khandor’s sports blog

There are many good reasons this little corner of the net has long held that Jerry West deserves to be placed in an exalted category among NBA General Managers:

=========================

Last season it was Carmelo Anthony. This season it’s Dwight Howard. Players who hold the threat of walking as a free agent over a team to force a trade to a destination they prefer.

Jerry West wants none of it. He says teams should call the player’s bluff — make him leave the money on the table to walk away.

The legendary player and long-time league GM of the Lakers and Grizzlies (and current Golden State minority owner and team consultant) was asked in interviews on ESPN Radio in Los Angeles how he would handle such a situation if it were his team.

“I honestly think I’d call their bluff,” West said in an interview on 710 ESPN’s Mason and Ireland show Thursday, not mentioning Howard specifically. “I really would, because I don’t think any agent or player is going to leave $30 million on the table. I just don’t believe that’s going to happen….”

“If I were an executive on a team where a player says he’s going to leave, let him leave,” West said on 710 ESPN’s Max and Marcellus show earlier Thursday. “It would be better than saddling yourself with a bunch of players that are not going to fit in to what you’re trying to do — high-salaried players, in many cases overpaid players by today’s standards, that would burden you going forward.

“I’d almost rather start over again myself. You’re not going to replace that player, but there’s an enormous penalty there and it looks like to me like the inmates are running the asylum if you let that happen.”

Jerry West just became very popular in Orlando.

West has always been a risk taker and his strategy comes with one big risk — that the player isn’t bluffing and would leave. Meaning the franchise gets nothing. Maybe West would rather just start over, but if you hold out like Denver did (and find an owner like James Dolan who caves to work with) you can get a fair amount of talent back.

=========================

The most important of which involves a specific perspective on the game of life that transforms negatives into positives, at all costs.

i.e. When a free agent leaves your team it is simply not the case that, “The franchise gets nothing [in return].” The simple facts are that: i) The franchise actually gets the Salary Cap space formerly associated with the departing player to use as it sees fit going forward; and, ii) The departing free agent gets to sign an employment contract with a new team worth $30.0 M less than he could have received from his former team.

If someone says that they no longer wish to work with you, or your team, then, once their present contract expires, you should simply wish them well and allow them to leave, so that you are in position to continue moving forward without them.

It really isn’t about the playing bluffing games at all.

What it’s really about is the important difference between: a) Being a Winner; and, b) Being a Loser.

Welcome back NBA.

When the ball actually stops bouncing long enough, in the NBA …

———————————————

Ex-Blazer Washington recounts his first aide trip to Congo

In the summer of 1994, I was working with Pete Newell at his Big Man Camp. At the time, his camp was probably the No. 1 camp in the world. Pete was a world-renowned coach and former general manager of the Lakers. He was the gentleman who drafted me to the Lakers out of college [No. 5 overall in 1973 Draft], and was responsible for me earning a spot as a starter in the NBA. I was working on the camp when the situation in Rwanda broke out.

The news was flooded with horrendous accounts of murder and terror, affecting hundreds of thousands of lives. My daughter, Dana, came into the room after watching the news on TV and was incredibly upset. Here was a young girl who was so sensitive and caring that if she saw a dog or cat hit by a car, she would always make me stop and pull it out of the street. She was compassionate for everyone and everything. She told me I better do something about this situation. I saw the broadcasts and it reminded me of the problems in Somalia years before when people were suffering and dying from the drought. I felt as though I should have helped those people and didn’t, and even years later still had residual guilt. I felt like this was my opportunity to change that feeling, so I looked in the phone book for an organization where I could donate money.

I called Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross. I didn’t have any success speaking to a person, just to an automated teller telling me how to donate money. When I called the Northwest Medical team in Beaverton, Ore., my luck changed. They were operating 10 minutes from where I was living, and got a person on the line that was able to talk to me and give me information. They also knew who I was and were very thankful that I called so I decided to donate to them. I don’t remember how much I donated on my credit card, but I did happen to say to them before I hung up that one day I would like to go and see for myself what the conditions were really like. They said, you can go with us next week, we’re taking a group over.

———————————————

There are some truly noteworthy things accomplished in this world.

The Kermit Washington Story – i.e. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 – is most definitely one of them.

