Archive for basketball
McGrady and Pistons a Marriage of Convenience
Posted by: | CommentsThe Pistons are using Tracy McGrady. But that’s OK, because Tracy McGrady is using the Pistons.
Let’s get that straight, because to not acknowledge that means we cannot have an honest dialogue about McGrady signing with the Pistons.
McGrady is 31 and has agreed to play for the Pistons this season for chump change. He’s being brought in at the paltry NBA veteran’s salary of $1.35 million, which is like Radio Shack bringing in Steve Jobs and paying him minimum wage.
There’s still magic in the McGrady name in NBA circles. His fan base is still strong. To many, McGrady is just one good rehab curriculum away from returning to greatness.
The Pistons signed McGrady for his name recognition and his potential to pull people into the Palace on a snowy night in January when the Memphis Freaking Grizzlies are in town.
I’ve crabbed about it before: the Pistons struggle to find an identity nowadays. They have no stars, no one who gets the NBA fan’s juices flowing.
Jonas Jerebko was a nice story last year. A posse of fans took to wearing plastic Viking horns on their heads at Pistons games, in honor of Jerebko’s Swedish heritage. That’s cute.
Rodney Stuckey is a nice guard who can shoot a little bit and play some defense. That’s OK.
Will Bynum has some potential in the backcourt. The Pistons just signed him to a new contract. Good for him.
Ben Wallace will play for the Pistons for two more years, past his 37th birthday. No one can doubt Big Ben’s status as a fan favorite.
But guess what? None of those players are enough, even combined, to generate the excitement required to want to traipse to the Palace and drop $100-200 on tickets, parking, some drinks and food.
Neither are Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince, the other links to the team’s salad days of 2004-08.
Does Ben Gordon do it for you? Charlie Villanueva? Jason Maxiell? Austin Daye? DuJuan Summers?
Some competent players among this bunch—some are even above average at what they do. You can win with these players, provided they have some help.
Not even the rookie big man, Greg Monroe, is enough to make the average fan trek to the Palace this winter.
Tracy McGrady will draw folks to the Palace, if at first for no other reason than curiosity. After that, it’s hoped, he’ll draw them for what he can do unequivocally.
The Pistons are using McGrady because they have no one else who’s even remotely a star in the NBA in the truest sense of the word. Even at 31 and fresh off major knee surgery, T-Mac has some gravitational pull.
It matters not that McGrady plays the same swingman position that more than half the Pistons roster plays. That’s irrelevant. McGrady is a name, still—and the Pistons need one, especially with the team for sale.
Of course, this sword cuts both ways. McGrady is using the Pistons, shamelessly.
He needs to showcase himself to the rest of the NBA. He needs to prove that he’s not finished.
He needs to do this, so he can get paid a real NBA salary again.
McGrady didn’t put himself through rehab hell to make $1.35 million a year for the rest of his NBA career.
If McGrady proves himself for the 2010-11 Pistons, someone will take notice and pay him something more than the peanuts the Pistons will pay him this season. That someone might be the Pistons themselves; who knows?
McGrady, of course, couldn’t care less who it is, as long as it happens.
The Pistons-McGrady marriage couldn’t be one of more convenience if they put a Slurpee machine, some beef jerky, an ATM and a magazine rack in the locker room.
But that’s OK. This is a business and both parties need each other.
The Pistons need McGrady to put some fannies in the seats. McGrady needs the Pistons to showcase his talents.
Till death—or 2011—do they part.
Tracy McGrady isn’t that far removed from when he drew gasps in NBA arenas. He’s playing for the Pistons this season on the cheap. He’s Allen Iverson minus the money and the baggage.
This signing will almost certainly spawn some roster moves. You can’t have six guys who stand between 6′5″ and 6′8″, all shooting jump shots and slashing to the hoop.
But those decisions can wait.
Tracy McGrady is the Pistons’ new groom.
And the team is betting that you’ll show up for the reception.
Rest In Pieces, Joe Louis Arena
Posted by: | CommentsJoe Louis Arena is the only sports venue I know of that became obsolete the moment it opened for business.
One of the best things to come from yesterday’s announcement by Mike Ilitch that he and his family are seriously pursuing a purchase of the Detroit Pistons, is that it probably will accelerate the construction of a new arena to replace JLA—one that will likely house both the Pistons and the Red Wings.
Such an arena can’t come a moment too soon.
Ilitch has been associated with the Red Wings for so long, I’m sure there are folks who think he had a hand in the creation of Joe Louis Arena. He didn’t. JLA opened in 1979, and Ilitch bought the Red Wings in 1982.
Where The Palace of Auburn Hills was built ahead of the curve in 1988, JLA was erected with no vision, no sense of convenience, no adroitness.
Parking is a nightmare. A fellow could have a heart attack climbing the steps leading up to the joint. The concourses are too narrow. There aren’t enough restrooms.
JLA’s exterior looks like a warehouse. It has the aesthetics of war-torn Europe, the warmth of a scorned woman.
They didn’t build an arena, they created a giant mausoleum. Today, it’s old and dilapidated. On Opening Night, it was just dilapidated.
It’s not like they shouldn’t have known better; JLA was built in the late-1970s, not during World War II. You walk in and you want to ask where they used to make the tanks.
The air inside has the freshness of milk left on the counter overnight. It’s more stuffy than an aristocrat whose name ends with “the Third.”
It’s the only sports arena that should have been fitted with drop-down oxygen masks. All the air is borrowed from whatever the patrons brought in with them. The foot traffic is fanny-to-fanny; it’s always rush hour. You could walk a mile and never see the walls.
