Monday was a rare off night for the entire NBA, with the spotlight placed exclusively on the NCAA’s title game in Houston between North Carolina and Villanova. [Read more…]
Of all the superlatives that have been used to describe Stephen Curry this season, the best may have come from Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, who in late December compared Curry to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. “They changed our everyday life,” Carlisle said. “Steph Curry is changing the way our game will be played in the future.” Two months later, Carlisle had proof when Mark Cuban, his boss, said it is time to begin considering change. “It’s not long before the discussion
I’ve learned a ton of things in over 25 years in the game, studying players at every level. First when it comes to projecting a player’s ability and potential and how he will translate to the next level, it’s never an exact science. That’s probably the biggest challenge of all when it comes to evaluating talent. Nowadays, there are many high-tech methods to track a player’s every move. Along with the current analytics movement, there are also countless player workout and
Larry Brown was like your grandfather. Or at least, that’s how everyone around college basketball described him. He was an unchallenged legend, revered as one of the game’s great teachers, a man who could parachute in to an irrelevant program in a borderline-irrelevant conference and turn it into a budding basketball hotbed. He was old (75), small, gentle and soft-spoken. He wore little circle glasses, paced around nervously and looked and acted like an English Lit professor. He talked constantly about teaching kids, teaching
Editor’s Note: Whether coaching or forecasting, Bobby Gonzalez knows college basketball. He went 8-0 picking games in the Sweet Sixteen a year ago, 7-1 in that round this year and 3-1 in last weekend’s regional finals. This is not some Bozo. It’s Gonzo. He knows what he’s talking about. It was 1991 and I was standing in the crowd at the Final Four as a New York City high school coach, watching All-American Larry Johnson of the dominant, unbeaten UNLV team
With the NCAA Tourament upon us, it seems like as good a time as any to remind everyone that there is a canyon between coaching in college and coaching in the NBA. There is more than a generation of evidence which clearly illustrates that any NBA team hiring a head coach directly from college is making a huge mistake. P.J. Carlesimo. Tim Floyd. Leonard Hamilton. Lon Kruger. Mike Montgomery. Jerry Tarkanian. Rick Pitino, who failed twice. Even John Calipari, who is
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