If you have time to read but one on-line article today, then, this is the one it should be:

———————————–

Jeff Ma on the House Advantage

Henry Abbott: You sitting there with Jerry West and the salt shakers and the mustard containers … this is where this field will develop, right? The statistical mind meeting the basketball mind. The more you’re speaking the same language, the more useful your statistics are going to be, it seems.

Jeff Ma: I think that’s kind of the key.

When I first met Bill Walsh, we had developed this football system that was supposed to measure success on any NFL play. If you’re first-and-ten and you gain five yards, is that a success or is that a failure? We kind of graded out the plays and the people in the plays based on that. We came up with a statistical system based on four years of NFL data looking at every play, a team’s winning, and we could tell you how you did on this down and how that affected your team’s chances of scoring.

But we needed a way to validate that. We went to Coach Walsh so he could help validate us. So we asked him some very simple questions. So, on first-and-ten, what’s a success? He said well, four yards is probably not a success, five yards probably is. Somewhere in between.

Our numbers showed that four-and-a-half yards was the threshold.

Then on second down he says well, I think you need to gain at least half a yard. And that’s exactly what our numbers showed also.

What we learned from that, and I would never use this quote because it’s very self-promoting, but he once said to our CEO: “I have no idea how he gets it, but he’s in my brain.” And he was talking about me. That was kind of like the biggest compliment that he could ever give me, because that’s all I was trying to do.

There are people out there like Jerry West and Bill Walsh who can make really good decisions without a spreadsheet behind them. But there are only a few of them. And so the goal is to create a mathematical system or methodology to use data and information that can make as good a decision as Walsh and West made, in a more structured and regimented way, so anyone can make them.

So what you’re saying is absolutely true. What you’re saying is absolutely true. The goal is to take what’s between Bill Walsh’s ears and put it in a spreadsheet, so people can actually understand what it all means.

———————————–

Amen to all concerned!

The best speadsheets in the world are simple attempts to blue-print the mental machinations of the best coaches in the world who already have the capacity to think the game accurately with nothing else but the benefit of their own experience.

The ability to generate an average gain of 4.5 yards on 1st down is the real objective here … whether on the ground - in a cloud of dust - or, through the air – via a Sid Luckman or a Don Coryell-inspired piece of artistry.

It is both the accomplishment which counts and the method of the madness … because – depending on the time, and the score, and the other complicating circumstances – the one is intricately connected to the other.

What can the good folks who run Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. [MLSE] possibly have to learn from an individual owner like Jerry Buss?

Buss has put up some numbers by Roland Lazenby [January 17, 2010]

This season marks the 30^th anniversary of the self-made Buss acquiring the Lakers and the Great Western Forum from Jack Kent Cooke in a deal so stunning that Sports Illustrated hired accountants to investigate how Buss arranged the financing. After scratching their heads for weeks, the accountants conceded defeat. They never did figure out his fancy tricks.

Buss immediately recognized that he better listen to then-Lakers GM Bill Sharman, who advised that Cooke’s organization draft an unorthodox guard named Magic Johnson.

Magic propelled the Lakers to the league championship in the first season of ownership by Buss, who promptly told the television audience that he had worked so long and hard to win the championship. It sounded ludicrous, but Buss was talking about his years amassing the wealth and know-how to acquire the team.

He always said he bought the club just because he couldn’t get the tickets he wanted. Buss immediately understood that he should listen to Sharman, a Hall of Famer as both a player and a coach.

To this day, the low-key Sharman’s influence within the Lakers remains a key factor, despite the fact that he’s well into his 80s. Each season he writes a report on the team and its personnel that is to be read only by Buss.

“Sharman has always had considerable influence,” team consultant Tex Winter confided last year.

That may help explain the numbers that Buss has put up in three decades of ownership. His Lakers teams have won nine titles and appeared in the league championship series another six occasions, In his 30 years of ownership his teams have played for the big cheese 15 times, numbers not even close to being matched in the modern NBA, or any other modern pro sport.

—————————–

Lesson #1.

Find a highly respected former player and coach, who is a member of the Basketball Hall Of Fame, and retain his services as a ”special consultant”, answerable to no one else but you.

Lesson #2.

