This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse

The NBA regular season (also known as God's way of making up for 4 months of nothing but baseball) opened tonight. I have never been so happy to see the start of the season as I am this year. There are a lot of factors why, the big ones being the Mavs exited so early last year and left a bad taste in my mouth and then I was treated to several months of some of the worst Rangers baseball in team history (and that's saying a lot!). But that's not the purpose of this blog. No, the purpose of this particular blog entry is to warn my 3 readers of their impending doom.

Each year the NBA has a free preview of their NBA League Pass package for the first week of the season. You can watch every single NBA game for a week as cable programmers hope to suck you into paying $150 for the rest of the season (for the record, if I had $150 bucks, you could bet I'd be sucked in each and every year). Tonight there was only one game opposite the national broadcasts so I tuned into the Utah Jazz (a team I have a slight routing interest in because of all the ex-Dallas area players) and the Golden State Warriors (a team I hate with the fire of a thousand burning suns). The thing I like about the League Pass is that each game is called by the home team's announcers. So instead of being subjected to Bill Walton's pot-riddled brain try to form complete sentences, John Saunders pretend he knows something about basketball (hockey player!), or Kevin Harlan getting overly excited about a 12 foot jumper, I get to hear local commentators who really care about their team and always provide actual insight into the team instead of filler.

During a routine report, the Warriors sideline reporter (whose name I missed due to my heart attack) casually mentioned that Stephen Jackson was one of the team's captains this year. Yes, you read correctly (I know because I had to rewind the Tivo to make sure). STEPHEN JACKSON is a CAPTAIN of an NBA team. In case you're wondering this is the same Stephen Jackson who once did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQomnCawBQM
Jackson would be the one throwing hay makers on a fan (a kid really) during the worst brawl in NBA history. Jackson is also the same classy guy who was ejected from 2 out of 6 games in the playoff series against the Mavs last year, has at least twice been fined for flipping off fans, and was suspended last year for illegal discharge of a firearm outside a strip club at 2 in the morning. A worse ambassador of the sport you could not find. Even Dennis Rodman looks like a choir boy compared to Jackson.

And yet the Warriors players and coaches, in all their good judgement, found it appropriate to make this moron a captain, a representative of the team. I'm sure David Stern is throwing a well articulated fit right now and wondering how in the heck his league became a such a circus act. The moral of the story is, gather the family, take a nice trip, get right with the Lord, because this has to be a SURE sign of the End of Days.