Mutombo All Up in Dzee House

First Shawn Bradley, then Alonzo Mourning... now Dikembe Mutombo is calling it a career.  Sign o' the times, I suppose.

Deke will have more quality time to work on other skills... like bowling, horse riding, golf, remodeling bathrooms so he won't bust his head everytime he needs to wash his hair.

I just hope he doesn't go the Manute Bol route and feel obligated to blow what fortune he has to pay off half of the Congo on the way back to some leaky hut down there.  But he's a giving guy, and he seems to have decent control of his finances, so who am I to worry?

You wonder, with the league's tallest dunkbait suiting up for the final time, what centers are really out there willing to play the victim and persistently produce facial dunk mixes for the next generation of high-flyers and low-post bangers?  It's gotta be players who are talented AND healthy enough to stick it out for at least a decade.  Oden and Yao have suspect feet... Bynum and Nene can't stay on the court for long... Dwight seems to pick and choose his block attempts... guys like Chandler and Dalembert look like they'd rather be doing something else with their time... and Hilton Armstrong, Brandon Wright, Roy Hibbert, and Cheikh Samb seem more destined for D-League infamy.  Plus coaching staffs are pulling centers further away from the rim each season.  So the "Halfway-Decent Centers Getting Dunked On Mix" era may well be coming to a close.

Like Zo, there's a Nasteedunx blog coming soon ("Not in Dzee House of MutMMMPH!") to highlight opponents' most degrading slams climbing up Mount Mutombo.  And yeah, it's safe to say there's a LOT of them, a veritable cavalcade of All-Stars and other ballers transcending two generations.  But Deke deserves his time to shine.  And I imagined coming through with a bunch of Dikembe DunkOns to be fair and balanced.  Alas...

Take a guy who's 7-foot-2 but has always been challenged on the offensive end.  Set up offenses where he hardly has to touch the ball unless he's rebounding.  Take defenders who don't take him seriously enough to challenge him under the rim.  And the result is -- well, why don't we let him tell us?

Yo, Deke, in 17 seasons... how many times have you been pictured throwing it down on somebody?

Oh.  And that was on Mark Jackson, not even the Tom Chamberized version at that. So should that even count?

Well, anyway, if you folk out there in cyberspace find some more, holla.  Meanwhile, here's the only other ones I could dig up to tickle your fancy.

~iyf

Happy Trails! Pat Garrity

There are two guys in particular who the Sixers' Samuel Dalembert will be happy to know have elected to depart from The League this off-season. One is to be featured in our next Crammed-On Chronicle archive from 2007, as he heads back overseas (to Moscow) to get some of that strong Euro cash.

The other is the Orlando Magic's Pat Garrity, who sat in quite a catbird seat as the treasurer for the NBA Players' Union. He retired from the NBA this week, to the amazement of many teammates who thought he stopped playing quality basketball long ago. In The League for ten uneventful seasons, including nine with the Magic, Garrity's legacy on YouTube consists of a single 30-second dunk mixtape... basically three replays of the same jam, but a good one from 2006. Opening himself up on the weakside after making a screen for the double-teamed Steve Francis, he barrels into the lane and knocks Sammy to the floor, folding him up like some cheap patio furniture as he windmills in a right-hander. Garrity's dunk elicited gasps from fans and teammates alike and was the "WTF moment" of the season. Outside of the 53 starts at small forward he had for the injury-riddled Magic in 2003, the dunk had to be the WTF moment of his career as well.

~iyf