½I haven’t had any one topic in my head recently that’s worthy of its own entry, so I’m going the pot luck supper route. Little bit of everything here.
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I loved reading about JR Smith and how he used his performances in the high school All Star games as the ultimate sign that he was ready for the NBA. High school All Star games? You mean those ones where a bunch of guys who’ve never played together get out there and throw each other alley-oops? Those “no defense allowed” games? That’s some great thinking there, JR! In fact, I read yesterday that Frankie Munoz, fresh off his stellar performance in MTV’s Rock and Jock hoops game, has declared for the draft as well. He’s projected as a mid second round pick.
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So, Dick Vitale is “amazed” that no one has jumped to hire Matt Doherty yet. I can just see the interview – “Matt, we really like your hair, but we’re concerned about this last entry on your resume. Now, can you possibly explain how you managed to screw up one of the easiest, most powerful jobs in the business? Didn’t you have immediate access to the living rooms of every top prospect in the country? Didn’t you have immediate access to Dean Smith, one of the top minds in college basketball history? Weren’t you taking over a program that had just been to two Final Fours in the previous three years and still had enough talent to be ranked #1 in your first year? Didn’t you manage to piss off every single person in and around the basketball program, including Dean, the nicest man in America? Can you explain all of this?”
Yeah, I’m shocked too, Dick.
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So, this past weekend I go to take a leak. As I’m getting ready, I see something no one should ever see down there. A tick. Of all the places to find a blood-sucking parasite, that’s way down on the bottom of the list. I hope I don’t get Rocky Mountain Spotted Dick.
Incidentally, that’s only the second worst taking-a-leak discovery of mine. A few years ago, not long after moving into my new house, I was doing some yardwork – trimming shrubs, pulling weeds, etc. At some point, I went inside to take a leak. Well, nothing too bad happened then. Or so I thought. A few days later, I found out (the hard way) that my yard has poison ivy. Talk about the itch that you just can’t scratch.
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I still get tons of search hits to my site from people looking for news on the Mike Danton case. So, this update’s for you, my Google searchers.
About two weeks ago, Mike Danton called a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and read a two-page statement written on a yellow legal pad. Danton wouldn’t budge from the script of the statement and reread some passages twice to make sure the reporter got the words verbatim. Among other things, the statement praised David Frost, the controlling psychopath that Danton tried to have killed, and criticized Danton’s family. David Frost was sitting with Danton as he read the statement (and Danton’s attorney had no idea this was happening). Gee, that sounds perfectly normal, right? Is there even the slightest chance that David Frost didn’t write that statement himself?
Fortunately, the judge in the case had some common sense and ordered Frost to stay away from Danton. You just don’t need the guy who completely control’s Danton’s life, the guy who Danton decided he needed to have killed, in there meddling with Danton’s trial. Actually, a better idea would be to chuck Frost in the clink as well, and let him try his mind control techniques on Bubba, his cellmate.
A few days ago, a judge denied bail for Danton, meaning he must stay in jail until his trial. That’s a fairly unusual step, but in this case, the judge feared that Danton would flee or kill himself. It was probably a wise choice, although it sucks for Danton.
Some interesting stuff came out of the bail hearing, namely that in the 12 days that Danton was held in a jail in California after being arrested, he talked to Frost on the phone 79 times. 79 times!
That Frost is one scary dude. I like hearing the prosecutors in the case talk about possible Obstruction of Justice charges for him. He’s the real bad guy in this case, not Mike Danton.
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In this week’s Sports Illustrated, they had a little article about Duke’s women’s golf team. SI compared them to the best women’s teams of all time and determined that this year’s Duke team was the best women’s golf team ever.
Whoops.
This weekend, the best team ever came in third in the NCAA championships. That’s why you wait to write those articles until after a team actually accomplishes something.
I suppose in this week’s SI, we’ll find out that the ’92 UNLV team was the best college basketball team ever.
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Jay Bilas has a nice article up on espn.com (thanks Yoni!) about the myth that college basketball coaches can’t make it in the NBA. He does a good job describing thoughts I’ve had on the subject. His main points are that college coaches usually take over bad teams and that most NBA coaches “fail.” Teams wouldn’t be hiring new coaches if the last one had done a good job (well, unless it’s Detroit). And look at how many NBA coaches get fired every year. According to the standard that says that Lon Kruger, Rick Pitino and John Calipari are failures, so are Byron Scott, Lenny Wilkens (how many times has that guy been fired?), Dick Motta, Hubie Brown, and just about every NBA coach out there.
I’m not saying all college coaches are cut out for the NBA, but to say that the NBA is much harder than college is ludicrous. If anything, it’s easier, because they don’t have as many different styles to coach against and they don’t have to (well, maybe they should, but that’s a different story) spend time teaching individual skills.
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No ACC teams made the men’s lacrosse Final Four (but Virginia won the women’s title). Syracuse did make it though, for the 22nd time in a row. Even though there aren’t that
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