to and enjoy.