HoopsHype.com NBA Blogs - Sam Smith

Three guys show up for their job orientation and who knows what they did, though it seemed to involve drugs and sex. Another guy makes a video apparently demeaning his country and finding enough vile words for an HBO special.

I know I’m excited.

It means our favorite guys are back.

Yes, it’s just about time for the NBA season.

Of course this is an overstatement. But that’s the inescapable burden of the NBA. I’ve been around this league for almost 30 years and believe its people are better than in any sport. No, golf isn’t a sport.

But part of the fun of loving the NBA is our guys do some goofy stuff.

I’m hereafter nominating those goofs for my Reggie Harding memorial award.

My preseason nominations are the Kansas Three, rookies Mario Chalmers and Darrell Arthur from Kansas and Michael Beasley from Kansas State. No, kids, you aren’t in Kansas anymore. And you shouldn’t have brought Dorothy to rookie orientation. Or her sister.

Then there’s Josh Howard, who slammed the national anthem this summer on a video (don’t these guys ever learn, Melo?) as the topping for his drug use admissions last season and excess partying in playoff defeat.

I’m told all Dallas Mavericks players this season when standing next to Howard will have to wear those “I’m with stupid” t-shirts that Kenny’s mom wears in South Park episodes.

And then there’s Ben Gordon, who really is a very good and decent guy, who seems to have turned down enough money to bail out Wall Street while working through an aimless free agency.

Oh yeah, Reggie.

Reg was a troubled young man who was one of the first to be drafted by the NBA without attending college. He was a seven footer from Detroit. He played four decent NBA seasons (twice even averaging a double/double through trouble shortened seasons) and one double/double season in the ABA, and was shot dead on a Detroit street corner in 1972 at age 30.

Reg wasn’t the brightest guy and so the story goes once, wearing a mask, he decided to rob a store in his neighborhood. The owner recognized Reg as there weren’t a lot of seven foot holdup men around.

“Reg,” the man said, “don’t do it.”

Replied Harding: “It ain’t me, man.”

You’d think Ron Artest retired this trophy, but Josh is working hard to wrestle it away.

As for my man, Ben, I weep for him.

Eventually, Gordon will be a rich young man. You’d say he probably is now since he’ll likely sign a one-year qualifying offer for about $6.4 million this season and thereafter become an unrestricted free agent.

And then what?

That’s the rub, and I understand Gordon’s position, much stated to the Bulls.

Ben: “I’m the leading scorer on the team for the last three years. I should be highest paid.”

Bulls: “We like you and believe you are valuable and would like you to remain with the Bulls. But you turned down $10 million a year for five years last year and you and the team had a bad season. So we’ll offer you maybe $9 million or so for six years, again more than $50 million. But you really are a classic sixth man, a great scorer with limited ballhanding and passing skills and you’re, what, six foot tall? We haven’t gotten any trade offers for you (OK, Miami said they were thinking briefly about Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks, but who wants Banks’ contract and Marion’s pout?). Go get an offer somewhere and we’ll make a deal. And, who, after all, is going to give you $10 million or more of saved cap room next summer when everyone is waiting for 2010 and LeBron, Wade and Bosh?”

And so Gordon sits with the rest of us suckers watching our money disappear.

Hey, I should have sold my house last year. But I didn’t. Now I can’t.

It’s timing. It’s life.

Sorry, Ben, the market for six foot shooting guards, no matter how good a guy you are and hard you work, isn’t there.

Take the $9 million or $9.5 million (estimate) and be a very, very, very, very rich man.

OK, not as rich as some of your friends.

But, hey, the guys at Lehman Brothers thought they were rich last week.

I understand well how this works.

It’s about respect, right?

No, it’s about competition.

You don’t become a pro athlete unless you compete at everything. They compete in conversation. So when all us old timers who are trying to find the airline without baggage fees say you are rich whether you make $8 million or $12 million and never can spend it all, anyway, we don’t get it.

It’s the same in your office. A salary of $75,000 might sound great until you find out the sinkhole at the next desk makes $85,000. Then it’s misery.

Especially with athletes.

It really isn’t about the money. Sort of. No one really realizes how good they are until you try to play against them. What gets you to that level is the desire (and we’d love to see it more often when they are there) to compete all the time.

