I have been thinking a lot lately (for better or worse) and I was thinking why the hell do we love to hate so much? We hate all the time. A lot of times it is easier to hate than love, and in society we love hating so much we are actually making t-shirts proclaiming our approval of our own said haters. Hating is easy, because hating takes no thinking. In sports, hating has become seemingly more effortless[1]. It is no secret that you can teach a 4-year old how to “boo” quicker then it takes to teach him to sing “‘Skol Vikes” and because of things like this sports fandom has become a community of haters.
Consider this, a buddy you work with gets caught drinking and driving over the weekend and although you know it was a stupid act, but when he arrives on Monday you do not ridicule him or tell him he is a dumbass every time you see him at the copy machine. That would solve nothing, and chances are he had the time to think of his dumbass-ness while sitting in the slammer. Now, imagine the exact same scenario, but instead of being nice to the guy, every time you see him by the copy machine you ask him if you are walking a straight line, and tell him you have some whiskey behind the desk if he needs some with his coffee. Your buddy takes the ribbing and continues to execute his job.
The second scenario is what a category one hater is. Hating on something that has nothing to do with the task at hand. Sure it can be funny, but it is redundant after a while. Especially, if the person hate on, is not only unaffected by the hate, but also possibly motivated.
The second is the “All he has is his athleticism/Will Never be as good as _____” category. These are players who are essentially hated on because they are super freak athletes but the super-freak-ness seems to be their only gimmick. AND/OR they are athletic, talented, yet still not good enough for whomever hates on him. LeBron James’ haters have been in this category for years.
A huge factor in the art of sports hating is jealously and spite. And both characteristics can fall under either category depending on the player or situation. Jealously and spite is the worst kind of hate. These arguments are usually the most illogical and annoying. We will touch back on this in a bit.
The first category is somewhat justifiable because logically everyone cannot like everyone, but I do think to hate on someone for the latter reasons is flawed. To hate on someone for only dunking, is actually just admitting your inferiority because chances are you cannot do that. To hate on someone for losing Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals is not fair because you are on your couch and will never play in a Game 6. As fans, we are often times more attached to the teams than the players themselves. We invest a lot into our teams. We take everything personally, and worst of all, we project our greatest dreams of achievement onto these guys and expect them to come through like it is nothing. We forget that it is really, really hard to be great, and these guys are not in our front yards shooting free throws. Not everyone is simply wired to want to be the best. Think about how many lazy people you know? Think about how lazy you are. We forget that Michael Jordan (the G.O.A.T) took eight years to win his first championship. Because of that, we are not treating these guys fairly when we call them out for their “shortcomings”.
Now to insinuate that we need to remove all hate from sports would be ludicrous, but we need to hate out of respect, not out of spite. It’s okay to hate LeBron for being arrogant and doing things he doesn’t need to do for attention (no look passes when wide open, or dancing with the ball while running the clock out)[2],just as long as you admit his greatness. It is okay to call San Antonio Spurs boring and bypass watching them, as long as you also admit that they are the benchmark for what an NBA franchise should be. Basically, we need to move away from criticizing players like this:“Blake Griffin is an arrogant, whiney, totally out-of-control freak of an athlete, whom carries no offensive skills other than outlandish dunks and getting on his knees to beg refs for calls (Even though when he gets calls, he will undoubtedly miss one or both free throws.). He has no jumper. His only post move is spin right, and he might as well cut the left hand off his baby-fucking-dinosaur-arms because he does not use it anyway. Also, I cannot even figure out what race he is, so I cannot even claim his freak athlete-ness is indeed white. Screw you Blake Griffin”
That statement (although made up by me) could have easily been said in NBA conversations in living rooms or a message board forum anywhere. People hate Blake Griffin. I hated Blake Griffin. And you know what…I’m sorry Blake. Let me tell people why you are great.
The first and most obvious thing Blake brings to the table is his arsenal of high-flying antics. I could sit here and link video after video after video but it would be redundant because we are all aware. Dunks aside, Blake has still produced some of the most eye-popping numbers around. Especially compared to his peers that were drafted with or since he was drafted in ’09. Of the other power forwards[3]none of them, and I mean none of them have even compared to Blake productivity:
Player | PPG | RPG | APG | PER Rating |
Blake Griffin | 20.5 | 10.4 | 3.6 | 22.5 |
Tristan Thompson | 10.4 | 8.3 | .9 | 15 |
Taj Gibson | 8 | 6 | .8 | 14.6 |
Larry Sanders | 6.2 | 5.5 | .7 | 15.6 |
Derrick Favors | 8.5 | 6.4 | .6 | 16.1 |
Blake is an outlier. He is more than a dunker. Yet people hate him for his lack of a jumper and shortcomings at the free throw line. We forget Blake is just 24 years old, and has been coached by Vinny Del Negro and Mike Dunleavy. He is now in his third full season with Chis Paul and first with Doc Rivers, his numbers should improve further. Shooting and coaching deficiencies aside, Blake has still managed to put up some of the best first four year averages of any power forward in my time which is a nightmare for the rest of the league. Look at this comparison:
PLayer | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 |
Blake Griffin | 22/12 | 20/10 | 18/8 | 21/10 |
Kevin Love | 15/12 | 17/13 | 20/15 | 24/12 |
Tim Duncan | 21/12 | 21/12 | 23/13 | 22/12 |
Kevin Garnett | 10/4 | 17/8 | 18/9 | 20/10 |
Dirk Nowitzki | 14/6 | 17/6 | 20/8 | 22/9 |
Of the other top power forwards in the league aside from Blake, only Tim Duncan did 20/10 in his rookie season. I think that deserves some serious love.
I am mostly trying to say we need to keep in mind what is really worth hating. It should not be so easy to hate someone for things that do not matter, or have not happened. What we need to start hating, is that Blake is so good spinning right, that we are scared of what happens if he ever does spin left.
We should not hate LeBron for getting labeled “The Chosen One”. Sports Illustrated did that to him when he was 14. Sure you can hate on him for embodying it maybe, but then also be able to consider that he has unbelievably in nine NBA seasons already won four MVP’s, been to the NBA Finals four times and won two titles.
When Larry, Magic and Michael came up the league was most obviously 30 years younger (leaving a lot of history to be written), but more importantly, the game was not covered in a 24-hour news cycle. No one reported on the sideline what Matt Barnes tweeted after getting ejected from the game. In today’s world, we have more media outlets than we do food places. We speculate everything, and we never speculate behind closed doors. There is far less privacy.
I think we are entering a new era of NBA in which we have legit stars at every age level. We have superstar veterans in Kobe and KG. Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul need to win now. We have budding super-duper stars in Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love, Derrick Rose and Kyrie Irving. Copious amounts of talent in players that are second year players/rookies/college stars. We have a super-duper star in Kevin Durant. And we have LeBron James.
I think that as fans, with this much talent comes responsibility (Morgan Freeman voice). Let’s stop hating these guys for what they are not, or who they are off the court, and start enjoying them simply for what they are giving us. Blake Griffin keep spinning right dammit. Spin right until you cannot no more.
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