BobSaccamanno

I’m a Larry fan. He did a difficult thing. He presided over the Pacers transition from one era to another without the benefit of high draft picks from one era to another. After all, he was smart enough to draft Paul George. George wasn’t a first or second pick. He went tenth. He was Larry’s guy. That was not his only good move. He was also coach in their heyday. People see the way he comes across—the grammar or whatever—but that’s not reasonably related to his intelligence. It’s a byproduct of his upbringing and the opportunities he had. I’m not going to defend Larry over every nitpick but this is a guy who is sharp when it comes to basketball. And he’s a legit, highest level superstar yet in my family’s interactions with him, he’s phenomenally generous with fellow Hoosiers. I have the highest regard for Larry.

Very good pictures from everyone. I enjoyed them all. Thank you for sharing. We have some very nice people and families in our community. Sure, I love fiction but I really love biographies, always have. It doesn’t have to be a celebrity to me. I honestly could listen to a biography from anyone. Everyone has a unique story that interests me. This trait has always helped me in conversation. People are often surprised if I start asking about why your grandfather came from Romania or whatever, or where was your grandfather deployed in WWII. It doesn’t even have to be that dramatic. So thank you all for your stories. People say we get off track—guilty as charged—but the biographical things that pop up in our regular threads are a nice feature of the community. Not to single anyone out, but Scott and Droogh, your granddaughters should be on the cover of a Pampers box or something. Very beautiful.

Gase shouldn’t be a head coach. That’s obvious. He honestly isn’t even coordinator material. He parlayed a Peyton Manning recommendation (from their time together in Denver) into two head coaching jobs. In life, you have to be careful who you recommend for what. You can’t just recommend your buddy for something he cannot do lest you lose your own credibility. We saw this in Miami with him. It’s totally baffling that the Jets would hire this guy after seeing how dreadful he was there. They had six personal foul penalties last night, and many more regular penalties. That’s fireable on the spot, IMO. It’s honestly hard to fathom. I’m not a Jets fan. They are who they are and always have been. But this is egregious. I love sports, but watching a bad product like what the Jets trot out is just terrible.

Yes, and he was the number six pick in the draft. I just meant applying the concept of a player like that with the traits I mentioned and not the “look at me” guys Kentucky focuses on. Somebody needs to shoot and score, I get that, but I’d love to see us run with a roster of tough, team oriented guys. The pros take care of themselves if you play the right way. That’s the fallacy in many kids’ minds, that you have to “get yours.” Kentucky ball gives me a headache. Their roster flips so often that the players can’t have any traction in terms of a legacy. To each their own if that works for Kentucky fans. If Archie gets this established in all four classes, the continuity year over year will fall into place and we can become formidable. I like Archie’s mentality, but he’s going to have to prove he can win tough games and get over the hump. Say what you want about Crean, but in a couple of seasons, he had the guys playing at a level where they won, home or road, in tough situations, consistently. I like Archie’s approach to recruiting, but he still has to prove this.

I’m not a Celtics fan although Larry Bird is my favorite basketball player of all time so there’s an internal conflict there. And I’m a big Brad Stevens fan, so that’s another thing. As far as their players, I like Jaylen Brown. But the guy I easily like the most is Marcus Smart. He embodies what I like in a ballplayer. Tough, competitive, defends, intense, team oriented, crazy high motor. If an observer is stats oriented, they will never get a guy like Smart and how critical he is to the Celtics ability to win. If I were recruiting for IU, I’d look for as many players as I could with as many of those traits as possible. I don’t need the prima donna Kentucky type of kid. I want @$$ kickers.

The Nurse move was purely disgusting. I lost respect for him after that.

Miami looks good. Spoelstra has been outstanding. He looked like a brilliant tactician. Lot of talk on Twitter that’s exactly where Giannis is going. Miami. I think Miami has the strategy already in place to make the money work. G with Bam and Herro with Spoelstra as the maestro - wow. I’m not sure anyone in the League would have the kind of upside they’d have other than Dallas. Those two teams could be the titans of the 20s. Shame for Milwaukee. They may never get that chance again. G was a once in a lifetime guy for them. It’s a lot like the Pacers. Very hard to envision either winning a championship without that marquee guy yet they can’t go get him like the Lakers or Miami can.

