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By: Freaknick/@euro_adventures

I would put Ebola Flakes into my cereal bowl each morning instead of calling myself a Knicks fan. This year, however, I will be checking their boxscores  like a trailer dweller does the winning lottery numbers every Monday. The reason: 7’1″, 270 lb. Russian Timofey Mozgov will be a New York Knick for three years and will become $9.7 million richer over that span. His yearly income will be 57.9 times greater than the median for an American household, so first let me take a moment to declare the Cold War over. Yeah it’s a little pricey for the 23-year-old big guy who only averaged 6 points, 4 rebounds and a block in Euroleague play for BC Khimki Moscow, but at least he’s got size and talent; talent which belongs in the wide open Mike D’Antoni offense and not suffocated in halfcourt sets in Europe. My greatest fear right now is that his recent Knickdom will keep him out of the FIBA World Championships this summer. I’d love to be there in person for his international encore after last year’s Eurobasket excitement. While we’ll not know his NBA impact for quite some time, his signing gave me an idea. Let me explain:

Most of my ideas come from ‘Hey, ya know what’d be awesome? If we ________.’ Others are more like ‘You know how we could exploit an insanely stupid fad?’ Then sometimes I just fall ass backwards into dumb luck and play it off as the finished product of some elaborate plan I hatched in a lab years ago.

The URL in your browser’s address bar calls that third one Mommy.

While this idea has shades of that first ‘awesome’ one, this new Freak’s Nicknames section owes its life to the competitive rage which lives deep down inside me—somewhere near my kidneys, I think—and is usually reserved for the Fight Club Slam and I started a few weeks back (First rule of Slam and I’s Fight Club: don’t talk about Slam and I’s Fight Club. Second rule of…). Because as I listened to the eloquent Timofey Mozgov relay his excitement to MSG, the Knicks’ cable station, I remembered back fondly to last summer’s Eurobasket in Poland when Timofey etched his name into my heart with oops, yams, flushes…whatever lame word you’d like to use as a substitute for ‘dunks.’

In particular, I found his 25-point, 11-rebound massacre-ing of Massacredonia quite entertaining, and his 18 and 8 against the much more legitimate Croatia cemented his position in my head as that-cool-athletic-Russian-big-that-I-will-enjoy-watching-down-the-road. His play was so explosive that he even earned a nickname:

The Mozgov Cocktail.

For those of you who’ve never been involved in a police riot or played Grand Theft Auto, a Molotov Cocktail is a glass bottle full of gasoline or napalm that blasts into a ball of fire when it’s lit and thrown against something hard: a car, a wall, a treasonous Soviet protester, a basketball court during the Greek League finals. And the best part, kids, is that you can make it with everyday household items! All you need is an alcohol-soaked rag, an empty glass Coke bottle, some gasoline and way too much spare time.

‘Cool Nick. Aren’t you a clever one. Why don’t you pat yourself on the back a little more? But why are you so mad?’ I’m sure all nine of you reading this right now still don’t understand the defensive nature of my post. You soon will. Soon as in now:

I see what you’re trying to do, neuroticomic2. Well make sure you check those dates before you go around trumpeting that moniker as your own, broseph. Yours was on June 2010, while ELA coined that mofo back in September of 2009. Now maybe I’m taking this a little too far; true, a less aggressive approach might be a smidge more classy and less pathetic. Unfortunately we forfeited our right to class at about the time we let autotune assist us in with our weekly RAP-ups, so in essence this is what we do now: pathetic. And we do it very, very well. And while the company jet and all-expense paid vacations are nice perks of the job here at ELA, all we really have to stand on is cool shit we make up.

So with that in mind, Euroleague Adventures now owns exclusive rights to all references to Timofey Mozgov as Mozgov Cocktail, be they written, spoken or thought aloud. Good day.