Fred Girard of the Detroit News has a remarkable account of why it is, exactly, that Robert "Tractor" Traylor is going to prison. It's not so much, Girard reports, that Traylor helped a drug dealer launder money by buying property with ill-gotten cash. It's that he then took a loss on the property on his own tax return. (Via Brian Windhorst) There's also an intriguing account of an Eddie Martin-sponsored party that Traylor -- while in college -- allegedly attended with Mateen Cleaves, Maurice Taylor, and others.
The top dog of those Detroit Basketball Piston ads.
I have long suspected this. Jeff Van Gundy says you have to be miserable to make it to the top in the NBA. Michael Murphy of the Houston Chronicle reports: "You can never exhale if you want to be a champion," Van Gundy said. "You can never relax, you can never think we've arrived and you can never underestimate the competition. It's a miserable way to live. It is. It's a miserable way to live. But if you want to be a champion, then you're willing to be that miserable and that exhausted. That's why you see Michael Jordan grabbing that (championship) trophy and breaking down, because of all you had to go through to get to that point. And you see that year in and year out - the champions really do pay the price. It doesn't have to be a lot more, but it has to be a little more than their opponent. And that is an exhausting, miserable, grinding experience. But if you want to win at this level, you're not going to out-talent anybody. You're going to pay a deeper price for something that you consider meaningful. And that's how you can tell if a guy considers something to be meaningful." I'm not sure this NBA coach agrees.
Lots of people, including Jonathan Givony and me, are hearing that Kevin Durant will be in this year's draft. Expect an announcement shortly. The real intrigue is which agent will be standing by his side. He'll likely be joined by Julian Wright of Kansas, who is slated to make an announcement this afternoon.
You can learn a lot about the NBA -- and basketball -- from Jack McCallum's article in last week's Sports Illustrated about the coaching chess match between the Suns and Mavericks. The more I learn about the NBA, the more I learn that the key coaching decision for many games is how you're going to defend the pick and roll. Different things (raid and recover, switch, trap, fight over, slip under) work against different players at different times, and a lot of effort goes into getting those decisions right.
Kevin Arnovitz from ClipperBlog on how the Nuggets beat the Clippers: "After the timeout, Anthony inbounds it to Iverson on the left arc, where he's covered by Quinton Ross. AI dumps it into Anthony on the left block against Cat Mobley. Anthony tries to back Mobley in, but he's having no luck. Once EB comes over for the double-team, he tries to reverse course and drive around EB with his right. He's headed backwards, but sees Kleiza all alone in the right corner. Anthony passes it over to Kleiza. Before Jason Hart can close - Nene does a nice job holding Hart captive - Kleiza hits his only shot of the night. This is what happens when there are two superstars on the floor for the same team. The old chestnut in sports is 'make someone else beat you.' They did and they did."
The Heat have looked good lately, but that they got Dwyane Wade back apparently it's time to start playing possum. They lost to the Bobcats, and James Posey got arrested.
An ethical question: a guy buys a bunch of tickets to an NBA game, and collects money from his friends. Many are no-shows, some without any advance warning. The guy who bought the tickets sells them at face value at the arena. Who keeps that money? The Ethicist, Randy Cohen, of The New York Times says it depends on who was playing: "... if you want to remain friends with all these folks, refund their money. You've already taken some pains on their behalf by arranging this outing. Why not go one step further and delight everyone? If this was a Knicks game, however, you've committed a gross ethical transgression by subjecting your friends to so disheartening a spectacle, to suffering so grave that it hardly matters how you divvy up any extra cash." (In fairness, that was before Isiah Thomas reportedly drew up a play for Eddy Curry to shoot a game-changing three-pointer. And even more amazing, Curry hit it.)
Selena Roberts of the The New York Times (Select) writes that sports aren't building character anymore: "In a disturbing survey of 5,275 high school athletes conducted in 2005 and 2006, recently released by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, students involved in athletics basically mocked the sports paradigm as a character-building savior of souls. In fact, high school athletes are more likely than their peers to enter an exam with a crib sheet. According to the survey, students involved in sports cheat in school at a higher rate than their nonathlete classmates by a margin of 65 percent to 60 percent. Suddenly, cheating is the new teenage sex: Everybody is doing it. 'I think it has become part of the brain,' said Michael Josephson, president of the nonprofit institute in Los Angeles. 'Technically, athletes see cheating as wrong, but it's also how we compete in every walk of life, in politics, business and sports.'"
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