Re: [Fwd: May On The Accountability of Wallace/Papile]

[Hironaka <j.hironaka@unesco.org>]

> ON BASKETBALL
> No question now: They will be answerable
> By Peter May, 4/25/2001
>
> They already had one deal aborted in February, one that would have sent
> Anderson and the
> three No. 1 picks to Dallas for Christian Laettner. The Celtics backed
> off that one twice. They also had a deal with the Bulls in which Chicago
> would have paid them $3 million for a No. 1 pick and McCarty; the league
> turned that down.

    What is it all the time with $3 million? It seems to come up time and
again. That's like the magic number to make "Thanks Dad" happy. Thank
goodness the league is protecting us from imploding, just as they did years
ago with the Cleveland franchise. They had to. There is absolutely no
basketball competitiveness argument to justify this type of sell-off.

    These two aborted trades have nothing to do with creating cap space.
It's about pocketing cash (a lot actually) for the owner. And it's about all
28 NBA teams around since 1995 having made the playoffs at least once, with
the exception of the Celtics. This is becoming a real handicap for the
franchise.

    Wallace, Papile and Obie had all better stop being "yes men" the very
second the ink is dry on their contract extentions. This team needs to be
run by basketball people.

Joe

N.B. One comment on the WEEI Wallace interview, I don't see any
justification in waiting out the Denver pick (as Wallace hints we might do)
unless he can make an argument that Denver may be one of the three worst
teams in the NBA in the coming years. Instead, he seems to argue that Denver
is very unlikely to make the playoffs in the more competitive West even if
they finish 11th worst again. I mean is that just pissah as an argument or
what? We pass on a deep 2001 draft so that we can have a 1% chance at
winning the lottery with Denver's future pick (the 1% figure is the percent
of ping pong balls a team has with the 10th pick). With that kind of fuzzy
math going for our brain trust, this team deserved not to get Tim Duncan if
you ask me.  Something must have got lost in the translation (trade a sure
pick for a 1% chance). That is flat out one of the stupidest arguments I've
heard in awhile.

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