There are few things that indicate futility more than when a coach loses the connection with his team. When that happens there is nothing to fix, nothing to do, nowhere to turn. It is over. The wonder of team sports is the coming together of a group of people willing to put personal agendas aside for the common goal of winning. When that happens you truly get a whole bigger than the sum of the parts, and magic happens. When people
During Friday’s 104-82 loss to the Utah Jazz, the Denver Nuggets had an interesting huddle. According to the Denver Post, Nuggets players broke a fourth-quarter huddle with the chant, “1 … 2 … 3 … six weeks!” As in six weeks to the end of the season. Yes, the Nuggets have given up on the season, as coach Brian Shaw sensed a month ago. And now Shaw and assistant Lester Connor have been fired. The Nuggets are 20-39, 13th and falling fast in the
The NBA lost one its pioneers with the death of Earl Lloyd. As a former teammate of my dad, Dolph Schayes, I had the pleasure of speaking with Earl on many occasions. He was a man of tremendous grace who seemed timeless. A quiet man never without a smile, Earl was a tremendous presence in any company. Earlier this year I said goodbye to another pioneer that I’ve known forever. In the 1980s my Denver Nugget teammate Kiki Vandeweghe and I were
It is pretty unusual for a team in the playoff picture to make wholesale changes at the trade deadline. While it is common to add a piece or two, trading featured stars or half the roster is not common for teams in the hunt. This season it was surprising that so many impactful trades were made at the trade deadline, the busiest one in NBA history. With Phoenix and Oklahoma City fighting for the last playoff spot, team instability is something
The NBA has again taken a monumental step forward in its business. In 2016 the league will enter into a new television contract that will more than double in size from the previous one. And since the TV revenue is the largest component of revenue that is counted as the total pot shared with the players (Basketball Related Income, or BRI) the effect on the salary cap is obvious. It’s going up. Up is actually an understatement. The cap will be going
I started on this mission to dig into One and Done with two main goals in mind. The first was to shed light on the issues in a fact-based way, free from rhetoric and bias. For years the entire policy has been discussed in a way that obscures the facts, not clarifies them. The second is to have the policy viewed as more than an argument over what age to draw the line restricting players from entering the league. While I
Are NBA players likely to be better if they stay in college longer? Do NBA executives know the difference between a stud and a dud based on how long the player stays in school? There is anecdotal data everywhere, from Kobe Bryant to Korleone Young. But former NBA player and current SheridanHoops columnist Danny Schayes works for Intensity Corporation, a firm that did its own exhaustive study on early entry candidates for the NBA draft. Schayes has written a three-part series explaining the
I get pretty tired of all of the complaining about One and Done. It’s time to do something about it. The current rule is a prime example of what happens when two sides are negotiating several major issues simultaneously and a point that deserves a fully thought-out plan becomes something to compromise over. A rule gets made that doesn’t address the actual issues very well, causing distress on all sides. So what’s the plan? How does one actually come up with a