Posts tagged ‘john calipari’

If it weren’t for the NBA lockout, I probably would’ve watched last night’s exhibition basketball game online just the same. It was either on a very small frame with fair resolution or via more disturbed pixels on a full computer screen blow up, but it was basketball. Basketball involving very good players. Namely, John Wall. It didn’t poetically go down-to-the-wire, but for brief spells, it was enjoyable to watch, even on that small screen streaming from the website of www.wkyt.com television station.

The Dominican Republic national team, coached by University of Kentucky head coach John Calipari, beat a team assembled of former UK disciples who are now locked-out NBAers 106-88 at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. Confusing connections? Certainly.

The Pros, a team name eligible to be sponsored by Bud Light in a college atmosphere, featured Wall, his former UK teammates Eric Bledsoe and DeMarcus Cousins, along with Rajon Rondo, Tayshaun Prince, Keith Bogans, and Nazr Mohammed. They started off with a burst of over-excelled activity, perhaps due to lockout inactivity. They’ve all played in other summertime Pro-AMs, but none of them like this, on a stage against legit, more consistent competition and in front of 24,000. Their desire to give the Rupp crowd a show was clear, but still with knowledge that it wasn’t going to be like their other individual forays into summer hoops, highlights of which courtesy of YouTube mix-videos.

The Dominican Republic team featured some pros themselves — Francisco Garcia, Al Horford, along with another guard familiar with Kentucky, Edgar Sosa, courtesy of time spent playing at the University of Louisville, with Garcia — and they didn’t come to tool around. The D.R. team had been working hard under Calipari’s tutelage for the last two weeks in Lexington. They preparing for international competition at the FIBA Americas tournament set to start in Argentina at the end of August.

Many of the Bud Light Pros, on the other hand, came from Las Vegas, the site of a recent birthday party for Cousins. They had a single practice together, but it sounds like the balls were simply rolled out onto the floor without direction. Their coach, Joe B. Hall, did all but throw his hands up in the air in a gussy over how much he hates this NBA, in my imagination, via this quote from the AP: Read more »

The ESPN TrueHoop Network NBA Mock Draft 2011 is going down today. The first five picks are listed below and then it’s the Wizards’ turn, the decision made by a consensual agreement amongst the contributors to Truth About It.net. Keep checking back below the text of this post for updates on the entire first round.

1. Kyrie Irving, Cleveland Cavaliers [Cavs: The Blog]
2. Derrick Williams, Minnesota Timberwolves [A Wolf Among Wolves]
3. Brandon Knight, Utah Jazz [Salt City Hoops]
4. Jonas Valanciunas, Cleveland Cavaliers [Cavs: The Blog]
5. Kemba Walker, Toronto Raptors [Raptors Republic]

And with the 6th pick, the Washington Wizards select…

Enes Kanter slipping to Washington’s pick at six is almost as lucky as the Wizards winning the 2010 NBA Draft Lottery and landing John Wall.Not that Kanter is a game-changer on the level of the actual “Game Changer,” but had Ted Leonsis’ magic landed the top pick in the 2011 draft too, Ernie Grunfeld would’ve had a much harder time choosing between Kanter and Derrick Williams than he did when considering between Wall and Evan Turner (which was never really considered).

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John Wall, heard of him?

Okay, good. David Falk recently made him the “official” number one overall draft pick of the Washington Wizards. Didn’t know Falk, as Evan Turner’s agent, still had that power.

All kidding aside, Wall has been the pick for a long time now. The hype surrounding the assumption he would be taken by the Wizards became so pressurized that even small considerations of taking Turner became unreasonable — potentially creating another situation akin to when the Timberwolves traded Brandon Roy for Randy Foye.

Not saying that the schism between Foye and Roy as players would be emulated by Turner and Wall, Turner could very well be better. But a selection of Turner over Wall would create a situation where you’d have one player being measured in comparison to the other before they ever step on the court (I know, with Roy and Foye it was a little bit different).

Sounds unfair, and perhaps an irrational buy into the hype. So, I guess it’s silly to play this ‘what-if’ game and Wizards fans should just continue with the assumption they’ve been making all along, that John Wall is coming to D.C., and not look back … even though Ted Leonsis says he’s not allowed to talk about Wall. Curious, since barely after the Los Angeles Clippers won the 2009 NBA Draft Lottery, Mike Dunleavy, who severed ties with the franchise in March 2010, said, “Clearly, we’re taking Blake Griffin.” The day after winning the lottery, the Clippers began a marketing campaign featuring Griffin.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of Wall assumptions, it’d be useful to ask some Kentucky fans to share their knowledge about Wall with Wizards fans. Guy Ramsey is the head UK writer for StraitPinkie.com, a site dedicated to Louisville and Kentucky sports. To start, I’ve asked Guy about Wall’s point guard leadership and the perception basketball-crazed Kentucky fans have of one-and-done guys like him. Read more »

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, almost since Eddie Jordan got fired from his gig with the Wiz. Well, now that he’s at the helm of the Philadelphia 76ers, this is an appropriate time as ever to publish.

My feeling is that a majority of Wizards fans think Jordan was unjustly fired (or at least weren’t dancing in the streets when he departed), and that even more wish him well.

Count me among both of these groups. Although, when he was terminated, I wasn’t like, “OMG! What an injustice!”

I was more disappointed with the entire landscape of the team, and later resigned to it just being ‘one of those things’, and in the end, maybe it was best that both parties moved on. But we’ll never really know.

In any case, here goes my tribute to Jordan’s basketball career (to date).

Eddie Jordan was selected by the Cleveland Cavaliers out of Rutgers with the 11th pick of the 2nd round (33rd overall), in the 1977 NBA Draft. Ernie Grunfeld was selected with the 11th overall pick out of Tennessee by the Milwaukee Bucks in that same draft.

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