DeAndre Jordan, Welcome to the NBA’s Maximum Security Prison!

I have to admit, although this guy went to my school, Texas A&M, I found myself hoping and praying that neither my Clippers nor Spurs would touch him with a ten foot pole. I knew the Clips wouldn’t do anything as rash as to draft him with their top pick, but I was less certain that the Spurs, in their search for an athletic post, wouldn’t fall victim to his “potential” (On a side note: I am officially declaring a moratorium on the word “potential” on my posts, and later, the remainder of all basketball related news sites. EVERYONE has potential. I have some. You, the reader, have some. The guy outside my window throwing empty Keystone cans into the pool has some. DeAndre Jordan has potential because he’s seven feet tall and isn’t a lifeless, reanimated, brain-eating zombie corpse. And even then, he’d have potential. Parentheses over.)

After the first round came and went with me cursing the Spurs for drafting their clubhouse janitor, I focused on the second round, knowing that there were still plenty of talented guys to be taken. I also knew that somebody was going to take a flyer on DeAndre Jordan and his illusory potential. I should have known it’d be the damn Clippers.

By now, you’re probably asking, “Geez Justin, what’s with the DeAndre scorn?”, in hopes that I don’t actually have a real, valid answer for my dislike of a player that I consider to be the second coming of the animatronic Chuck E. Cheese  mannequin that used to play guitar and scare the hell out of my friends and I. You’re all in luck though, because I have eye witness accounts of this horror. First of all, I’m going to say that when you’re seven feet tall, 260 pounds, and athletic, being a failure at basketball should be a federal offense. In my fantasy land, DeAndre Jordan would be in Guantanamo Bay. Not since Andy Slocum have I seen someone who has less of an excuse to be terrible at what he now does for a living. For those of you not from Texas A&M and living in LA, Andy Slocum was 7′1″, 370 lbs (no body fat… WINSTROL V!!) and was the worst basketball player I have ever seen in my human life… 

Now, back to that “potential” word. Jordan has had that word following him around since he was in grade school. As before, being from A&M, I take interest in players that play there, so I knew about Jordan well before he walked through the doors to Reed Arena. I’m thinking that for a grade schooler to receive the tag “potential”, people have taken notice that he may be faster or stronger than other kids in his age group. Most of these so entitled youngsters end up falling by the wayside as their peers catch up to them in respective growth spurts etcetera. By the time a player reaches the next stage, should he still have “potential”, then he will continue to stand out against tougher competition, and so on.

DeAndre Jordan has effectively lived his entire young life with that word hovering over his seven foot fram which leads me to believe that the Clippers drafted him in hopes that he would eventually be nine feet tall with a 200 inch vertical. Jordan spent his lone season at A&M doing exactly one thing. Dunking. To the casual NBA fan, there is nothing more exciting, and to the smaller, less athletically endowed, there is no athletic feat more pursued. My guess is that DeAndre is some sort of basketball philanthropist, because that it all he ever did.

When y’all Clipper fans rush to youtube to search for highlights of Jordan, you’ll see…. dunks. No face up, or turnaround jumpers. No well timed help defense or smart block attempts that don’t leave his man absolutely wide open underneath the basket. But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t make up for some egregiously blown coverage with a rim rattling dunk attempt that may or may not have actually gone in!

That brings me to my next point. DeAndre Jordan misses more dunks than he actually makes. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve actually called for him to be struck down from on high for missing a dunk because he felt the need to try and do something that can only be done in NBA Jam. He misses putback slams, breakaways, and whatever other kinds of dunk you can miss. That’s not all he misses! Freethrows. The old men at your rec center probably call them “Charity Tosses” because that’s, in effect, what they are. Most people don’t ever seem to break down the compound into its two ingredient words. Free. Throw. As a Spurs fan, I can’t stress enough how angry Tim Duncan makes me over his inability to make these things. However, for as mad as I get at Tim, let it be known that DeAndre Jordan is worse. We’re talking Shaq and Ben Wallace love child bad. If the fate of the world rested on DeAndre Jordan making two free throws in a row, we’d all get blown up by the Death Star.

The one and only thing that can be said in DeAndre Jordan’s defense is that he’s so young. Since I’m having so much fun in this expose, I’ll go ahead and say that I don’t expect it to get any better. Think back to Darius Miles. Athletically speaking, there is no way he should’ve ever failed to meet his “potential”. Looking back though, the only thing that can be said in favor of Miles (like Jordan), is that he had athleticism. News Flash, folks. Basketball is actually a sport, and those who play it with any sort of proficiency, are considered to be athletic. If this was a playground game, Jordan and Miles would be my first two picks. Since this is the NBA though, you can’t gamble night in and night out on simply being a better athlete than a professional athlete. The odds become stacked largely against you on that stage. This is precisely why the Miles experiment failed. Well, that AND his massively bad attitude. In that respect, he’s actually JUST LIKE JORDAN, except I’d bet that Miles could destroy Jordan in a one on one.

In the aftermath of the NBA Draft, I suppose it’s not all that unusual that the Clips have taken DeAndre. As my other favorite team, I hope that they promptly get rid of him, because having him in Los Angeles will only further stagnate the franchise, and the Clippers desperately need to catch a break. However, aside from the 2006 campaign where we got within a game of the Conference Finals, it’s been largely the same year in and year out. The Clippers, like Jordan, have had “potential” for what seems like an eternity. They’ve had the various pieces, but for whatever reason, haven’t found the way to fit them all into their puzzle. In that respect, I guess the Clippers were a franchise tailor-made for DeAndre.Still, I wish it wasn’t this way… Oh well, there’s always my Playstation 3 Clippers… (sigh) Justin Out…