Tuesday Bolts – 11.1.11
Two economists for Grantland: “Does the players’ line in the sand over 2.5 percent of BRI make economic sense? No, not if they miss many games to achieve it. Is the owners’ offer fair? Not really. Should the players take it? Yes. Will the owners give in and up the ante? Very unlikely. Will the players be rational and take what is on the plate? We can only hope so.”
Chad Ford and Marc Stein using the amnesty clause for each team: “Robinson is the only Thunder player that you could even conceive of them ushering through the amnesty exit door. But then you remember who we’re talking about here. OKC paying someone not to play? Laughable. Based on our latest info, Team Presti prefers to keep Robinson’s $4.5 million expiring contract around for potential trades. Otherwise? The Thunder’s next bad contract will be their first.”
Henry Abbott of TrueHoop on owners’ funny spending habits: “If Wizards owner Ted Leonsis pays Lewis to go away, though, then Leonsis will be both out $43 million and in need of somebody who can play 32 minutes a game at power forward. There aren’t a ton of those people around. Appropriate free agent candidates include Glen Davis, Dante Cunningham, Craig Smith, Carl Landry or Jason Smith. By PER, Smith is the best of them, with the 42nd best PER. But he’d like to be paid too. Which means Leonsis will have paid Lewis’s $43 million, plus another $5 or $10 million over the next two years to have similar work to what Leonsis would have already paid Lewis for. Would you pay $10 million to replace Rashard Lewis with Craig Smith and a bit of cap space? Not if money were tight.”
Andrew Sharp of SB Nation: “There’s good news in all this that gets ignored. On the whole, the NBA’s growing, and all but a few NBA teams are doing just fine. The rise in expenses has paled in comparison to the rise in overall value, and the system’s about to get a whole lot more favorable. No matter how hard David Stern tries to make the NBA look like the NHL, there is no battle for survival. There’s billions in TV revenue waiting for the owners if they take the deal that’s there. And you know, if the players can weather the storms that come with each wave of ominous predictions, at some point, the good news might be what saves them.”
KD is playing in LaMarcus Aldridge’s charity game in Portland.
Kyle Porter of Pistols Firing on KD playing flag football: “You know, just your average multimillionaire playing a flag football game with a bunch of giddy 20-year old guys on a late-October Monday night in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Most of the rest of his colleagues are probably out at posh Halloween parties, and who could blame them? That’s what we would do if we were multimillionaires. KD though, I think we want to believe he’s different. And whether he is or not doesn’t much matter to the 6 dudes on his team and 7 dudes playing against him. They’ve all got an all-time story to tell their friends. The dude owns Oklahoma, and nights like this are the reason why.”
Video of Durant getting mobbed after the game.
Anthony Slater of the Daily O’Collegian: “George Overbey, a member of Sigma Nu, saw the tweet after class and decided to Tweet back at his favorite player, not expecting a response. “About five minutes later I get a retweet from him,” Overbey said. “He goes, ‘Can you play?’ And I go, ‘Can you catch?'” Through direct message, specifics were drawn out and numbers were exchanged. And there Durant was, outside of Overbey’s house, ready to put on his Sigma Nu 35 KD jersey. “He picked me and my buddy up,” Overbey said. “He’s got a big, big van. He didn’t have a limo…When his car pulled up to my house, I was like, ‘this is really happening.'”
KD did throw three picks though. Here’s one of them.
Darnell Mayberry: “According to McCubbin, Sigma Nu had to forfeit the game because Durant doesn’t belong to the fraternity. It cost Sigma Nu a shot at a four-peat. Overbey and his buddies, of course, didn’t mind.”