Solomon Alabi If you read my draft recap, you’ll know how I feel about the Alabi pick. I’m pretty much all for it, and believe he has a chance to be a good contributor in the NBA. At #50, I think he was a steal. Even with hepatitis. If you haven’t read my draft recap, go do so. But you might want to book a day off work in advance. It’s a bit long. Bobby Brown Brown just completed a two year guaranteed minimum salary contract, initially given to him by the Sacramento Kings. He won that contract because of his play in summer league 2008, where he scored a lot of points in a variety of different ways. The Kings didn’t play Brown much in any regular season games, and later included him in the trade that brought over Shelden Williams from Minnesota, as was their perogative. Minnesota forwarded him on last summer to New Orleans as a throw-in to the Darius Songaila trade, as was their perogative. Once in New Orleans, Bobby started to get regular minutes. Byron Scott played him as the primary backup guard, often ahead of Darren Collison and Marcus Thornton, but it really did not go well. Brown shot the ball every time he touched it, taking 152 field goals in only 328 minutes, and attempting only 8 foul shots. To put it bluntly, he chucked. (Byron Scott was later fired, Collison and Thornton started to play more, and the Hornets’ season was salvaged. These things are alll related.) Brown was traded to the Clippers in a salary dump later in the season, where he did more of the same; 191 minutes, 85 field goals, 7 foul shots. Brown took a three pointer every 5 minutes last year, and didn’t seem to mind that […]
The South Korean basketball league [KBL] is a relatively new league, only thirteen years in existence, that unashamedly focuses on Korean national players. Part of that means heavily restricting the amount of imports that so heavily permeate all the other leagues around the world. Teams are allowed only two imports, and unlike in some other countries, dual citizenship is very hard to come by. It also has some quirky rules. Each team is allowed two foreign players, but in the second and third quarter of all games, only one import is allowed to play at any one time. Additionally, a few years ago, the KBL had a rule that barred any players standing 6’8 and above. What the intended purpose of that was, I don’t know, but presumably they quickly figured out how damaging that rule was to their basketball product, because they have now done away with it. Now, tall foreign dudes are allowed, and they’re kind of prevalent. A combination of that, and the 54-game schedules that teams play, make the KBL highly intriguing to the hardened nerds amongst us. Every summer, the KBL holds a draft of foreign players who want to play in their league that year. The players that are drafted are mostly tall guys, as Korea doesn’t produce much talented size of their own. (Ha Seung-Jin excepted.) The criteria for entry in the draft, though, is pretty weird. Players pay a $100 fee to be entered into the pre-draft list camp, and that list of players is culled down to a manageable amount of invitees by the KBL. The surviving list then go through one more cull, and the surviving few proceed (if they still want to) to the KBL pre-draft camp, which takes place in Las Vegas. And from there, the draft choices […]