The seating was arranged as if to punish those who couldn’t afford the lower bowl tickets. The only arena promoting class warfare. The top row in the upper bowl is somewhere in Bad Axe. The game below is only being played on the word of well-placed sources.
If you don’t have the cash, you’re sitting closer to Terry Sawchuk’s retired number than the ice. Between periods you can while the time away by counting the girders.
There are suites, of course, but they’re even further away than the so-called nose bleed seats. Every suite should have come equipped with telescopes.
Joe Louis Arena was never state-of-the-art, unless the state of your art is circa 1950. It’s the only arena I know of that was a demotion from its predecessor, Olympia Stadium, which even at age 60 was ten times the hockey palace than JLA was on Opening Night in 1979.
JLA is a 20,000-seat cave. You keep wanting to look out for the bats.
The arena was old and outdated the night they swung the doors open for the first time. If it was a Broadway show it might have opened and closed in one night.
In the early days, the hockey team was worse than the arena, if you can imagine such a thing. Then the team got better and the arena just kept getting older. They’d try re-painting it from time-to-time, like Tammy Faye Bakker’s face, but it only postponed the inevitable.
The funny thing is, when JLA opened on December 27, 1979, it was deemed to be some sort of marvel—a real nifty place. It wasn’t until you got further from its grand opening, and you saw the types of buildings built shortly after it, that you realized we were sold a bill of goods.
Then along came The Palace of Auburn Hills, and that only underlined the foibles of JLA.
The Palace opened in the summer of 1988—less than 10 years after The Joe but light years ahead of it in every way imaginable.
So brilliant was the planning and architecture of The Palace that even today, some 22 years after its opening, the arena is presented as a model for what a sports and indoor concert venue should be.
If Ilitch succeeds in buying the Pistons, no doubt a new, dual-sports arena will be in the offing, likely downtown.
The Red Wings’ original 30-year lease with JLA has expired, and the team then negotiated a temporary extension to that lease, until another arena is built—or until the Red Wings move elsewhere (The Palace) as a stopgap measure.
Regardless, it appears as if the days of the Red Wings playing in Joe Louis Arena are (finally) numbered.
I call dibs on the plunger at its implosion.
Pistons Next Coach? Why not Big Ben?
Posted by: | CommentsThe NBA head coach is like a child in his terrible twos.
He’s up, he’s down. He can’t sit still. He always has something to say. He’s constantly asking his players, “Are we there yet?”
He stomps and screams and makes faces. He won’t eat. He wants everything right now. Sometimes he needs a time out.
The NBA head coach has typically been a former player, and one who likes to touch the basketball a lot.
Point guards and small forwards have enjoyed the most success. Perhaps they’re the most cerebral players. Nobody tell any behemoth I said that.
The NBA head coach, as a rule, hasn’t been a former center or power forward. At least not the ones who’ve won a lot of basketball games wearing Armani.
These things happen. Goalies haven’t traditionally made good hockey coaches. Pitchers aren’t normally the best managers in baseball. When’s the last time a running back became an NFL head coach?
So Ben Wallace has the odds against him. It’s not the first time.
Wallace, the Pistons’ soon-to-be 36-year-old center, went to Virginia Union, which sounds like something that should be in a Civil War Museum. Nobody drafted him, which isn’t surprising, because nobody knew where to look.
Undrafted NBA players are lucky to latch on to a roster, let alone stick in the NBA for 14 years, as Wallace has.
Wallace found a place in the NBA because he could block shots and intimidate in the paint. It takes him a week to score 20 points, but that’s not his game. That was odds-defying, too; not too many players stick around for 14 years being as offensively challenged as Ben Wallace.
Wallace found his niche and decided to be a master at one thing rather than try to be a jack-of-all-trades. He’s been named the Defensive Player of the Year four times, and has made four All-Star teams. He has a championship ring, and came very close to snagging a second.
Not bad for an undrafted, undersized (he’s 6′9″, which barely qualifies as a forward nowadays, let alone a center) player from Virginia Freaking Union.
He’s defied the odds, and will have to do so again, if what I’m about to suggest is to come true.
Ben Wallace ought to be the next coach of the Detroit Pistons, right after whoever is coaching them when he retires. Now bring your jaw back up from the floor and put your eyes back into their sockets.
I don’t mean this season, or next. He just agreed to terms on a two-year contract as a player, anyway.
Wallace has a coaching gene in him, I’m convinced of it.
I’ve taken him to task in the past for failed leadership, but that was a few years ago. Since he returned to the Pistons last summer, Wallace has been a gem, counseling the younger big men. He can’t wait to sink his tendrils into rookie Greg Monroe.
Wallace is a Piston, and always will be, despite not starting his career in Detroit, and fleeing for a couple of seasons as a free agent. He’ll retire as a Piston. Whoever is the head man at that point, whether it’s John Kuester or someone else, ought to hire Wallace to his staff, let him work with the bigs, and Ben should stick around until there’s an opening a few seats down—which there invariably is in the NBA.
Wallace would make a good head coach because he had to work his ass off to attain the success he found as a player.
Bill Laimbeer is mentioned a lot as a possible NBA head coach. I agree with the mentioners. I see Wallace as Laimbeer with a mute button.
They’re similar, in the sense that Laimbeer was a lumbering oaf with the sad-sack Cleveland Cavaliers who no one could have predicted would turn into a multiple All-Star and a two-time NBA champion.
Wallace was a lumbering oaf who couldn’t score who was playing for the irrelevant Washington Wizards because no one else would have him.
No one talks about Wallace as coaching material because he doesn’t have that “terrible two” side to him. Laimbeer certainly does.
