re: May on David Wesley

[opi@unesco.org]

     In Peter May's column, Charlotte GM Bob Bass says the following
about David Wesley (5 assists, 6 rebounds, 24 points last night):

    ''Over the last 25 games, David played great,'' Bass said. ''David
and Baron may even be out there together at times, depending on
matchups. Last year, when we played Detroit, he guarded Grant Hill. And
we beat them, 3-0. He also guarded Horace Grant one night when he played
Orlando and he didn't score a point.''

    David Wesley is a pure self-made NBA player, almost like Armstrong
down in Orlando and many other admirable players in the NBA past. The
superficially impressive thing about Wesley was how unbelievably fit and
muscled he was, hulked up like a Darnell Valentine or TR Dunn. Larry
Bird simply trashed Wes and the rest of ML's midget guard corps, for
reasons I can sort of grasp (they didn't have 70% of the court vision of
the much taller Bird or Walton).

    Although this is a gross simplification, Rick Pitino in retrospect
could have affordably retained vets like Wesley and Fox on his bench
these past few seasons, instead of getting infatuated with Travis Knight
and the Pips.  I adamantly disliked Fox as an NBA starter/mediocrity (at
his professional peak, I regarded him as not even the 15th best small
forward starter in the league, and a guy who literally did nothing
particularly well or make the slightest positive impact in the win-loss
column). Still, I'll admit Fox would have been a turnover-creating
machine on our pressing unit and deservedly retained his Boston
captaincy, under these trying circumstances. Pitino has a tendency to
write off players without so much as a fair tryout, as with Eric
Williams, Kris Clack, Dino Radja...

    In terms of salary cap flexibility, it ultimately didn't make one
shred of difference that we dumped a bunch of Carr-era vets for John
Thomas, Ty Edney, Bruce Bowen etc.(this is not a criticism of Pitino,
who made a calculated effort to clean up ML's financial mess). The
original 36-win team might have even made the playoffs then and there,
and developed an entirely different outlook than a team handed over to a
21-year-old captain. Weirdly enough, the Celts probably could even have
carried the old Dino-saur on our roster, since it seems we ended up
paying much of Radja's wages anyway in that whole Larry Brown fiasco.
Personally,  I'd take back a healthy Radja over Mo Taylor in a
heartbeat, since Dino was consistently good for 9+ lazy rebounds in the
NBA while the presently overrated "Liz" Taylor really has to exert
himself to get his rebounding average above 4 per game, even with a 71
million contract at stake and knowing it would help his pathetic team a
lot if he made the effort to do his job.

Joe

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