Daily Factoid: The only player who played in the 1994 FIBA World Championships that is still in the NBA is Shaquille O’Neal.
- Jonathan Feigen – ‘Rockets’ schedule heavy on back-to-back games‘: “The Rockets will have 21 sets of back-to-backs, including 16 that end on the road. Their opponents will be playing their second game in as many nights 20 times, all but one at Toyota Center. The Rockets will also spend much of the season driving to and from the airport. With 13 one-game road trips, the Rockets have 24 road trips. As with much about the Rockets schedule, those potential issues also bring reasons for optimism. The Rockets do have an incredible number of short-hop trips to play one road game. Some – to Boston, Milwaukee and Atlanta – are not so short. But with so many trips, they do not have any road trip longer than four games all season, and only have one that long. Though they start the season with six of their first nine, and 8 of 12 games on the road, they play five of their seven April games and 11 of their last 16 games at home. The toughest road trip by far —to Dallas and San Antonio before a Lakers-Jazz back-to-back —ends January and begins February. February ends with a pair of back-to-backs before playing in Portland and at the Clippers to open March. But overall, the schedule offers the chance to make a move down the stretch.”
- Houston Chronicle lists 13 can’t-miss Rockets home games in the 2010-2011 season.
- Zach Harper of ESPN selects several of this season’s games and divides them into different categories of exciting match-ups.
- Bradford Doolittle of Basketball Prospectus enumerates the number of back-to-backs each team will have this year.
- Rob Mahoney of Hardwood Paroxysm: “Right now, Team USA’s focus should be on repetition. The style that the Americans are looking to play in the World Championships requires that everything they do is easily replicable. The team’s ball-handlers need to be able to make on-target passes to their teammates time and time again, be they on the break or in a half-court set. While having a Chris Paul or Deron Williams might help in that respect, the group of talent Team USA has at point guard is fully capable of making the necessary plays…provided they reach the desired comfort level with their teammates. Putting together the right lineups is one thing, but Coach K needs to run those lineups into the ground. In drills, in scrimmages, in exhibition games, and in the preliminary contests in Turkey. Everything before the elimination stage is a trial, and every second of playing time brings those players closer to the lofty chemistry level needed for extended success. Beyond that, this team needs to run. Constantly. Mike D’Antoni would be the first to tell you that it takes a well-disciplined and well-conditioned team to run for an entire game, and based on Team USA’s aggressive defensive strategy, these players need to be in regular season shape. That wasn’t the case in Vegas, even at the intrasquad scrimmage at the camp’s conclusion. A number of players admitted to showing up out of playing shape, and despite going through half-speed and full-speed workouts with the Team USA staff, the Americans don’t quite look ready to run the ball down the throats of their elite competition. Here’s to hoping that the remaining 15 have stayed fresh during their break from camp, because while Team USA may have the commitment to run the break on offense and attack ball-handlers on defense, it won’t mean all that much unless the players have the endurance necessary to implement those strategies.”
- ESPN – ‘Source: Tracy McGrady, Pistons agree’: “Tracy McGrady has agreed to a one-year, $1.35 million contract with the Detroit Pistons, a source told ESPN.com.”
- Dave Feschuck – ‘Good young zebras on endangered list’: “The dearth of talented young referees is a problem everywhere from the pro ranks to local high schools, in basketball and other sports, and lately you can lay some blame on adults who should know better. Foxcroft said 65 per cent of Hamilton’s high school referees quit after three years because they grow tired of the badgering from parents in the crowd. It’s a telling snapshot of the current climate of hyper-criticism that carries on up the ladder to the pro ranks. Never have referees been under more scrutiny. Never before have the masses displayed so little patience with the failings of human beings engaged in the difficult work of bang-bang judgment calls. ‘The negativity weighs on our (referees),’ Nunn said. What isn’t pointed out often enough is that calling an NBA game has to be one of the hardest jobs in sports. And NBA refs — for all the examples of badly botched decisions — do an awfully good job, considering. Every call is evaluated, after all, by in-arena observers and by video analysis. And though the results of those evaluations aren’t made public, Nunn said the best NBA refs, when they blow the whistle, get the call correct 94 to 96 per cent of the time. When they don’t blow the whistle — when it comes to non-calls on, say, a subjective level of body contact — Nunn said the percentage dips to the high 80s or low 90s, even if players and coaches carry on as though nobody on their team has ever committed a foul.”
- New York Times – ‘Confounding Hire Leads to Garden’s Image Problem’: “Creating a positive image in sports and corporate circles has rarely been a concern of James L. Dolan, the executive chairman and overlord of the Garden. So it was less a surprise than a disappointment that he is ushering Thomas back to the Knicks, which is now part of the publicly traded Madison Square Garden. Thomas was renowned for dishing out bloated player contracts that compromised the Knicks’ salary cap, for on-court failures and for being liable, along with the Garden, for a sexual harassment verdict in federal court in 2007 that forced his employer to pay $11.5 million to Anucha Browne Sanders, a former team executive. In a twist of cosmic fate, Thomas’s return to the Garden as a consultant came on the same day that Hewlett-Packard ousted its highly effective chief executive, Mark V. Hurd. The company’s board forced Hurd’s resignation for submitting inaccurate expense reports to cover his payments to a woman who had accused him of sexual harassment. He settled the matter with the woman, a marketing consultant to H.P. John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at the Columbia University School of Law and a prominent expert on corporate governance, called the Hurd and Thomas cases ‘bookends’ that describe the extremes of corporate oversight. ‘It’s zero tolerance versus maximum tolerance,’ Coffee said. ‘In Hurd’s case, the board didn’t even find anything to the sexual harassment claims, but this is a board that is very demanding of its C.E.O.’s.’ Hewlett-Packard forced Hurd out but Thomas stayed for six months after his trial, until Donnie Walsh replaced him as the team president and then fired him as the coach.”
