Dan Steinberg of the D.C. Sports Bog: "'Why's everybody tripping out?' Gilbert Arenas asked Mike Wise yesterday. 'Big picture, if I start rehabbing now and get through the pain that prevented me from running or jumping this summer, I'll be back on the court sooner,' he said. 'How's that a bad thing?' Well, the reason everybody's tripping is because we've heard such reassurances before, and they've been consistently, wildly, depressingly wrong every time. That's why I'm getting lengthy e-mailed manifestos about the history of Gilbert's knee from Wiz fans, whose heads this morning feel like they're filled with loose debris." Steinberg then includes a long list of past sunny Gilbert-knee forecasts. It's also worth pointing out that it has been a long time since we have seen Arenas move well on the court.
At Ontario's Durham College last year, there was a basketball phenom. Anthony Batchelor set all the scoring records, and the gym went absolutely insane. However, the level of play is low enough that it did not draw all that much national or international attention. For example: One of Batchelor's teammates, Liam McMorrow, had not played one second of organized basketball before college. But the story takes a very strange turn. One player from that tiny school just got a full ride to Marquette to play basketball, and it wasn't Batchelor. It was McMorrow. Behold, the power of being seven feet tall. (Thanks, Mark.)
As discussed before, there aren't a lot of Rasheed Wallace's jerseys available. The reason, reportedly, is not because he's on the trading block, but because he's changing back to his old number, 30.
You know how players come back from the off-season looking ripped? In an Oregonlive podcast, the Oregonian's Jason Quick makes a fantastic point: The last time you saw all these players they were gaunt, gassed and spent. All the travel and exertion makes everyone look skinny and unimpressive in April. So, a lot of players are looking big and ripped for that reason alone. Also, along those lines, the other day I mentioned a claim that Alando Tucker has added "15 pounds of muscle." A TrueHoop reader urged you to consider what 15 pounds of meat would look like. Is it possible to add that much bulk? Then I learn that apparently Lang Whitaker of SLAM is years into charting the hilarity of that "15 pounds of muscle" phrase. "Why 15 Pounds Of Muscle?," he writes. "For whatever reason, guys never seem to add 10, 11, 12, or 13 pounds of muscle in the offseason, it's always 15 Pounds Of Muscle."
Jamal Crawford for Newsday: "Zach [Randolph] loves to play and he's been scoring and rebounding, doing his thing. Him and Eddy have had some nice match-ups. They look better on opposite teams ... (hahahah, just playing! I knew that would get a rise outta you guys!) I don't know what's gonna happen with all the trade talk and everything, but its good to see that, either way, he's not letting it affect him."
The rebuttal to an earlier claim that the Memphis Grizzlies would be terrible this year. One major piece of evidence presented is the hotness of Marko Jaric's fiancee.
Yahoo's Adrian Wojnarowski, talking Olympic hoops with Empty the Bench: "To me, the biggest surprise was how much credit that people wanted to give Mike Krzyzewski for this team. The least surprising? The fact that he has already sold another 'motivational' book that will detail his leadership of the gold-medal winning team. As one NBA GM said to me, 'I guess K didn't have time to do a book after '06.' Those were the world championships when Krzyzewski couldn't make an adjustment to stop the Greece pick and roll and didn't prepare enough to know the names of the Greek players. The insistence after that semifinal loss was that the team was too young and too inexperienced. They had enough to win in '06, but obviously they were much better by '08. Still, putting that loss in the Worlds on the players was typical of the college coaching establishment. They want the credit when it goes well, and none of the blame when it doesn't. Krzyzewski said it himself: This was an easy team to coach. It really was. They were motivated. They were focused. They were determined to be unselfish. The biggest thing of all was this is that they had been together for most of 3 years. He had the best talent. The best preparation time. And to his credit, he made the most of it. But I've been around that program enough the past two years to know this: The leadership on this team came primarily from two places: Jerry Colangelo and Jason Kidd/Kobe Bryant. Listen, Colangelo gave Coach K an excess of talent, and he still needed every last superstar-Kobe, Wade, LeBron, etc.-to beat Spain in that gold medal game. It's kind of typical of the college culture and its enablers to make sure the coach gets all the credit."
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