Where Are They Now, 2010; Part 17
January 28th, 2010
It’s days like yesterday that remind me of why I spent a good three weeks of my life making the anagram feature. Greg Oden’s anagram is “engorged,” and by Jove did that turn out to be fitting. In amongst the two hundred and seventy jillion jokes made about Oden’s goods the other day, none seemed more apt than that. The day Tayshaun Prince/Raunchy Panties comes out as a lingerie model is the day I start worrying if those things are actually premonitions. – Dan Dickau Dickau signed with the Suns for preseason, instead of signing with the Celtics as was first thought. He played in five preseason games, totalling 14 points and 7 assists in 39 minutes, but did not make the team. He was never going to, really, because even though the Suns had open roster spots to play for, they’re the Suns. Since being waived by Phoenix, Dickau has not signed elsewhere, which seems strange for a 31-year-old man whose career will be on the downslope soon. Perhaps he’s injured. – Kaniel Dickens Dickens is in France, averaging 9.3 points and 3.8 rebounds per game for Nancy. However, he has been unbelievably inconsistent with his scoring. In 12 games, he’s scored in double figures only four times, with three of those games being 22 points or more, and with with six other games of scoring 4 points or lower. His scoring totals on the season read 8, 6, 24, 4, 0, 28, 3, 1, 11, 2, 22, 2. Can’t get much more up and downy than that. That’s like a hummingbird’s heart monitor. – Michael Dickerson Dickerson made a surprising return to basketball in training camp 2008 when he signed with the Cavaliers after five years out of the game. He did not make the […]
2009 NBA Summer League round-up: Phoenix Suns
July 23rd, 2009
– Kaspars Berzins: Kaspars is a tall Latvian, but he’s not Andris Biedrins. He’s a fine outside shooter for a seven-footer, but he’s not Dirk Nowitzki. And he’s a good athlete, but he’s not Chris Andersen. Mainly, he’s a tall jump shooter who avoids contact and doesn’t play much defence. In the fine tradition of teams drafting tall foreigners in the second round despite their unsuitability for the physical NBA game, being 7’3 would probably have gotten Berzins drafted. But a mere seven-foot? Pah. – Josh Carter: Carter is a decently-sized wingman out of Texas A&M, who is primarily a jump shooter. He’s a good jump shooter at that. But he’s not a really good jump shooter. And that’s why he wasn’t drafted. (Even then, being a really good jump shooter is not a guarantee you’ll be drafted. Anthony Morrow wasn’t, after all. But it worked out all right for him in the end. If Carter gets his jump shot to that standard, he’ll have a chance as well.) – Earl Clark: I saw a lot of Louisville last year, because they played in a lot of games, because they were good. And Earl Clark is a large part of why that was. He should have been taken ahead of Terrence Williams, given that he’s younger, bigger, and won’t struggle to score as much. But he will struggle a bit; the jump shot’s not good and nor is the free throw stroke, he’s not much use off the ball at the moment, and he barely posts up. Still, a lot of this was true of Boris Diaw once, and he turned out all right. I’ll push this comparison for a while yet. – Geary Claxton: Claxton is one of those rare beasts, a 6’5 man with forward […]
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 […]
