Where Are They Now, 2009; Part 35

For what it's worth, a "team of admins" are now looking into the problems with this website's server, which has now mutated from one problem into two. It's not fun for any of you, but least of all for me. But at least we're trying. I'll just keep putting stuff up here anyway, both on this blog and site-wide. If and when you're lucky enough to be able to see it, it's all yours. Be patient, resilient and brave. We'll get through this together, even if some lesser folk die along the way.

Why this had to happen at the time of the trade deadline, I don't know. But it could be worse. This website didn't exist during the 2007 moratorium. Maybe I should put ads up and get a dedicated server. Yeah, that might be wise.

- Rich Melzer is currently unsigned, and played only three games last season for the German side Quackenbrueck, whose name also doubles as a duck's favourite breakfast. Having just turned 29, this doesn't seem like a particularly healthy direction for Melzer's career to be going towards. Then again, he used to play in Australia, so this might be better.

- Pops Mensah-Bonsu is a legend. There are two reasons why I think this. The first is because he's English. The second is because he's a legend. Pops started the year with DKV Joventut Badalona in Spain, playing five Spanish league games and totalling 14/9 in his one Euroleague game, before injuring himself (I think it was his shoulder) in late October. DKV released him (I think it was by mutual consent - it's all written down somewhere, but I'm too lazy to look for it), and Pops spent the next three months on the sidelines. However, in late January he returned, and was acquired by the Austin Toros of the D-League as just one more in their long line of decent big men this season. In the 6 games that Pops has played for Austin, he has absolutely beasted in the way that only legends can, averaging a fully stuffed statline of 25.3 ppg, 12.5 rpg, 2.3 apg, 4.7 fpg, 2.8 spg and 1.3 bpg, and shooting 61% from the field. This man can, will and should be in the NBA. By the way, with him, Luol Deng, Ben Gordon, Joel Freeland and potentially Kelenna Azubuike (whose initial application for a British passport was turned down, even though he was born in London, due to the immigration status of his parents at the time), British basketball finally has something that it has never previously had; genuine hope. That's a starting five that could beat the Kings right now, and it's all ours (sort of). In a period of world basketball that sees old mainstays like China and Lithuania getting up there in age with no great influx of youth coming through, Britain has a chance to make an impact on the world basketball scene for the first time since.....well, ever. We've been so far behind for so long that you might not even notice it happening, but in the not too distant future, this could be a team that plays in the important competitions for a change. And believe me, this would be an achievement. Even losing at a high level would be solace of sorts. Maybe one day, we'll develop a league worth televising.

- Ron Mercer is also a legend, albeit in a different way and to a far lesser degree. Since his retirement back in late 2006, Mercer's sole foray into the headlines was back in 2007, when he was cited for misdemeanour assault after punching a bouncer in the face at a strip club. It is not known what else he does with his time.

- Scott Merritt is playing for InterCollege Etha Engomis in Cyprus. He averages 16.3 points, 7.3 rebounds and 4.0 fouls. Haven't a gag for this.

- Aaron Miles is signed with Panionios in Greece. I had a Panionios game to watch the other day, but my bastard Sky+ (it's like Tivo) recorded over it. Oh well. Miles is averaging 11.0 points, 2.6 rebounds and 2.6 assists in the Greek league, with 13% three point shooting, alongside 10.2 points, 2.8 rebounds, 3.3 assists and 25% 3FG in the Euroleague.

- Oliver Miller's last basketball gig was as the player/coach of the Arkansas RiverCatz (the Z makes it appeal to children!) in the ABA back in 2006/07. I don't know how it went, nor what he does now. But he does (or did) have a clothing label called "Da O Zone". However, a gig Google of that reveals only this:


Scary stuff.

- Reggie Miller is now one of my least favourite announcers around. No offence.

- Paul Miller now comes off the bench in Poland. For Anwil Wloclawek, Miller averages 10.7 points and 5.4 rebounds a game. One of my favourite memories from this past summer league was a clip of Quentin Richardson walking up to Miller with a camera on him, and repeatedly (and playfully) punching him, while Miller stood still and looked a bit bemused by it all. If you saw this too, you'd understand.

