="nhl95.jpg" src="http://deadspin.com/assets/resources/2008/05="nhl95.jpg" width="289" height="252" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" />This is BALLS DEEP With Big Daddy Drew (Balls® is a registered trademark and has been used with the expressed written consent of AJ Daulerio). It's gonna be like an SI Point After column, only with dick jokes. You can email him here.
My="nhl '94 team was the Buffalo Sabres. I have no clue why. I think it's because everyone else had already taken the Blackhawks. This was back when the Stars had just moved out of Minnesota, so I couldn't pick them (sorry Leitch, I don't swing that way). I liked playing with Buffalo because I liked using Alex Mogilny. With Mogilny (and really, with any player in the game, but I liked doing it with Mogilny), I could do this one move. It wasn't the best move, but it worked for me, so I did EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME I CAME DOWN THE ICE.
I would have Mogilny skate to an area between the goal post and the boards, then I would have him skate directly across the front of the net, shooting just before I hit the far post. That's it. Boring, but effective. Other players preferred the one-timer (Roenick was great for that), or juking the goalie just as they drove past the net. But those moves were far too nuanced and subtle for me. I needed a move that I could execute with half a case of Busch and an entire bag of Salsa Rio Doritos inside me, and holding down the left side of the stylus and pressing C did the trick quite nicely. I tried mixing it up once or twice and trying a different move, which never worked, causing me to immediately regret deviating from the norm.
Moves like this were a staple of old sports video games, back before the games were made far too realistic for me to be able to actually excel at them. Stupid EA sports. Don't they know I play Madden because I lack the timing and coordination to play REAL goddamn football? Annoying.
Anyway, the classic example of this was Bo Jackson in Tecmo. Everyone loves Bo in Tecmo Bowl because everyone did the same move with him: sweep him to the right, hit the corner, angle back to the center of the field if necessary, get the defense in the rear view, then run a zigzag pattern all the way to the end zone, bodies trailing in Bo's wake. It never failed. The few times it did, I would glare at my NES in complete outrage. Stupid fucking console. I DIDN'T PAY FOR YOU SO YOU COULD BEAT ME.
I am, like most people I know, a creature of habit. If I find something that works for me, I just keep doing it until it's beaten well into the ground (like those crazy Wade and Jerry posts!).
One time, I cooked dinner for a girl and got the hook-up. I proceeded to do this with every girl I liked thereafter. I even cooked the same thing: ravioli. Eight minutes in the pot, a ladle full of Rao's sauce, and VOILA! Instant tongue wrestling. The ravioli didn't have to taste great. What mattered was that I put in the effort. Women just LOVE seeing a man at work, I tell you. They're evil like that.
I also use the same move every time I play foosball. We have a table in our office (which, along with the insurance, is why I'll never quit my day job). When my front row gets the ball, I place the ball on the left side of the center's foot, at the right side of the goal. Then I quickly push the ball to the left and shoot all in one motion SNAP. This is the move I always do, because I'm decent at it and trying to expand my repertoire involves going away from the move. And I'm far too lazy to ever do that.
I bring this sort of go-to-the-well mentality with me to any sporting event I watch. If a team has one move that works, I get irritated when they try and move away from it, or the player who can best pull it off. This happened a lot during the NFL season, when the Vikings comically refused to hand Adrian Peterson the goddamn ball. If you're a Florida fan, chances are you got peeved whenever Tim Tebow does a direct handoff rather than something totally awesome. But this cuts across other sports too.
LeBron James has a move. He has lots of moves, but there's only one he needs to use. You know the one. It's the one where he says, "Fuck it," drives to his right, past his man, elevates over the rest of the defense, then either (a) lays it in, (b) throws it down, (c) kicks it out, or (d) hits a soft five-footer. Then he finishes with a counter-clockwise swirl.
But that move is so fucking easy for LeBron, it's laughable. Save for his dreadful Game 1 shooting performance against Boston, it's usually easy money for him. Almost like he's cheating. (And, with a little hand from the referees, he probably is.) Watching him drive to the hoop is like watching the end of "The Two Towers," when they ride out on horseback into the middle of the orc army AND NOT ONE ORC DOES A FUCKING THING ABOUT IT. Stupid Uruk-hai. They're on fucking horses. Pull an Eight Belles on Aragon's steed and take his ass out.
Watching LeBron play isn't like watching Kobe Bryant. When Kobe scores a million points, he has to work for that shit. He has to muscle through traffic, or consistently nail that turnaround fadeaway of his that looks exactly like Jordan's. It looks like a lot of effort. Kobe's probably a "better," or more well-rounded player than LeBron, but only because he has to be.
LeBron doesn't have to employ all those crazy moves. All he has to do is make like a goddamn tank and plow a bitch over. I remember watching Shaq back when he wasn't frozen in carbonite, and I remember people saying, "Eh, it's no fun to watch Shaq play. All he does is dunk." Well, at least someone had to pass Shaq the ball. LeBron needs no such help.
I get very annoyed whenever I see a Cavs player that is not LeBron handling the ball. And I get really fucking annoyed when one player who is not LeBron passes it to yet another player who is not LeBron. "What are they doing? Are they retarded?"
In my own simplistic mind, I'm convinced that LeBron should and can do this move every single time the Cavs bring the ball up the court. I know they almost do this anyway, but I'd like to see a game where they do it wire-to-wire. This nearly happened when in Game 5 versus the Pistons last year, but that was just in the second half. What about the first half? Yes, I know defenses will quickly catch on to this sort of game plan. But I don't give a shit. If LeBron kicks it out a handful of times, they still have to remain honest. I think. Fuck it, I just want to see it happen. I wanna see if the motherfucker can score 80. It worked for Mogilny, dammit.
This is how I think as a fan. Obviously, the coach knows better than me. But the whole fun of being a fan, for me, is to assume I know best. I'm sure there's a reason the Cavs have set plays for Ilgauskas. But fuck that shit. I'd far rather assume Mike Brown is just afraid to be accused of lacking creativity for running the same shit over and over again, or ignoring the rest of his players, or breaching some sort of on-court etiquette.
What. A. Pussy.
It's the same feeling I get whenever I see the Chargers NOT call a running play for LT, or whenever I see Randy Moss run a 15-yard square-in. I want to see them dominate by doing the same thing over and over again. In a sense, I'd like my real-life games to be more like the old video games I played. This makes no sense. If anything, I should want my video games to hew closer to real-life games. But I hate that, since newer games won't give me a move to rely on. I've got no security blanket, no Jay Novacek to speak of. And that makes me uncomfortable.
Seeing the same move executed over and over again should bore me. But it doesn't. There's a certain comfort to the repetition, whether I'm watching it or doing it. (This is also why I drink beer after beer after beer). I like knowing that something has been perfected to the point where it requires no deviation. And that's why I want to experience it multiple times over.
Wait. Now I know why I masturbate so often...
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