But if yelling and screaming was all it took, John McEnroe would have been the next Red Auerbach.
Wallace was never a guard. The offense never ran through him. He never called plays, or even for time outs. His words can be measured by the handful.
But he’s won, and he’s been around a lot of different coaches. He can pull the best from many of them.
I wouldn’t put anything past an undrafted multiple All-Star and NBA champion who played a position that he’s several inches too short for, from Virginia Union.
Pistons coach Ben Wallace.
It’s just crazy enough to work.
LeBron James’s Act of Cowardice will Forever Tarnish His Legacy
Posted by: | CommentsIf you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Literally, in the sad, pathetic case of LeBron James.
James, the mercurial star who jumped to the Miami Heat a couple weeks ago, has already, at age 25, tarnished his legacy in an irreparable nature.
Even if James manages to win an NBA title as part of the Heat’s new triumvirate of James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, he’s a loser.
The kid, by fleeing Cleveland, has put himself in a lose-lose situation.
Never will his legacy shine as brightly as those of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan. Not even close.
Especially not when two of those—Magic and Jordan—have already come out publicly as saying that they would never have dreamed of joining their rivals simply to form a powerhouse team.
“I came out of college wanting to beat Larry Bird,” Johnson said of his plunge into the NBA after his sophomore year in 1979, when his MSU Spartans beat Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores for the NCAA National Championship.
And thus was born an individual rivalry that injected the NBA with much-needed sizzle for a decade, when by that time Jordan was about to start winning championships—with a Bulls team that he paid his dues with.
Magic never once considered phoning Bird, suggesting a truce and a partnership.
Jordan, for all the heartbreak he suffered as a Bull trying to get past the Detroit Pistons in the late-1980s, didn’t bail on the Windy City.
It would have been unthinkable.
What if Coke and Pepsi threw down their arms and teamed to form an uber-cola?
LeBron James is taking what he thinks is a shortcut to greatness. He’s 25 but in a hurry, apparently. He’s been led to believe, by someone, that he won’t be considered truly great unless he wins the brass ring.
But James is too young, immature, and just plain short on brains to realize that by going to the Heat, he’s done the exact opposite.
Anything LeBron James wins with the Miami Heat—and it’s not fait accompli that he gets his championship, by the way—will be tarnished. It will be sneered at and derided.
James turned down more money to stay with his hometown Cavaliers, and went to the Heat instead.
It was a cowardly act.
James’s Cavs surprisingly made the NBA Finals in 2007. They were swept away by the San Antonio Spurs, but making it was a high accomplishment. The last two seasons have ended in bitter disappointment in Cleveland—tons of regular season wins but playoff flameouts.
James’s body language was abhorrent in the 2008 and 2009 playoffs when things began to go sideways for his Cavaliers. He has a “pouting gene” that the aforementioned superstars, plus many others who never won titles (John Stockton, Karl Malone, et al), never possessed.
The only glares and sour looks Magic or Bird or Isiah or Jordan had were reserved for the officials or for their opponents—not for their own teammates or their coach. And they certainly never sandbagged it on the court, as James did.
James’s absconding to Miami was an act of cowardice because he didn’t have it inside of him to stick it out in Cleveland. His impatience is only matched by his gutlessness.
James had an opportunity to never turn his back on the folks in northern Ohio, and to see the journey to an NBA Championship all the way through. He had the chance to be a genuine hero, and to be placed shoulder-to-shoulder with other true NBA greats.
LeBron James can’t hold the jock straps of any of the superstars who won championships in the 1980s and 1990s. His heart is infinitely smaller. His fortitude is laughable.
James can’t win by playing for the Heat. If he never wins a championship, that speaks for itself. But even if the Heat do manage a title, whose titles will they be?
The Lakers’ titles were Magic’s first, then closely followed by Kareem, Worthy, and the rest.
The Celtics’ championships were Bird’s first, without question—despite the Hall of Famers he played with.
Same with Isiah and the Pistons.
Certainly the same with Jordan and the Bulls—all six times.
But LeBron James and the Miami Heat?
You don’t think that the Heat is still Wade’s team?
Perhaps none of this is important to James—he couldn’t care less about journeys or loyalty or missions. His Ohio roots mean nothing to him. He wants his ring and he wants it now. He thinks it cements his legacy as an NBA great.
This is where it gets pathetic, because James couldn’t be further from reality by holding this misguided viewpoint.
LeBron James can win as many championships as his calculated plan can muster.
But never can he be held to the same idyllic reverence as those champions who preceded him. For they took the truest, most proper route to greatness—a route filled with pride, guts, honor and distinction.
James is taking a short cut, and all he’ll find is a dead end when it comes to his legacy.
Shame on him.
Pistons Could Have Left Detroit When No One Was Watching
Posted by: | CommentsThey were a ramshackle pro basketball franchise, with a history of slapstick. Their story seemed to have been written by Mel Brooks in collaboration with Albert Camus.
Since moving to Detroit in 1957, the Detroit Pistons in 1974 had, at various times: hired their radio guy as the team’s GM; made a 24-year-old player the head coach; played playoff games in a Grosse Pointe high school gym; had a coach quit on the spot after just 10 games into the season; and had an owner that was so absentee, he only knew of his team’s nightly fate via the wire services.
All that, and more, played out against the backdrop of losing in a vacuum. A typical Pistons season in those days finished at 26-56, with home games attended by only a few thousand of Metro Detroit’s most curious. The Pistons didn’t have fans, they had gawkers.
But Bill Davidson liked pro basketball in the worst way, so the Detroit Pistons were perfect for him.
