New teammate for Wiggy
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I read both and I still believe Cleveland should hold on to Wiggins. Superstars have not always gotten a Championship (Barkley, Ewing, Malone); however, regardless of the supporting cast they usually made the playoffs; in six seasons The Timber Wolfs have missed the playoffs every year. Here is an article that nicely outlines the situation:
I am not convinced on well the LeBron-Love combination would work. Kevin Love is commonly referred as a “stats stuffer” more interested in padding his personal statistics than advancing the cause of the team; also, his defense is sub-par and offers no rim protection like other comparable players do. Of course, it worked OK in Minnesota where he was the alpha dog, but in Cleveland with LeBron and Irving, two renown ball hogs, i am not sure if there are enough plays to satisfy all three.
As I said before, Cleveland has a long history of making bad decisions and this is a s big a decision as they come.
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@jaybate 1.0
Embiid signed with Adidas. The conspiracy continues…
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@icthawkfan316 Since Cavs have not signed Wiggins yet, what would happen if, say, Wiggins’ agent got him a decent contract overseas for a year? Would T’wolves make the deal? If so, for how long would they hold the rights to Wiggins? With no contract, could Wiggins make some money this year in Europe and get re-drafted next year?
Having signed with adidas, would he even be able to sign with a Euroleague team?
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@EdwordL These are good questions that I don’t have the answers to. I’m not sure how long Cleveland would retain Wiggins’ rights should he go overseas, and if Wiggins contract with Adidas is contingent on him playing in the states.
It would also be pretty unprecedented for a North American player to bypass the NBA as a rookie for a gig overseas. Not sure how viable that really is, but it would be interesting if nothing else.
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@JayHawkFanToo Thanks for the link. Good read.
Yeah I’ve been saying for quite awhile (see six days ago on this very thread in a response to HEM) that Love hasn’t made the playoffs and that he is a stat stuffer, so you don’t have to sell me on those points.
As I said on another thread, I think the best course of action is to let this play out a bit. See how LeBron AND Wiggins mesh with the team. If after 30 games or so it is apparent that the one thing missing is a guy like Love, then you make the trade. It’s all about winning that elusive championship, so if that’s what needs to be done…so be it. But at least take the time to find out what you have with this team before shaking it up again.
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I posted just about the exact same thing in a different thread. I don’t believe it would be an issue with Adidas. they rule Europe in soccer and signing Wiggins to play BBAll there would be the greatest coup ever; it would be the equivalent of having the best European soccer prospect come to play in the MSL. It most certainly would throw a monkey wrench in the Cavs plans.
At this point the process is like a chess match where teams need to look not just at the next move a but a few moves ahead. having a good agent is crucial and can make all the difference; helpfully Wiggins has a chess-master of an agent…
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@JayHawkFanToo I’ve said before the only NBA I watch are teams of Jhawks and the playoffs. If many think Lebron would be a great mentor to Wigs, what if your theories are true that he doesn’t want wigs there, for whatever reason? Does he treat Wigs(19) worse than he did Mario? Since Lebron is running the show, could he make wigs life miserable?
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@Crimsonorblue22 I’m with you on watching only teams with Jayhawks on the roster - and honestly, I rarely watch more than a couple of minutes then. I just don’t like the pro game.
It makes no difference to me WHERE Wiggins winds up - I’ll watch two or three minutes of those games and then move on to Survivorman or something.
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I am not sure how that would work out. Mario was a lot more outspoken where Andrew is the quiet type. On the other hand, Mario was a second round pick with a small contract, limited potential and no leverage, who in many ways has overachieved ; Andrew on the other hand is the top pick with a huge upside and a lot of leverage.
As I said before, LeBron’s move to Cleveland was a calculated business decision that he spun into a favorable publicity stunt in an effort to improve public perception. He might be the best active player and one of the more popular players as well but he is also one of the more disliked players.
On a similar note, looks like the Warriors are willing to trade Klay Thompson…go figure…
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@JayHawkFanToo Xavier back to the Lakers on a one year minimum contract, per ESPN’s “league sources”.
