The Sacramento Kings have “excused Ron Artest from participating in team-related activities for an indefinite period” while things get sorted out over Artest’s arrest earlier this week. He’s still getting paid but he’s also under investigation for an incident where a woman called “911” from Artest’s home and claimed she was being assaulted. Police found what they called “visible trauma” and there were stories of her being slapped and held to the ground and etc. One report also said that someone banged a kitchen pot through the windshield of an SUV belonging to Artest on the premises.
First of all, we should all wait just a bit while the police procedures and the legal procedures move along until we draw final conclusions here. However, I want to point out that the Sacramento Kings have done something positive here by telling Artest to stay away from the team until more of the facts are known. Artest is unquestionably the best player on the Kings; and even though the team isn’t going anywhere this season, removing him from the team reduces them to a status one step above an expansion franchise.
The Kings are a team that needs reconstruction from the ground up. Mike Bibby is a quality player but he cannot carry a team very far on his own. Other than Bibby and Artest, there are players on the team with “potential” but you know how “potential” doesn’t always turn out to be “real ability”. What the Kings have to hope for here is that Artest emerges from this matter without more damage to his reputation to make him such a pariah around the league that they can’t trade him somewhere for a high draft pick and maybe another “player with potential”.
The rest of us shouldn’t hope that he is cleared or found guilty here; that’s a procedural matter. But I do wonder why it is such a difficult concept for men – athletes, celebrities and “ordinary Joes” – to grasp that it just isn’t right or proper to slap women around. This isn’t hard, gents; get with the program here.
It must have been a slow news-month in the financial sector because Forbes decided to publish an ordered list of the best GMs in sports; it was a long list – probably 100 people on it – but I never made it to the bottom. You’ll notice that I rarely do such things here because they are difficult to do and usually one winds up comparing apples and oranges in a meaningless way. When I heard that this article had been published, I figured it would be worth a few chuckles because of significant inversions on the list, but when I went there, I never got below #3 on the list. At that point I had to stop and think that I was in danger of being transported into a parallel universe – or at the very least that a white rabbit would hop through Curmudgeon Central looking at his watch and declaring that he was late for a very important date.
Atop the list was Kevin McHale as the single best General Manager in sports according to Forbes. That is stunning and shocking. McHale has been in his job at least 10 years and the Timberwolves have yet to win anything; they haven’t even been conference champions. AND Kevin McHale spent a year on suspension by the NBA because of his involvement in a phony contract deal done with Joe Smith to circumvent the NBA salary cap restrictions. Don’t give me that nonsense about if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’. He put himself, his owner, and his team in a bind – the team lost 4 first-round picks over this matter although the league eventually commuted the sentence to 3 lost picks – over a sneaky deal to acquire Joe “Are You Kiddin’ Me” Smith! That should give you some kind of clue that McHale is not an infallible judge of basketball talent and prowess.
That was bad enough but when I saw Billy King’s name on the list at #3 I began to wonder about the sobriety of the folks at Forbes and couldn’t decide if this was an example of a financial magazine stepping way out of its realm of expertise or if this was a warning not to use Forbes as a source of information regarding anything at all – even matters financial. I’m sure Billy King is a nice man; I’m equally sure that his stewardship of the Philadelphia 76ers has not been one full of glory and championships while simultaneously void of controversy and embarrassments. I never got past his name and that ranking…
Since I mentioned the Timberwolves and Kevin McHale above, he fired Dwane Casey as the Wolves’ coach earlier this season. At the time, the team record was 20-20; that’s hardly outstanding. This morning, the Timberwolves are 27-33; they are 14 games behind in their division; they are 11th in the Western Conference. I don’t know if they’d be all that much better had Dwane Casey finished out the year, but it is fair to say that the early results from that strategic personnel decision from the Wolves’ front office hasn’t exactly panned out yet.
The NBA All-Star Game in Las Vegas generated a lot of headlines. I read in a report in one of the Las Vegas papers that it also generated more than $80M in revenue for the city. And at the height of the criticisms of the experiences in Las Vegas, Billy Hunter said that it would be bad for the NBA to take the All-Star game to New Orleans next year. He even threatened to sue the league over that before back-pedaling quickly from that position. Then Tracy McGrady said he might not go to New Orleans to play in the game because he did not think that there would be sufficient security in town for the event. And these two guys got excoriated in the national press because it just isn’t nice to say anything negative about New Orleans in the post-Katrina era. Hogwash!
I said before that New Orleans has all of the elements that invite “people of the thuggish persuasion”; if there can be two NBA franchises in New Orleans, why can’t there be one in Las Vegas? New Orleans is “crime-ridden” today if the national media is to be believed; truth be told, New Orleans was “crime-ridden” before Hurricane Katrina was a tropical depression. If Hunter and McGrady think the All-Star Game should not be there, their opinion should be heard and evaluated for what the opinion is and not in light of some emotional construct related to the downtrodden city of New Orleans. If Tracy McGrady doesn’t feel safe there, he should be applauded for being smart and staying home. He did that when the security at the Athens Olympics was thought to be “less than air tight”.
Suppose for just a moment that Tracy McGrady said the following:
“I am not going to go out to a strip club at 3:00 AM because I do not think it is safe and I am not comfortable with the level of security that would be provided there given the kind of people who are likely to be there. I’m going to choose to stay at home and chill out and watch some TV.”
Tracy McGrady would be lauded for that statement; we know that “strip clubs” plus “athletes” plus “3:00 AM” is a volatile mix; we’d say he was smart to see the potential for trouble and to remove himself from that coordinate in the space-time continuum. Now substitute “New Orleans” for “strip club” and substitute “NBA All-Star Weekend” for “3:00 AM”. So, why didn’t anyone think that Tracy McGrady was a genius?
Finally, since everything today has been NBA-related here is something from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:
“Snippet from a Q&A with Suns coach Mike D’Antoni in the East Valley Tribune [Mesa, Ariz.]:
Q: What’s your handicap in golf?
A: Talent.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…