If someone told me that for the rest of the NBA regular season I would be forced to watch to the 4th worst team in the league, with an over weight care-free (in a bad way) point guard, with an racist owner http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=hill/110905&sportCat=nba, and a fan base that could care less about the outcome of the game, I would be perfectly fine with that. More than perfectly fine, I would be legitimately happy to watch this team play and this is due to the fact that I get to watch the most exciting player in league; Blake Griffin. A spot that had been reserved for Chris Paul the past couple of years, Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire during the “7 seconds or Less” era in Phoenix and Vince Carter during his days in Toronto, the position of my favorite player to watch in the NBA is now set-aside for Blake Griffin. With only 31 games into his young career Blake Griffin has done the unimaginable, drawn my attention away from what was going on in Miami with Lebron and the League of Super Friends and brought it to the blue and red Staples Center to see what amazing highlight Blake Griffin had that night. If there is a night I did not catch the Clippers game the first thing I do when I enter ESPN’s main page is look for the highlights on the Clippers game, because I know there was at least one amazing highlight I had missed form Blake. The man is just a highlight machine; he has taken over Sportscenter’s Top 10 Plays faster than (fill in funny expression).
Let me take you back to the first day of the NBA season, the Boston Celtics where playing the Miami Heat in arguably the most anticipated NBA regular season game of all time. Well the game was crap, it was close, but the Heat were a mess, looking like a worse set of teammates for Lebron than the 2009 Cavilers and the Celtics looked like the same team as last year, but older. As the follow up to this game we got the Portland Trailblazers and Los Angeles Clippers. A game I had little interest in, but would still watch. Just 4 minutes into the game Blake Griffin got his first basket,
which resulted in Matt’s first jump out of the couch play of the year and just a few plays later he had a barbaric one-hand put back, where you could tell that he was really capable of doing stuff like this each night of the season
Blake Griffin was pulling out these crazy dunks each and all ready has numerous amounts of awesome youtube mixtapes and highlight pages through 31 games, that any NBA player would love to have over a ten-year period. But the night that sealed the deal as my favorite player to watch was the Nov. 20 game against the Knicks.
Even in the loss, he had 44 points and 15 Rebounds and the three of the best dunks of the year, in my favorite game to watch of the season so far. I think 4 of those plays were on Sporstcenter’s Top 10 that night.
Although dunks do not necessarily make a player a great team basketball player, it is not the case with Blake Griffin. He could have been mailing it by know, playing on a 9 win team in a silent arena, but there has not been a game this year were he has not tried, he has the tremendous dunks on the offensive end ranking 18th in the league in scoring and getting the dirty work on the defensive end, being a tough match-up at the four position, being to strong for the fast players and to fast for the strong players. One of the most phenomenal things about Blake is he is 4th in the league in rebounding with 12.4 a game. The amazing thing about that is, he doesn’t know how to rebound. You can tell by watching him he doesn’t knew where the ball is going or how to box out, but he is 4th in the league just by his pure athleticism and jumping ability.
Right now besides my Bulls being 19-10 and Derek Rose making the transformation to an elite player, nothing in the NBA brings me more joy than watching Blake Griffin fly through the air and watching a highlight show by him each night. This may not last long though, because as exciting as he plays, the way he plays is at times stupid
nearing an injury it seems each time he dunks the ball. So enjoy it while you can people, Blake Griffin my new favorite player to watch.
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