Basketball Archives

An end to what should never have begun, for the most hated figure in the history of New York sports. You sometimes hear malign influences described as being like a "cancer" on a team; Isiah was more like the ebola virus.

*Bob Klapisch has a must-read (really!) article about how the Twins got backed into the Santana deal with the Mets instead of taking better packages from the Yankees and Red Sox (one is left with the impression that the Red Sox, possibly rationally, lost interest once the Yankees were out of the bidding - unlike the Yanks they don't have unlimited financial resources and have a fairly solid pitching staff at present). Via Pinto. On the one hand, the Twins' new GM Bill Smith clearly screwed up by turning down a deal involving Phil Hughes, Melky Cabrera and two additional prospects in December; on the other hand, the Yankees will probably regret turning down a last-minute chance to get Santana for just Ian Kennedy, Melky and one other prospect (and I say this as someone who thinks Melky has a good shot to be a real good player).

*Speaking of great reporting, Fred Barnes' account of how President Bush decided on the surge, based heavily on interviews with the president himself, is also a must-read for intelligent discussion of the subject.

*The five stages of voting in Republican primaries. Via Vodkapundit. Absolutely spot-on.

*The wages of Kelo: the Second Circuit this morning affirms the use of the eminent domain power for the munificent public purpose of bringing the Nets to Brooklyn.

*Stanley Kurtz on Waziristan past, and Waziristan present.

*This is an amazing story, if true.

*You will look long and hard for two savvier observers of presidential politics than Karl Rove and Patrick Ruffini, and their takes on the 08 scene are worth reading, especially Rove's point about exit polls and Patrick's point about the advantages of online fundraising (added advantage he doesn't mention: online donors don't show up demanding favors).

*The FBI interrogator who questioned Saddam after his capture confirms what we all knew: Saddam intended all along to retain the ability to ramp up WMD production as soon as he could, and he made a deliberate effort to appear to still have WMD capability:

Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."

Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"

Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."

Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

*Great move by the Yankees snagging Morgan Ensberg. Ensberg has had his struggles lately and granted he will be less useful as a first baseman, but his combination of power and patience makes him a potentially very useful bat.

*Color me un-shocked that Clinton crony Strobe Talbott would be duped by Soviet agents.

*The real DB Cooper, unmasked? Nah, he would never have stolen paper currency just months after Nixon took us off the gold standard.

*Mark Steyn rightly takes McCain to task for his hostility to making money in the private sector. I think John Hinderaker has the better of the argument about preferring McCain to a novice politician like Romney on foreign affairs - unlike Steyn's example of Hillary, McCain is a longstanding, indeed life-long, foreign policy hawk who has no illusions about the likes of Putin (I believe he once said he looked in Putin's eyes and saw the lettters "KGB"). And Pejman properly takes McCain to task for misrepresenting Romney's position on timetables and the surge, which is a shame because there really is a fair contrast (see here and here) on the fact that McCain was a longstanding, vocal leader on Iraq strategy while Romney played the role of a cautious follower who always kept his options open to bail on victory in Iraq for the greater good of getting himself elected.

*Andrew Ferguson on Fred: brilliant. Ruffini's Fred postmortem is also worth reading.

*This video about Hillary's role on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart will likely hurt her mostly in the primaries, and certainly doesn't scandalize me. But it's amusing and interesting on a few levels, not least the accent she was using back then. There's also a lesson about what drives journalists; biases are one thing, but when Brian Ross mentions that he covered this story 16 years ago, it's pretty clear that returning to it now is about Ross' career more than about Hillary.

The WSJ's sports blog has a roundup of some great feature stories of the past year.

I have to wonder at this point if Isiah Thomas is the most unpopular sports figure in New York history. At least while in New York, that is; Walter O'Malley is still hated in many quarters 50 years after taking the Dodgers from Brooklyn, but O'Malley was only disliked for leaving town. Leo Durocher was hated by Dodger fans when he managed the Giants and Giants fans when he managed the Dodgers, but that's also not the same.

Consider the elements that went into Isiah's unpopularity:

1. As a player, he was a hated rival of the team.

2. He came to town with a seemingly endless stream of controversies in his past, many of them racially charged.

3. His prior record as a coach, GM and league executive was an unbroken string of failures, including the collapse of the league he ran.

4. He took over in NY as both the GM and, subsequently, the coach, thus eliminating any competition (other than the owner who hired him) for the fans' hatred.

5. He assembled a roster that was unsuccessful, seemingly designed not to play well together to match the talents of the players involved, expensive, not young, and not full of hustling, aggressive players. After this failed, he basically turned that roster over for another one just like it.

6. This method of roster construction left the team unable to change its direction for the foreseeable future due to the salary cap, while competing teams found ways to acquire major stars on the market at the same time.

