Wanted: Announcer Capable of Human Emotions

As you’ve probably heard by now, late last evening America’s Team (the Golden State Warriors) pulled out a truly dramatic win over Dallas to go ahead three games to one in their first round series before one of the most rabidly insane NBA crowds probably of all time. Without fear of overstating it, we can safely call it an incredibly exciting 2.5 hours of basketball.

But to hear TNT announcer Dick Stockton call it, you’d think it was an exhibition match in the Dubuque, Iowa Over-58 Men’s High Sock, Rec Spec, Set Shot and Herniated Disc League.

Look, this is the team that is quickly bringing into the lexicon (courtesy of a dedicated group of diehard fans out West) the mantra “More Crazy!” They are the only team in the league that has a catchy, unique, slightly douche bag-esque yet more-or-less irresistible nickname: The Dubs.

Yet when Jason Terry and Dirk Nowitzki were raining threes to desperately keep the Mavs in the game in the closing minutes, you’d have thought the Warriors were already up 30. It was simply awful work on Stockton’s part, and fortunately the game itself was so exciting that he couldn’t fully drag it down.

It’s one thing for Stockton (and to a slightly lesser extent, Reggie Miller) to take the pronunciation of Mickael Pietrus’ name and blast it into a thousand pieces at point-blank range with an elephant gun, but Monsieur Stockton must summon the same gusto that he uses to annihilate pronunciations to match the insane energy of the fans in the arena and the players on the court. More crazy, Dick Stockton! MORE CRAZY!

Honestly, we’ve never had a real problem with Tricky Dicky in the past, but that’s probably because he doesn’t usually cross paths with series that are this entertaining. His 11 heart beats per minute style might work on a random Thursday night in January, but that blasé approach simply will not stand in the O-rena.

Now a quick digression that will prove relevant in a moment:

A good friend of ours was once playing basketball on New York City’s Goat Courts, located at 100^th St. and Amsterdam Ave., in a game that prominently involved a number of high school-aged kids (this has a tendency to happen sometimes on New York City playgrounds).

Anyhow, at one point in the game, with a team made up entirely of high schoolers trailing by approximately 6 to 8 points, one of the kids crossed over the older guy guarding him and caused him to slip. And right at that moment, he tossed the ball to the ground, walked off the court and declared the game over. That was it – because he had broken his defender so badly, the game was finished. And somehow this meant that his team had won.

Insane logic to be sure, and on several occasions it’s made us imagine how hilarious it would be if similar principles were applied in the NBA and were actually incorporated into the rules of the game. So if a player got crossed over really badly or was delivered a particularly nasty facial, the ref walks up to the player who got abused and throws him right out of the game. Double technical on the spot – you’re gone. Can you imagine how insane the crowd would go for something like this?

Okay, clearly it’s a ridiculous concept and will never happen, but we bring it up because we’d really love to see some sort of in-game penalty system for lackluster TV announcers. Picture Dick Stockton slogging through the third quarter of Warriors-Mavs on Sunday night, and after he nonchalants his third consecutive exciting play, the ref stops the game, walks over to the table and gives him the heave. He protests (half-heartedly, of course) and then eventually is forced to leave underneath a hail of two-thirds empty beer cups and french fry containers. Now that would be amazing.

Unfortunately, such a system clearly isn’t going to be implemented despite its clear and undeniable merits. However, we do have a solution to the Stockton problem that we think could work out well for everyone:

Dick Stockton and Erick Dampier are to be traded to the Raptors-Nets series in exchange for Marv Albert and Bostjan Nachbar.

In sum, we have decided that what we need at this point is More Crazy, and Marv can at the very least provide us with A Little Bit of Crazy.

(Dampier and Nachbar, for the record, are included because of salary cap purposes.)