It was a perfect time, too. 1974 was pet rocks and mood rings and polyester and Richard Nixon out, Gerald Ford in. It was Patty Hearst with a machine gun and boycotts of lettuce. It was like the country threw up in its throat a little bit.
So what better time to lead a group of investors in buying the Pistons, the NBA’s deadbeat son? 1974 did very nicely in that regard.
Davidson, the millionaire from Guardian Industries, came from a world where a deal was a deal. So imagine his umbrage when Dave Bing held out for more money.
Davidson wasn’t the Pistons owner for more than a few months when superstar guard Bing wanted a raise from his 1973-74 salary, even though Bing was under contract at that rate.
Davidson didn’t understand. In his world, a contract was a contract.
The Pistons had just completed, finally, a relatively successful season in 1974. They went 52-30. Their coach, Ray Scott, was named Coach of the Year. The blind squirrel had found its nut. Every dog really did have his day.
Now Dave Bing wanted more money. He threatened not to attend training camp unless Davidson ripped up Bing’s contract and wrote another one.
Davidson looked at Bing and saw a petulant player who was using his team’s only good season in Detroit as leverage.
A year later, Davidson traded Bing away—for Kevin Porter. Davidson went from the frying pan to the fire; Porter’s photo could have been found next to Webster’s entry for petulant.
Such went the beginning of Bill Davidson’s foray into pro sports ownership.
Somehow, the Pistons remained in Detroit throughout the 1960s and early-1970s after moving from Fort Wayne, Indiana, even though the teams were lousy and the crowds were skimpy. The Pistons were dinner theater; the Red Wings, Tigers and Lions were Broadway.
Davidson’s predecessor, Fred “The Z” Zollner, was committed to Detroit. It would have been so easy to up and move the Pistons. He could have fled town with them and had gotten a one year head start before the team would have been reported missing.
But Zollner stayed in Detroit. He’s one of the most under-celebrated figures in Detroit sports history, for showing such resilience.
Today, Bill Davidson’s widow has shown how smart she is.
Karen Davidson, from the moment her husband passed away in March, 2009, made no bones about it: she wanted no part of being the owner of an NBA team.
Women usually are the brains of the group.
Karen Davidson has no delusions of grandeur, like her late husband did when he purchased the Pistons in 1974, thinking owning a pro team would be swell. She knows how shark-infested the waters can be.
“I think you need an owner that’s passionate, engaged,” she told the media during the latest basketball season.
What she didn’t add because she didn’t have to, was that she is not the passionate, engaged owner that the Pistons need. She’s the Accidental Tourist.
The Pistons are for sale. Only those sleeping under rocks don’t know that.
Karen Davidson stands to make quite a haul when she gets someone’s signature on a receipt. The Pistons are just part of the deal. She’s selling Palace Sports & Entertainment (PS&E), too—which includes the DTE Energy Theatre, Meadowbrook Theater, and the Palace itself.
The irony is that, after all those wretched years in Detroit in the pre-Davidson era, after all the times Fred Zollner could have moved the Pistons elsewhere, there are rumblings that after this upcoming sale, the Pistons might not have Detroit as their prefix.
“It’s always our preference to keep the sold team in its market,” NBA Commissioner David Stern told the media this week. “But we haven’t always been successful in that endeavor.”
Cue the foreboding music.
The Pistons would leave Detroit now , after all they’ve been through and all they’ve overcome? It’d be the couple divorcing after 53 years of marriage.
For what it’s worth, Karen Davidson doesn’t think that will happen. She thinks the lure of PS&E would make moving the Pistons unattractive to potential buyers.
But the fact that Stern didn’t slam the door shut on such a notion is a little troublesome.
The Pistons leaving Detroit? After 53 years?
We’ve already lost Stroh’s and Uniroyal and Towne Club. Vernor’s, too. And Hudson’s.
Karen Davidson thinks that’s not going to happen. David Stern says, cavalierly, who knows?
If the Pistons leave Detroit now, decades after having no business even being an NBA franchise—and after three championships and many near-misses—then the franchise’s story will not have been written by Brooks and Camus, after all.
It sounds like something LeBron James’s biographer would pen.
James Flees, and Cleveland Takes Yet Another Hit
Posted by: | CommentsLucy pulled the football away again. The nerd got rejected by the homecoming queen. The house wins again.
Good got shutout by evil. The check’s not in the mail, after all. It’s a week of Mondays.
Cleveland isn’t a city, it’s a syndrome. It’s pocked. The whole town should be enclosed in a plastic bubble. It’s so tainted, you need to be inoculated just to drive by it.
It’s OK to wonder now: what did Cleveland do to the Big Guy upstairs?
Judas didn’t even get it this bad.
Cleveland, where every headliner has closed after one night.
The Drive. The Fumble. The Shot.
Now, The Decision.
Even the locals can’t wait to beat it out of town.
LeBron James, the biggest thing out of Akron since rubber, has bounced out of Ohio.
This was fait accompli. It’s Cleveland, after all.
You’ve heard it all before, like the story of the Hindenburg or Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign.
You’ve heard the tale of Cleveland, where no sports championship has been won since 1964. Where even the city’s athletes caution against the town.
“The best thing about playing in Cleveland,” one former Indians player once said, “is not having to make road trips to…Cleveland.”
The story right now is bookended nicely.
It began with another superstar’s defection.
Jim Brown, aka The Greatest Running Back of All Time, led the Browns to the 1964 NFL Championship and retired a year later, fleeing to Hollywood to chase an acting career, despite opposing defenders still not having figured out how to stop him.
