The Rookie

If you don't like Chuck Swirsky, you really don't like him. If you like him ... well, you've got bigger issues in your life.

But not hard to wonder why Swirsky, the all-the-time voice of the Toronto Raptors, is disliked by those who find him, among many things, completely unlistenable.

Portland Trail Blazers' guard Brandon Roy was named the NBA's rookie of the year recently, garnering 127 out of a possible 128 first-place votes and running away with an award that had practically been given to him two months ago. While the Memphis Grizzlies put together a unique campaign to get their guy, Rudy Gay, some love and Toronto-centric media trumpeted Andrea Bargnani for the prize, the consensus for some time was that Roy was the guy and very few argued it.

But there's that one lingering vote. The one first-place ballot that went to Bargnani instead of Roy. One person in all the media granted rights to vote on such things thought Bargnani was the guy over Roy. Three guesses as to whom it was.

Swirsky has received hate mail over his decision to check off Bargnani instead of Roy and there's no discussing how ridiculous and infantile that is. If your life has a section in it where you take the time to compose hate mail over one person's vote for the rookie of the year balloting, well — to take a basketball term — it's time to sub out. Shoot, it's not even the most coveted of the individual awards.

But Swirsky was recently quoted in The Oregonian this way:

This is not an anti-Brandon Roy thing, I hope people understand that. This was strictly a case of me seeing Bargnani day after day. He was a significant player on a playoff team."

Undoubtedly the Italian was a big part of Toronto's nice little regular season and he probably blossomed quicker than the pre-season naysayers had expected. But the problem with Swirsky's statement is when he says it was because he saw Bargnani day after day. He would have, conceivably, seen Roy play twice.

Swirsky has been bashed on more than one occasion for being unabashedly homer towards his beloved Raptors and anyone who watched Toronto broadcasts on the regular will have heard him big-up his boy Bargnani almost shamelessly.

The statistics between Roy and Bargnani were extremely similar but Roy has an edge in virtually every significant stat:

	PPG	RPG	APG	FG%	3FG%	FT%
ROY	16.8	4.4	4.0	45	37	83
BARGNANI	11.6	4.0	1.0	42	37	82

Roy also did this on one of the most atrocious teams in the NBA. You could make the argument that Bargnani assisted in a revamped and suddenly not so dreadful Raptors team and its newfound success. Until you consider that as rag-tag as Toronto was, it wasn't nearly on the same level as what Portland had to work with. For any player to step into an environment such as the one in Portland and make something good happen is commendable, for a rookie to step in and do it is remarkable.

But this isn't so much an argument for Roy vs Bargnani as it is against Swirsky who, try as he might to make his pick seem objective, can rarely be counted on to make a brains-first decision when he pretty much showed his allegiances in his quote. So whether the fault is in the process for allowing people who are going to be naturally biased to whatever team they see regularly, or the fault is on the person making the vote, Swirsky is entitled to his opinion even if an entire population tells him he's wrong.

But that's the problem. It's one thing that we have to listen to his goofy and non-sensical catch-phrases, sit through his homering and look at his made-for-radio face but if you tell me he actually has an impact on things other than his headset and cough button — things that matter on some level outside Raptor TV-land — that's when I'd suggest we cut his mike.