Listen closely to what this special consultant actually has to say about the game, itself, and the people who happen to play, and coach, and GM, it.

Lesson #3.

Prioritize ‘championship success’ above all else.

Lesson #4.

Do exactly what your “special consultant” tells you to do.

Lesson #5.

Stay the heck out of the way …

by occupying yourself with whatever sort of distraction might be necessary to keep your fingerprints off the day-to-day operations of the team, even if this means embarassing yourself by spending ‘quality time’ with a bevy of bouncing beauties less-than 1/4 of your own chronological age …

except, of course, when the REALLY BIG decisions MUST get made, usually involving OBSCENE amounts of $$$, in which case you become a “tough as nails” ruthless barracuda who …

—————————–

Lakers’ Buss knows when to hold’em [March 2, 2008]

has done whatever it takes to bring this city [Los Angeles] a championship.

“What’s kept me going is my competitiveness,” he says. “I really, really do want to win.”

We forget this because, as he walks through the Staples Center tunnel with a colorful shirt and a laughing date and a pleasant handshake for everyone, he seems like just another L.A. dude.

We forget that he had the smarts to help engineer the NBA’s deal of the season by getting rid of Kwame Brown . . . because, well, you see that seemingly empty house across the narrow street from his house?

“Kwame Brown lives here,” Buss says, shrugging. “Seriously. We used to hang out. We’re friends.”

When is the last time an owner admitted that his team makes him cry?

Jerry Buss says that when the Lakers are playing well and Staples Center is rocking and the city is embracing his baby, he is moved beyond words.

“It’s a tearful experience sometimes,” he says.

His team can also make him so mad, he will storm out of his box in silence.

“I’ll say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m just so angry now, I can’t talk,’ ” he says.

Jerry Buss doesn’t own the Lakers, he lives them, from filling the front office with his family to filling some of his players with unabashed love. Maybe this is one of his secrets? The team isn’t run by him, it is him?

—————————– 

Presto!

PS. The Los Angeles Lakers [32-9] pay their only visit to The Big Smoke this season on Sunday, January 24 [i.e. later on this week]. Raptors fans should mark the date down on their calendars as, unfortunately, Showtime, doesn’t happen in these parts with the degree of frequency that befits a world-class city like Toronto. 

Eighteen holes with Jerry West
Excerpt #1. The playoffs can become a sore point for West, a 14-time All Star, who, despite nine trips to the NBA Finals, remains haunted by his inability to collect more than one ring as a player, that coming in 1972 against the New York Knicks.

“It’s left a huge scar on me, huge,” West said. “I’m not going to ever forget that till the day I die.”

Excerpt #2. Looking back, West wishes he could have dealt with the stress better, and enjoyed the experience more.

“When you know you have a good team, you’re always worried about the little unknowns,” he said.

Excerpt #3. On the 18th green, he needed a 10-footer for his par. He missed.

“I’m not leaving till I make it,” he said. He made it on his fourth attempt.

Please take a good long look at this piece of impressionistic writing about The Game Of NBA Hoops, this year’s runner-up and the newly crowned Champs:

———-

Behind the Box Score, where we have a champion
I don’t know if anyone expects as much out of this version of the Los Angeles Lakers as I do. I saw 70-win potential in them, heading into this season. Didn’t think it would happen, not with all those variables, but I know that offense and I’ve seen what that defense can do. I know stats and I know where these players were headed. If they got it right, and stayed healthy … 70 wins.

Problem is, they didn’t stay healthy. And some of the career arcs seemed to spin off course.

After completely shoring up Los Angeles’ awful point guard defense from two years ago in 2007-08, Derek Fisher(notes) fell off the face of the earth defensively, like an NFL running back that somehow went from 1300 to 500 yards in a year’s time.

Jordan Farmar(notes), out of nowhere, fell off. Andrew Bynum(notes) tore a significant ligament in his knee, and Kobe Bryant(notes) lost a little bit of patience. A lot of patience. Especially in the first three rounds of this year’s postseason.

But with all of that logged against them? 65 wins, in 82 tries. 81 in 105 attempts, overall. Third in offense, sixth in defense. Those are championship stats, and as much as I’m telling myself to remember this team at its best, I’ll probably remember this team for not being able to take that extra step. Coming close, but falling short due to injury, slumps, and an impatient tone in May.

