Negative Dunkalectics: NBA Playoffs Preview: San Antonio Spurs

Rainer Maria - entire discography (1995 - inevitable reunion show in 2015)

I feel like it was ages ago that I was shamefully googling Jejune lyrics and videos and listening to Mineral for the first time. Spring hadn't arrived and the Atlanta Hawks were horrible. Now the Pyrus calleryana are in bloom, Dwight Howard's demanding a trade before game two, and we've written sixteen of these ridiculous playoff previews.

Where does the time go, indeed!

Here's the place to thank the whole Negative Dunkalectics ensemble for making this happen. Thanks, too, to everybody who took the time to read it. Sincere apologies if we inadvertently led you to squander like $20 on a Sunny Day Real Estate reissue on Record Store Day. If you call our customer service hotline, we'll try to work out some recompense.

(You can click here for an indexed version of the whole series.)

Since I don't like the Spurs and I do apparently still like Rainer Maria, of course my preparation for writing this comparison devolved (or ascended?) into a realm of just watching Rainer Maria videos. Both the Spurs and Rainer Maria have been... consistent... for a long time. The Spurs get written off every year as "too old" only to remain in contention. Rainer Maria ostensibly broke up back in 2006, although if you buy tickets to their 2015 reunion show now you can lock in the special pre-QE4-spurred-hyperinflation rate.

Just kidding about part of that last sentence.

Yago Colas's great paper about Manu Ginobli notwithstanding, I don't like watching the Spurs play. And so I hope they get knocked out in round one in the Grizzlies' greatest playoff series victory of all time. It'll save me the hassle of spending time wondering which of the two San Antonio-Miami games was the fluke.

(Update: Go Grizzlies! To commemorate their historic victory, I give you this great page from Tao Lin's book Eeeee eee Eeee -- which I read this weekend, even though I said I wasn't going to -- about how much of an utter hassle it would have been to go see Rainer Maria play out in Red Hook:)

Using the magic of embedding YouTube videos via HTML, I put together this dual retrospective of Rainer Maria's career-to-date along with Spurs rookie Gary Neal's first season in the league. Gary Neal deserves a humiliating trophy, by the way.