Now James, aka The Greatest Basketball Player Currently Who’s Never Won Much of Anything, is hightailing it to South Beach, to play for the Miami Heat.
Poor Cleveland. The Land That Time Forgot.
Well, someone isn’t going to take this lying down. Someone is trying to rally Clevelanders.
Revenge of the Nerds.
“I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE”
The words are those of Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, in an open letter to fans. The all caps are his, too.
Gilbert then got downright sinister.
“The self-declared former ‘King’ will be taking the ‘curse’ with him down south,” Gilbert wrote. “And until he does ‘right’ by Cleveland and Ohio, James [and the town where he plays] will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.”
Is this the NBA or the Old Country? Is Gilbert a team owner or a voodoo magician?
You know it’s an ugly breakup when the jilted owner says, in essence, “You’ll get yours.”
Only in Cleveland—a city that doesn’t have fans, it has outpatients.
The town’s sports teams since the Browns’ title in 1964 have taken turns at messing with the minds of their faithful.
The Browns, Indians and Cavaliers have won divisions, some playoff games and playoff series. They’ve drizzled water onto the parched tongues of their fan base, then kicked the canteen over and spilled it all onto the desert ground.
Now James has fled, and even though there was no guarantee that the Cavs would have won a championship had LeBron stayed, it’s pretty damn certain that they won’t without him.
Look at what happened to the Chicago Bulls after Michael Jordan left.
But at least the Bulls won championships. The Cavs got good at winning 60+ games and then taking pratfalls in the playoffs.
According to the jilted owner Gilbert, you can look cross-eyed at one guy and one guy only if you’re searching for reasons for the post-season flameouts.
“He quit,” Gilbert said of James and his performance in the 2010 Conference Semi-Finals series against Boston. “Not just in Game 5, but in Games 2, 4 and 6. Watch the tape. The Boston series was unlike anything in the history of sports for a superstar.”
Relax, Danny Boy. LeBron James is the Miami Heat’s headache now. He’s going to a team with Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, and two other players under contract. And only one basketball to play with.
The Heat has to fill its roster, and after coughing up the dough for its three superstars, don’t be surprised if you find a voice mail from Pat Riley, asking if you can give him 8-10 minutes a night.
Cleveland lost Jim Brown when he still had some football left in him. They now have lost James, the local kid, at age 25. In between they’ve lost fumbles, World Series leads, NBA Finals series, Joe Carter, the Barons, ALCS series leads, the Browns, and sleep.
What did Cleveland do to deserve all this?
It’s the only sports town in America that ought to hold a telethon, complete with slow montages of its poor, pathetic fans, with morose music playing in the background.
Won’t you please give?
Today’s Pistons Sans Identity
Posted by: | CommentsWe can recall them now like all the infamous gangs—crews of James, Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Black Hand.
Call Warner Brothers. Commission the first draft of a screenplay. Start casting the principals. Find a sexy femme fatale.
The godfather was called Daddy Rich. He wore $500 suits whose creases could slice an apple.
The wise guys were led by a runt that went by Zeke. His seconds were a big oaf named Laimbeer, a sharp shooter called VJ, and a quiet assassin named Joe D.
The minions had names like Spider and Worm and Buddha.
The architect of the whole operation, they called Trader Jack.
This marauding, brawling posse reigned terror throughout the National Basketball Association some 20 years ago or so.
The Detroit Pistons, aka The Bad Boys.
They were on the NBA’s Most Wanted List. G-men like Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson were powerless to stop them, when the Bad Boys were in their heyday.
Enter the lane at your own risk. Zeke’s gang gave no quarter, showed no mercy.
They pulled jobs at all the NBA burgs. They were detested, feared, but celebrated—in that infamous way that we’ve reserved in twisted fashion for the likes of Charlie Manson and Robin Hood.
The Bad Boys didn’t play basketball, they committed it.
They squeezed the life out of you, 48 minutes at a time.
The Pistons of the late-1980s, early-1990s. Legendary now. Forget the Hall of Fame; their exploits should be in the Smithsonian, in the American crime history wing.
They traveled the league in their own jet plane, the first NBA team to do so. It was their getaway vehicle, parked on the tarmacs of all the airports around the country, the engines running. The pilot could have been prosecuted as an accessory, unless the Bad Boys held his family hostage in exchange for unmitigated destination-to-destination travel.
They were branded as thugs, bullies, heathens. They hardly denied it.
Zeke and the Bad Boys would swing into town, mug you for 48 minutes, and make off with another victory. You can practically imagine them in their getaway plane, cigars in mouths, swapping stories of infliction, as they jetted to their next stop.
They carried on in this manner, thumbing their noses at NBA Commissioner David Stern, Jordan, Bird, and anyone else who had a problem with they way they conducted themselves.
It was fitting that they were around courts so much.
Was there shame? Ha!
Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn—Ricky was one of the heavies, part of the muscle—once posed for a poster with a deflated basketball and one of them was chewing on a net. They wore dark glasses and sleeveless shirts. They all but dared Stern to arrest them.
Daddy Rich, Chuck Daly, was the coach but he wasn’t so much coach as he was boss. Daly was a hands-off administrator. He let Zeke and the Bad Boys police themselves.
When Trader Jack McCloskey traded for Mark Aguirre in 1989, Laimbeer and Zeke’s other seconds took the new guy to dinner. They may as well have taken him to a backroom and shined a bright light in his face.
Throughout dinner, Aguirre, whose reputation as being a team player was less than sterling, endured a third degree. He was warned: play nice here or we’ll break your legs.
And I might not even be exaggerating.
