USA Basketball

The other night I went to see the USA Men's Basketball team play Puerto Rico's national team. I have a million other things that I should have been working on instead, but it's not very often that you get an opportunity to see some of the NBA's best players on the floor at the same time, let alone on the same team. Plus, tickets were only $15, at least for the nose-bleed seats behind the basket, which is what we got. Everything else had already been taken by the time we bought our tickets.

I took my camera along on the off chance that I'd be able to put the 10x zoom to good use. A few of the pictures even turned out decent. Here's one that I took right as they were about to throw up the opening tip. It could probably have been framed better, but I'm just glad you can see Team USA's starting five:

I took a few other pictures of individual players, but none of them turned out great. I also tried to get a few short video clips of some of the better plays, but I would usually end up only recording the tail end of a dunk so that was a little disappointing. I guess the cool thing is that the US team crushed Puerto Rico. The final score was 114-69.

In addition to the players on the team, there were several big names from the NBA in attendance . Scottie Pippen, Clyde Drexler and Pat Riley to name just a few, but the one I got most excited about was Julius Erving. That's right, Julius freakin' Erving! I took some pictures that all came out quite blurry, but figured I'd show the best one:
Shut up, I'm willing to bet that it's better than any picture you've ever taken of Dr. J., and it's hard to hold your camera still enough without a tripod when you're at max zoom.

Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly), the picture I took of the hot girls sitting a few rows behind Dr. J. came out a little better: All I can say is that if I had realized that playing in the NBA would have meant groupies like this then I probably would have applied myself to learning the game of basketball a little better in my youth.

(I'm sorry if I'm being stereotypical here, but if I see a row of hot girls all sitting in the third row at half court at a game like this, and there are no males with them, and they don't really appear to be paying attention to the game, I'm drawing the conclusion that they are groupies).