And I should stop, because that’s being ridiculous. Could it have gone better? Could it have gone smarter?

Yes, and yes. And guess what? They’re not robots. And, from November until mid-June, they walked all over this league.

The playoffs, I’m sorry, but that was a tough, tough run. Laugh at the Utah Jazz all you want, but that team can play. And some of the best offensive stretches (small things, good four or five minute runs, but “stretches” nevertheless) I’ve ever seen in my life came from these Lakers against a Jazz team some picked to win the West before the season started.

The Rockets? Chortle if you must at the absence of Tracy McGrady(notes) and (eventually) Yao Ming(notes), but that was an impossibly-tough defensive team that had advantages in all the right slots (Aaron Brooks taking on Fisher’s defense, most profoundly), and were about as stern as second round warnings come.

The Denver Nuggets? Mock if you will, but that was a championship caliber team that had quite a few pundits wondering aloud about who, exactly, would win a Denver/Orlando Finals pairing. They weren’t wrong in that line of thinking, because the Nuggets were good enough to get there.

And the Lakers were good enough to top them all.

And they were great enough to down the Orlando Magic in five games.

Three may have been close. Two may have been won in overtime, but they beat a great, great team four out of five times in June. That is so, so impressive.

These are the things we have to remember. These are the things we need to appreciate, now. Not just for this week, as something to chew on before the Draft hits and free agency takes over.

But for all time. These Lakers were a powerhouse.

These Lakers are a powerhouse.

Understand what the Lakers did to Orlando, with their offense. Please.

Teams double-team offensive firebrands like Kobe Bryant all season long. But nobody seems to get away with doubling Kobe, not just because of Kobe’s brilliance, but because of Los Angeles’ offense. And when the Magic, the best defensive team in the NBA did it, Los Angeles seemed to have a 6-on-3 advantage due to that offense, with its unmatched spacing. Not just your typical 4-on-3. The Magic were helpless once that ball started moving.

115, 104, 121, 103 and 110 points per 100 possessions for the Lakers in the series. That’s against the NBA’s best defense, a defense that gave up only 101.9 points per 100 points on average during the regular season. If the Lakers are the unstoppable force, and the Magic were the unmovable object, well, the force wouldn’t stop. And the object got to moving.

That’s the stuff I have to remind myself of. The Laker defense, however, will be hard to forget. Splayed out in front of me from Games 1 through 5, is the biggest thing I’ll take from this series.

Now, Orlando isn’t exactly the 2005 Phoenix Suns. They can fill it up as they did during Game 3, but they were still 11^th in offense during the regular season. So it’s not the greatest accomplishment if you shut them down.

But watching that Laker defense in person? Observing that all-out effort? The length? The timing? The game plan (Phil Jackson’s assistants are just the gold standard)? The results?

Seeing the way Trevor Ariza(notes) absolutely manhandled Hedo Turkoglu? It wasn’t just that he was playing him physically; he was beating him to the spot, every time down court. By the end of Game 4, Hedo wanted absolutely nothing to do with playing against this guy, any more. Ariza just swallowed him up.

Speaking of which, Pau Gasol(notes)?

You might be sick of me going on about it, but the way this man was able to move his feet, I swear, it was downright Rodman-ian at times. I don’t toss that out there lightly. He had help, especially from slap-happy Laker guards and Lamar Odom(notes) on the baseline, but Pau deserves so, so much credit that I regret to assume he’ll never get for his work in this series. Just swallowed Dwight Howard up.

Kobe’s help defense was excellent. After years of me banging on about how I don’t believe he’s earned those all-NBA Defensive Team selections (I still don’t, because for the good of the Lakers, he takes defensive possessions off. Lots of them), this was continued proof (proof that I didn’t need, mind you) that Bryant is amongst the game’s best defensively when he has the ability to be.

And after a year spent working with Tim Grover, Bryant had that needed stamina. I talked with Grover after Game 5, and he wasted no time telling me that he thought the media reaction to Kobe’s supposed weary-legged ways was “hogwash,” mainly because Grover and Bryant had developed a system of stamina-building and rest that even went down to ways of conserving energy while others shoot free throws.