Whether you liked them or not, admired them for their brashness or were disgusted by their tactics, the Bad Boys had one thing that no one can ever take away—besides their two NBA championships.
They had an identity.
So did Creepy Karpis and Baby Face Nelson and Bugsy Malone, I know. But at least you knew who those guys were.
One of the Bad Boys alums—the one they called Joe D—is in charge of today’s group of Pistons. It’s not the easiest of gigs these days.
Joe Dumars has seen the highest of highs as a player, and as a team executive. He’s one of the few who’s won NBA titles as both player and GM, for the same franchise.
He was the quietest Bad Boy. Every gang needs one of those, who doesn’t say much. Daddy Rich would give an order, and Zeke would gather his seconds and minions to carry it out. And Dumars was the one leaning against the wall, chewing on a toothpick, nodding when given his assignment.
Last year’s Pistons finished an unsightly 27-55. They were Pistons in tank tops only. The franchise’s once-appropriate motto, “Going to Work”—leftover from the championship of 2004 and the near miss of 2005—fit it last year like a Speedo on Rush Limbaugh.
It was a team of no leaders, no guts, no passion.
And no identity.
Dumars’s charge is to rebuild his team into a winner, like the glory days. But right now he has no Zeke, no Laimbeer, no Spider, and no Worm. The players wander around aimlessly, looking for their leader. It’s a bunch of Joe Pescis waiting for their Robert DeNiro.
At last week’s draft, Dumars grabbed Greg Monroe, a 6′11″, skilled big man from Georgetown University—the school of Ewing, Mourning, and Motumbo. Georgetown used to be a Big Man Factory. John Thompson, the old coach, was a center’s kindred spirit. And Thompson sent some of the very best to NBA greatness.
Thompson’s kid, also named John, coaches Georgetown nowadays. And he says the Pistons got a whale of a player in Monroe.
Monroe isn’t the leader type—at least not now. But he should be a competent, steady player. A big—literally—piece to the puzzle.
I submit to you that Dumars needs to find an identity for his team. Right now, there’s no “there” there, as was once complained. The basketball clothes have no emperor.
It doesn’t have to be “Bad Boys, Revisited.” Not necessarily “STILL Going To Work.”
But it has to be something.
Dumars needs to figure out in what mold he wants today’s Pistons to be cast. The great teams all have their identities.
He ought to know.
McCloskey’s Rotten Draft Luck in ‘72 Meant a Short NBA Coaching Career
Posted by: | CommentsBefore Jack McCloskey was “Trader Jack,” the risk-taking, daredevil GM of the Detroit Pistons—architect of two World Championship teams and damn near a third—he was a rumpled old college basketball coach.
The Eastern seaboard was his jurisdiction. He coached for 10 years at Penn then for six years at Wake Forest, picking-and-rolling in the sweaty gyms of the campuses of Rutgers, St. John’s, Temple, North Carolina and CCNY. The basketballs in those days had just become lace-free.
The shoes were canvas sneakers and their tops were high; if you wore them with today’s basketball shorts, the tops and the shorts would just about touch.
Trader Jack was Coach Jack, and his teams were winners.
Before he was even Coach Jack, McCloskey was Lt. Jack—serving in WWII, commanding a landing ship for the Marines.
It made a road game in Philadelphia seem like a Hawaiian vacation.
In 1972, Coach Jack was lured out of his college lair and agreed to make the jump to the NBA. Perhaps you’ve heard of a potential similar move in the news lately.
The expansion Portland Trailblazers were three years old but still in their Terrible Twos when they hoodwinked McCloskey into leaving campus and becoming their new head coach.
In their first two seasons as an NBA club, the Trailblazers had won 47 games, lost 117. They were the typical NBA expansion team; if they made it through all 48 minutes without tripping over their shoelaces, it was a good night.
McCloskey took the job, and one thing about it was attractive, for sure.
The Trailblazers, thanks to their ghoulish 18-64 record of the season before, were possessors of the first overall pick in the 1972 NBA Draft. There was no lottery back then. In those days, the “last shall be first.”
McCloskey knew a little bit about college players, and he positively drooled over the specimen from the University of North Carolina who would be the cornerstone of the Trailblazers, around whom the entire roster would be rebuilt.
Bob McAdoo wasn’t a basketball player, he was a scoring machine.
Mac was six-foot-nine but he played nine-foot-six. You didn’t guard him, you watched him with an umbrella—as he rained points on you like a monsoon.
McAdoo was, unquestionably, the most talented player that would be available in the ’72 Draft. The Trailblazers had the first overall pick. You do the math.
In February, McCloskey was on the phone, guesting on “The Knee Jerks,” a podcast I co-host with Big Al Beaton. And he recalled how things went horribly wrong in 1972.
“It looked like McAdoo was going to be ours,” Jack said in his famously raspy voice. “The negotiations were going fine. But close to the draft, the owner (of the Trailblazers) and Bob’s agent disappeared into a room.
“When they came out, the deal was off.”
To this day, McCloskey has no idea what happened. All he knows is, one moment he was about to coach the greatest college player in the country, and the next, the kid vanished—like waking up from a good dream and finding out that the giant marshmallow you were munching on really was your pillow.
Bob McAdoo, the crown jewel of the 1972 draft, the leaping, point-churning All-American from North Carolina, was so close to McCloskey and the Trailblazers yet so far. Mac might as well have been playing on Mars.
McAdoo wasn’t going to be a Trailblazer, after all. So who would? If not McAdoo, then who was the hotshot college player about to be selected first off the board?
When they told Coach Jack the name, he might have asked them to repeat it.