Good job btw, previously running down all the locations of the former 'hawks.
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Gooden resigned, not sure if we posted that yet.
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Good news. I think that is all the Jayhawks in the League. Still waiting to see if Tyshawn, Tarik, Josh and Elijah are able to hook up with a team. Tarik has been playing well in Vegas with the Houston team; maybe not well enough to grab a roster spot, but maybe a pace in the Development League. EJ is in the 76ers roster but has yet to play, definitely a long shot. Tyshawn still pretty busy on Twitter (he should really,really stop) and I believe he is now in Lawrence; maybe Coach Self’s connections can get him an audition somewhere.
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http://m.imgur.com/gallery/7YNvvBF
Really cool pic of wilt
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He was one skinny dude back then. The caption says running high school track in 1962. Will was at KU from 1955 to 1958, so I will guess that maybe it should be 1952? Also, it does not look like much of track, maybe a park? I like the shoes, Chuck Taylor or PRO-Keds?
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@JayHawkFanToo did wilt have many injuries in his career? Just thinking of all the sports he did.
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As far as I know, while at KU, in addition to basketball he competed in track and field events including high jump, cross country. and long jump in which he was conference champion. He claims he only lost 1 time in the high jump to the current Olympic champion; he also claimed to have never been beaten in the shot put, including beating KU legend Al Oerter, whose specialty was the discus.
Once he left KU, he only played basketball. After retirement he took up volleyball and by some account he was every bit as good as he was in basketball. Considering his long career, how many minutes he logged and how physical the game was back then, he was remarkably injury free. One knee injury (?) sidelined him for a few months but that is the only significant injury that comes to mind.
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@JayHawkFanToo amazing and look what kind of shoes he ran in. Also pretty sure he ran on some pretty hard surfaces. Makes me wonder?
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You are right. I believe we are only beginning to realize and appreciate now, how great of an athlete he really was.
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Curious why you use the C-word with Embiid signing with adidas?
Using the C-word implies to me something nefarious or illegal.
There seems to me no illegal conspiracy with the activities of the Petro-ShoeCos.
Everything they appear to be doing that I can recall remote observation of through media appears to be legal.
It appears one of the things that may be making it hard for board rats to analyze meaningfully the evolving role of the Petro-ShoeCos in hoops and in sports generally is an apparent tendency to assume the Petro-ShoeCos evolving role as suggestive of operating improperly or illegally.
Use of the C-word appears to suggest something illegal could be happening and this IMHO discourages constructive strategic and tactical analysis about the role Petro-ShoeCos may actually be evolving toward.
I operate from the assumption the Petro-ShoeCos have good legal counsel and do nothing in this regard intentionally illegal, including not conspiring illegally.
Instead I hypothesize the Petro-ShoeCos as a large, significantly influential player in college and pro basketball industries with an evolving role; this appears to be where I differ from some. Some appear to believe that if the Petro-ShoeCos were to play an increasingly influential role in sports industries that it must necessarily be a somehow an illegal conspiratorial role. I believe this is an assumption that makes it very difficult for board rats to think clearly and objectively about the probable actual evolving role Petro-ShoeCos are playing in re-shaping the sports industry.
Looking for conspiracies is often a way to mistake the forest for the trees IMHO.
Plus I vaguely recall reading somewhere or other that military-intel propagandists and psychological operations specialists were at one time actually schooled to use the C-word as a means of redirecting mass media focus, hijacking thread discourse and smearing messengers in public discourse. The frequent apparent assumption and use of the C-word appears perhaps to have significantly “trickled down” into common usage–if so an unfortunate consequence.
So I always like to make clear I so far see no illegal conspiracy in what appears to be a significantly evolving role of Petro-ShoeCos in the college basketball industry.
I approach the role of large private donors similarly. They appear to have a significantly evolving role in re-shaping parts of the college basketball industry. But it appears they have able legal counsel and appear so far not to be involved in any illegal donative activities like illegal conspiracies.
