The Weekside: Dwight Howard and the search for a villain

Words With Friends

This week’s five must-read articles about the NBA

1. An Oral History of Kevin Garnett, the Player Who Changed the NBA
by Howard Beck, Bleacher Report

"Paul Pierce: I remember [Joakim] Noah looked up to KG. He was like, “Man, KG, I had your poster on my wall, I looked up to you, man.” And then [Garnett] just said something like that, and was like “F— you, Noah.” I was like, “Whoa.” This kid fresh out of college, looks up to KG, just said he had his poster on the wall, and he tells him that! It crushed him. It crushed Noah."

2. Karl-Anthony Towns vs. Jahlil Okafor Is a Question of Philosophy
by Paul Flannery, SB Nation

"Okafor would be a huge boost offensively for any team, but the Wolves already have an offensive-minded big man in Nikola Pekovic who plays close to the basket and is a liability on the defensive end … Towns would offer the kind of rim-protecting big man they’ve been missing for years … The decision is in Flip Saunders’ hands. He will either buck the modern basketball ethos with a nod to his old-school roots, or embrace it by passing on what once was the model of conventional wisdom."

3. Fans’ Uniform Look Is a Team Effort
by John Branch, New York Times

"The idea of persuading fans to dress identically in team-provided T-shirts is often credited to the Winnipeg Jets hockey team of the mid-1980s … But with the proximity and visibility of fans surrounding a basketball court, N.B.A. arenas in 2015 may represent the pinnacle, the near-perfect blend of allegiance, marketing and stagecraft … “The way it looks on television is important to teams and to broadcasters. And I really believe in the sociological and psychological impact it has on people. I think people want that. That’s why they are coming to the game. They want more of that.” … It is [also] a slow-release form of guerrilla marketing. “I go to the gym, and I see every campaign from the last seven years … For a few dollars a shirt, I’m getting somebody to advertise our brand in perpetuity, or at least for a certain amount of time.”"

4. Stephen Curry’s Next Stage
by Lee Jenkins, Sports Illustrated

"The Zone has been around as long as sports themselves, but the Curry Zone is bigger, hotter and more enduring than any before. He describes the first time he stepped inside that blast furnace, as an eighth-grader in Toronto, playing for a travel team called the 5–0. “I shot everywhere,” he says, “and I couldn’t miss.” He scored 63 points that day, but his dad skipped the last 20 because he was in a hallway outside the gym. “All these people were coming in to see what was going on, and there was so much commotion, it seemed like he was never going to stop,” former NBA marksman Dell Curry recalls. “I had to get out of there. I felt bad for the other team. I couldn’t watch what he was doing to those kids.”"

5. Poster Child: Cavaliers Center Timofey Mozgov
by Jonathan Abrams, Grantland

"In Cleveland, Mozgov has quickly become a fan favorite with exploits that extend beyond the basketball court. He got married in Las Vegas while dressed in a tracksuit. His Instagram account is colorful and includes pictures of himself dressed as Breaking Bad’s Heisenberg. And, of course, there are the quirky commercials for a Cleveland-area bar. “There’s the caricature and then there’s the actual, regular human,” said Benjamin Hochman, a Denver Post columnist who coined a bevy of nicknames — TinaFey Mozgov, Mozel Gov!, Ivan Drago — for Mozgov during his stint with the Nuggets. “I think we really enjoyed the caricature aspect.”"

Next: Enter the Villain