The Rasheed Wallace We All Know and Love

By Have Jumpshot Will Travel (a.k.a. Trashtalk Superstar)

Friday night, Detroit Pistons center Rasheed Wallace earned his seventeenth technical foul of the season and was, subsequently, suspended by the NBA. Way to go 'Sheed. Before your arrival in Detroit, you had long led the league in "T"'s and were generally viewed as the personification of the stereotyped NBA "thug." But we were told that you had "matured" and "grown as a person" in recent years. Glad to see that you're still keepin' it real. Don't let all tha haters get to ya, dawg.

Rasheed, you did a great job of keeping yourself in check during that '04 NBA title run. You joined the Pistons at the trade deadline and fit in nicely on what went on to be a championship winning team. You were the "mature" Rasheed Wallace, finally putting the team ahead of yourself. You even held it together in '05, when your Pistons lost to the Spurs in the NBA Finals. But last year you started to let your personality out of its cage. You started racking up the technicals again. You stopped being a "team guy." Interestingly, your team failed to get back to the Finals.

Al Gore once said, "a leopard can't change its stripes." Well Rasheed, I didn't know that leopards had stripes, but I'm glad that you haven't changed yours. Just as the "new" and "mature" Lindsay Lohan will eventually need to be "hospitalized" due to "exhaustion" or "dehydration," the "new" and "mature" Rasheed Wallace can still be counted on to put himself ahead of his team.

Yeah, Rasheed, screw all that team bullshit. It's still all about you.


Have Jumpshot Will Travel (a.k.a. Trashtalk Superstar).