Starting from this assumption frees one to analyze and hypothesize about what they appear to be doing, rather than starting from an assumption they are doing something wrong and/or illegally conspiring.
Starting from the illegal C-word appears to direct us into asking the wrong questions.
And as Thomas Pynchon reputedly said, “if they get us to ask the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
Rock Chalk!!
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@jaybate 1.0
With an open mind, I agree with your post. It seems like the ShoeCos risk too much by participating in anything illegal or of a conspiracy fashion. On the surface, it appears that they obtain their power by “buying in” (literally and figuratively), throwing countless millions into the air just to see where they drop.
However… I do think many people (including myself) will always retain a skeptic’s view on just about anything where so much money is at play.
What I am very curious about is your focus (overall) on ShoeCos and their impact in sports? It seems obvious to all of us that you’ve (most-likely) invested the most thought in this area than the rest of us, maybe even all of us in entirety.
Do you see ShoeCos as a threat to college basketball? Kansas basketball?
In my books, ShoeCos do represent a threat as does all of the monstrous commercialism surrounding college sports. I made a vague statement because it isn’t clear to me how much of a threat all the money around college sports is.
What really bothers me about all the money in and around college and pro sports is the vastness of the money supply but how it sticks into so few hands. It is hard to view the NBA these days as anything more than a lotto sweepstakes. Buy your lotto tickets and maybe you win a truckload of money. Probably you don’t. So so many great players out there working their tails off, chasing the illusive jackpot.
There should be better protection in place for the players… especially the guys on the fringe. That is the first area of change where a lot of hard working guys could see a pay off. And let’s not forget, these guys are a part of the overall fraternity of the game that has allowed the greatest players to become great. None of those guys did it alone. It takes years of play, thousands and thousands of games, and in order to put in those kind of reps, the fraternity (brotherhood of basketball) was, and is, involved.
ShoeCos exist totally on the brotherhood. It is the brotherhood that produces the great players for everyone to follow (and follow with buying endorsed products) and it is the brotherhood who makes up almost the entirety of the buying market. Yet… ShoeCos, for the most part, act like the NBA and team owners in only throwing money at that very top tier.
In some ways I’m glad I wasn’t a better player back in my days. I’m glad I wasn’t better (but just below that upper tier) where I would have sacrificed everything to chase “the dream.” I bet I know and have met 1000 of these guys. I estimate that only 2-5% end up doing anything else with their lives that really helped them move forward, and raise families or reach other dreams. I was fortunate enough to be at a skill level not even close to making an NBA roster, so it stayed inside me only as a fantasy dream, not a dream I would pursue and make other costly sacrifices in the process.
My heart bleeds for all of those guys who are sitting on the fence. Most have worked so so hard, and will never show anything for it and will largely be viewed as failures. There should be most structure in place… more paid leagues… more cross training to help these guys find other forms of success. There should be more mentoring programs that would help these guys and also turn around and have these guys help the youth coming up. I’d feel better about ShoeCos if they took 10% of the money they squander on top tier talent and do more for the brotherhood.
Reminds me of a trip I had to Vegas with my father. We were driving by all the big casino signs showing names of jackpot “winners” and I mentioned all the names. My father replied, “you’ll never see them acknowledge the names of all the players that really helped build their casinos (losers)!” No difference in the NBA.
The NBA… rightly named the “No Boys Allowed” league. At least college ball does open other doors. Players should finish their degrees and make a bunch of quality adult connections that will help them throughout their lives.
And how about the NCAA? The scrooges of college basketball could take all the revenues they make on former athletes and turn it back into the system. Build programs to help former college players integrate into a basketball and non-basketball career.
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I actually don’t think about this much at all. I just notice a considerable amount of posting either about it, or about issues that appear perhaps to gain more clarity through recalling the Petro-ShoeCos participation in the basketball industry.
