SH Blog: Joerger possibly leaving Grizzlies for Minnesota; did Dick Parsons really play college hoops?

Scandal, scandal everywhere.

If it’s not Donald Sterling, it’s Mark Jackson feuding with the Warriors’ front office. Or maybe it’s the Grizzlies’ management structure suddenly collapsing. It seems everywhere you turn, you get smacked with another piece of dirty laundry. And if you just want to watch the games? Get ready for controversy after controversy over flops, out-of-bounds calls, arguments between teammates. Anything people can complain about, they will.

With all that – combined with louder than usual cries of fixing at the lottery – it would be understandable to get a bit jaded. But there’s plenty to be excited about as well: We’re going to get a marquee Finals matchup for sure, with the league’s four best teams still standing. The NBA is so confident in its case against Sterling that it is basically telling everyone who will listen that it has got him dead to rights (and I am nothing even close to a lawyer, but it certainly seems like it does). And any front office turmoil will be forgotten as soon as the ball tips this fall, if it even takes that long. The Warriors certainly rebounded well enough from the Jackson fiasco, what with snatching Steve Kerr away from Phil Jackson and all.

That doesn’t make stories like this one any nicer, though.

Did the Clippers’ new CEO really play college basketball?

Dick Parsons has had, as they say, a long and distinguished career. A one-time aide to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and a former chair of organizations ranging from Time Warner to Citigroup to the Jazz Foundation of America, he’s if anything overly qualified for his current role as CEO of the Los Angeles Clippers.

It wasn’t just his aptitude for the cutthroat politics of various boards that made him a good fit for the job, though. At his introductory news conference, he talked about his days playing college basketball, and the NBA’s press release on his hiring mentioned his time at the University of Hawaii, “where he played basketball.”

This detail suggests that he’s more than a connected suit serving as a front for the league, that the 6-foot-4 Parsons brings an intimate knowledge of the game to his new role. It’s just the sort of thing the press loves.

The New York Post, for example made sure to mention it: “He attended the University of Hawaii, where he played varsity basketball.”

So didSports Illustrated: “He also played basketball for the University of Hawaii before earning his law degree from Albany Law School in 1971.”

Even the Antara News found Parsons’s playing days worthy of a mention: “Parsons, yang pernah bermain bola basket untuk Universitas Hawaii, mengaku penggemar berat NBA yang marah terhadap kata-kata Sterling.”

Here’s a far more interesting tidbit: Parsons didn’t play varsity basketball at Hawaii.

There’s absolutely no record of Parsons playing for any sort of varsity team representing the school—not under the name Richard Parsons, or Dick Parsons, or anything Parsons. You won’t find his name on a University of Hawaii basketball roster, or his face in a team photo. Hawaii athletic officials can’t come up with anything that says he really played for the school.

“Unfortunately we do not have statistics on Dick Parsons,” says Neal Iwamoto, sports information director for Hawaii’s men’s basketball program.

It’s not just that Parsons doesn’t show up in box scores, photos, rosters, or news stories from 1964 to 1968, the years he says he was at the school. The guys who do show up don’t remember ever playing alongside any Dick or Richard Parsons.

“There was nobody on the team with that name,” says Harvey Harmon. A three-year letterman at Hawaii in the mid-’60s, he was captain of the varsity squad during his senior year of ’67-’68, the same year Parsons says was his senior year at the school.

Now for the rest of the news from the NBA:

Kicking things off, we’ve got Dave Joerger potentially leaving the Grizzlies after just one year to go coach the Timberwolves.

First, let’s go to ESPN.com’s Marc Stein:

The Minnesota Timberwolves have made “significant progress” in their attempt to hire Dave Joerger away from the Memphis Grizzlies to be their new coach, according to sources close to the process.

Sources told ESPN.com that although compensation details with the Grizzlies have to be worked out, Minnesota’s fast-moving bid to make Joerger its next coach is gathering momentum.

The Wolves are restricted to offering draft picks and/or cash to Memphis to free Joerger from his contract with the Grizzlies. But one source said Thursday that Joerger landing in his home state with the Wolves is “the way this thing is headed.”

Joerger met with Timberwolves president of basketball operations Flip Saunders on Thursday and is scheduled to meet with owner Glen Taylor at some point this weekend, a source told The Associated Press.

