WATN: Terrell Owens's NBA Celebrity Game MVP Streak Comes to an End

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As basketball fans, All-Star Weekend is our reward for slogging through the inevitable ebbs of the first half of the NBA season. The spectacle of the entire thing is unparalleled throughout the rest of the sports year, and the numerous mini-dramas and breakout performances contained within make every single part of it a must-watch. We'll hopefully have game threads, if not perhaps a live blog or two, for the main events on Saturday and Sunday night, but we all know that the REAL action of the weekend comes on Friday Night, in the Rookie/Sophomore Challenge and the All-Star Celebrity Game.

Terrell Owens, one-time star Philadelphia receiver and All-Star Celebrity Game regular, was the prohibitive favorite to win the MVP award for the third straight time in this year's game. But after a hot first half, which included a couple trademark crowd-pleasing dunks, TO went absolutely ice-cold in the second half, as he saw his East team's lead slip away.  I'm not sure what his final stat line was--if I'm not geeky enough to keep box scores for this, I can't imagine that anyone else would be--but it probably looked something like 10 pts on 5-19 shooting, with five rebounds and seven turnovers. For his defensive efforts on Owens, comedian/Brian Scalabrine-wannabe Michael Rapaport was instead rewarded the award.

Oh, and when Stuart Scott asked Magic Johnson before the game how he hoped to contain TO, I was really praying he was going to say something like "well, we're just going to play him in single coverage for the first quarter and let him wear himself out, and when his teammates don't get him the ball, we're hoping he just spends the rest of the game pouting on the sideline." He didn't.

A couple more notes on the game after the break:

  • Pitbull looks exactly like Jason Kidd when wearing a basketball jersey. Well, a midget Jason Kidd, anyway. And the gap between Chris Tucker and Patrick Chewing gets a little thinner (OK maybe thinner isn't the most appropriate word here) every year.
  • What kind of wisdom was Drake supposed to add as an assistant coach on Magic's bench? Had he been studying the Triangle Offense under Tex Winter or something? 
  • Isn't this whole thing like, really embarrassing for the female players involved? Angel McCoughtry was the freaking #1 pick in the last WNBA draft--is it really that hard for her to stand out playing with Mark Cuban and one of the losers from Dodgeball? Seems wrong.
  • That basketball movie that Stuart Scott talked about Common starring in sounds awful. First of all, Common, what? I saw Smoking Aces--dude was not crying out for a starring vehicle. And Queen Latifah as the love interest? And Stuart Scott making a (minute-long) cameo? Pass.
  • Oh, and about actual basketball as it relates to the Rookie-Soph game: Russell Westbrook is awesome, I could watch OJ Mayo set up teammates for alley-oops all day, and I hope at least 20 GMs eventually get fired for letting DeJuan Blair slip to the Spurs in the second round of the draft. And that Omri Casspi dunk over Danilo Gallinari was riiiii-ghteous. Hope someone finds me a video of that.
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