I’ve noticed you and I almost always like the same players. But on this one, I have always like Logan. He’s got a no-nonsense, physical style with a confidence I like. He will likely be a four year player who will bring a butt kicking attitude to our front court. The ranking of 63 is meaningless. I subscribe to the Bill Parcells planet theory. There are only a certain number of guys who have that size who can play. The ranking gurus will rate a lot of chucking combo guards or whatever higher who regularly go 6-19. It’s hard to find a guy like Logan who will help you win games. If I cared that much about rankings, I’d add a premium to his ranking accordingly.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I will stop and watch strangers play pickup ball.

I have been holed up working on some urgent matters and haven’t seen the Kenosha thing (shocking). I’ve read the young man was shot in the back in Kenosha and is paralyzed. I’m happy with the boycott. They have a voice. It may not get them to the end they want, but I like the statement. The bad (very few, in my opinion) cops need rooted out and, even better, should never be hired in the first place. I obviously can’t micromanage them but they need to (a) do much better with psychological evaluation before making new hires, (b) root out the bad ones when they go off the rails, and that right has to be non-negotiable in collective bargaining, and (c) have much smarter training with consequences for trainers that trend toward having trainees that turn into rogue cops. I’ve defended cops in other threads because my interaction with them has been overwhelmingly positive and they do a tough job. But they need to accept and be enlightened on not having the bad ones go so far off the rails. It’s not good for the country, not just the individual victims.

To be clear, I am 100% for all people to be treated fairly and equally. I empathize with difficulties African Americans have faced and continue to face. But, I am very glad he owned it and apologized. Race should not be uttered in a derogatory way in any direction. What he may not have realized—and hopefully does now—is it diminishes the own African American cause by ripping on someone else’s race. I feel similarly about the argument that African Americans own the N word now and are free to use it. Or that race baiting is not a two way street such that a black can say something about a white and a white can’t say anything about a black (the years of oppression being the difference). Again, I don’t buy it at all for many reasons. It diminishes your own cause. Beyond that, it’s not like the world is full of rocket scientists or Rhodes scholars. The average person can’t comprehend some philosophical basis distinguishing one race’s circumstance over another’s. The practical effect is that it exacerbates racial tensions. It boomerangs on the African American. So, why make it more of a challenge to improve race relations? Race should not be a basis of distinction or a reason for division in a society working to be free and equal as stated in the constitution of our great country. I would imagine that Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with my take. He wanted to take the high road and positively move toward change. To me, that’s the best way to getting to your goal.

They passed on Doncic right? Enough said.

Yep. It’s hitting us now. Hunkered down. Some kid toys out back that we didn’t get in. I hope it works out. Heavy winds

I did too! I have that series on auto record. I can't get enough of the series.

Definitely all good. I just wanted to be clear that I wasn’t even thinking about China or politics when I made my original post, just that it seemed to be working on the court. In baseball, the Cardinals have missed, what, 9 games? How will that be made up? I don’t see how the NFL will avoid the same fate unless our numbers go way down (fingers crossed that it happens).

Sorry to hear that. My condolences to your colleague. I have a buddy who had it earlier. He was blind in one eye twice and hospitalized both times. It got infected. Very scary. He was aggressively sick for like ten weeks. It was early so the testing was terrible with unintelligible results. There’s still a lot we don’t know including the long term effect on organs. We can make all the assumptions (and there are too many out there) we want but there are lots of unknowns about this scourge that won’t be resolved by anything but time. As an example, there was a prevailing wisdom that we’d get a breather during the summer because of heat and wouldn’t you know obviously Phoenix, Miami, and Houston got drilled in the dog days of summer. When it became clear how serious this was by the start of the B1G tourney, I posted at the time that this gave me that post 9/11 negative feel. It’s a different event obviously but the dread in our collective psyche is there and probably worse now because it’s so widespread and the number of deaths is off the charts. I’m concerned about how the next half decade is going to go for us economically and psychologically. We always win as a country but it’s going to be a tough row to hoe for awhile. I don’t think we just flip a switch. There are a number of economic problems under the surface that are problematic due to mismanagement by both parties. The debt to GDP is awful. The money supply has soared to astronomical levels where we throw trillions around like it’s nothing. Interest rates are crazy low. All of these abnormal economic conditions need to be worked out and it doesn’t look easy. Monetizing the amount of debt on our plate will likely have consequences. On the plus side, I believe the harder it is, the longer and better the upside will be when we come out if it, kinda like how positive the 1950s were and we started rolling again.

