Sin Fanaticos: Third in a Three Part Series

Surely you guys have seen this video. If not, google Micah Ginn. Or put "Are You Ready" into the little box on Youtube, and watch this guy's videos he's put together. I'm fairly certain he was the guy behind the season recap high-light reel that was played before the Egg Bowl. He obviously wins at life.

Anyhow, we mention the video now not as a flame to the RSC guys. Those guys knew they would quintuple (?) our normal Monday traffic with their post about us, and we obviously appreciate that. And we sort of get why some people are turned off by David Huertas. But the mindset bugs us a little, and we're gonna try one last time to flesh that out.

The first time we met David Huertas was at a pre-season photo shoot in November 2006. We had gone in early to get some lighting figured out for a shoot with Todd Abernethy, Bam Doyne and Clay Sanders. When we got in the Tad Pad, the only other soul in the building was Huertas. Doing just what he's doing in that video. Free throws. Three pointers. 18-footers. From the time we got there, until the time we had taken a memory card full of pictures and left. He was doing the same thing every time we went in the Tad Pad (literally) that season, excluding games, obviously. From everything we've heard, he still stays late after practice to work on his shots.

The point is, that video's dialogue probably isn't all that far off from Huertas' work ethic.

But we don't want to get hyperbolic, as our friends tell us we have a tendency to do. We don't want to harp on his work ethic, or the long odds of a kid coming from Puerto Rico to the United States to make it by playing basketball. No, we're not going to cast him in that underdog role. We ask that you refrain from doing the same.

Likewise, refrain from seeing him as the bad teammate. The kid who disrespects his coach. And, rightly or wrongly, yells at his teammates. Disregard the overly dramatic, sometimes borderline queer dives he takes when trying to draw a charge. Forget that he is likely just a Saint of Circumstance, with inflated stats because everyone around him is either terrible or hurt.

At the end of the day, after all, talk is talk and facts are facts.

All we want you to do is to ask yourself, as an Ole Miss fan, why you wouldn't be all for the guy who leads the team in points and assists.

We realize that the Spirit message board mindset is a rose-colored-glasses fantasy land that is easily made fun of. "All our kids are choir boys, all their kids are thugs." We're not asking you to adopt that 'blindly love all things Ole Miss' attitude.

But we do ask you to question why its all of a sudden popular to hate on the best player on your favorite team. Sometimes people fall into these cycles of having to adopt a contrarian point of view to like, prove their fanhood or something similar to that. To prove to people that they're paying close attention, because dammit, they are a serious fan.

Well, not to get too Lietchesque or anything, but sometimes it should just be enough that a player is excellent at his sport and also he plays for your team. Ergo, you are his fan. Its simpler that way. Its more natural. Its not dumb or Spirit boardish. Its just being a fan who enjoys seeing his or her team do well.

We agree with Juco All-American over at the Cup that by this time next year, no one will remember all the David hate, because at that point :knock on wood: we should be heading for the home stretch of one of, if not the best seasons in Ole Miss basketball history. We hope that everyone is on the same page by that point, and in the mean time, we accept this mea culpa* we received via email from everyone's favorite bloggers.

*we kid because we love

Quit Making Us Defend David Huertas, People

Let's go ahead and state the self-evident: the RedSoloCup > Forward Rebels. That blog is well thought out, its funny, its sharp and timely and you can tell the guys who maintain it take pride in what they do. They don't take days off like we're prone to do. AND they've always been nice enough when Forward Rebels has had internet/techish questions. AND they write about Ole Miss sports, which is obviously our interest, and thus we check in on them daily. We're fans of those guys, and almost always agree with them.

Except when, in a probably flippant little moment of inter-Cup division, one of them takes a lengthy swipe at Dahveed. Which truly wouldn't be that big a deal except that a large amount of people actually believe this shit. Since we like to pretend that we're above wading into message boards and correcting every idiot we disagree with (and the Huertas Haters are legion, believe us), we're glad that Cup author The One That Got Away teed one up for us. If you call out a blogger, he's at least got the means to defend himself, if need be. Anyhoo, let's get all FJMish up in here by dissecting this argument. The usually on-point tOTGA's thoughts are in bold:

I am going to politely disagree with Ghost and say he [sic] Huertas is overrated and inconsistent. I don't like Dahveed and if you have ever sat around me at a basketball game it should not come as a surprise.

