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11.17.17

In the last edition of The Grip, we speculated the only person that could stop this Boston Celtics team was Boston Celtic Marcus Smart

Suppose we aren’t actually psychics, but we came pretty darn close. Smart turned in a great audition for worst game of the last 20 NBA seasons, scoring one point on 0-7 shooting while bizarrely goaltending one of his own teammates buckets, but the Celtics clamped down on the Warriors and won an improbable game, 92-88.Kyrie Irving was the catalyst in the fourth quarter, but it was the play of Al Horford and Jaylen Brown that kept the Celtics lingering in the second half. Here are some highlights:

This, of course, was the truest test Boston has had to date, and, of course, they passed with a shockingly good performance. Charles Barkley, during the halftime show, made the remark that the Celtics are the fourth best team in the East, behind Cleveland, Washington and Toronto.

They aren’t the best team in the league, or the East, probably, but eventually the asterisk will have to be removed if they keep up this pace.

Surely, though, we can all agree: Barkley is talking that bullshit.

Edit: In the interest of unbiased reporting, we must point out that Marcus Smart was a +15 last night. Is he good or bad? It’s year four and we have no idea.

Twitter’s reaction to Joel Embiid’s Wednesday night masterpiece was so Twitter

*picture credit: Hoops Habit

The bad thing about Twitter is that there is no middle ground. Things get retweeted thousands of times because they are either very, very good or very, very bad. There is no room for logical discussion in the Twitter world. It’s just one big roast of the latest idiot or one big fawn-sesh of the latest roast of the latest idiot.

In that same vein, Joel Embiid was simply magnificent on Wednesday against the Lakers, and NBA Twitter was ready to float Embiid to the damn heavens:

Sometimes, it just takes a little Lucas Frankel to bring us all back down to earth:

Looking at the NBA through the eyes of Rucker Park legend Cal Ramsey

Earlier this week The New York Times picked Cal Ramsey’s brain on the current state of the NBA.

A quick refresher: Cal Ramsey played just 13 games in the early years of the NBA but made his name known at Harlem’s famed Rucker Park, where he clashed with the recently deceased Connie Hawkins (our home page hero).

We have always wanted to sit on a couch with a current or former player and pick his brain for a couple of hours. This article did just that -- but instead of a couch, the backdrop was courtside at Knicks vs. Cavaliers. Here’s an excerpt that we just need to show you:

He could tell you about attending Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech in Washington with Wilt Chamberlain in 1963. He palled around with Willis Reed during the Knicks’ glory days in the early 1970s and later became a team broadcaster and community relations mainstay.

Long before that, in the fall of 1959, Ramsey played for the Knicks as a rugged 6-4 small forward out of New York University, averaging 11.4 points and 6.7 rebounds in 22.9 minutes a game off the bench over a seven-game stretch aborted by a culture of unofficial quotas.

As the story was once told to me by Fuzzy Levane, who was the coach then, he got a call from the owner, Ned Irish, informing him that four African-American players on the roster amounted to one too many. Ray Felix, Johnny Green and Willie Naulls stayed. Ramsey wound up in Syracuse, where he injured his knee and drifted, like many a deserving black athlete of the time, into obscurity.

Scroll down to the our Concrete Reads for a link to the full story.

• Remember Chris Bosh?

• https://twitter.com/thebasedparker/status/930972363365154817

• ANDRE DRUMMOND FREE-THROW WATCH: Andre Drummond is shooting 63.1 percent from the free-throw line and the Detroit Pistons are 10-4.

• In that same Embiid masterpiece, Ben Simmons came within an assist of a triple-double. It is hard to imagine the ceiling for that team.

• LAKERS PICK WATCH: The Lakers are 6-8.

• Last night, the Houston Rockets played the Phoenix Suns, a glorified G-League team, and put up 90 points in the first half -- tied for second most in a half in NBA histroy. Ironically, the most points scored in a first half belongs to Phoenix, who scored 107 in 1990.

• NETS PICK WATCH: The Nets are 5-9.

• This Tweet.

• OK, we’ve been pretty mean to Marcus Smart, so here’s a breakdown of why he isn’t actually the worst player ever, and how he helps the offense. [Tap Here]

• 80 year old Cal Ramsey -- the king of Harlem’s Rucker Park -- reflects on the current state of the NBA. [Tap Here]

• The Boston Globe recently launched a cool new daily podcast hosted by columnist Chris Gasper. Each one is about 20 minutes long, and, at some in the early-afternoon today, they will come out with one about the Celtics’ win, likely with reactions from the best sports section in the country’s Celtics writers. [Tap Here]. P.S.: If they hit you with a paywall, hit us up and we’ll give you Mama Sarah’s login details.

LAST NIGHT'S SCORES

Boston 92, Golden State 88Houstin 142, Phoenix 116