7. On top of the failures in constructing, motivating and managing the team, he managed to get himself embroiled in a sensationally ugly offseason sex scandal.

8. He is apparently in no danger of ever being fired.

It's reached the point where the Onion's satire seems plausible enough and Knicks fans are reduced to discussing assassinating the coach.

I've certainly seen unpopular people in NY before. M. Donald Grant comes to mind after the Seaver trade, Steinbrenner's been hugely unpopular at times, and of course there's Joe Walton. Plenty of failed players have found ways to expand their portfolio of unpopularity, like Bobby Bonilla. Going back further, I don't believe there was ever this kind of hate directed at the likes of Ralph Branca or Fred Merkle or Joe Pisarcik or even Charles Smith.

Unless someone has a compelling case for someone else, I'm going with Isiah.

*There's a fair number of debates from the Virginia Tech shooting I don't have time to weigh in on now (there's the gun control issue; Glenn Reynolds aptly summarizes the case for less of it here, there's the university's reaction time, and there's the appalling spectacle of NBC News broadcasting the killer's videotape), though it seems the most important question is why it was so hard to get the killer out of circulation or at the very least on a list of people who should not be permitted to buy firearms, when he was giving off every sign of being a potential danger to himself and others and everyone around him saw those signs and several people tried to do something about it.

In all the horror I did find one moment of a little levity from this quote:

Briettney said her friend, who was shot in the knee, buttocks and shoulder, was expected to be all right. "The one day he goes to class, he gets shot three times!"

*If you were wondering what was so gosh-darn important about holding that Rutgers press conference: the Rutgers coach now has a book deal.

*All three of my fantasy baseball teams have Felix Hernandez. This is not good news for any of them. Perhaps letting him throw a 111-pitch complete game on a cold April night in Fenway in his last start was not such a good idea.

*I definitely did not see a Mark Buehrle no-hitter coming. The past four years, Buehrle has finished second, second, first and first in the AL in hits allowed.

*You can read my reactions to the partial-birth abortion decision here, here and here. This is also a good summary of the concurrence (H/t).

*Please, wear your seatbelts.

So the Rutgers women's basketball team held a team press conference yesterday to respond to Don Imus:

Rutgers' outraged coach, C. Vivian Stringer, wiped away tears as she recounted her own battles with racism and said she won't let Imus "steal our joy."

Then each player stood up, walked over to the microphone and introduced herself.

Towering over her teammates, Vaughn gave a cheery "Good morning, everyone." But her broad smile faded as she opened up about the hurt she feels - as an African-American and a woman. "I'm not a ho, I'm a woman. I'm someone's child," she said.

The decision to hold this press conference is a horrible failure of leadership on the part of Stringer and anyone else in the athletic and academic establishment at Rutgers who let this happen.

To recap, for those of you just tuning in, radio 'shock jock' Don Imus is in hot water, and justifiably so, for referring to the Rutgers women's hoops players as "nappy headed hos," and a fair debate is to be had as to whether this proves that Imus is

(a) a racist and/or sexist;
(b) a boor and a moron with no sense of propriety;
(c) a cranky old coot whose brain is permanently addled by drugs having a 'senior moment' on the air;
(d) an aging shock-radio guy trying desperately to stay relevant by talking like a 22-year-old rapper; or
(e) my personal favorite, all of the above.

I'm not here to defend Imus, as his remark was indefensible, and besides, Imus endorsed and relentlessly touted Kerry in 2004, so let the Left defend him. On the other hand, as I have long argued, not everything that is indefensible is necessarily a capital crime. Imus has, appropriately, been given a two-week suspension for the same reason you hit the dog with a rolled-up newspaper when he poops on the living room rug. Whether he should be fired depends on what you think more generally about shock-jock radio, since this kind of thing is basically an occupational hazard of employing people like Imus. Of course, there's also the fact that Imus isn't funny (granted, I've never been a regular listener, and I first heard him around 1980 so I may be selling his early work short, but in my book a guy who is unfunny for going on three decades is not funny).

But here's the thing: whether or not they think they are just in the business of winning ballgames, college coaches are role models to their players. College students are at a particularly impressionable stage in their lives: finally old enough to first start to see adults as peers rather than distant authority figures, they naturally begin to model themselves on whomever they meet that most impresses them. Most college athletes - and I assume this is true of the Rutgers women as well - will not become professional athletes, and thus are preparing themselves for life and jobs in the real world. It is incumbent on their coaches to teach them lessons that will help them there.

