Where’s Wallace At? Just Where He Needs to Be, in the NBA

Since the Knicks got casually bounced out of the playoffs last season, they have apparently decided that the thing that was standing in the way of them becoming a championship contender was a lot of old guys. Glen Grunwald, the general manager, signed four players over 35: Marcus Camby, Jason Kidd, Pablo Prigioni (who?), and Kurt Thomas. Grunwald is also reportedly trying to add a fifth in 38-year old Rasheed Wallace, who hasn't played a game in the NBA since the 2010 Finals and wasn’t exactly lighting the world on fire then, either.

As a Sheed fan for the better part of the past decade, I was incredibly, ridiculously, preteen-mobs-outside-a-Hanson-tour-bus stoked to hear that soon I'll be able to wear an old Blazers jersey to the Garden and get kicked out for yelling “Ball don't lie!” too much. But apparently not everyone shares my excitement—I’ve read blog post after blog post about how the Knicks just convinced a team-wrecking, tantrum-having, technical foul-earning machine out of retirement. So let me just set the record straight: Everything you’re hearing about Rasheed Wallace is a whole lot of bullshit.

Let's start with why I love Wallace. He looks like a dude from a rec league who is improbably playing and beating the best big men in the world. That’s not an insult—in a league dominated by Kobe’s corny, self-styled jutting-jaw mystique and the cartoonishly-cardboard nice guy facade of Lebron, Sheed has always been genuine in taking basketball with exactly as much gravity as anyone should. He’s serious about the game when he’s playing it, but he knows it’s just a game and that everyone will go home and smoke blunts afterward. For all the egos and slap fights and psychotic, drooling Kevin Garnetts and CIA-serious Popoviches, he’s always been one to break kayfabe and have fun.

What other current players in the one-dimensional drama that is the NBA could boast so many legendary moments? His electric boogaloo inspired my entire dance repertoire. He was shouted out for smoking reggae eel on Chappelle's Show and he’s one of the only people whose post-practice gambling on half court shots actually paid off. How can you not like a dude who talked shit to one of those corny pink shirt-wearing dickweeds who are always peacocking on the sidelines? And let's not forget "Jingle Bells."

What else? Oh yeah, "Ball don't lie!" stands as one of the greatest quotes in basketball history (Yahoo! named its basketball blog after it). And there was the time that, as a youngster on the Blazers, he forced a Sports Illustrated writer to go bowling. (Strangely enough, said writer was in town to cover a lengthy custody battle between Wallace and his first wife, who’d kidnapped his first son. At one point Sheed was on TV tearfully asking for help in finding the child.)

But it was the later years of his Blazers tenure that caused Wallace to be labeled as a bad egg, when arrests and fights left the millennium-era Portland squad forever with the Jail Blazers nickname. Lost in that story is the fact that Wallace was the best player on a team that went on a seven-year playoff run. But what’s remembered about him isn’t his surprising athleticism and range, it’s "both teams played hard" and his temper.

He followed his years with the Blazers with a dominant, championship-winning run with the Pistons. And while he's the one guy who got credit for keeping a cool head during the Malice at the Palace, he’s never been able to shake the stigma of the Jail Blazers days. In a league that weathered the destructive ego of Allen Iverson, still manages to keep up with the lunacy of Ron Artest, accepts the shameless two-faced weaseling of Dwight Howard, and has already forgotten about the quite tragic gun-toting insanity of Delonte West, that stigma has been surprisingly enduring.

The standard storyline about Wallace is that while he's that rare breed of big man who can play in the post and shoot threes, he doesn't care enough, he's lazy, and his volatile temper hurts his teams and the league’s previous image. He’s the career leader in technical fouls, people sneer. Guess who tends to lead the NBA in technical fouls? The league’s best players. If you look at the list for the 2010-11 season, you’ll find Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant, Blake Griffin, and Dwayne Wade near the top. Sheed’s in good company technical foul-wise. And I’m not going to hold anything against a guy for getting frustrated, especially someone who, by all informed accounts, is otherwise a genuinely likable person. What’s worse, a dude calling bullshit when he sees it, or Kobe using his star power to constantly badger the refs into getting what he wants? As far as I’m concerned, Sheed is the more honest of the pair.

But by the end of his career, his temper has gotten far more airtime than the skills he built his career on. It’s a shame, though no surprise, that on YouTube, “Rasheed Wallace: Greatest Moments” is just blurry footage of him freaking out. I have to laugh at the media folks ignoring everything about Sheed but the technicals, just so they can lazily wring their hands over a grown man getting angry at blown calls. Wallace’s only crime is that he has not  bought into the faux-seriousness of a league that, more than any other, seems to cultivate self-conscious, egomaniacal assholes as its superstars.

The newly-old Knicks don't have a hope of winning a championship. They're in for a long season of mediocrity and relentless comparisons to the younger, shinier team in Brooklyn. Wallace can't expect much more than to back up Tyson Chandler and hope for a playoff spot. And even if he's only coming in for a few minutes off the bench, notoriously-fickle Knicks fans and beat writers are doubtlessly going to have little patience for the loudmouth with the bald spot. But even as the Post struggles to come up with another technical foul pun, I’ll still be unabashedly cheering Sheed on. Because in a league that’s increasingly more about PR, paying lip service to scandal, and keeping up appearances than playing actual basketball, he’s one of the only honest, fun dudes left.

@derektmead

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