- Ricky Minard is in his second season with Premiata Montegranaro in Italy, where he seems to constantly go by the name Minardi for some reason. (I guess it's deliberate and not just constant typos. By the way, best Formula 1 team of all time other than Forti.) Minard averages 17.4 points, 4.2 rebounds and 1.4 assists, making him one of the leading scorers in Serie A. And that's a pretty impressive boast.

- Albert "Miracles" Miralles is into his fourth season with Pamesa Valencia, and might be a lifer. Miralles averages 5.2 points, 3.2 rebounds and 3.0 fouls in the Eurocup, and 5.9 points, 3.6 rebounds and 2.5 fouls on the season in the Spanish league. To read a recent crudely translated interview of his, click this. Notice how it doesn't mention the NBA anywhere.

- Dwayne Mitchell is in the D-League with the D-Fenders, who got allocated him after he was cut from the Lakers training camp. This is the benefit of signing lots of long shots to your training camp roster. The downside is when you get a Jason Richards or Mike Wilks-like situation, where the player gets injured in camp and you have to pay them for the full season. That kind of sucks a bit. Mitchell averages 17.3 points, 7.1 rebounds and 4.4 assists, but is shooting worse than ever from outside, with only a 19% three point success rate. That also kind of sucks a bit.

- Finally, Jerome Moiso was Pops Mensah-Bonsu's replacement at Joventut. How coincidental! Moiso averages 7.1 points and 4.3 rebounds per game in the Spanish league, while shooting 71% from the field.

God Bless America

All those who read my diary type thingy from last year's preseason game in London will notice how I have a little bit of problem with Five's marketing policy of the sport, which seems to want to solely appeal to the "hip hop" (which you can probably go ahead and change to "young black") market. Of the ten courtside interviews conducted that day (Brian Scalabrine excluded), all ten were of black celebrities, this coming immediately after an advertising campaign exclusively focused on the street demographic. (If that last sentence wasn't enough of a clue, I'm white. Bravo, top hole, jolly good chap, rather bracing, tea and scones, "I say Biggles, how awfully uncouth", et cetera. Basically I'm from a Battle Of Britain war film.)

Apparently my opinion fell on deaf ears, though. This may have been my faultWhy Five Suck for never actually voicing it to anyone other than your powerless selves, but still. I was right, and changes needed to be made.

They weren't.



Right now, our national team is making the headlines, and actually becoming significant on the world stage. With Luol Deng, Pops Mensah-Bonsu, Joel Freeland, Dan Clark, Nate Reinking and (hopefully) Ben Gordon in our team now, amongst others, we finally have a side worth knowing about in Europe, and we've recently qualified for the European Championships, after only recently being so bad of a basketball nation that we were ranked behind Chinese Taipei in the world rankings. In addition to this, the NBA apparently loves us and our swanky new arena, resulting in the rare but special sight of an annual proper NBA game played in this country. (Note to other countries out there: if you build a spectacularly pointless dome shaped building to "celebrate" the new Millennium, then after you flush millions of pounds down the shitter as it struggles to be financially viable for the one year of its existence, it eventually becomes worthwhile when you completely rebuild and re-design it into something entirely different to what it was before! FISCAL FINANCIAL PLANNING FTW!). For the first time since I've been alive, and for the first time perhaps ever, basketball has a modiocum of significance in this country.

And who do we get to bring the sport to the general public? Why, it's only the blackest fifty one year old white man in rural Lowestoft, Tim bloody Westwood.

Just not good enough, is it?.

Try a bit harder next time. Find someone who knows something about the game, rather than vapid "celebrity" interviews of people who pretend to love the game but only when doing so gets them free airtime. Try and blag some interviews with the NBA people on show, or even with some of the American press sent to cover the game. Fuck it, interview me. I scrub up all right in a tie, and I actually know proper English words and stuff about basketball and stuff. I also don't gesticulate with my hands like a crack addled twat, and pensioners love me. I look perhaps a bit too much like Andrew Bogut to be good TV material, but......Tim Westwood? Are you kidding me?

