Welcome to the NBA All-Star bye week! Yes, even though it’s been a few days since the All-Star Weekend festivities, you will have noticed that there haven’t been any actual games. NBA commissioner Adam Silver reworked the schedule to give players a bit more time off this season, although he admits that this idea still needs some fine-tuning (see below). Because of this, NBA action won’t kick off again until after Thursday’s 3pm ET trade deadline. That hasn’t meant that there hasn’t been a lot of NBA news being made during this downtime.
Adam Silver isn’t done playing around with the schedule
Now some of you are asking yourselves, “Hey, didn’t the All-Star break used to be, um, a tad bit shorter?” Why yes, the NBA used to only take a long weekend off as recently as last season, but, in his second year as NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver decided to extend it to a full week to give players a bit more of a break.
Unfortunately, whatever good the extended time off will do for NBA players might be offset by the increased number of back-to-back games, or stretches featuring four games played in five nights, they will end up playing to make up for the longer bye week. This has not gone over well with players or the coaches given the task to keep them upright through the 82 game regular season.
During his state of the NBA talk on Saturday Silver acknowledged that this season’s schedule put too much strain on players: “We’ve talked to our partners at Turner and Disney about maybe opening up a little bit more flexibility on Thursday nights and Sunday. That will help with the scheduling … we’ve also talked to our teams and their arenas about creating more windows, more opportunities to schedule games. I think that it’s a give-and-take in terms of the other events in the building.
Silver said he sympathized with growing concerns that the current playoff structure is unbalanced, with making the Western Conference playoffs a much more difficult challenge than making the postseason in the Eastern Conference. Silver acknowledged that the current system isn’t fair, but he was unwilling to go so far as saying that the current conference system should be scrapped altogether.
“If there was a simple solution we would have made it long ago,” Silver said. “I understand the notion that we should have the absolute 16 best teams competing in the playoffs seemingly regardless of conferences and divisions. I am a believer, though, in the conference and the division system … Although I think there may be some tweaks.
Well, we probably shouldn’t have expected the NBA Commissioner to hop on the “Eastern Conference Must Die” bandwagon. Still, it’s nice to have someone leading the sport who seems at least open to changing things that clearly are no longer working.
Steph Curry pays tribute to slain fan
The most powerful moment of All-Star Weekend really wasn’t about basketball at all. Deah Shaddy Barakat, one of three individuals killed in a recent shooting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was a huge Steph Curry fan. He identified himself as an “Aspiring Splash Brother” on his Twitter account and even paid tribute to his favorite basketball player in his wedding pictures. The Golden State Warriors guard who learned of Barakat’s fandom after his tragic killing, decided to participate in Saturday’s Three Point-Contest wearing sneakers that honored his memory.
“Even though we never met,” Curry explained, “I think it will hopefully mean a lot to his family and friends that knew what kind of a basketball fan he was to have some kind of peace knowing that people are thinking about him and they’re not alone.”
Curry’s plan hit a brief snag when the sneakers he originally planned to wear were stolen, but he was able to get replacements in time for the Three-Point Contest. On the shoes he inscribed Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
.@StephenCurry30 honors the memory of Deah Shaddy Barakat, one of the Chapel Hill shooting victims & a huge GSW fan. pic.twitter.com/kiy9NUXzDS
— Golden St. Warriors (@warriors) February 15, 2015
It was these sneakers Curry was wearing when he made 13 straight attempts, a Three-Point Contest record, on his way to winning the event on Saturday night. Despite his skill at long-distance shooting, it was the first time Curry had won a contest that seemed almost custom-made to showcase his abilities. Maybe it helped that Curry wasn’t just participating to further his own legacy, but to honor the too-short life of one of his biggest fans.
Curry’s gesture was superficially similar to the decision of LeBron James and other NBA stars to wear “I Can’t Breathe” shirts to pay tribute to Eric Garner, who lost his life in what many believe to be an incident of police brutality, but it was very different in intent. Curry was not making any direct social or political commentary on Saturday night. This was more personal. It was just one man mourning someone he never knew but whose life he had nevertheless touched.
It was clear now that, in his passing, Barakat had touched Curry as well. A day after his triumph at the Three-Point Contest, his thoughts remained with Barakat’s family:
“I’m going to send them the shoes I wore yesterday. And hopefully they know that I’ve been thinking about them.”
Amar’e Stoudemire escapes from the Knicks
There was a time, believe it or not, when Amar’e Stoudemire was supposed to revive the New York Knicks. When the Knicks signed the Phoenix Suns big man to the five-year, $100m contract they bought him out of on Monday, it was supposed to be the start of a new era of New York basketball. Somehow, he almost lived up to the hype in that first year of the contract. During that time he set a franchise record by scoring 30 points or more for nine straight games and finished the 2010-11 season averaging 25.3 points and 8.2 rebounds. If it weren’t for Stoudemire, goes the official narrative, the Knicks probably never would have been successful in acquiring Carmelo Anthony from the Denver Nuggets and locking him up to a long-term deal.