- The Star-Ledger – ‘As Nets Head to London, David Stern Has An Epiphany’: “David Stern, today: ‘It’s actually too much to ask all of those great players to play full seasons and then play internationally every really, not every two years, but almost every year. We are going to wind up breaking down the players, so we have to find a balance between playing for your league team and playing for your national team.’ It’s been obvious to anyone with a working brain that owners who allow their $100-million commodities to play three extra weeks in the summer are playing with fire, and only a handful of people (Mark Cuban and Sam Mitchell among them) had the guts to question the nanny state and flout Stern’s directive to shut up about the risks. Now Commish admits there is a risk. Imagine that. After 18 years of shouting people down about it. Must be getting soft. That’s fine, we accept your apology.”
- Trey Kerby – ‘Scottie Pippen chooses some guy to give his induction speech’: “We can talk about how cool it is that Jordan will be giving the introduction speech for Pippen’s Hall of Fame induction this Friday… So perfect, you guys. Like Scottie said, it’s ‘by far the obvious choice’ and an ‘easy one,’ but it’s still the right one. So happy. It’s just good on so many levels. Pippen finally getting his moment in the spotlight and being honored by Jordan after years of being the second fiddle is really, really cool. I wish there were a more eloquent way I could say this, but the 7-year-old me is freaking out right now, and the 26-year-old version isn’t reacting much differently. Totally radical, dude. Of course, with Jordan returning to the scene of his final score-settling there’s a little danger in giving him the microphone first so he can bust like a bubble. But honestly, I don’t see that being a problem. Even when Jordan was taking shots at each and every person who ever wronged him at any point in his life, he had nothing but kind words for Pippen. Scottie’s a guy he really cares for, and if his heartfelt performancewhen the Bulls honored Johnny ‘Red’ Kerr is any indication of how he’ll act Friday, then this will go smoothly. I’m not even that worried about Jordan wearing mom jeans. I’ll let it slide this time. Seriously, guys, Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan sharing a stage. They’re great. That’s great. Great.”
- Lang Whiticker of SLAM sits down with an interview with Kevin Durant.
- Trey Kerby – ‘Tracy McGrady will be misfiring Piston in Detroit’s jalopy’: “Try as he might, Tracy McGrady’s just about done. He might have a game or two a month where he looks not terrible, but the Pistons aren’t contending and should be developing young talent. And while he’s supposedly agreeing to come off the bench in Detroit, less than a month ago, his desire to be a starter submarined a potential deal with the Bulls. Seems fishy. Not to mention, McGrady won’t be able to wear his preferred No. 3 in Detroit — that belongs to Rodney Stuckey — so he’ll probably switch back to the No. 1 jersey, which he wore throughout the beginning of his career. The last Piston to wear that number was the one-and-only Allen Iverson, so that should bring back some good memories for Pistons fans. Not. (Again, 2010.) Look, taking a flyer on McGrady for the veteran’s minimum isn’t the worst thing of all-time. It’s just kind of sad from every angle. Sad that the Pistons are the one signing McGrady, sad that McGrady isn’t very good anymore, and sad that I keep using not jokes. We can all do better. On the plus side, late-period McGrady looks a lot like Will Smith in “Hitch,” which is something I think we can all get behind.”
- Lebron James via Twitter – “Don’t think for one min that I haven’t been taking mental notes of everyone taking shots at me this summer. And I mean everyone!”
- J.A. Adande- ‘Lebron’s Summer of Wrong’: “Quick summer summary for LeBron: creates a show to announce his free agent choice, gets roundly criticized for both the choice and the format; takes out an ad to thank his hometown of Akron and gets criticized for not mentioning Cleveland or Cavaliers fans; tweets his reaction to all of the criticism and gets criticized for that. At this point there’s nothing he can say that will make it better, no way he can get back in the good graces of all of the fans he lost this summer. He should either keep quiet and stay off Twitter for the rest of the summer or just go all in and make as many antagonizing comments as he can. I hope LeBron is taking mental notes. I hope he’s storing it in a mental database and preparing a mental PowerPoint presentation for every pregame this season. I hope he stops trying to be nice and turns into Clint Eastwood at the end of ‘Unforgiven.’ If LeBron can live up to all of the additional pressure he created for himself than he will unleash one of the greatest campaigns in NBA history. The first step is creating enemies, even if they’re imaginary. That’s what Michael Jordan did. I tweeted that LeBron’s little statement was the most MJ-like thing he’s done so far…and that brought even more derision and LeBron hatred. It also exposed more ignorance of how Jordan really functioned. People insisted Jordan never would have said anything, he simply would have done it. It’s as if people forgot his Hall of Fame induction speech last season, or they didn’t catch the multiple clues of Jordan’s m.o., including his reaction to then-Knicks Coach Jeff Van Gundy labeling him a con man (make particular note of Jordan’s comments at the 1:25 mark…they’re almost identical to what James had to say Tuesday). Another example of Jordan revealing the sub-zero temperature of his heart was in the 1997 Eastern Conference Finals, when he reacted to the Miami Heat’s physical play in Game 4 by declaring from that point on: ‘It’s personal.‘”