Can you see why we might not have the biggest fan base for the sport in this country?

I don't care what colour they are, but let's try and get some people who know of the sport that they supposedly "love". Maybe the broadcast could then be used to relay some interesting facts, snippets or insights into the game. And then maybe it could be used to inform and entertain the public. You know, like they did back in the olden days.

It's just a theory. Feel free to ignore it again.

Summer signings, round 16

- Bracey Wright and his Bengali cats are to sign with DKV Joventut Badalona in Spain, where he'll be joined by Pops Mensah-Bonsu. Pops's status was up in the air for a while, as he exercised a clause in his contract that allowed him to attempt to find some NBA work. But there wasn't any, and so Pops will return to Joventut, a broken man. Maybe.

- The point guard crop got another touch weaker, as Dan Dickau signed with Avellino in Italy. (I suppose an altternative title for this post would be "Dick Out!". Ah well, too late now.) Is this the end of Dickau in the NBA? I hope not, but I fear it might be. And that's a crying shame. If it is, and if we include his draft night like we did for Bobby Jones in a previous post, then the list of NBA franchises that Dan Dickau spent some time with is as follows:

1: Sacramento
2: Atlanta
3: Portland
4: Golden State
5: Dallas
6: New Orleans
7: Boston
8: Portland (again)
9: New York
10: L.A. Clippers

In only 6 years, that's a damn good list. Maybe one day, we can add Chicago to it.


- J.R. Pinnock has signed with Pallacanestro Roseto 1946 in Italy's second division. It's hard to make jokes about team's names when they include the year in which they were founded in them. It's hardly the best ammo in the world, is it?

- Dawan Robinson has signed for Prima Veroli, also in Italy's second division. I know that you know who Dawan Robinson is, and I know that you can tell me which NBA franchise he went to training camp with back in 2006 without looking it up. If you can't, there's something deeply wrong with you. (Clue: Dan Dickau once played for them, which gives you a 1 in 9 shot of a lucky guess. Unless you just skipped the bit about Dan Dickau. If you did, there's something deeply wrong with you.)

- The Phoenix Suns' lengthy pursuit to sign Goran Dragic - their own draft pick - ended in misery and defeat. Dragic decided for about the 400th time to stay with Tau Ceramica in Spain, leaving the Suns having to look elsewhere. It hath been mentioned by people whose job it is to mention these things that the Suns will now look at Damon Stoudamire as their next point guard target. I know very little about Goran Dragic, but I know that he's better than Damon freakin' Stoudamire. So this is not much of a consolation prize.

(You know who else is better than Damon Stoudamire? Salim Stoudamire! That's who you need, Steve Kerr!)

- James "Get The" Gist has signed for the elusive Italian stunner herself, Angelico Biella. (That "Get The" thing is an audible joke, by the way, and one that works really well if the name Gist is pronounced with a soft G, and if you have an advanced understand of English lower middle class colloquialisms. If you don't have such an understanding, but would like to develop one, then you've come to the right website.)

- Jermaine Jackson has signed with Udine in Italy. I have literally nothing else to say about that. Not a sausage. Bugger all.

- The draft rights to Kyle Weaver were traded by Charlotte to Oklahoma City in exchange for New Jersey's second round draft choice next season which Oklahoma City owns from the to Mikki Moore trade of whenever it was. Kyle Weaver was rendered obselete after the Bobcats signed Shannon Brown, and the Bobcats signed Shannon Brown almost immediately after I pointed out that no one had signed Shannon Brown, and that no one ever would. So, essentially, Kyle Weaver's plight - if you can call it that - is my fault. Whoops. Sorry about that, Kyle.

- My Call Mike Hall has signed with Armani Jeans Milano. The single best thing about the NBA is the fact that they have not gotten into the trend of selling the team names for commerical sponsorship. Yet.

- Ryvon Covile has signed for Orleans in France, not New Orleans in America. Both Ryvon Covile and Jermaine Jackson graduated from Detroit Mercy - a college which sounds like a WNBA team - and they are quite possibly the only people in the world to have ever graduated from there. Hooray! I thought of something to say about Jermaine Jackson!

