Welcome to THIS WEEK IN GIFs, y'all. Voting, as usual, will remain open until Sunday at 11 p.m. Please allow Matt Ufford, Dan Rubenstein and myself to argue the cases for our favorite GIFs this week:
Enjoy!
KEN DANEYKO
I put this GIF at the top because it is the best GIF, for reasons I laid out in the video above. You're free to vote against it, but if you do, you are wrong.
SAD TOMAS VOKOUN
(Via Pat Iverson)
"Ahhhh shit. I was sleep-tending again. I wonder if I gave up any -- ahhh shit."
PENS-FLYERS
(Via Pat Iverson)
Here's more on Tomas Vokoun's crummy evening. Please enjoy five Pens players attempting to play goalie, and their goalie, Tomas Vokoun, kind of not really playing goalie at all. Despite their five-goalie setup, they managed to give up a goal here, but I wouldn't know it from this GIF. It looks like No 8. is just sort of celebrating an orderless cluster of human beings.
CHRIS BOSH
Alley-oop? My personal belief is that "alley-OOPS" is what this is more like. I sincerely believe that, in my heart, to be true. I feel very strongly about this. I really hope we don't have to have a fight over it.
KEVIN HART
This is Kevin Hart, who just finished humiliating himself on the basketball court during the celebrity game. I'm including this because while I was putting together a collection of GIFs to choose from, the lady seated at the coffee shop next to me looked at the screen and started cracking up at this guy. I couldn't not include it. Vote, lady!
DUNKIN' OTTER
(Via Erik Malinowski at Buzzfeed)
Perhaps my memory is failing me, or perhaps this really is the first animal to make it to THIS WEEK IN GIFs. Matt Ufford made a special request for me to include this one, and for good reason. D'awwwwww.
If only [NBA player or NBA team] could be this good at basketball! Just kidding. They are professional basketball players and this is just an otter. I like this otter a lot but he is not as good.
JEREMY EVANS
I'm always gonna mark out over the Slam Dunk Contest. Always, always, always. Between the choreography, the props, and the silliness, it's as close as any of the stick-and-ball sports ever get to pro wrestling.
You know, I think there's something about the NBA's emotional lightness that's configured just right. The NFL is too dang serious all the time. Baseball gives us plenty of silliness, but there's also a lot of solemn dignity and "baseball is the greatest sport on Earth" hyper-gravitational schooling. College basketball ends in a weeks-long heart attack, which is tons of fun, but not quite what one would call emotionally-balanced.
The NBA respects its Finals as a dignified affair, and it's got its Flu Games and such, but it also has all the other funny stuff that will unavoidably sprout up when you mash a bunch of teams of wildly disparate talent levels against each other for 82 games. And it has this stuff. And nobody's ever all, "you don't watch the NBA because you have a short attention span / are too stupid." It's just there, and it's the best.
JEDI PONG
(Via Bill Hanstock)
The guy in red is me, every time I have to play a "next level" ping-pong player. There are two primary rungs in the table tennis game: those who can do spins, and those who can't. I can dominate in the "those who can't" classification, and lose pathetically in the "those who can" classification.
There's also a third class of players, known as the "can't really do spins but will try 20 times in a row on game point because you can't lose on a serve" group, and they are the worst thing about being alive in the 21st century.
VOTE!