Al Horford Has Angel Wings: Identity, Injuries, and Hope in the NBA

"We'll be alright once we get _________________ back."

What sports fan hasn't at some point uttered the above statement, whether out of confidence or sheer desperation? The imagination of sports fans exists in a realm of hypotheticals, what ifs, and naive wish fulfillment. Injuries to significant players flatten the playing field, allowing both wealthy and impoverished fans alike to create a parallel universe where, with one crucial addition, anything can happen. It’s the absence of a player that brings them down, and this absence also allows them to imagine the previously unthinkable: that a team whose achievement has grown stagnant can still shatter glass ceilings.

Number of the Day: Zach Randolph's #50

For most of his career, we have not known Zach Randolph. He has been the prodigal, making brief stops at Michigan State, Portland, and New York, displaying volatile rumblings of talent and substance, to change and manipulate the NBA's power structure, but, in most cases, every time he has appeared ready to change the landscape of how things are he has turned out to be more smoke than fire. But not any more; now, after nine years in the League, he appears ready to ssshhhhhh his critics with an array of post moves that would have even the great Tim Duncan tipping his hat in admiration. And that's the thing about the Grizzlies, it would be easy to only view Randolph and his cohort of young teammates as a group of adolescents playing with matches, burning down the old and cackling in the new, but that doesn't seem fair, that line of thought seems to view them in the same light that made so many of them cast offs and vagabonds in the first place. The Grizzlies need their story told.