Every morning, we compile the links of the day and dump them here… highlighting the big story line. Because there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good morning dump.
Corey Crowder called Jae’s mother — the couple separated when Jae was 8 — and asked her to throw out all their junk food. He called Coach Robinson and asked him to make sure Jae stopped devouring chicken fingers before games.
Crowder had always spent summers with his father in Miami, but now he went there to train. As his peers competed in AAU tournaments, he was playing in men’s leagues where he was incessantly shoved and hacked.
“They did everything you could besides fight,” Crowder said.
The sessions toughened him, and as he began to lose weight, he also began to sprout. When he’d return to Villa Rica, other students would go to the gym just to see how he had transformed over the summer, how he was evolving into a sinewy 6-foot-6-inch guard that no one wanted to mess with.
Adam Himmelsbach with a great piece on Jae Crowder. The snippet above, more than anything else, explains how Jae Crowder ended up with his throw-back game–playing in loosely officiated old-man leagues instead of the AAU meat market.
The article also references a 1978 Oldsmobile Delta. Just so you know what one of those looks like:
Page 2: Travels with Bill
“I’ve got the Grateful Dead just blasting,” remembers Walton, who has attended more than 850 Dead shows. “I’m in the zone. The kids are in the back working on their homework, traffic is just gridlocked, and we’re not going to get to the game.”
So San Diego Bill beached the car in the middle of Storrow Drive.
“I said, ‘Boys, let’s go,’ and I give the keys to a complete stranger,” said Walton. “The boys are saying, ‘Dad, don’t give the car away, we’re never going to see it again.’ So the boys and I get out and walk. Celtics fans are yelling and screaming. We win the game and [the Garden parking attendant] says, ‘Bill, here’s your car.’ It was just awesome.”
Passing City Hall Plaza, he says he’d like to see the Bill Russell statue, but there’s no time.
He says as a kid he took Russell’s book, “Go Up For Glory,” out of the library and never returned it, to the chagrin of his mom, a librarian. He still has it at home, but he says he wrote the library a big check when he made the NBA.
Walton says he fell in love with the Celtics through the voice of Chick Hearn, the legendary Lakers announcer, on his tiny transistor radio.
“I had incredible visions of watching the C’s run up the court as one, the fast break always started by Bill Russell,’’ Walton raves. “It was his defense that started the offense.”
There is entirely too much awesome in that snippet above, which is just a small part of the Globe article.
If Chick only knew that he was instrumental in making one of the greatest college basketball players in history a Celtics fan…….
Page 3: Why the Celtics got hosed Wednesday night in a single easy to understand paragraph
The problem? The league only changed the tiebreaker procedures for a two-team tie in the standings. For multi-team ties (like Boston finished in last night) a division winner was and still is the top tiebreaker over head-to-head record for some reason. That caused the Celtics to get a tough draw last night in the final Eastern Conference standings.
As has been pointed out on multiple occasions, the Celtics essentially brought this on themselves by losing to Atlanta and Charlotte; however, it is also fair to ask why the league left the divisional tie-breaker in place for ties involving more than two teams. Collective head-to-head seems to be the best solution even when it involves an unequal number of games between tied teams.
Page 4: Hard work leads to more hard work
This matchup with the fourth-seeded Hawks is the worst of all worlds for the Green, who with a more hospitable draw could have dreamed of the Eastern Conference finals. Hard work didn’t pay off. It just led to a harder path.
Man. The Boston Globe killed it yesterday.
Gaspar with a column that is, at least in my opinion, a bit too pessimistic. Yeah, Boston matches up better against Charlotte and Miami–on paper. But Miami’s a team of tested vets. They weren’t going to be an easy out, Boston’s 3-0 regular season record notwithstanding. And Boston went 1-2 against Charlotte this season, just like they did against Atlanta, so I don’t know that Charlotte would be that much easier. [EDIT: Apparently I got my math wrong, and the C’s beat Charlotte twice, so possibly Charlotte would be an easier out, but they certainly wouldn’t be if the Celtics adopted that mindset].
Ultimately, winning games in the NBA is hard, and even harder in the playoffs. If Boston can’t win a series against Atlanta, then they probably would have struggled against Miami and Charlotte.
And since when is winning a first round series something that Celtics fans should be especially worried about? If the team’s not good enough to win a championship, it’s not good enough, period. Doesn’t really matter when they exit the playoffs.