The kid’s name was LaRue Martin, from Loyola of Chicago. LaRue was nearly seven feet tall—a beanpole on sneakers. He was so skinny, if he had turned sideways you’d have lost sight of him.
And—get this—McCloskey had never heard of him.
Jack McCloskey, who until being hired by the NBA’s Trailblazers had scraped out a living scouting, recruiting, and coaching teenagers from across the country, had his new bosses informing him that they were about to draft a kid who was an unknown.
It was like being a wine connoisseur and having the maitre d’ bring out something in a Boone’s Farm.
“I said, ‘Gee, I know a lot of college players but I’ve never heard of LaRue Martin,’” Retired Jack told Big Al and me.
LaRue Martin, 22 years old, showed up at Trailblazers camp that fall—we assume with photo ID on his person.
Bob McAdoo, meanwhile, was snatched up by the Buffalo Braves with the No. 2 overall selection, on his way to superstardom and multiple NBA scoring titles—and a trail of migraines he caused along the way.
“LaRue Martin was a very nice young man,” McCloskey said. “But he just wasn’t worthy of that high of a draft pick.”
There are two instances when someone being described as nice should cause grave concern: before a blind date, and when you’re assessing the No. 1 overall pick of the NBA Draft.
Martin played in 77 games his rookie season, but only 996 minutes, or about 13 minutes per game. It wasn’t playing time, it was charity.
LaRue scored 340 points in those 77 games—4.4 per appearance.
Bob McAdoo averaged 18 points and nine rebounds per game and won the league’s Rookie of the Year Award. He would average over 30 points per game the next three seasons.
LaRue Martin played in the NBA for four seasons and laid in 1,430 points—total. McAdoo scored that in pre-game warm-ups in the same time frame.
Coach Jack didn’t have much luck in the NBA. First his bosses blew the deal with McAdoo. Then he was fired after two seasons—just before the Trailblazers got it right and drafted Bill Walton to play center.
When Coach Jack became Trader Jack with the Pistons as their new GM in 1979, the team had a brooding, petulant forward who wanted to be anywhere but in Detroit.
The forward was Bob McAdoo.
When McCloskey first laid eyes on McAdoo at North Carolina, Mac was fine wine. When he encountered McAdoo with the Pistons seven years later, Mac was fine whine.
Twelve years after the Trailblazers’ mistake with LaRue Martin, they managed to top it.
Prior to the 1984 draft, the Trailblazers, possessing the No. 2 overall pick, again looked at a player from North Carolina—a kid of such fantastic skills and leaping ability that he would eventually become an airline.
But the Trailblazers said no, and selected a center with bad knees from Kentucky, Sam Bowie.
The Chicago Bulls, with the next pick, chose Michael Jordan.
And you think Jim Joyce’s call was bad?
Finally, Izzo Closes the Door to the NBA
Posted by: | CommentsTom Izzo finally did it.
He finally uttered those three little words.
No, not those three little words—but these were even better.
“I’m a lifer.”
And with that, they ought to start building a fence around the Michigan State University campus.
On top of the fence should be a sign, in huge green letters on a white background: “NBA: KEEP OUT.”
Izzo, the MSU basketball coach who flirted with the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers last week, not only told them no, he essentially told the entire NBA the same thing.
“I’m a lifer,” Izzo said at a press conference yesterday, “And damn proud of it.”
I wrote about the Izzo Watch last week and I was criticized for being mean spirited. Others—including MSU people—said that as much as it pained them to admit it, they agreed in principle with what I had to say.
Namely, that Tom Izzo had—to that point—failed to give the NBA any reason to keep his name off their phones’ speed dials. Until he did so, I wrote, we were likely to go through this kind of thing every couple of years, ad nauseam.
And who needs that?
Yesterday, Izzo officially barred the NBA from his coaching life.
“I’m a lifer.”
If his word has any merit—and we have no reason to believe that it doesn’t—then this confession of being a lifer at MSU should finally take Izzo’s name out of the rumor mill when future NBA coaching jobs open up.
If it doesn’t, then I’m back to where I was last week: shame on Tom Izzo.
Izzo is remaining at Michigan State because he’s happy there. Better than that—he’s content. There’s a difference, though it’s subtle.
Happy means it’s fun to go to work. Content means that you’ll never be in want of anything as long as you keep your butt firmly planted where it currently rests.
Izzo made the right decision and everyone knows it. Probably even Dan Gilbert, the hotshot, high-spending owner of the Cavs, knows it, in his heart.
Izzo’s trip to Cleveland last Thursday can now be described thusly: He came, he saw, he vacillated.
Typically, when a guy makes a trip to a city that’s courting him—when he visits that team’s facilities, meets its head honchos and takes a look at the roster—there’s a presser called forthwith to announce that guy’s hiring.
Typically.
Izzo came back from Cleveland and clearly he wasn’t able to pull the trigger. He likely spent the weekend asking himself why.
The answer was wonderfully simple but maddeningly elusive.
Izzo couldn’t say yes to Cleveland because he couldn’t say no to Michigan State.
The Detroit News’ Lynn Henning got it all wrong. It wasn’t the first time.
Henning wrote the other day that Izzo’s taking so long to decide meant that his heart simply wasn’t all with MSU anymore. Henning went one step further: Izzo had taken so long, that he had gone beyond the point of no return; he couldn’t any longer stay at MSU and retain any sort of credibility.
Balderdash!
Henning was 180 degrees wrong. Izzo took so long because his heart was at MSU. If it wasn’t, he’d have signed a deal with the Cavs last weekend, shortly after returning from his trip to Cleveland.
The decision was a double-edged sword—yes to Cleveland, no to East Lansing.
