No matter whom you like in the race for NBA Rookie of the Year, one thing is certain: Both Karl-Anthony Towns and Kristaps Porzingis will be watching the playoffs on TV. That’s no dig at either player. It is usually what happens to high draft picks during their first couple of seasons. You have to go back to Derrick Rose in 2008 to find a top overall pick who reached the playoffs in his rookie season. In fact, among the last 40
This is the time of the year for the earliest Mock Drafts, and I am subbing myself in for our regular guru, Joe Kotoch, who has been writing Mocks for this site for four years. Kotoch will be back … I am a one-and-done guy in this particular category. As I sat down to write this column, I was consumed with one thought: If you are in the business of finding great players and you want to stay employed, you
PHILADELPHIA – For nearly five decades, Jerry Colangelo has been pro basketball’s version of Annie Sullivan: a miracle worker. No, he never taught a blind and deaf Helen Keller how to “read.” But he did take over the expansion Phoenix Suns in the late 1960s and build them into a legitimate NBA power, twice winning the Western Conference and coming close to a championship with a team that was almost always respectable. That made him an institution in the Valley of the
NEW YORK – Some of the 2016 NBA draft’s top prospects were in town for the 2K and Legends Classics with executives drooling over their potential, including Philadelphia’s Sam Hinkie and Boston’s Danny Ainge. With Brooklyn holding the third-worst record in the league (3-12), Ainge should give Nets GM Billy King a Thanksgiving turkey for sending him Brooklyn’s unprotected first-round pick next summer as part of the 2013 trade for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. However, Hinkie – the man who puts
In the classic war movie Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando plays a decorated American colonel who has abandoned the war in Vietnam to set up his own dystopian military conclave in Cambodia that features random missions, animal sacrifices and human beheadings. Martin Sheen plays an American captain sent on a classified mission to assassinate the colonel. When Sheen arrives at the camp, he is asked if he believes the colonel’s methods are unsound. And Sheen replies, “I don’t see any method at all,
NEW YORK – Dragan Bender is the trending name amongst NBA general managers and executives after Maccabi Tel Aviv’s tour in Chicago and New York. At 17, the Croatian forward has the league drooling over his long-term potential and future lottery teams scheming for the ping-pong balls to select the 7-footer in next year’s draft. League executives and scouts from Denver, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Utah were on hand at Madison Square Garden to watch Bender. “Closest thing to Pau (Gasol)
Once again, to the dismay of GM Sam Hinkie and the rest of the folks running the Philadelphia 76ers,.the NBA will insist the franchise play all 82 games this season rather than just skip straight to the only part they seem to care about: the draft lottery. After all, no team has seemed to make less of what goes on between the lines from late October through mid-April than the team that has openly flaunted the rules, believing it is the