Finally:
Get
off
my
lawn
“I think this has been an amazing day for sports fans, basketball fans in particular,” Bryant said as he wore his Lakers’ uniform about an hour after the game, not quite willing to take it off for the final time. “It’s been a great day with them setting such an unbelievable record — you think about that, 73 wins, that’s ridiculous. And then obviously what happened here tonight, it’s been a great night in basketball history.”
The retired Laker still flattering himself.
Me? I’ve had it with this greatest-of-all time crap. Kobe is a volume shooter who, over the course of his career managed to hit roughly the league averages for overall FG% and eFG%. If “greatest of all time” required nothing more than having a Nike-funded publicity machine and a willingness to take more shots than almost anyone in the history of basketball on this planet, then yes, Kobe is the greatest.
Me? I guess I set the standards just a little bit higher than that.
And enough people have celebrated Bryant’s 60 point night that I feel no obligation whatsoever to say anything about it. It has already been overpraised.
I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but let’s take a moment to remember–in the middle of all this hype–Bill Russell’s claim to be the greatest player in professional basketball.
(yes, yes, Russell himself disclaims such praise, and these things are not objective facts that can be verified, but still, with all this blather about greatests of all time…..)
Let’s start off by looking at wins. Because they haven’t come up with a more meaningful stat for team sports.
Bill Russell won 14 championships in 15 years–two NCAA titles, one Olympic medal and 11 NBA titles. As Chris Paul said, ‘all he did was win.’
And I can already hear people saying, ‘but there were only 8 or 10 teams in the NBA back then’, as though it were easier to win in the NBA in the ’60s.
In 1966, Russell’s Celtics played Chamberlain’s Sixers fifteen times. You going to tell me that made it easier for Russell and the Celtics to win a championship?
Winning has always been hard.
You take Russell off of those Celtics teams of the sixties, and I’m not sure they could’ve even won a single championship. If you think that they would’ve been anything like they were with Russell, then you have no idea how important the center position was in the 60s, and in an era where that position was the most important one on the court, there was absolutely no question who played that position better than anyone else.
Russell was not a scorer; he didn’t have to be. He was the first guy in an assembly line that turned the other team’s offense into Boston points, whether by blocked shots, rebounds, or even outlets off of made baskets. Without Russell, there would be no “Celtics”. You can’t find one other player in the NBA who was that important to a franchise of Boston’s age–and Russell was that important to a team that won an unprecedented eleven titles in twelve years.
There is never going to be another player like Russell. Nobody’s going to call someone the ‘next Russell’; he is sui generis.
And that’s not a bad thing.
Russell played with a ferocity that wasn’t driven by imagined slights from high school coaches or by growing up in the mean streets of Rieti, Italy. Russell grew up in Oakland after his parents left Louisiana to avoid being lynched. And if you think that segregation was strictly a southern thing, then ask yourself how it comes about that every northern city of a certain size has a black neighborhood–and why that neighborhood is invariably dirt poor? If you think that racism and discrimination were strictly southern–then see if you can track down the guys who broke into Russell’s Boston home and defecated in his bed, if they’re still alive and feel like talking about it.
Russell lived and played in an environment of overt and unspoken discrimination that was intolerable to anyone with a sense of his own value, and he channeled that into an intensity on the basketball court that we will never see again. And yes, I’m including his airness in that statement. Russ didn’t come out of retirement to play for the Wizards.
Russell retired when he couldn’t summon the rage that had driven him for over a decade.
Think about it. This is a guy who retired because he wasn’t mad enough to play basketball anymore.
And yet, in all that, Russell never lost his humanity. If people remember anything about Bill apart from those titles, they remember his cackle.
So spare me the excess praise for a decent player turned into a myth by a company that profited handsomely off of that myth. Spare me the encomiums for a guy who spent the last nine months worried not about winning, or even making his teammates better, but filming his own farewell documentary.
Give me a guy who made his teammates better, and who with those teammates did something we’re never going to see again.
Mongoose out.
The rest of the links:
MassLive: Isaiah Thomas: Boston Celtics confident they can win a series, but need to win a game first | 2016 NBA Draft: Thon Maker cleared to skip college, enter NBA draft (report) (because hey, Boston’s got lotsa 2nd round picks)
CSNNE: Heinsohn offers playoff advice to Stevens | Heinsohn: C’s have ‘plenty of ammunition’ to win series
ESPN Boston: Numbers give Hawks edge over Celts
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