A Second Favorite Team

I got an assignment* the other day:

For many years, the Phoenix Suns under Mike D'Antoni were (almost) everyone's "second favorite team," and why not? They were fun, exciting, joyful, and kinetic. But ever since Steve Kerr took a wrecking ball to the roster and D'Antoni moved east, sentimental favorites have been slow to surface.

What's your second favorite team -- the squad you'd adopt if your club was Sonicsized, the team you might go upstairs with if you had a few too many at the hotel lounge. Is it a specific player that draws you in? A scheme? An organizational philosophy? Alternate jerseys? A general vibe?

Barring the implication regarding the strength of my virtue. I jumped in the deep end with an answer that will surprise roughly zero (0) regular readers of this blog...

MY SECOND FAVORITE TEAM

a brief essay by Bret LaGree, Hawks blogger

By leaving Kansas City in 1985, the Kings, in the long term, created the opportunity for me to become partial to a different team in a different town two decades later. In the short-term, for a basketball-intensive and willingly partisan kid in Eastern Kansas, their move to Sacramento created a void I filled fully with the University of Kansas men's basketball teams coached by Larry Brown. My complete immersion in those teams gave Brown significant influence over my formative thinking about, initially, how to play and, more permanently, how to watch and evaluate basketball.

Brown's five year stay at Kansas culminated with a national championship and, though members of that team populate a handful of NBA front offices theoretically giving me a choice as to how to hang on to a happy memory of youth, it's only ever whichever team Larry Brown currently coaches that I feel any sort of emotional attachment. With perhaps more feeling than I should have for a man I've never met, I want Brown to succeed again as a head coach to ensure that he's remembered as much for his talent as a coach as for the compulsive and idiosyncratic ways in which he fosters and expresses dissatisfaction. I'm not naive enough to believe his current job is his last job, but for now, for 78 out of 82 games, I'm a minor Charlotte Bobcats fan.

*One of the real pluses of this gig: people caring enough about what I think to provide a premise for me to work within and, even more importantly, a deadline to meet.

If anyone else has a second favorite team to which you'd admit and a reason why, please share in the comments. Comments attacking me and/or my admission above will not only be allowed but also serve only to embolden me. Fair warning.