The Spurs and the Heat are up against it now. Both had 2-0 leads, both have lost 3 straight and have to win on the road in order to force Game 7. I think Miami has a better chance of doing that, but I’d like to see the Spurs win Game 6 and then I don’t care what happens. Got no trouble rooting for OKC. My only rooting interest is to see the Heat lose. Be great if the Celtics can do it. I’m not convinced they can but I can always hope…
Jonathan Abrams profiles Stephen Jackson over at Grantland:
Jackson is a person whose past influences his present and will probably shape his future. Is he a good person who occasionally mixes in the bad? Or a bad person sometimes inclined to do good? The answer, with most like Jackson, is not as black and white as the familiar jersey he wears again.
“A lot of people mistake my passion for the game with being a thug or a gangster,” he said. “I’m far from that. I’m just a guy who come up in the hood and came from nothing and made something and hasn’t changed. I’m still going to be in Port Arthur all summer walking around with no shoes on, eating crawfish, barbecue, going fishing. I’m going to be the same guy, and I take pride in saying that because a lot of NBA players are not touchable. They’re not real. But I take pride in being a regular guy that people can walk up to and I’m not Hollywood. I want people to understand that that’s the person I am and I’m not changing for nothing.”
Here is a good piece on Chris Bosh by Chris Haberstroh over at ESPN.
[Photo via Fast Company–Chris Graythen/Getty Images]
Steve Kerr advocates raising the NBA’s age limit over at Grantland. His argument is that the NBA is better served financially by having players in college longer. And in the end, Steve, isn’t what’s in the best financial interests of the NBA really what’s best for America?
The dreckiest sentence in this mountain of dreck is this one: “Why should NBA franchises assume the responsibility and financial burden of player development when, once upon a time, colleges happily assumed that role for them?”
Let’s rewrite that question for Steve, but add one single ounce of humanity and perspective: “Why should anyone other than the NBA assume the responsibility and financial burden of player development?” Steve thinks the NBA is entitled to reap the corrupted benefits of the professional basketball player factory that is the NCAA.
And thank goodness for the NCAA. Assuming responsibilty over here and financial burden over there, all out of the goodness of their collective heart. The NCAA and NBA have concocted a virtually risk-free scam in which the NCAA develops talent at no cost, funnels that talent into a monopoly. The only potential risk is a player getting hurt before he gets pushed through the funnel. That’s a minimal risk because the flow of talent is endless.
Well, minimal risk for the NBA and NCAA anyway. But screw the kid. That’s Kerr’s point and at least he had the guts to state it bluntly – albeit after he piled on about 2000 words of tone-deaf platitudes and other compost:
The arguments against raising the age requirement hinge on civil liberties, points like, “Who are we to deny a 19-year-old kid a chance to make a living when he can vote, drive, and fight in a war?” If this were about legality or fairness, you might have a case. But it’s really about business. The National Basketball Association is a multi-billion-dollar industry that depends on ticket sales, sponsorships, corporate dollars, and media contracts to operate successfully. If the league believes one rule tweak — whatever it is — would improve its product and make it more efficient, then it should be allowed to make that business decision.
With that guiding principle Steve, what other “rule tweaks” might serve the greater good of the NBA, and by definition, America? An endless and frightening list of things comes to mind. No business should be allowed to violate fundamental freedoms of our society to improve their bottom line. That type of thinking is vile.
And why is Grantland publishing this badifesto? I’m not asking an entire collection of writers to speak with one voice, but dropping in a non-writer with partisan ties to an issue to editoriolize is in poor taste. Especially when his case is so glaringly weak and offered without counterpoint.
I also don’t think rich, old, White men should be allowed to arbitrarly decide when impoverished, young, Black adults should be allowed to earn a living in their chosen profession, but Steve Kerr deftly dealt with that issue by not mentioning it.
Hoops documentary directed by Adam Yauch.
I saw a security guard in my office building this morning. Knicks fan.
“You heard about Amare?” I said.
He looked up from a small pad of paper he was writing on. “No, what happened?”
“He punched a glass case after the game.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He was frustrated I guess.”
The guard looked at me and titled his head to the side. Squinted his eyes.
“He couldn’t hit something soft?”
Logical question. The big dope.
The Nets play their final game in New Jersey tonight. Dig this photo gallery of New Jersey Nets hoops over at SI.com.
There is an excerpt from Frank Deford’s new memoir in SI this week: “When the NBA Was Young.”
Fun read. For more on Deford, check out this fine podcast with Richard Deitsch.
Knicks vs. Heat at the Garden this afternoon.
Like old times, sort of. The Heat have not played well lately. This’d be a huge game for the Knicks to win…
[Photo Via: Gruesome Twosome]
Reggie Miller was elected to the basketball Hall of Fame a few days ago. Knicks in Indy tonight.
Go sports.
Will Coach Cal get his first championship? No.
Coach Cal’s Kentucky Wildcats vs. Rick Pitino’s Louisville Cardinals is the first game. Ohio State vs. Kansas comes next.