Fair enough. He doesn't like David Huertas and has been vocal about it at basketball games, while presumably cheering for all Rebels not named David Huertas. And how would you like to substantiate your dislike? Maybe pointing to a huge loss that Huertas caused?

Yesterday was a perfect example of Huertas and how he hurts the team.

Oh. You went that way with it. See this piece was written on Sunday, meaning "yesterday" was Saturday, the day Huertas dropped 17 on Georgia in a convincing 69-47 home win to pull us to .500 in conference. OK, OK. I'm still listening, I guess. Continue.

Kennedy decided to take Dahveed out early because Huertas was throwing up retarded shots. The one that did him in was a drive to the basket when he was triple teamed and threw up a circus shot that hit nothing but backboard.

Hmmm. The coach took out a shooting guard because he started off cold. I guess that reflects poorly on the shooting guard. Like he's trying to do too much on offense. Why would a shooting guard, and the team's most tenured player, think he needs to do that much? Doesn't make sense. Now, you may look at it logically and say: "Dahveed is the SEC's 4th leading scorer and the only player in Saturday's starting lineup who had started a college game prior to this season. And also, he's one of only two consistent, legitimate offensive threats on our team." Well, don't go thinking too much, friend. Observe:

AK immediately went to the bench and when Huertas saw he was being taken out made sure the crowd and everyone on the court knew he was upset with AK's decision.

*GASP!* David Huertas: 17 pts, 5 rebounds, 2 assts, 1 scowl at that bastion of public restraint and emotional discipline, Andy Kennedy. Kick his ass off the team!

It's clear that AK and Huertas have a strained relationship. This isn't the first time they have got into it with each other. I think it was the UT game when they were both yelling at each other, probably because Kennedy reminded Dahveed that he has teammates.

Ok, in seriousness, I would rather our players didn't talk back to our coaches. BUT, I'll take 20 points and a hissy fit over 2 points and "thank you sir, may I please have another" every day of the week. You want a team full of Patrick Spachs? Good luck. When scowling at your coach starts being worth -20 points, call us.

As for "reminding him that he has teammates": David Huertas has 62 assists on the year. He leads the team in that statistic. Granted, the starting point guard went down early in the year, and the new point guard hasn't played enough to catch him in that category, but 62 assists out of your 3 guard is nothing to scoff at.

I think the "reminding about teammates" argument is a subtle nod at the prevailing notion that Dahveed is a ball hog (a sentiment reiterated in the comments section of the RSC post). Before we address that issue, lets point out that another paradigm among the Huertas Huaters is that Terrico White plays the "Rebel way" or some shit like that, and that White is the greatest player of all time at Ole Miss (seriously, lots of people think this. tOTGA says as much in the linked article, where he also complains about Huertas missing too many shots).
UGA game FG-FGA stats:
Huertas: 5-12
T. White: 8-18

Season FG %
Huertas: .423
White: .420

It drives me insane watching Huertas, who is not a very adept ball handler, waste 10 seconds of the shot clock trying to find his way into the lane or get a look at a three.

Woah. Chill out there, tOTGA.

I know he puts up points, that's great,
Better than great. Its how you win basketball games, which is the point of playing basketball. Anyhow, here comes the crux and fallacy of all of this...
but it frustrates me to no end how he takes plays off,
One of the most intense defenders on the team. If anything, he is too passionate, as Latin athletes tend to be...
doesn't pass,
Leads the team in assists...
blows up on his teammates when they do something wrong
Guaran-fucking-tee you if he was white everybody would be cool with this. We were watching the UF-LSU game tonight on ESPN and Nick Calathes chewed out a freshman (black) teammate on camera and the announcers ooohed and aaaahed about Nick's leadership abilities.
Not saying tOTGA is racist, believe us we're not. But why is it not cool for the most experienced player on the team to chew ass sometimes?
and disrespects his coach.
Who spent the night in jail for calling someone Osama Bin Laden, and also probably hurls some of the most venomous insults anybody can imagine in team huddles. Also, that coach plays him for 35 minutes a game, so, you know, there's probably an understanding there.