One of the things I believe may slightly differentiate (for better or for worse) my takes is that I have gone back and read some of the muckraking books from the 1990s that to some degree were reporting about the 1950s-1990. These books, if they have any legitimacy, establish a long steady migration of basketball from compromised amateur sport to what I now call, for lack of a better term, a contemporary basketball industry. It happened, if the old books were legitimate, slowly and incrementally starting almost from the origins of amateurism, certainly well before you played. If one views basketball today as a much more advanced stage of migration to a sports industry, then all of this seems much less startling and shocking, even if it has its unfair and perhaps tragic aspects. The greatest game ever invented has slowly become industrialized with all the good and bad and in between that suggests.
I don’t really know more than the little that I post. I don’t know if industrialization is good or bad for sport. I just believe that it appears to have been evolving for a long time. If you look at what happened to other human activities that were industrialized, then you can have some informative idea about where basketball is head, at least that’s my hypothesis so far.
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@jaybate 1.0
Curious why you use the C-word with Embiid signing with adidas?
Like Sheldon in “The Big Bang Theory,” you seem to be sarcasm impaired.
Maybe I should enclose sarcasm in characters such as /s sarcastic comment here s/
By the way, Aldrich McLemore and Tyshawn are also with Adidas…/s the conspiracy continues… s/
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Nice back peddle.
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@jaybate 1.0
Back fill here.
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@jaybate 1.0
“The greatest game ever invented has slowly become industrialized with all the good and bad and in between that suggests.”
Amen on that!
BTW: I wasn’t trying to be overly critical of you by connecting you with ShoCos!
Oh-ooo… I’ve connected the dots, and you appear to be one of the dots! CCCCCCCCC!
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I appreciate that, slayr, no offense taken. But really I’m not a dot. I am just like you, only without as much hoops talent. I’m just with you in the Greek chorus of KUBUCKETS trying remotely through the give and take of online discourse to piece together what is happening to the greatest game ever invented. We both want the game to look after the interests of all the players, because we grew up in a time long ago making moves toward somewhat more social, educational, and wealth distribution equity, and we have seen that time eclipsed by something else that introduces a new distribution that makes us a bit concerned for many of the players and sometimes for the quality of play.
I personally don’t much care what regime the powers that be industrializing the game decide upon, so long as it is transparent enough ensure accountability and looks after the players and coaches education and life needs rather than exploiting them and tossing them aside. No system can be perfect but some can be a lot more regressive than others.
My philosophy at this point in such discourse is to try to understand what goes on by formulating hypotheses, hope others can advance or refute them, thus perhaps enabling new hypotheses, and have some fun, rather than pass judgement. Industrialization, if I were even correct in that hypothesis, would be an evolving process and the last word might take decades to be written. I find legislature, lawyers and the judiciary capable in those regards. They, not us, decide, as our representatives and agents, what is legal. We just get to be fans trying to hypothesize what, how, and why things are evolving as they appear to be. I sense board rats get a little too serious about all this stuff at times. I mean anything is possible in online discourse. You and I could even turn out to be the only two aliases attached to identities on the site. Or only one of us. Or even neither of us!!!
As always, good to hear from you.
Rock Chalk!
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@jaybate 1.0
Thanks for the reply. Well said.
I hope you keep replying to subjects involving ShoeCos. I have a better understanding now of where your replies on this come from.
Basketball, like everything else in life, will continue to evolve because time doesn’t stand still, and neither does the human experience.
Advancing the game of basketball, from 1891, has been a positive evolution (for the most part). I hope it stays on a positive path that first, and foremost, takes into consideration the athletes involved, and their well-being. That doesn’t mean I want to totally eliminate physical contact in the game.
BTW: I’m a cloned alias… nothing more than a script running behind a firewall.
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@jaybate 1.0 I am a broad rat. I love eating cheese and talking KU basketball. I spend many nights searching the web on all things KU basketball. I even track former KU basketball players in the NBA and overseas, even though I hate the professional game. I believe that KU is the birth place and the protector of the game we call basketball. OH wait this isn’t a thread about addictions on KU basketball? Never mind.