Funny, I’m the age where I discovered solo Beatles first and then backtracked to the Beatles. But my dad filled me in quite a bit. I like a lot solo Beatles material. Not legendary stuff for the most part like the Beatles put out, but still good music. If you took all their material in a given year and spliced it together like a Beatles album, they would be quality albums that would go deep with tracks we know. You’re not getting Rain or Hey Jude or Let it Be or Something or Strawberry Fields or Penny Lane and on and on because they weren’t together to polish stuff up brilliantly. That’s what they lost being apart. There are a ton of good George Harrison solo tracks. There are ones people know, but underrated ones like Love Comes to Everyone, or This is Love. If you take George’s Beatles compositions and the ones from his solo career, it’s a very good list that would have been a legendary career on its own merits. Paul gets crap for having some sub-par tracks—and rightfully so—but he’s so prolific that there’s still good ones. Jet, Junior’s Farm, Band on the Run, Maybe I’m Amazed, Let me Roll It, Letting Go, Coming Up, and on and on. But he’s still Paul and there is a coolness to it all. John has some fantastic ones like Give Me Truth. I’d love to hear what he would have had to say of all the events of the past 40 years. Just tragic. I love all the Beatles individually so I wouldn’t pick among them. I choose them all, lol. It’s amazing how much talent that was together in that group.

Those are good points I hadn’t focused on. I was more talking about the fact that the games I’ve seen were entertaining. The teams played really hard, and the overall quality was good. I think the setup of the schedule and the playoffs has been great. The virus is contained for the most part based on their strategy which has worked. The visual of the game is pretty good. You’re not looking at empty seats like in baseball. As for the jersey thing, the NBA will always back the players sensibilities and their freedom to do that. That’s been their M.O. They will let fans who don’t like it walk because they think they will get more fans that way. That’s their calculation on who their customer base is. Speaking only for myself I spent like 5 seconds on the jersey thing. It’s just not something I’m hyper sensitive of. I’m focused on the game. But I do accept and have no problem with the fact that we have lots of opinions in the country and as long as they aren’t hateful, I accept it. I don’t agree with some concepts at all but I know it’s out there and I just let it go. It’s just the way it will always be in a free society and with the constitution we have. As for the China thing, I haven’t noticed anything about that so I can’t really comment. They obviously have a market there and they are running a business just as lots of US businesses are in China from Apple to Nike to Starbucks. And other companies actually outsource suppliers over there. It’s commerce. Personally, I’d like to see our companies divest from suppliers in China. I think their government are thugs. That doesn’t make their people bad. It’s the government and their human rights violations, cheating, stealing IP, mendacity with the virus etc. Hong Kong has fallen and it’s not really the NBA’s role or fault in that other than they want the market.

Agree, we have talked about it so many times but that recruiting class of Bryant, OG and Juwan was truly epic. And many of us (like you and me and many others) were very excited about the class coming in so it’s not just hindsight. Man I really like the games, enthusiasm , toughness, etc of all three guys.

The NBA is running circles around the other sports in terms of competent leadership. Rob Manfred has a peculiar Ivy League arrogance. He may have tested well to go there, but there’s “book smart” and there is “creative, able to solve problems” smart. The players association in baseball is part of the problem for sure but I blame Manfred. Adam Silver and his team thought of a solution that’s fantastic. You’re not even looking at empty seats. They thought of everything. The 8 regular season games ginned up drama and allow the teams to acclimate prior to the playoffs. The NBA is running on another level than the other sports. I’d probably fire Manfred as soon as possible and I have never liked Goodell. A monkey could make money for the NFL. Their decision making is just off. But Silver for the most part has a very well thought out design across the board.

The Leland Walker height thing is pure balderdash. Archie and staff are in daily communication with Walker. The must important defensive attribute for defending other point guards is not being 6’3. It’s having excellent foot quickness to stop the ball and make it difficult for the other lead guard to initiate. You’ve got to keep the ball in front of you and stop it. A defense that doesn’t have a single guy that can do that will have to then compensate for that deficiency. So you try to avoid having that deficiency in the first instance. We also know that Archie has told another smaller player in Smith that he doesn’t care how tall he is. Maybe you want to mix and match personnel to have a roster with a taller guard coupled with a smaller one but the notion that a player can’t be recruited because he’s only 6’0 is false. Besides, Walker is a top flight athlete from what I’ve seen and that kind of athleticism is an equalizer.

I actually read about your friend and his trademarks. The media was calling him a squatter. Then I saw you point out he is your buddy and that he’s not looking for money. Very cool!

Call them the Red Tails and let’s move on with our lives. It’s perfect.

I have a feeling from what I’ve read that Leland Walker is underrated and ends up rated much higher.

Thanks, as always. It will be interesting to see which guys we get traction with.