Thursday Bolts – 7.7.11
KD is one of many athletes to vote on what their favorite Derek Jeter was. It’s all promo stuff for Gatorade, you see.
Howard Bryant of ESPN.com talking sense: “Instead of learning from baseball, living with an imperfect system and refusing to chance losing the public, the NBA seems ready to try the nuclear option used by the the NHL of 2004-05. After three work stoppages in 13 years, commissioner Gary Bettman and hockey owners canceled an entire season and in return received prohibitive, favorable labor terms (a hard salary cap, huge reductions in payroll). The players, trying to rally five years later, hired the legendary Fehr in December. Their message: Yesterday’s defeat would someday be avenged.”
Dime’s 1-on-1 tournament has KD vs. Monta Ellis: “Countless doubters have played the height card against him and lost. Durant’s wingspan may prove bothersome, but bothersome just isn’t good enough. Unless you’re swatting his shot into the stands, Ellis will put it in the bucket more often than not, because his near-the-hoop arsenal is more dangerous and versatile than most give him credit for. If he’s soaring through the paint with the ball in hand, count on him to flip it, scoop it, lay it up or even dunk it. If he drops a few in a row, don’t be surprised if frustration begins to seep in for Durant. There’s nothing worse than watching a little guy score when you were inches from a devastating block.”
One reason games might not be missed? TV networks would lose lots and lots of money.
Kevin Pritchard finally talked Oden and Durant: “It’s the question that I probably get most. I have never studied a person or players like I did Durant/Oden. It was every single minute of every single second of their entire careers. We were going back into AAU and the one thing that kept hitting us really hard was Greg Oden lost three games until he got to Ohio State, then he got hurt again and only lost a couple there and that was over hundreds and hundreds of games. The overwhelming thing that we got from everybody we talked to was the cat doesn’t care if he scores or does anything, but he’s about winning. We had been really trying to change our culture for guys who really put the team first, not care about stats, and really be about winning. We thought he was the pick at the time. We did the same thing with Durant.”
Trying to understand why one owner is so willing to lose the season.
Zach Lowe of SI on all the financial stuff: “The league would appear to be saying here that Coon and Silver are just flat wrong when they say any expenses related to the purchase of a franchise are used in the way those two say they are. In financial accounting, there is always room for some middle ground between two apparently contradictory statements — some trick of semantics that makes both sides technically “correct” in what appears to be a black-and-white dispute. I’ve reached out to a few experts this morning to see what that middle ground might be, but a league source has already told me there is no such middle ground — that Coon and Silver are wrong, and that costs related to the purchase of a franchise are not factored into losses the league claims teams are suffering.”
