Where Are They Now, 2010; Part 18
January 28th, 2010
– Dion Dowell Dowell is signed in Israel, putting up numbers quite impressively similar to those of his senior season in college. He’s playing for Altshuler Saham Galil Gilboa – a team that really needs to settle upon one name only – and is averaging 9.6 points, 4.8 rebounds, 0.5 assists, 1.4 blocks and 1.5 steals per game. There are two types of players in Israel; Israelis and Americans. That’s basically it. Despite Israel being kind of in Europe, there are only a handful of non-Israeli European players in the league. And by “a handful,” I mean “two.” The breakdown of the nationalities of players on Israeli league rosters, according to Eurobasket.com, goes like this; – 60 Israelis – 50 Americans – 7 Americans with dual Israeli citizenship (Chris Watson, Jason Thomas, Jeron Roberts, Shawn Weinstein, David Bluthenthal, Derrick Sharp, and ex-NBA player Cory Carr) – 1 Australian (Julian Khazzouh) – 1 player born in Belarus, but who has lived in Israel since childhood, goes by an Israeli name, and who holds a dual Israeli passport (Vladimir Yiermish/Vladi Ermichin) – 1 Welshman who has played in Israeli since he was a teenager and who holds an Israeli passport (Tal Michael Dunne) – 1 Englishman/Nigerian (Ugonna Onyekwe) – 1 dual American/Panamanian citizen (Danilo Pinnock) – 1 dual American/Puerto Rican citizen (Jesse Pellot-Rosa) – 1 Israeli with a Polish passport (Yaniv Green; plays for the Israeli national team) – 1 Gabonian (Stephane Lasme) – 1 hybrid who was born in Sarajevo to Serbian and Bosnian parents, whose family fled to Israel during the war, and who then moved to America, but who considers himself Israeli (Robert Rothbart; read his quite amazing story here) – ……and 1 Serbian (Sasa Bratic) I don’t know if it’s all just a big coincidence, politically motivated, or […]
Where Are They Now, 2009; Part 14
March 7th, 2009
– Vlade Divac is currently trying to become President of the Serbian Olympic Committee. Never thought I’d say that about anybody, but there it is. – Nigel Dixon was in China to start the season, but left in the new year. Dixon averaged 26.3 points and 9.8 rebounds for the Zhejiang Guangsha Lions, with 69% FG and 44% FT percentages, before being replaced by Jelani McCoy. By the way, speaking of Nigel, the eagle eyed and really regular viewers of this site may have noticed a few weeks ago that every player’s name had been changed to “Nigel” when viewing either the rosters or player index pages. This wasn’t a childish joke, but merely an error that I forgot to fix. I’ll explain; hile trying to make some changes to the dull technical bits (specifically, we were creating the ability for players to appear on two rosters at once), we noticed that the changes that we had made didn’t take. Unsure of why this was, we reasoned that maybe the host company had a setup, whereby any user’s changes to certain Javascript files were not parsed until the following day. So, to test this, we changed the setup again, making it so that all player’s first names would be changed to Nigel if it worked instantly. If it didn’t work instantly , then we’d know that our original theory (about changes not taking until the next daily server rest) was correct. It didn’t work instantly, and so our theory was correct. But then my stupid arse forgot to delete the Nigel version, and so everyone was Nigel for a day. So there you go. ShamSports.com – run by an amateur, and assisted by a friend of a similar mental age. – Michael Doleac was not re-signed by the Minnesota Timberwolves […]