- Walter Herrmann re-signed with the Detroit Pistons. Good move. I had assumed, without any real evidence, that Detroit's decision to not tender Herrmann a qualifying offer would mean that Herrmann would have pissed off back to the beautiful continent of Europe, from whence he came. But it would appear that their decision not to do so was solely one of financial motivations - Herrmann has re-signed with the Pistons on a one year deal that pays a significant amount less than the fully guaranteed qualifying offer would have done. So it works out better for Detroit this way. More importantly, they now have a bench player who can score, shoot from the outside, and who doesn't suck. They could still use a guard with a jumpshot - the backup guard rotation of Rodney Stuckey, Will Bynum, Arron Afflalo and probably Lindsey Hunter will hit about 39 threes between them, and you can guarantee that I'm going to bump this post if that number proves to be anywhere close to accurate. Yet Herrmann gives them a shooter and a perimeter scorer off the bench that they had previously lacked. Plus, he's Walter friggin' Herrmann. That's a positive in itself.


And now, ladies and gentleman, Mr Conway Twitty.

Summer signings, round 4

- Andreas Glyniadakis, former Pistons draft pick and one-time Sonic, has extended his contract with Costa Coffee in Greece. I hope that the sponsoring of team names never catches hold in the NBA, even when it leads to beautiful times.

- Ersan Ilyasova, whose NBA rights are still owned by the Milwaukee Bucks, has seen his contract with Barcelona extended. It seems odd that, in this instance, the NBA franchise has been the feeder club for the European team. 10 years ago, that just doesn't happen.

- Gabe Muoneke, a man on the fringes of the NBA for about 6 years now before finally getting a sniff with the Charlotte Bobcats last October, has signed with Asvel in France. Last season, Muoneke played in Iran, and he's probably made the right decision to get out.

- English supestar Pops Mensah-Bonsu has signed with Joventut Badalona in Spain, and, if I've ever called them Joventut Barcelona in the past, then I apologise. Pops will play alongside Ricky Rubio, and if you've heard that name but don't know much about him.......he's brilliant. He really is.

- Qyntel Woods has signed with Fortitudo Bologna. I want to make a joke about dogs, but I like dogs, so I won't. By the way, I sponsored a dog recently, and let me tell you - it's a damn scam. I take my time choosing which dog I want to sponsor, pay for a full year, but then they send me a letter saying "we're sorry, but that dog is no longer available to sponsor". And then they kept the money anyway. Bastards. So learn from my mistakes - if you're feeling philanthropic, sponsor a panda or a child or a leper or something. There's no value in the dog thing.

- Rodney White - possibly the worst player in modern history to have a triple double in an NBA game, depending on your view of Chris Duhon - has signed for Maccabi Tel Aviv, which is in Tel Aviv, Israel.

- Troy Bell has signed for Soresina in Italy's lower divisions. The drafting of Bell was quite possibly the worst roster move that Jerry West has ever made in the NBA, depending on how shit hot your NBA history knowledge is. (Mine's awful.) Players drafted after Troy Bell in 2003 include David West, Leandro Barbosa, Josh Howard, Kendrick Perkins, Boris Diaw, Jason Kapono, Carlos Delfino, Maurice Williams, Luke Walton, Zaza Pachulia, James Jones, Kyle Korver, Steve Blake, Travis Outlaw........et cetera. Whoops.

- Former Denver Nuggets guard Vincent Yarborough has hit the big time, signing for Bonn in Germany. The mere mention of Vincent Yarborough has reminded me of how bad that 2002/03 Denver Nuggets team was, and so, for the hell of it, here is a run down of the whereabouts of everyone they gave an airing to that season.

