Where Are They Now, 2010; Part 52
April 13th, 2010
– Pavel Podkolzin After his NBA career set new records in failure, Podkolzin returned to his native Russia to play for Lokomotiv Novosybirsk, the team he began his career with. Podkolzin is into his fourth season with the team, and has stuck with them even after they were relegated out of the Russian Superleague down to the second division. Statistics are hard to come across, because they’re all in Russian, and Russians use the wrong alphabet. However, as far as I can tell, Pavel averages 12.9 points, 5.6 rebounds and 3.9 fouls per game. On the Novosybirsk website, three players are listed as playing the position of “центровой.” Pavel is one of them, and a quick internet search reveals the obvious; that word translates as “center”. But curiously, if you run that word through Google Translate, it comes out with the result “Washington Bullets.” I’m not making that up, either. – Scot Pollard Pollard last played in the NBA with the championship-winning 2007-08 Celtics. He didn’t play in the postseason and barely played during the regular season, but he got a ring and a million for sitting around and putting up with a year of ankle pain, so it’s not all bad. He now works for NBA TV, where he’s already created one of the more awkward moments in television history. – Olden Polynice Polynice was last in the NBA in February 2004, when the Clippers waived the then-39-year-old before the playoff deadline so that he could catch on with another NBA team. He didn’t. But Polynice did squeeze out bit parts of two more years in the world of professional basketball, playing 18 games in 2004/05 with the Michigan Mayhem of the CBA, and briefly being the player/coach for the Los Angeles Aftershock of the ABA in […]
Robertas Javtokas has still got it
February 11th, 2009
For some reason, whenever we get a EuroCup game screened over here (something that happens way more than the screening of NBA games), it almost always involves Dynamo Moscow. It’s a bit annoying having to see the same old players out there time after time when there’s so many others that I’d rather watch. But it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either, because Dynamo Moscow (as is the case with all EuroCup teams) has plenty of good quality talent on it, and I get to see them all over again. The most notable players on the Dynamo Moscow team are former Hawk swingman Travis Hansen, Spurs draft pick Robertas Javtokas, former Nets and Rockets forward Bostjan Nachbar, former Blazer and King forward Sergei Monia, big Lithuanian Darjus Lavrinovic, and Russian national team point guard Sergei Bykov. (Brian Chase, who recently signed with Dynamo, hasn’t played yet.) Travis Hansen has taken an acceptable NBA career and turned it into a beast of a European career, playing as a first option player on some of Europe’s better teams, showing a fine mid-range game, the ability to run the offence, and his ever-present athleticism. Nachbar is playing well against the far less athletic European opposition, and Monia still rocks the “I’ll do anything but shoot” approach that so befits a baby-faced tweener Russian. Lavrinovic is a good all-around player, with legit NBA size, an inside/outside game, good rebounding instincts and no ability to jump off the floor, and Bykov is a good little guard whose sensible and smooth play is making the loss of Jannero Pargo entirely survivable. However, the one I’m going to focus on is Javtokas. Often, the commentators talk of Robertas Javtokas’s 40-inch vertical. You may have heard about it yourself; it was his combination of great size and athleticism […]