Imus' remarks were crude and ugly, but the lesson Stringer should have been sending these young ladies is that they say a lot about Imus but nothing about them. Different people handle these things differently, but a coach worth his or her salt could have played this at least two perfectly reasonable ways. One is to laugh it off with the traditional "sticks and stones" attitude, and show the players that this really shouldn't mean anything to them; there will always be people who say inappropriate and mean-spirited things in life, and you shouldn't take that seriously. A more combative personality of the Bobby Knight variety would respond by taking some personal public potshots at Imus, drawing the story away from the players and into coach vs. shock jock; this would teach the players the valuable lesson that when somebody sucker punches your people, you hit them back in kind and teach them a lesson.

What you do not do is call a press conference like this:

"I want to ask him, 'Now that you've met me, am I ho?'" said Rutgers center Kia Vaughn of the Bronx. "Unless they've given 'ho' a whole new definition, that's not what I am."

Declaring that Imus has "stolen a moment of pure grace for us," the wounded women spoke out for the first time about Imus' racist radio remarks.

"This has scarred me for life," said guard Matee Ajavon of Newark. "I've dealt with racism before. For it to be in the public eye like this, it will be something I will tell my granddaughter."

Somebody gave these young women the message - or at least failed to disabuse them of the notion - that they should take Imus' words seriously, take them to heart. This press conference was a show of the coach and the players wallowing in Imus' words, embracing them, and thus elevating them as if any serious person would think less of them - rather than of Imus - for what Imus said. This story should never have been about the players, because Imus' words were generic (indeed, that's precisely why they were offensive). It's the Culture of Victimology at its most destructive, teaching these young women that they should consider themselves to have been genuinely maligned by an aging boor and to seek out the status and posture of one to whom a deep wrong has been done and who is owed.

Put more succinctly, when someone calls you a 'nappy headed ho,' you should not feel the need to call a press conference to deny it. Maybe these young women don't know that - but if they don't, it was the business of someone in a position of authority to teach them. Shame on Vivian Stringer and Rutgers University for failing to teach them that.

So, Holy Cross will play in the West Regional 4-13 game against Southern Illinois in Columbus, Ohio on Friday, looking for its first NCAA Tournament victory since defeating Navy and Wake Forest in 1953. This is the highest seed for either HC or Southern Illinois in recent history.

Just to recap, HC lost by 4 to Kentucky in 2001, led in the second half against Final Four team Kansas in 2002, and led in the second half and lost by 4 against Final Four team Marquette in 2003; Patriot League rival Bucknell beat Kansas in 2005.

It's time for a win.

I'm guessing that alumni of places like Duke and Kansas don't get email messages like this one I just received from Holy Cross:

Your men's basketball team is having a fantastic season, and they need your support as they are now just two wins away from another trip to the NCAA Tournament!

The Crusaders are 23-8 after a victory over Lafayette in the Quarterfinals of the Patriot League Tournament on Wednesday night, and now will face American University in the Semifinals this Sunday, March 4th, at 2 PM at the Hart Center.

Unfortunately the academic calendar has the student body -- who have made the Hart Center an unbelievable home court advantage this year -- away on spring break. WE REALLY NEED YOUR HELP! The weather forecast is good so please give some thought to making the drive to Worcester and supporting the team. You can call the ticket office in advance (508-793-2573) or you can buy tickets at the door.

The Crusaders' excellent regular season efforts were well recognized by the League - as senior Keith Simmons won Player of the Year, senior Torey Thomas was the Defensive Player of the Year, and head coach Ralph Willard was selected as Coach of the Year.

But now all that matters is the next two home games. A victory on Sunday would lead to a championship game against the Bucknell/Army winner on Friday, March 9 at the Hart Center . It would be a 4:30 p.m. tip off with the winner guaranteed a spot in the NCAA Tournament.

We need your support and we hope to see you, and hear you, at the Hart Center this weekend.

Dead at 52. There are great players and there are good players, and then there are good players who are always in the right place at the right time. That was Dennis Johnson. RIP.

If only they had had the calm, steady leadership of Allen Iverson, the Nuggets would never have had that brawl with the Knicks.

UPDATE: On a more serious note, Iverson is a great statistical puzzle. Now, basketball stats are subject to more illusions and limitations than baseball stats, and we still run pretty short when it comes to measuring a basketball player's defense. On the other hand, I don't buy the idea pushed by Iverson's champions (see this otherwise-excellent Bill Simmons column) that the numbers are entirely meaningless.

See, here's the thing. You win basketball games by doing three things: (1) getting more shot attempts (including free throws) than the other guy, (2) converting more of your attempts into points, and (3) preventing the other guy from converting his attempts into points. Period. Nothing else matters.

Leaving aside his defense, which I don't doubt is valuable, the statistical question is whether there is really any evidence that Iverson helps out with #2, or whether he does enough on the offensive end to help out with #1 to offset that.