“Every second counts,” he told me. And while we were talking about little breaks in the action meant to refuel and reinvigorate, he may as well have been talking about Bryant’s overall approach to the game he’s obsessed with.

Kobe’s mannerisms may annoy the piss out of you. He might come off as transparent, or cloying, or obvious in his approach. It shouldn’t matter. The guy works hard. He obsesses over the game more than anyone in this league. And there’s a reason why, even if he isn’t as dominant a force as Jordan and Bird and Magic were, he still seems to put together just as many highlights as they did.

Not because he’s a publicity hound, desperate to make the cable recaps. Far from it. It’s because he knows the game well enough to work in this Laker offense and make the phenomenal look, well, phenomenal. Because he’s developed all the moves.

This isn’t to say he still isn’t worth shouting at. He does things in and out of that offense that leave stomping my feet with frustration, and I could give a rip who wins or loses. I’m not going to tell you that he’s earned the right to freelance as much as he does in that offense, because nobody should freelance in that offense, that much. Michael Jordan certainly didn’t, even when he wanted us to believe that he did.

What I can tell you is that the man deserves our respect. This paragraph used to be several paragraphs. It included several reasons why he deserves our respect. It could have grown into dozens of reasons why. I’m not going to bore you with them. I’m just going to demand that you appreciate a guy like Kobe Bryant, while he’s around.

This was more of a team victory than the coverage surrounding it will suggest. Bryant has a team that suits his talents, and I’m not trying to be obscure or contrarian when I suggest that Gasol’s defense was certainly on par with Kobe’s offense in this series, and that Bryant’s defense was about even with Gasol’s offense, making them both MVP candidates.

But if anyone deserves to be pushed forward, singularly, when four or five others deserve the spotlight as well, it’s Kobe. Because of that unending obsession, the one we all want our favorite players on our favorite teams to have.

And if Kobe’s your favorite player, on your favorite team? Congratulations. Because I don’t think this team is done, yet.

Bryant may be in his 30s, but there is absolutely no reason why he can’t have the security and the willingness to fade into the background a bit, as was the case with the man who drafted him, Jerry West. You know he’s smart enough to pull it off.

The 1971-72 Lakers set a then-NBA record for wins in a season with 69, and though West and Wilt Chamberlain were that team’s most enduring superstars, Jerry was second on the team in scoring, and Chamberlain was fourth. There’s no reason Kobe can’t take a step back, work as a facilitator, and remain his team’s most dangerous offensive contributor even if he does rack up the points or (and this is important) the assists. That’s up to Kobe, ever mindful of his place in history, to be secure enough to assume that we’d understand.

It’s also up to us to understand. To see why scaring people on the weak side offensively can be just as potent as nailing a 17-footer in Courtney Lee’s face. Hell, if we were good enough to appreciate Jackie Robinson scaring the wits out of the pitcher as he moved up and down the third base line, why can’t we admire the same from basketball players?

That’s in the future, we hope. For now, I guess I have to come back, and throw another bon mot Los Angeles’ way as the season ends. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I remember wrapping up a season-ending BtB for the last game of the 1999-00 season, giddy with potential, looking forward to a possible Laker dynasty even after a wearying season such as the one we just worked through. “See you next year,” I wrote. It’s what I ended the post with.

Of course, the site I wrote for didn’t make it ‘til the next season. And the site I wrote for after that didn’t make it to the Finals the next year. And the site I wrote for after that wasn’t really interested in detailing the game action. And on it went, for years.

And last year? Boy, I had fun. And I loved those Boston Celtics. But you never got a chance that they were in it for much more than 2008, and possibly 2009. Turns out, the former was right.

These Lakers? They look set to dominate. And that, to me, is never a bad thing when the basketball is good. And with these Lakers, the basketball is so, so good.

I don’t care that this franchise always seems to be in the Finals. I don’t care that we’ve seen these faces before. I don’t care if we know, by Christmas, who’s going to win it all.

I care about great basketball. And outside of my family and friends and the readers that dare pull me up every morning, it’s always been what I care about the most.

The Los Angeles Lakers are giving us great basketball. Time and time again, on both sides. And whatever happens from here on out, whatever form they take, whatever fork they choose, I’ll always appreciate what they gave me, us, this season.

