Re: Pitino/Cousy

[j.hironaka@unesco.org]

Josh Ozersky wrote:

> I think Pitino believes that Walter
> can be much more than a headless chicken on the press.
>  I think that Walters salary is meant for the player
> he can be, and is partially designed to give Walter
> confidence, and to head off salary disagreements
> should he blossom.  Pitino said that this past year he
> thought that Walter had regressed since college.

A lot of good points/arguments (which I conveniently cut) about Pitino's
coaching impact, particularly on man defense.

Even though the No Limit soldiers have ridiculed Pitino for taking money
out of Ron Mercer's pockets to waste on dipsticks like his ex-teammate
Walter McCarty, I've said before (or at least I think I did) that Pitino
rewarded Wallah with a new contract not ONLY based (as is commonly
assumed) on foolish optimism about his future potential.

Actually Pitino re-signed McCarty  in part because he was a double
figure scoring starter and arguably the second most valuable player on
the team in the first half of Pitino's inaugural season (before Mercer
heated up and Kenny Anderson arrived). Other than illustrating just how
crappy our team was, it also shows that McCarty was productive in a
number of categories for a "first-year" pro. The kid passed the ball
(2.16 assists), he hit his freethrows (.742), he played defense (1.34
steals, 4.4 rebounds) and managed 9.6 ppg overall. In fact, I believe
McCarty may have been the second leading scorer in the preseason and he
started the season strong on both ends of the court.

Pitino rewarded him with what I thought was a reasonable contract (2.5
million isn't it?) somewhere in the vicinity of the league average. In
retrospect, Pitino could have waited another year to resign McCarty, but
I certainly don't view it as appropriate to make the energetic
"Bunnyman" some sort of scapegoat or symbol of Pitino's incompetence.
He's actually been excellent in the summer leagues. Let's at least wait
until Wallah is healthy again before Celts shareholders attempt to write
him off on their tax returns. And even though I may have helped start it
on this list, I say we put a moratorium on comparing McCarty's court
sense to that of a 6-11 rubber chicken (with his head cut off).
Sometimes even I wonder why of all Pitino's Kentucky kids, we had to
keep the two spazziest guys in basketball (Toine and the Bunnyman).

Joe


In the case of Tony Battie, his rate of development is not WAY out of
the ordinary for a talented early-entry player in the second pro year of
a three-year rookie contract.  I tried to suggest that Battie's
improvement  may in part simply reflect our far greater familiarity
with his game and potential than when he was putting up similar stats
for his previous team. He's certainly a great fit for a Pitino-coached
team, but I believe his career high games (including a rare 8 block
night versus the Celtics) actually occurred while he was an "El Busto"
rookie in Denver.

I'm NOT bad-mouthing Battie by any means (you know how I feel about
him). My point is to the extent that we basically ignored him when he
was playing on another team (at least most of us did), we don't have
much basis beyond intuition to say he owes Pitino a big hug for
resurrecting his career. It goes without saying that we tend to know
much more about a 6.7 ppg player (or whatever he was) on our team than
we do about the 100 or so other NBA players with similar credentials
scattered around the league.

But again, I think this type of center forward is both hard to
affordably find and critical for the success of Pitino's system. Tony
Battie has at least as much potential as Marcus Camby. Although I didn't
see Camby in the playoffs, I do have an early season Knicks game on
videotape in which Battie looked far more athletic than Camby, and more
importantly better polished in every aspect of the game except
shot-blockers timing.

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