And for more on what’s up in the Grizzlies’ office, here’s Sean Deveney at The Sporting News (the piece is excellent and a highly-recommended clickthrough):

These are trying times for Grizzlies fans, undoubtedly. A year after the team let go of head coach Lionel Hollins, who had led the team to a franchise-record 56 wins and the team’s first appearance in the Western Conference finals, there is more upheaval, with Memphis owner Robert Pera ousting team CEO Jason Levien and his assistant, Stu Lash.

That put exiled general manager Chris Wallace — who confessed to Geoff Calkins of the Commercial Appeal that he had not been into the Grizzlies’ office in nearly a year — in charge on an interim basis. Worse, the successor to Hollins, Dave Joerger, has received permission to interview with the Timberwolves for their open job. Joerger was signed to a three-year contract just last summer, and led the Grizzlies to 50 wins this season.

But considering the way the organization has been run — the treatment of the Barones being an example — and that the team has now rid itself of Levien, whom one league source called “just a bad guy,” this week has actually been a good one for the franchise going forward.

Joerger isn’t the only one of last offseason’s first-time hires who could be switching jobs. Brian Shaw has been a longtime Phil Jackson acolyte and the New York Post’s Marc Berman wonders if he could be headed to New York now that Kerr is in the Bay Area.

Phil Jackson’s first preference in his post-Steve Kerr hunt isn’t Derek Fisher, but rather Brian Shaw, the Nuggets coach who keeps stating he is happy in Denver.

According to a source, Jackson, the Knicks president, prefers Shaw over Fisher, but the Nuggets would require the Knicks to pay compensation. That appears to be a bigger roadblock to getting Shaw out of his Denver contract than Shaw’s reluctance to come to New York. It’s unclear whether Jackson has formally asked the Nuggets for permission to speak to Shaw.

The source said Jackson hasn’t totally given up hope he somehow can pry Shaw from Denver, especially if the Fisher scenario falls through.

Interestingly, the Nuggets propped up Shaw on the dais of Tuesday’s NBA Draft Lottery. He finished his first season in Denver without a playoff berth amid some rumblings the players weren’t thrilled with him.

Another coaching vacancy yet to be filled is the Cavs’:

The Cleveland Cavaliers are aggressively mining the college ranks in their coaching search, league sources tell Yahoo Sports.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) May 21, 2014

That opening just got a lot more plumb with Cleveland winning the lottery, especially if they can wrangle that into a package that could tempt LeBron to come back home. Here’s Jason Lloyd of the Akron Beacon-Journal:

Whenever the idea of LeBron James returning to the Cavs this summer was broached during the NBA predraft camp last week, personnel from around the league met the topic with a mixture of snickers, laughs, eye rolls and direct denials.

“It’ll be a short conversation,” one agent said. “No thank you and have a nice day.”

One more stunning, unexpected turn of lottery magic has indeed ensured the Cavs of having many nice days between now and the June 26 draft. But it has also left them with a grueling decision, and it’s not simply choosing whom to take with the No. 1 pick.

Based on opinions from around the league, the Cavs’ odds of luring James back to Cleveland before Tuesday were probably smaller than the 1.7 percent chance they carried into the draft lottery. Today, however, everything has changed.

…. and Steve Kyler of Basketball Insiders:

The Cavaliers are open for business. They are open to trading the top overall pick, but they want a bona fide All-star in return. Minnesota big man Kevin Love has been linked to the Cavs and he is absolutely a player the Cavs would move the top pick to obtain. The Cavs would require Love to opt-in to the final contract year of his deal as part of a transaction. It’s unclear if Minnesota or Love are open to that kind of deal.

The Cavs were not expecting a pick this high in the draft and have started to work through the process including scheduling visits and workouts with the top five or six guys. Early reports peg the Cavs as having eyes for former Kansas stars Joel Embiid and Andrew Wiggins.

There is a ton of uncertainty surrounding Embiid and his back and the Cavaliers are eager to understand what’s real and what is gamesmanship by his agent. Should Embiid pass Cleveland’s  medical evaluation there is a real strong chance he could be the top overall pick. If there are doubts or conflicting opinions about Embiid’s back, the Cavs would turn to Wiggins.

Duke star Jabari Parker is not out of the mix in Cleveland, but according to sources is a little lower on the board than Wiggins and Embiid. A strong workout could swing things in his favor, but it’s believed that if Cleveland keeps the pick it’s down to Embiid and Wiggins at this stage of the process.