Mundane Basketball Terms Redefined

Welcome to what I hope to be my first recurring theme here, now that they allow the ever-popular tagging on blogger. Alongside co-geniuses Casey and Michele, we've begun to retool the standard basketball journalist's phrasebook to make the sport sound like the true man-to-man war that it is.

Today's redefinition is for the term "loose ball." You know, like, when the ball is in no one's posession and all the players go diving for it. Sounds a little more exciting than "loose ball" lets on, right? From here on out, we collectively dub the loose ball, the Alabama Scramble.

Named for the late Alabama Franklin of the New Orleans Jazz, the Alabama Scramble became a popular local term in the south in the 70's as Franklin was rather adept and denying inlets to the high post and swatting away the point guard's posessions, but could never quite recover possession without causing a mass of flying bodies resembling a bad game of Twister. We'd like to dedicate this exciting occurrence in basketball to him.