Knicks host the Cavs tonight and there is bad news to report. Jeremy Lin has a torn meniscus and needs surgery. Frank Isola reports that Lin will be out six weeks.
Kudos to the Grantland’s “Director’s Cut” series for reprinting this gem by the late Paul Hemphill (may he not be soon forgotten).
Here is “How Jacksonville Earned its Credit Card” (from Sport, June 1970):
It must have been the fall of 1962 when I first met Joe Williams. Most newspapermen, at one point or another, succumb to the illusion of public relations — thinking it is the rainbow leading to money and class and peace of mind — and I had just quit writing sports to become the sports publicist at Florida State University. It was football season all of a sudden and I was buried in brochures and 8-by-10 glossies and travel arrangements when Bud Kennedy, the FSU basketball coach, walked in one day and introduced Joe Williams as the new freshman basketball coach. Even then Williams was not the kind to make dazzling impressions. He was quiet and pleasant, tall and hunched over, a man in his late twenties, who grinned out of the side of his mouth and looked up at you, in spite of being 6-foot-4, through bushy black eyebrows. He was, it seems, sort of a part-time coach while doing graduate study or something.7 Florida State was just beginning to flex its muscles in football then, and so Bud Kennedy (who died recently) and assistant coach Hugh Durham (now the head basketball coach at FSU) and, by all means, Joe Williams sort of hovered about like extra men at a picnic softball game.
Joe did have a beautiful young bride named Dale, whom he had met while he was coaching high-school basketball in Jacksonville.8 But she was the only outwardly outstanding thing about Joe Williams, and they lived in what sounded like a fishing-camp cabin in the swamps outside Tallahassee, and I suppose I had his picture taken for the basketball brochure and I suppose the freshman team played out its season. I just don’t know. I went back to newspapering very shortly, and Joe took an assistant coaching job at Furman University, both of us roughly the same age, both of us just looking for a home, and we went separate ways without looking back.9
Jacksonville’s basketball program was, in those days during the early sixties, almost nonexistent. I had seen them play, against teams like Tampa and Valdosta State and Mercer, and it was a twilight zone of dark and airy gyms, small crowds, travel-by-car and intramural offenses. There was a line in the papers about Joe Williams leaving Furman in 1964 to become head basketball coach at Jacksonville University,10 not the most exciting announcement but at least news about an acquaintance. Jacksonville, you could find out if you bought a Jacksonville paper, got progressively worse — from 15-11 to 8-17 in Joe’s first three seasons — and people like me who had known him however vaguely were wondering whatever in the world possessed him to take a job like that.
The Miami Heat photographed last week. A rare occasion of politics mixing with professional sports.
Los Knicks are ripe for an off-night. Still, we’ll be root-root-rooting them on tonight as they play the Raptors in Toronto.
[Photo Credit: Al Bello/AP]
Here’s Pat Jordan’s piece on Geno Auriemma for Deadspin:
“I don’t coach women,” the coach says. “I coach basketball players.” He tells a story. He was practicing with his team before a game when the opposing team’s female coach came out on the floor. “I’m telling my players how to play man-to-man defense. The other coach says: ‘You can’t say that. It’s person-to-person defense.’ I said, ‘You’re shittin’ me.’ She says, ‘But it’s women playing it.’ I say: ‘Yeah, but it’s man-to-man. They’re just pawns, without gender. I’m a gender-neutral coach.'”
…Geno became a women’s coach by accident. He was 21, without a job. A friend asked him to help out coaching a girls’ high school team. Geno said, “Girls! No way.” Then he thought about it. “I realized it could be pretty cool,” he tells me. “So I gave it a shot. The girls listened to me. They appreciated what I taught them.” His high school job led to an assistant coaching job on the University of Virginia’s women’s team, which led, in 1985, to an interview for the head job at UConn. By then, Geno had decided that he “liked coaching women. But I didn’t view it as coaching women. I was just coaching the game the way it should be played.
When I ask him why UConn hired him, he says: “I have no fucking idea. They wanted a woman. But nobody wanted the job. UConn had had only one winning season in its history. The facilities were lousy, there was no money, the pay was $29,000 a year, but I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to coach. So I lied to them. I told them I’m gonna do this, and this, and this, and they believed me. So I took the job. I figured I’d win a few games then after four years I’d go someplace good, men or women, as long as I could coach on a high level.” Those plans never materialized. His teams became very good, very quickly, and then, as he puts it, “a funny thing happened. After those first winning seasons, nobody called. Nobody gave a shit because I was a guy. The women’s teams didn’t want a guy, and the men’s teams figured if I was coaching women, how good could I be?”
He smiles, the big smile of a guy who’s got the last laugh. “Now nobody wants me because I’m making too much fucking money.”
Knicks in Philly tonight. Gritty first half. Here’s hoping Los Knicks have enough to get the win.
Knicks vs. Pacers, Heat vs. Sixers, Spurs vs. OKC, and all the NCAA that you can watch.
Have at it.
[Photo Credit: Felp Flores]
