– Erazem Lorbek Domen’s brother is with Barcelona, whose basketball team are almost as much of a juggernaut as their football team. But let’s not talk about their football team. Lorbek is averaging 10.1 points and 4.0 rebounds in the ACB, alongside 8.7 points and 3.9 rebounds for the inevitable EuroLeague champions. He could play in the NBA, but he won’t. – Derrick Low Former Washington State guard Derrick Low moved to Lithuania this year to play for a salary less than that of your average telephone engineer. He did this because the team he is playing for – Siauliai – were a EuroCup team, so it was a good opportunity to get some exposure. Low has had to play full-time point guard for much of the year, as opposed to all the off-ball time he has had in his career thus far, and he’s doing a decent job of masquerading as such. Low averaged 18.5 points and 3.8 assists in Siauliai’s EuroCup campaign, averages a further 14.7 points and 4.4 assists in the Baltic league, and averages 12.8 points and 5.3 assists in the Lithuanian league. The Lithuanian assists tie for third in the league. He’s also had all that hair cut off. Probably best. – John Lucas III John Lucas’s son John Lucas went to China this year. He started out with a fight, but then quickly started owning. His team, Shanghai, are currently 1-1 against Smush Parker’s Guangdong in the CBA Semi Finals. Lucas had 56 points, 13 rebounds and 8 assists in the series so far. – Tyronn Lue Tyronn Lue did not play this season, after splitting last year between the Bucks and the Magic. He then retired somewhat unexpectedly aged only 32 to become an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics. […]
Do you ever stop and think about that time that Mark Madsen shot seven three-pointers in an overtime game, when Minnesota and Memphis had the most blatant tank-off that history has ever seen? No, nor did I. That is, not until this morning, when I woke up thinking about it. It’s not an entirely normal thing to wake up thinking about, even for the most hardcore Madsen fans amongst us. (For we are all Mark Madsen fans, obviously.) But some part of this must have ruffled my feathers, stoned my crows and enraged my loins, because this was all that i could think about for about three minutes after waking up. It is now a permanent blot on the NBA landscape. The situation Minnesota found themselves in – not good enough to make the playoffs, not bad enough to bottom out without trying to – left them deliberately trying to lose games. It needn’t have done, but General Manager Kevin McHale had already trded away Minnesota’s first rounder that season, as it was owed to the L.A. Clippers along with Sam Cassell in exchange for Lionel Chalmers and Marko Jaric. The pick, however, had top ten protection, and so in order to be able to keep it, Minnesota had to lose with a bit more regularity and finesse than they were doing up until that point. They did this with aplomb, telling Kevin Garnett to stop playing (or so we thought), playing their better players for merely token minutes, and letting their lesser players do whatever the hell they wanted, in what then-head coach Dwane Casey called “letting them have some fun” (to be read as “playing really badly so that we lose”.) The fact that they met an equally-tanking Memphis team, who were tanking for a different reason, was an […]