It was a whole lot easier to say yes than it was to say no.
Just after Izzo took the podium yesterday—before he really started talking in earnest—a couple players rushed the stage. They embraced him, individually.
The line of players kept coming. So did the hugs.
Izzo endearingly referred to a couple of the recent graduates as “has beens” as they took their turn paying homage to their coach with silent, heartfelt hugs.
It was a wonderful 30 seconds, give or take.
You think you’d ever see anything like that in the NBA if a coach announced he just signed a contract extension to stay?
Now reverse it for a moment.
If the presser was to announce Izzo was leaving, and then his players—EX-players—did the hugging procession, you might have had the first in-presser reversal in sports history.
For the look on Izzo’s face as his players spontaneously showed PDAs spoke a thousand words.
Contentment.
Izzo sparred with Henning for several delectable minutes yesterday, the coach’s face at times barely able to conceal his annoyance and disdain for Henning’s “you can’t stay NOW” column.
“Now THIS is more like the UP!” Izzo said to cheers, referring to his native Upper Peninsula’s way of duking it out, verbally, in public.
So Izzo stays, where he belongs. He fancies himself a Bobby Bowden, a Bo Schembechler, a Coach K, a Jim Boeheim. Izzo’s words. Guys who kept their rear ends in one place, despite other temptations.
“I have no desire to be a Paterno,” he said, referring to the octogenarian football coach at Penn State. “But I’m right there with those other guys.”
Izzo said those three little words. He finally said them. There should be no more NBA overtures.
I hear Phil Jackson might retire from the Lakers.
That makes me think of two little words.
Who cares?
Dumars’ Non-Midas Touch Must End Soon
Posted by: | CommentsWWJD?
What Will Joe Do?
They’re going to have another of those NBA Drafts next month. Another day where a bunch of man-children’s souls are sucked into the darkness of pro sports. The NBA allows the nation’s teenagers to get drafted. Someday, someone will stop them.
But that day is far from being here. So it is that the Pistons will, with the No. 7 overall pick, take their chances on a likely-to-be immature, underdeveloped project. Heaven forbid you draft a senior. Heaven forbid a player stay in college that long, period.
There isn’t going to be, at No. 7, a cure-all player. No panacea will be ripped from a college campus and plopped into the laps of the Pistons in Auburn Hills.
The ping pong balls didn’t cooperate, nor did one of the U.S. mint’s coins.
The Pistons lost a coin flip at the end of the season with the Philadelphia 76ers, and it apparently cost them the No. 2 overall pick. The ping pong balls put the Pistons where, mathematically, they suspected they’d be: seventh.
So now it’s up to Pistons president Joe Dumars to turn water into wine.
He’s been less-than-miraculous in that area over the years.
The beauty of pro basketball is that, since one new player represents 20 percent of your on court presence, improvement can come in a hurry.
The evils of the NBA Draft say that, unlike the NFL’s, first round picks are hardly guaranteed starting positions and a legitimate shot at success. If you’re not a Top 5 pick, the odds take a nosedive that you’re going to be an impact player. Sometimes.
Dumars is the rare president/GM, in that he’s now being given the chance to do a second rebuild.
The first came in 2000, when Dumars officially took over the Pistons’ front office and inherited a mess. He had himself a superstar (Grant Hill) who wanted out, and a questionable coaching situation. There were precious few talented players on the roster outside of Hill.
A few trades and free agent signings later, plus the hiring of Rick Carlisle as coach, and the Pistons were back on the map.
Rebuild No. 2 is just beginning, and this time the mess is of Dumars’s own making.
But like I said, Joe D is a rarity; not too often in this win-now society in which we live does a GM get the chance to even stick around long enough for a second rebuild. Usually they’re canned somewhere in the middle of the first one.
Yet here Joe Dumars is, ten years and six coaches later, with a roster full of shrimps and the big men he does have play like shrimps.
The Pistons haven’t had a center who could score with men guarding him since Bill Laimbeer. And Bill was most comfortable 15-20 feet (or more) away from the basket.
Don’t come at me with Rasheed Wallace, who isn’t a true center.
They haven’t had a low post threat with the ball since Mark Aguirre, and Mark was a shrimp, too.
If you want the awful truth, the Pistons haven’t had a true center to whom they could toss the ball in the post and make something happen since Bob Lanier—and Bob last played here in 1980.
Yet the Pistons have won three championships since then, playing with perimeter-happy big men and being served by guard play par excellence—and a bench that was among the league’s best, both in the Bad Boys days and in 2004.
Today the Pistons are a bunch of crooked jump shooters with no affinity for defense or rebounding. It’s a team lacking heart, leadership, and anyone taller than 6′10″ who can insert the basketball into the hoop.
No one plays close to the rim, except for Ben Wallace, who just happens to be the least talented man on the team. But he’s the hardest worker, which has kept him in the league for over a decade.
To this hodgepodge Dumars will add two players from this year’s draft—the Nos. 7 and 36 overall picks. The pie in the sky hope is that those youngsters will somehow invigorate a stale bunch and the relative newcomers—guard Ben Gordon and forward Charlie Villanueva—will rebound from lousy seasons and the whole unit will start to come together.
Yeah, and they used to hope that New Coke would take the nation by storm.
Forgive my lack of confidence in Dumars presently. He’s on a bad streak that’s now in its fourth year. It’s as if the soul he sold to the Devil early in his tenure is now a marker that Satan himself is calling.
Joe D needs a great draft in the worst way. He also needs a whole bunch of “ifs” to come true.
If Dumars has a plan left in him, now would be a wonderful time to break it out.