— For sure, Stephen Curry is a truly great player. However, he’s definitely not the best point guard of all time. Here are the guys at that position who were better than him: Magic Johnson, Jerry West, Isiah Thomas and Walt Frazier.
— Lloyd Daniels is currently being boosted as having been a potential superstar whose personal problems were the only factors that prevented him from excelling in the NBA. I beg to differ.
I coached against him on several occasions when he was playing for the Topeka Sizzlers in the Continental Basketball Association. The scouting report: He was extremely talented, yet also soft, defenseless and lazy.
Fred Cofield, who played a total of 50 games with the Knicks and the Bulls — and whom I had the pleasure of coaching for two seasons with the CBA’s Rockford Lightning — routinely ate Daniels’s lunch.
— Here’s what’s wrong with the Phoenix Suns: The owner, Robert Sarver, thinks that because he’s rich he knows everything about everything. He doesn’t consult his coaching staff in deciding on trades, draft choices and free-agent signings. Instead, Sarver relies almost exclusively on metrics, i.e., a system of numbers that reduces basketball to a video game, and is used by know-nothings to convince themselves that they’re experts.
— There’s an occasional NBA-come-lately who denigrates the 11 championships won by Bill Russell. The argument is that because there are 30 NBA teams nowadays, it’s much harder to win a title, a reasoning that’s totally fallacious.
In Russell’s initial 10 championships, the NBA was comprised of eight and then nine franchises. His last championship was won in 1969 when 14 teams existed.
Since free agency wasn’t available in those days, the only player movement was limited to trades. This meant that rosters were stable all over the league. Accordingly, the players on any given team were familiar with each other’s strengths and weaknesses — and the execution at both ends of the court was tightly choreographed.
In addition, players back then had played college ball for four years and, consequently, their mastery of fundamentals was much more advanced than are the vast majority of today’s NBAers.
Plus, except for the addition of expansion teams, there were far fewer patsies on the Celtics’ schedule. And since the distractions created by the current omnipotent media and the humongous salaries were unknown, the focus was almost totally on the game itself.
So, how would the Russellian Celtics fare today? This is a meaningless question. However, a Hall of Fame dominated roster of his teammates — say, John Havlicek, Sam and K.C. Jones, Tom Heinsohn, Frank Ramsey, Bill Sharman, Tom Sanders and Bailey Howell, plus the likes of Willie Naulls, Don Nelson and Wayne Embry — would be a formidable enough team to be a championship contender in today’s NBA.
— Shaq has admitted that he wasn’t paid enough at LSU, which necessarily means that he was indeed paid. This should come as no surprise.
The late Steve Patterson was a friend of mind, and he told me what the deal was at UCLA. “I was driving a junker, pinching pennies, busting my butt going to classes, staying up late to study, and then having to practice and play in the games. And I would see how many of my teammates would never go to classes, drive up to the gym in brand new cars, and be decked in golden chains and fancy clothes. When I asked one of them how was this possible, he simply told me to hook up with the basketball program’s bag man, Sam Gilbert. Which I did, and quickly received the same benefits that they did.”
There are an overwhelming number of reports of similar goodies made available to undergraduate hoopers. From one SEC school depositing 20K in a certain player’s mother’s bank account to postpone that player’s declaring for the NBA Draft for another year, to another powerhouse program supplying heroin to recruit and maintain an addicted doper. To say nothing about no-show jobs, rental allowances paid to players in rent-free apartments owned by alumni, and so on and on and…
The NCAA’s excuse is that they don’t have the budget to investigate all the abuses that routinely occur. For sure, programs run by serial lawbreakers like Rick Pitino, Larry Brown and Jim Boeheim have been punished. But it’s also true that the NCAA is usually moved to only prosecute the big-name illicit programs that have already been publically outed.
Amateurism in too many top 20 college basketball programs is a sham.
— So LeBron is claiming that he had nothing to do with the firing of David Blatt. I suppose he’s basing his denials on the probable fact that he never insisted on the move in any face-to-face contacts with either majority owner Dan Gilbert or general manager David Griffin. However, there were many other avenues where LBJ could make his feelings — nay, demands — known.
Among his like-minded surrogates were LeBron’s agent, several of his teammates and their agents, as well as members of the local media.
Also, LeBron’s frequent public dissings of Blatt during games, plus his well-known advocacy of his buddy Tyronn Lue, were impossible to ignore.
There’s no doubt among NBA insiders that in Cleveland (and in several other teams), the inmates are running the asylum.
To those of you who might agree that, along with Pontius Pilate, LeBron’s hands are clean, I can offer you a good price on the Brooklyn Bridge.