See you next year. I mean it, this time.

———-

The fact is …

Nobody in the business today does THIS better than KD.

———-

PS. KD, the only quibble is a minor one … with the 1st sentence in this specific excerpt. IMO, there was [at least] one other person with an even higher level of expectation than you had for this version of the Lakers. i.e. This is a special team. Keep On Truck’n

In the early 1970′s, the fact is, ‘Mr. Clutch’ was the first favourite NBA player of this corner …

——————————————-

Jerry West still is a reluctant sports hero
West can best be described as one of the most conflicted legendary sports heroes of our time. He is a man who has had a lifetime of success in nearly all facets and has never been comfortable with that.

Part of that might hark back to the third nickname, the one he likes the least: “Zeke from Cabin Creek.” That was placed on him by other players from bigger cities when he arrived in the NBA in 1960, the second pick of the draft and perhaps a comparative hick. He had been an All-American at West Virginia, and nobody questioned his basketball credentials. Nobody but him, that is.

“I didn’t think I was good enough to play in the pros,” he said back then.

As the second-youngest of six children growing up in the relative poverty of Cheylan, W.Va., and learning his basketball craft mostly alone on muddy outdoor courts with cheap hoops, West couldn’t have been less prepared for something like Los Angeles.

“Cabin Creek was about a mile away,” he said, elaborating with a snapshot of life in the ’50s in a coal mining state. “That’s where we got our mail. I’d run there and back. Maybe that’s why I was in such good shape to play basketball. I remember running past Wade’s Pool Hall on a Saturday morning. You could tell how wild a time the coal miners had had the night before by how many of the windows were broken out.”

——————————————-

While time and increased maturity have succeeded in developing an increased appreciation for the outstanding accomplishments and contributions to the game of terrific players like, e.g. The Great Bill Russell, the ‘Big O’, Kareem, Dr. J, the ‘Moutain Man’, Magic & Bird [because they will forever be linked together], Isiah, MJ, Hakeem, Duncan, etc., it can never overshadow what it meant to these young eyes, late at night, watching on a grainy black & white TV a certain player, wearing #44, who just kept hitting big shot after big shot, in an effort to help his team win a rather silly game, played the Right Way, in short pants with a round ball and an elevated basket.

Although time marches on … you can never ever replace THAT.

My friends, it simply doesn’t get any better than this …

———————————–

Conversation: Bill Russell and Jerry West catch up
The NBA season is here! What better way to tip it off than with some insights from Hall of Famers Bill Russell and Jerry West?

They were happy to let us listen in as they reflected on their Celtics-Lakers rivalry, the offseason preparation needed to excel for 82 games, and what they are looking forward to most this NBA season. Here’s the conversation. Enjoy… we sure did.

Jerry West: Hello, Bill.

Bill Russell: Jerry, is that you?

Jerry West: Yes, it is.

Bill Russell: Now, Jerry, Cabin Creek, is that the place you’re from?

Jerry West: Yes, it is, Bill and I’m going to take you there before too long.

Bill Russell: Ok, let’s go. [cackles]

Jerry West: Bill, the NBA season is about to tip off, what are you most looking forward to?

Bill Russell: The Celtics and the Lakers. Both teams will have to improve to get back to the Finals. If you show up saying we’re the Lakers and the Celtics, you’ll get your hat brought to you. You lose some games and you say those are upsets. They will not be upsets.

For example, when Red [Auerbach] didn’t draft [Bob] Cousy, he drafted a guy named Charlie Share because George Mikan was the dominant player in the league and Share had the size and ability to compete with George. Red’s theory was: To be competitive you have to be competitive with the best teams.

All the teams are figuring a way to beat the Celtics and the Lakers. There were a lot of personnel changes [with both teams], not necessarily star players, but players that become part of their rotation. So I would give both teams a heads up that to get back to the Finals, you’re going to have to be better than last year.

———————————–

Mandatory reading for all!

Which one of these two player rosters would you prefer to have, going forward from this point, if you were Jerry West and you were the GM for the Toronto Raptors?

[please read the question carefully]

—————————-

—————————-

1. Make a choice between A or B.
2. Provide your rationale, if possible.