He's done good things for us, no doubt, but for now I am not going to miss him when he leaves.
"Water is essential to life on earth, no doubt, but for right now I could handle a drought for a year."

In sum: Take David Huertas off this team and we are looking at maybe 8 wins this year. That's not wild proselytizing. That's the truth. He is the best player on this team, and if he weren't here, nobody associated with Ole Miss would give two shits about basketball at this point in the season. Don't succumb to this chic prevailing notion that he is somehow bad for our team, or worthy of your hate. He's just goofy. And goofy's always been alright with us.

Defending Dahveed

There's a fortune inside your head /All you touch turns to lead You think you might just crawl back in bed /The fortune inside your head

You know you're just a mama's boy/ Positively unemployed

So misunderstood

Wilco, Misunderstood

A theoretical: If you moved to, like, New Jersey or some metropolatin exurb up north, would you change the way you dressed or acted? I got a friend who made such a move recently.

Last I talked to this kid, he was having trouble. He couldn't really find the right crowd to run with and kept having girls "scooped right out from underneath" him. The only reasoning he could come up with, and I tended to agree with him, was because he refused to put product in his hair, or wear jewelry or sport the omnipresent backwards fitted flat-billed hat.

Anyhow, I couldn't help thinking about that as I read the Ole Miss message boards yesterday following our 10 point loss to Vanderbilt in Nashville. The problem with Ole Miss's effort yesterday, according to everybody with a keyboard, was David Huertas.

Understand: our problem wasn't that Mac White and DeAundre Cranston got pwned by an Australian guy on the boards all game. It wasn't that Vandy shot 67% from the field in the second half. What it was was that damned David Huertas and his 19 points that only accounted for 30% of our offense.

Before I get too deep into this, I'd like to address the fact that Forward Rebels is just as guilty of Hurt-us-cising Dahveed as anyone else. We've got an "Is David Huertas an Alien?" tag. We're culprits. BUT, there's a big difference in having a cheap laugh at a guy's goofiness and actually believing he's what's wrong with our team. Make no mistake, David Huertas is the MVP of this team, and I'm not so sure that's simply by default by virtue of EP and Warren's injuries.

But its his goofiness that leads to all the negative pub he gets. Or more accurately, its his Puerto Rican-ness that makes him stand out. Just like I wouldn't put product in my hair if I lived in State College, PA, Dahveed is not going to quit scowling when things go wrong on the court in Mississippi.He's not going to quit being abrassive to opposing players and referees.He's not going to quit being overly dramatic when trying to draw a foul.

It's easy to see, after watching the international players in the Olympics this past year, that Huertas' style of play is 100% FIBA, which is to say that morally its a lot closer to soccer than it is to the NBA. The players wear their emotions on their sleeves. They take dives. They generally cut corners that American players wouldn't.

This phenomenon of villifying your star isn't exclusive to Ole Miss. The Yankees do it with A-Rod (and have long before A-Rod's recent troubles). Nevermind the fact that Alex Rodriguez puts up MVP like numbers in New York. Nevermind that he's the best player on their team. He dates movie stars and hasn't won the World Series, so he's the problem with the team. He's not a "True Yankee" like Derek Jeter.

Likewise, if Dahveed had gone down with an injury early in the year, leaving Chris Warren to lead a group of freshmen into SEC play, and then Warren had a poor start to the game against Vandy, I don't think anyone would've put our failure to make the NCAA tourney on Warren's shoulders. I saw multiple threads on the Spirit and Rivals boards yesterday doing just that to Huertas. Why? Because Warren is essentially emotionless on the court and hustles his ass off. Huertas grimaces, he scowls, he smiles, he talks shit in Spanish, he isn't totally submissive to the coaches.

But he's also the best thing we've got right now. Terrico's had an excellent three or four game run, but David's still averaging about 20 a game - and that's from the first game on. While his slow start did play a factor into Saturday's loss, it wasn't the reason we lost. It was maybe 9th on the list, and remember that Nos. 1-3 are "knees" and No. 7 is probably "Saddam Hussein".