To the casual fan, Iverson scores a lot of points, so he must be a good offensive player. But the fact is, for most of Iverson's career his points per shot attempt have been terrible, and his mediocre assist totals have suggested a player who isn't really setting up his teammates well enough to offset that. (Granted - and it's a big "granted" - he improved in both regards starting with the 04-05 season, largely as a result of pushing his free throws per shot attempt into the stratosphere). Plus, he turns the ball over a lot.

Defenders of Iverson will argue that he has made up for this historically by getting off a huge number of shots. Now, it's true that a team's go-to guy can and should have a lower ratio of points to shot attempts than, say, a guy who scores 10 points a game - the key scorer has to make the toughest shot attempts when the clock is running down, and it's worth a few misses to push your scoring average from 12 to 25, as long as the marginal extra points don't come with so many extra misses that you end up just sucking the life out of the rest of the offense.

Anyway, I haven't bored into the details of Iverson's Sixers teams closely enough to have a strong opinion on the subject, and as I said in recent years he has shown sufficient improvement that maybe the questions about his first eight years in the league are moot. But I don't regard it as simply received wisdom to be accepted without question that Iverson's high-scoring raw numbers automatically make him a superstar-level offensive player.

I would be remiss if I didn't toot the horn of the Holy Cross Crusaders for taking the fight to Duke. And yes, moral victories count, for a program like HC.

Former NBA All-Star Eddie Johnson was arrested for a terrible sex crime - but it may not be the Eddie Johnson you think.

The Johnson who got busted for sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl is this one, not this one.

If you haven't already, you must read this article in yesterday's NY Daily News, polling former CBA colleagues of Isiah Thomas about his current situation with the Knicks; to say these guys are experiencing schadnefreude is like saying Bill Gates makes a decent living.

The Knicks' acquisition of Steve Francis in exchange for senior citizen Penny Hardaway and Trevor Ariza is obviously a steal on a pure talent basis, which only makes it more likely that Isiah Thomas is doing this to set up Larry Brown as the fall guy, by giving him talented players who can't possibly fit together. Isiah is probably thinking that Marbury and Francis could whup Isiah and Dumars in their primes in 2-on-2, which they probably could; unfortunately, the NBA is not a 2-on-2 game.

UPDATE: Bill Simmons nails this in a satirical column that's just comedy gold, especially the McHale-Isiah exchanges. An excerpt:

Now, I'm certainly not a proponent of strangling every advertisement that could possibly be imitated by someone stupid, but Giacomo at Joust the Facts notes a Nike ad (which I haven't seen) that seems pretty likely to be imitated by young boys with ghastly results.

Bill Simmons is dead-on again with this second column on Kobe Bryant, dealing with his 81-point game. The whole "I'll show I'm really unselfish" thing when he sat after cracking 60 in three quarters was just pointless. Like Bill said after the criminal trial, Kobe now has to embrace his destiny as a Barry Bonds-style bad guy who doesn't let up, doesn't apologize, doesn't care what you think of him, gives no quarter and asks none; that's the only role left to him.

I recently finished reading Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, (reviewed here by Frinklin), which picks up the story of Anakin/Vader (and others) shortly after the end of Revenge of the Sith. More on that later, but the point here is that the book reminded me of Bill's point about Kobe: Vader spends a lot of the book whining to the Emperor about the limitations of his suit and his spacecraft and fleet, obsessing about the Jedi, cursing the events that led to his wife's death and his mutilation, and otherwise wallowing in self-pity. Eventually, though, he accepts the fact that his old life and old ties are gone, that he can't go back to the places he was before, and goes about single-mindedly pursuing power and domination because that's the only avenue he has left. The result puts him on the path to being the Darth Vader of the original trilogy - ruthless, powerful, feared by allies and foes alike.

I'm not suggesting that Darth Vader is a good moral role model, of course. But I found the parallel intriguing: whatever private redemption Kobe might undertake, his only plausible public role, at least on the court, is to become a single-minded dominator of his opponents. He'll never get credit for being a nice guy anyway.

Great profile of the community-building charitable activities of NBA Hall of Famer and ex-Piston Dave Bing (Via Kaus).

Now that the 2004-05 stats are up at Basketball-Reference.com, I thought I'd update the tables from my historical analysis of shooting efficiency in the NBA. As it turns out, 2004-05 may go down as the year the league's tinkering finally yielded some results in terms of improved offensive efficiency and increased tempo, resulting in just the second season in a decade with an average team scoring above 97 points/game and the best shooting efficiency since they moved the three point line back eight years ago. Here's the new tables, including revised historical averages incorporating the new numbers:

The 2000s

You'll see that all the elements of offensive efficiency were up - shooting pe