Posts Tagged ‘Zaza Pachulia’

The Season In Flopping

April 25, 2013  ·  2:49PM


ALL BALL NERVE CENTER – Much has been made the last few years about flopping. The NBA’s full definition of a flop is here, but, loosely defined, flopping is when a player embellishes his movement in the hopes of influencing a call from a referee.

It is hard to make a blanket statement here, but for the most part, flopping is a bad thing. (It is hard for me to be completely objecting about this topic mostly because flopping was the part of the game I excelled at when I played in high school.) At its core, flopping is designed to trick the officials into giving you an unfair advantage.

The NBA recently announced that those caught flopping during the playoffs will be subject to a series of escalating fines designed to discourage this sort of behavior.

But perhaps the best way to publicly shame the floppers? Videos like the one below from Slate, set to appropriately dramatic music, highlighting the most egregious flops of the 2012-13 NBA season…

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Tough Luck There, Zaza (Video)

December 13, 2012  ·  6:52AM

By Jeff Case

 

You gotta feel a little bad for Zaza Pachulia last night … sure he finished with seven points and nine boards in Atlanta’s 86-80 win against Orlando. Pachulia, you see, is 0-for-16 lifetime from 3-point range (and 0-for-17 if you include the playoffs). Yet there the Hawks were at the end of the third quarter, inbounding the ball with 1.2 seconds left. Josh Smith passes to Pachulia. He takes one dribble and then heaves the ball from a little bit longer than halfcout. It sails through the air and … swish!

Too bad it came well after the buzzer.

Looks like ol’ Pachulia will have to stick to his role as unofficial playoff hype man and offseason scholar and forget about joining the ranks of the Hawks’ 3-point specialists.

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Zaza Pachulia Extends A Foot For Udonis Haslem

November 9, 2012  ·  11:18PM

by Zettler Clay IV

The Heat came to Atlanta Friday night for a friendly regular season matchup. Well, nix “friendly” from the vocabularies of Zaza Pachulia and Udonis Haslem for this one:




Pretty hilarious. Haslem was probably too annoyed at the constant activity of Pachulia to help him up. Or he just doesn’t like him. Or he is a hyper-competitive forward who has survived in this league longer than many thought he would (Haslem was undrafted out of the University of Florida).

Either way, this is par for the course for Zaza, which can only bring a smile to the face of any Hawks fan.

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Zaza Pachulia Takes Classes At Harvard

July 17, 2012  ·  2:59PM

by Micah Hart

The Hawks’ Zaza Pachulia has long been one of the NBA’s most engaged entrepreneurs outside of his basketball day job. While some athletes sadly end up in dire straits once their careers are over, Pachulia seems determined to set himself up for success once he finally hangs ‘em up.

With that in mind, Zaza has spent parts of the last four offseasons taking executive business courses, for example at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business. This summer he stepped it up a notch, joining the future Zuckerbergs of the world at Harvard for a three-day business seminar, as he recently detailed for Hawks.com:



I like to picture Zaza at Harvard, hanging out with the bad guys from Good Will Hunting, playing the enforcer and causing that scene to play out much differently than it did in the movie (slight language).

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Zaza Pachulia can throw a Volkswagen a whole half block

October 20, 2010  ·  10:00AM

by Micah Hart

Many players do various kinds of cross-training in the offseason to prep themselves for the coming year. From running hills, to doing ballet or yoga, to dance battling against tween pop stars, a lot of players look for ways to prepare for the season without necessarily playing basketball 24/7, 365. Count Hawks C Zaza Pachulia as one of those players looking to mix things up, as he decided to, well, mix things up this summer as a way of keeping in shape.

My sources confirm to me that part of Zaza’s regimen includes training 20 hours a day, lifting big ole’ cars and big bales of hay.

Of course Hawks fans out there shouldn’t be surprised to see Pachulia practicing the sweet science, as he is generally considered to be the most Rocky-esque player on the team:

Zaza Pachulia is rough like a freight train and smooth like ice, and you know what? Wait up, I think there is a certain former boxer he might beat.

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