Then came the second year, when the injury concerns which caused the Suns to pass on re-signing Stoudemire began to keep him off the court. In his four and a half seasons with New York, Stoudemire would end up missing over 100 games.
Worse, when he was healthy, the Knicks struggled in finding ways to effectively play both him and Anthony at the same time. The two never really meshed, which became a big reason why the Knicks only won one postseason series during Stoudemire’s tenure. His only memorable moment in the playoffs occurred when he picked a fight with a Madison Square Garden fire extinguisher. And lost.
These probably-should-have-been-foreseen circumstances transformed Stoudemire from a borderline MVP candidate into a prohibitively expensive millstone by the third year of the deal. As far as Knicks fans go, the main emotion associated with the news of his buyout was probably a sigh of relief.
Although his time with the team was rocky at best, Stoudemire has shown no ill will towards the city or his fans. He even wrote a poem to New York on his way out:
NY NY what a beautiful city
A place where you can hang out with Anna, JayZ & Diddy
Its a place absent of excuses and patience
If your smart, you can meet leaders of every nation
NY NY big city of dreams
Everything in NY isnt always what it seems
In the land where the jungle is concrete
The money flows Dow Jones and Wall Street
Home of #STATcity and the #KnickstapeOrginator,
Shalom to all my fans, Salute to all my haters.
Peace and Love
Amar’e Carsares Stoudemire Sr.
Stoudemire didn’t stay on the market for long. Shortly after he was bought out, the Dallas Mavericks agreed to sign him for the veteran’s minimum. The Mavericks hope that he will be a suitable replacement for reserve big man Brandan Wright, who they traded away in the deal to pick up Rajon Rondo from the Boston Celtics. It’s not the most glamorous task for the former All-Star but at this stage of his career, one imagines he’d rather be a supporting piece of a contending team in the Western Conference than to be a mostly forgotten man on the team with the worst record in the league.
Just don’t expect Stoudemire to pen any poetic odes to Dallas when his time there is up.
Sacramento Kings officially welcome George Karl
The Sacramento Kings made the George Karl deal official on Tuesday. The signing is a win for Sacramento if only because the team has landed its first choice as a head coach. Had the Kings failed to come to agreement with Karl it would have made the decision to fire Mike Malone look even more foolish than it did at the time. He was probably the best coach left on the market, and the idea that they would have sacrificed the relatively successful Malone only to end up with, say, Mark Jackson would have been a PR disaster.
No one is doubting that Karl is a great coach, but the main question mark for the Kings is how he will get along with DeMarcus Cousins, the newly minted All-Star who should be the franchise’s cornerstone player. While the Kings were still negotiating with Karl, Cousins responded with what sounded like, at best, a tepid endorsement.
Cousins has had four head coaches in his NBA career and has gotten along with exactly one of them (Malone, whom the team fired). It’s quite possible that the hiring of the headstrong Karl could be the beginning of the end for Cousins in Sacramento.
So, the Kings ownership may have mucked things up for good with their franchise player by unexpectedly firing the one coach who has been able to reach him. Meanwhile, under the overmatched Corbin, the Kings went 7-21 while playing absolutely putrid basketball while the organization has been negotiating with his obvious successor.
Whatever stability the Kings were seeking to establish by making the decision to cut ties with Malone early in the season has been lost in the weeks it’s taken to finalize their deal with Karl, who is coming into the organization too late to salvage anything. In short, Karl is inheriting an absolute mess of a situation.
Then again, in his last job, Karl won Coach of the Year honors during a season so tumultuous that the Nuggets fired him after he won the award. Clearly if any available head coach had any experience good on-the-court results despite clear organizational dysfunction, it’s him.
Other things we’ve learned
• The 2015 Basketball Hall of Fame nominees were announced on Saturday. They include Dikembe Mutombo, Kentucky head coach John Calipari, longtime referee Dick Bavetta, Boston Celtics legend Jo Jo White, Tim Hardaway, Spencer Haywood and former Phoenix Suns guard/current Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson.
Mutombo celebrated with one last high profile “block,” this one on a former US president:
Dikembe @officialmutombo – DOWN IN FRONT!! #NBAAllStarNYC pic.twitter.com/00YozsN0R8
— Bill Clinton (@billclinton) February 16, 2015
• New York Knicks owner James Dolan, to the surprise of probably no one, isn’t apologizing for that whole “writing back to an upset Knicks fan to call him an alcoholic” thing.
• Could Paul George be returning early from the horrific injury he suffered this summer just in time for an Indiana Pacers postseason push? Somehow: this is in play.
• Oh, and speaking of NBA owners behaving badly, it turns out that Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert once got Yahoo! Sports to take down a snarky post. Maybe he was just upset it wasn’t written in Comic Sans?
• LeBron James was elected as vice president of the NBA Players Union on Friday, yet another step in his plan to be Emperor of All Sports by 2030.
• Oh and Zach LaVine brought back the Dunk Contest on Saturday.
