Dirty Knees, Look at These

Editors Note: There is a 100% chance you don't care about the first few paragraphs and a 4% chance you will find the last 2 paragraphs funny. As always, I recommend you read something else.

City League game last night down at El Rio ( I think thats the name, its the neighborhood center over by the rodeo grounds at Irvington and 6th). We moved up to the 'A' league this season after winning the 'double B' last season without much effort.

We won our first game against a team that was also in 'double B' last season and who we played like 4 times. I think we split with them in the regular season and then had them twice in the double elimination playoff. This time around they were missing their big guy and we were really on and wound up beating them by about 12.

The second game was against what looked like a very strong team that included Neal (he played at Sahuaro a few years behind me and has only gotten quicker over the years) and a couple of other guys I don't know but looked kinda good. They only had 3 guys show up so we won by forfeit but scrounged some extras that were standing around and played anyway. The lady running the clock actually ran the clock even though we had no refs. It was a fun game, close the whole way. We were down 2 with about 30 seconds to go and hit a tough 3 pointer to go up by one. They came down and got a quick 2 and nearly stole the inbounds pass, it got tipped around to Eric who hit what had to be the ugliest off balanced one handed layup of all time to win the game. For a game that wasn't actually real, it was a blast.

Last night's game was against a very strong press team and we didn't have a true point guard to handle the ball for us. They were all good athletes and had played together quite a bit and though we were up as much as 11 in the first half as we wore down our turnovers increased. Even though they missed a bunch of free throws down the stretch to give us a chance we turned the ball over on 2 of our last 3 possessions. Down 3 with 1.7 seconds to go we managed to get a long baseball pass off to Krump who (amazingly) managed to jump about 30 feet in the air and tip it to a wide open Adam (who had hit a huge 3 just a few minutes ago). Unfortunately he missed the shot so we didn't get OT but it was a great game.

There was a weird moment mid-way through the 2nd half. They had this skinny white guy that could really leap. He had thrown down 2-handed on a dead play and tipped in a pretty nice alley oop from their point guard(conspicuosly wearing his Tucson Summer Pro League jersey, come on dude....be serious) but he wasn't very strong. I posted him up every chance I got and he had 4 fouls by halftime. This play I had the whole side cleared out and Jason was coming to me with the entry pass. When playing post defense from behind, you are taught to never square up completely, it gives the offensive player all the leverage. Instead you are supposed to either get around to the side of his body (usually the lane side to keep him from the middle) or to put your outside knee sort of between his legs so that you get the leverage advantage back and can move him around. It also forces his hips forward so that he can't get a good base to push off from.

ANYWAY...this guy tried the knee trick because I was actually physically restraining him from coming around the side. I don't know if it was because he was extra skinny or what but when he pushed his knee at me, instead of it knocking me off balance it sort of pushed between my ass cheeks. I jumped like I'd been hit with a cattle prod and the ref immediately called a foul thinking the guy had shoved or punched me. Me and the defender both kind of recoiled and I think silently agreed to never speak of it. He didn't argue the call and I went home to check WebMd and make sure that knee to ass contact doesn't put me at risk for any kind of disease. I still feel kind of violated.

No exercise today, I'll be taking 30 showers and trying to forget what happened.