1: Juwan Howard - unsigned, spent last season with the Dallas Mavericks.
2: James Posey - agreed today to sign with the New Orleans Hornets for 4 years.
3: Maybyner Hilario - the only one still with Denver, although he hasn't played much for a variety of reasons, including cancer.
4: Chris Whitney - long since out of the game. And the headlines.
5: Shammond Williams - now a Georgian citizen, somehow. Playing for Pamesa Valencia in Spain.
6: Rodney White - see above.
7: Donnell Harvey - recently joined the Charlotte Bobcats summer league team, but left early due to a family emergency. Unsigned. (By the way, speaking of the Bobcats summer league, Jackie Butler was supposed to be on it, but he never turned up. If we haven't done so already, can we officially scrub Jackie Butler from our minds? Thanks.)
8: Marcus Camby - yes, well, let's not talk about that.
9: Devin Brown - unsigned, last season played for the Cavaliers.
10: Jeff Trepagnier - unsigned, spent last season with Pau Orthez in France.
11: Kenny Satterfield - Scoop Jackson assures us he's fine.
12: Mark Blount - currently the Miami Heat's starting centre, which probably enthuses them no end.
13: Chris Andersen - unsigned, but that won't last. Played all of 34 minutes last year with the Hornets.
14: Lorinza Harrington - playing for the Philadelphia 76ers summer league team.
15: Nikoloz Tskitishvili - unsigned. Quick! Before someone snaps him up!
16: Ryan Bowen - unsigned, played last for the Hornets, Says he's "hopeful" of being re-signed, something which I agree with.
17: John Crotty - very very done, but I don't know what he does now.
18: Adam Harrington - unsigned, played last year in the D-League.
19: Predrag Savovic - has one year left of a five year contract that he signed with Bilboa in Spain back in 2004. Still sucks, but he has Luke Recker, Drago Pasalic, Mile Ilic, Quincy Lewis and Fran Vazquez for company.
20: Vincent Yarborough - see above.
21: Mark Bryant - didn't play again after leaving this very same Nuggets team. Now an Oklahoma City assistant coach.

Jesus. What a shite team that was.

Where Are They Now? Part 25

Cornelius "Scooter" McFadgon continues to he one of the highest scorers named McFadgon in the D-League, averaging 16.1 points for the Bakersfield Jam.

Ivan The Terrible is playing for Kolejliler Ankara in Turkey, and as I've described before, Turkish league stats are an adventure. So work them out yourself.

Jeff McInnis was waived by Charlotte during the season and has not caught on elsewhere.

Keith McLeod is in the news this week, after giving Lonnt Baxter a shout-out. The article says that Keith is unemployed, but he did briefly play in Italy this season, playing 4 games for Siena, where he averaged 4 points. Must have pissed him off, that.

Slava Medvedenko has not played since his short stint with the Atlanta Hawks last season. The Hawks decided that they could probably do better than that, and in the season after dumping Slava, they made the playoffs. Just firing it out there.

Antonio 'Blessed Are The' Meeking is Luis Flores's teammate in the Italian second division, for Indesit Fabriano. You may remember that I made a crap washing machine joke at this juncture once when discussing Flores. Or maybe you don't remember that. Probably best not to. Meeking averages 11 points and 5.5 rebounds a game, and for the record Flores averages 22 points and 3 assists.

Sammy Mejia is averaging 11.5 points and 4.9 rebounds for Capo D'Orlando in Italy, where he plays alongside someone by the rather fabulous name of Oscar Gugliotta. And there's you thinking that the basketball world had only one Gugliotta.

Rich Melzer is playing for the Art Dragons of Quakenbrueck in Germany. (Do dragons quack? And if so, does it echo?) You may remember this as being where Adam Chubb plays. Melzer has played only one game for the team, scoring 11 points in 16 minutes, while Chubb averages a team high 14.2 points to go along with a pretty shocking 4.8 rebounds. He's also shot more free throws than field goals, which must be hard to do.

Pops Mensah-Bonsu is a part of the stacked Benetton Treviso lineup in italy, where he averages 9.3 points and 8.8 rebounds. He is also shooting 59% from the floor, and who wouldn't with Reece Gaines serving up high percentage looks all game?

Ron Mercer retired due to injury a while ago, and hasn't made the news for a while.

Scott Merritt is playing for the Tulsa 66ers of the D-League, where he averages 7.0 points and 3.6 rebounds.