For the longest time, the only basketball I watched was college basketball. Growing up in Baltimore, there was no real “home” team in the NBA. The closest was the Wizards, and I could never really get behind a DC team like a Baltimore team. But the University of Maryland fit like a glove. They were good, they were fun to watch, and best of all, they were my home team. I even ended up going to the same high school as Juan Dixon. Eventually, I grew to appreciate the NBA, but the Maryland Terrapins are still the basketball team I root hardest for.
Last year, when the Wizards were just awful and everyone wanted to fire Randy Wittman, longtime Terps coach Gary Williams’ name came up as a replacement. The consensus was that while Gary could thrive in an environment where he didn’t have to play ball with AAU programs and the youth basketball establishment, his refusal to do which was his greatest weakness in his last days at Maryland, he would never even be considered because NBA teams don’t look for college coaches any more.
Then this offseason, the Celtics pretty promptly hired Brad Stevens. Of course, there are plenty of things that make Stevens a better NBA coaching candidate than Williams, but it still makes me wonder what might have happened if Gary had gone to the NBA, say, sometime after winning the 2002 National Championship at Maryland.
Let’s kick off our roundup of the latest NBA news with something on Brad Stevens, then:
Terrence Payne of NBC Sports’ ProBasketballTalk lets us know what Rick Pitino thinks of the Celtics’ hire of Brad Stevens: “Despite the lack of success from coaches in the past, Pitino believes that Stevens will be able to make the transition as the head coach of Celtics. “It’s all about your personality,” Pitino said during the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame press conference on Saturday afternoon. “Brad Stevens is a perfect fit, perfect, couldn’t be more of a perfect fit to go from college to the pros. He runs pro offense. He runs a pro defense.” Pitino left his post at Providence College for the Knicks opening in 1987. But even before he became the head coach at PC, he was an assistant under Hubie Brown in New York. Serving as an NBA assistant coach was considered a prerequisite to being an NBA head coach in Pitino’s mind. Although, he sees Stevens as an exception to that rule. “I spent two years with Hubie Brown as an assistant, that prepared me,” Pitino said. “It’s so foreign. It’s such a foreign game, the pros to college. That is an adjustment that’s difficult to make unless you’ve been there. Brad is one of the few people I think can do it. I think Coach K can do it because of his Olympic experience. But it’s very difficult to do unless you have experience as an assistant.” “- Some minor notes on the Heat’s roster, including one familiar name, via Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald: “Center Justin Hamilton, the Heat’s second-round pick in 2012, will sign with Miami in the coming days and attend training camp, his agent J.R. Hensley told us. Hamilton, who played in Croatia and Latvia last season, did not participate in the Orlando or Las Vegas summer leagues because of a hamstring injury. He has been working out at AmericanAirlines Arena in recent weeks and said he was cleared today for contact work. The Heat would lose Hamilton’s rights if it releases him. If he had returned to Europe this season without attending camp, the Heat would have kept his rights. The Heat has 13 players signed to guaranteed contracts, and Hamilton, Jarvis Varnado and undrafted forward Eric Griffin have non-guaranteed deals. Also, undrafted rookie point guard Larry Drew Jr., from UCLA, will audition for the Heat over several days this coming week. Drew, who averaged 7.5 points and 7.3 assists for the Bruins last season, was originally supposed to play on Miami’s summer league team but could not because of a quad injury.”
- Mark Cuban explained why he refuses to trade Dirk Nowitzki on a radio show recently. Here’s what he said, reprinted by the Dallas Morning News: “Dirk defines our culture. When your best player, no matter how old, is the first one in the gym and the last to leave, and works the hardest and encourages guys the way Dirk does … that has a value that goes far beyond what you see on the court.”
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Former Pacer Sam Young is in San Antonio meeting with the Spurs today, his agent tells me. Several other clubs have expressed interest.
— Chris Goff (@PacersScribe) September 4, 2013
Mark Deeks of SBNation explains why the Sixers not meeting the minimum salary has been overblown a bit: “Philly’s tanking strategy is hugely unsubtle and a tad unsavory, but entirely logical. Knowing they hadn’t enough talent or incumbent potential to become a contender in time soon — particularly in light of the absolutely staggeringly, debilitatingly unsuccessful trade for Andrew Bynum — they decided, as best as possible, to stop acquiring any. They traded away their best player for someone who can’t take the court, haven’t signed a single free agent and, given that one of the few rumored free agent candidates they’ve been linked to was Chris Duhon, should probably continue to not bother signing any. It’s an emphatic tank job, and yet, tough as those can be to reconcile with a fan base, it seems worth it here. All this inaction has left them at $40,013,749 in committed salaries to 11 players, which will rise to $45,386,989 when Nerlens Noel and Michael Carter-Williams sign. (They haven’t yet done so.) For the first time this season, the minimum team salary will be 90 percent of the salary cap, equal to $52,811,100 to a $58,679,000 cap. The Sixers, then, are almost $7.5 million short of the threshold, and there’s no one left on the market to spend even nearly that amount on. This doesn’t matter. The ‘punishment’ for missing the minimum salary threshold is merely that you get charged up to the amount of it anyway. That’s it. The excess is divided up amongst the players on the roster at a percentage determined by the NBA Player’s Association, and that’s all that happens. That’s not a punishment at all. That’s not even really a penalty.”
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Dan Malone is in his fourth year as a journalism student at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and spent this summer as a features intern at the Cape Cod Times. He blogs, edits and learns things on the fly for Sheridan Hoops. Follow him on Twitter.