I waited longer than A.C. Green to make this post

Finally…The Fox…has come back…to the Shamrock Headband.

OK, so now you’re either wondering who the hell I am or if you do remember the few posts I’ve put up, you’re wondering where the hell I’ve been. I’ll make it easy for you. I’ve been enjoying the summer. Putting in the hard hours on my weekly radio show and frantically trying to push my fantasy baseball team to the playoffs and coming up just short (I also learned drafting Chris Carpenter with your 2nd pick can cause substantial hair loss in a 24-year-old).

I’ve been ravenous for hoops news. The Celtics signed KG and it seemed like the sky was the limit for NBA summer roster shakeups. And during the month of August – I saw nothing. I saw James Posey. And Scot Pollard. Eddie House. I was waiting for Ainge to sign up David Wingate, or Gerald Paddio, or maybe the immortal Steve Scheffler. What the hell are you doing Danny? Of all the inexpensive bench options you had, you grab throw-ins from late-90’s, early 2000’s Schick Rookie-Sophomore challenges. I could go on all day about this, but sticking with the story…

So I said “screw it, NBA.” I kept reading the excellent posts on this blog and waited…and now, suddenly, we’ve got Shawn Marion wanting a trade. We’ve got Andrei Kirilenko wanting a trade. As DJ Kay Slay would say, “Drama!”

To the Utah Jazz: help yourselves out! Kirilenko is dead to you, at least in Sloan’s offense. You could have Richard Jefferson starting at the 2 next year. Alternatively, you could have Lamar Odom starting at the 3. Both of these players have demonstrated skill in a half-court set, which is Sloan’s bread and butter. Make a deal!

To Shawn Marion: if you go anywhere, make sure they have a decent point guard. You’ve had the fortune of playing with Jason Kidd, Stephon Marbury (over 8 dimes a night at the time), and Steve Nash in Phoenix. You can stay there and challenge for the NBA title the next couple of years, or you can see a significant drop in production playing for a lottery team. But then of course, everyone and their uncle with the glass eye is demanding a trade, so we might not see anything here.

So now I’m back and I’m ready for the season. The kicker was clearly when I went to visit my dad for the weekend and the one thing he wanted to do was go to the grocery store so he could pick up the Sporting News, Athlon Sports, and Lindy’s NBA Preview Issues (i.e. every basketball magazine on the rack). That’s when you know things are heating up: the preview issues hit the shelves.

I’m excited to watch The Ticket play for my home team. I love Jesus Shuttlesworth playing the 2 this year. Love him. Class act. But I’m not drinking, as my radio co-host would call it, the Celtics “cuckoo juice.” The Green is going at it this season with a trio of all-stars and a band of Smurfs. Why, they just signed a big Bolivian stiff this week. He can play Papa Smurf behind Fee-fi-fo-fum Perkins and eccentric Canadian singer/songwriter Pollard. What’s that? Batista is from Uruguay? My apologies. Welcome to town. But I don’t care if he’s from Bolivia, Uruguay, if he’s from Kamchatka (the country in the upper right hand corner of the “Risk” board) – I don’t care if he’s former Blue Jays slugger Tony Batista or Batista the roided-out pro wrestler. He’s another Danny Ainge, “post-KG special,” stiff. We’ll talk more on this in the future.