Gordon’s like that. And he’s a worker.

I hate this being him because he is a dedicated guy. I’ve traveled with the Chicago Bulls on and off the last few years and just about every city the Bulls land in Gordon gets off the plane and heads directly to a gym to shoot. There are few guys in the NBA who practice as much, certainly not on their shooting. Every summer, Bulls coaches rave about all the work Gordon has put in.

And then it turns out he’s still six feet tall.

No one on that Bulls team gets as much defensive attention, so it didn’t go so well with Ben Wallace averaging $15 million. Geez, and the guy can’t make a layup.

Gordon asked for $15 million last season and didn’t budge. The Bulls offered $10 million and didn’t budge.

Next!

So this summer Luol Deng signed after he rejected a deal last year close to $60 million for five years. It was announced this time at more than $70 million. But with, according to league sources, perhaps $20 million deferred in the first five seasons, the present value of the contract is believed to be slightly less than Deng was offered last season. The Bulls are believed to have made a similar proportional offer to Gordon, like Deng, slightly less than Gordon could have made last year. But seemingly a lot of money.

Gordon averaged more points than Deng as well and now Larry Hughes is there making about $13 million a season and he’s no Ben Gordon. Where’s the loyalty?

So Gordon remains unsigned.

It seems clear the Bulls will not trade him, and though Gordon this summer talked of having played his last game for the Bulls and never playing for the qualifying offer, he has nowhere else to go.

Were he even to get an overseas offer, he’d still be a Bulls free agent when he returned as you cannot by rule play out your free agency somewhere else. Plus, the European offers have been even less than the qualifying offer and much less than Gordon keeps rejecting here.

So he’ll come in and disrupt the team by, what, shooting all the time?

Duh.

It’s what he does.

Gordon’s not going to hurt the team, and the Bulls know it.

First, he’s not a bad guy, and he would become unrestricted if he signs the one year offer. Not a great time to lay down.

Plus, he always comes in shooting anyway. What’s he going to do to undermine the team? Pass?

So the Bulls will panic because they can’t afford to lose him in free agency and get nothing in return? Right? Hardly.

Admittedly, it’s not a great free agent class next summer, though Carlos Boozer and Hedo Turkoglu could be there. The teams most likely to be $10 million or more under the cap to sign someone unrestricted likely figure to be from among Memphis (not spending money), Oklahoma City (probably not with the big relocation fee due), Portland (got guards), Miami (going for Boozer, we hear), Indiana and maybe Minnesota. So if you are spending, you lock in Ben Gordon and pass on a chance for Wade or Bosh? LeBron is going to New York or New Jersey, as we know.

No. If Gordon wants to go anywhere and get paid he probably would have to come back to the Bulls anyway for a sign-and-trade. Which is why the Bulls don’t seem in any hurry to make a deal.

And with a signed Deng and No. 1 pick Derrick Rose, they need Gordon. Who else is going to score? Gordon has a chance to have a terrific season, and perhaps the team improves as a result.

The Bulls have made it clear they aren’t going to make a bad deal to accommodate Gordon, and they aren’t about to panic. Most Americans’ portfolios don’t look like they did two weeks ago, and so the timing isn’t great for Gordon, either.

But Gordon still has a chance to be guaranteed some $50 million or more. Hey, it would be more than Josh Howard got.

I know, I know. Bad example.

My guess: Gordon ends up re-signing with the Bulls at some point.

I was reading the report last weekend of Chicago Bulls center Joakim Noah being arrested back at the U. of Florida for marijuana possession. And I’m thinking, “Why is this news? Isn’t it news if it was reported Noah—have you ever looked at or listened to this guy?—wasn’t using marijuana?”
 
But here we go again with NBA reefer madness with Noah and a month or so ago the dumbest player in the NBA—that certainly would be Josh Howard now in what no longer appears a close contest—volunteered he’s a regular offseason marijuana user and figured it was no big deal because it’s use was commonplace in the NBA.
 
Geez, didn’t anyone ever give this guy that speech about if your friend jumped off a building or told the world he was committing a crime would you do it, too?
 
Anyway, this all hardly qualifies as an epidemic, though many would have you wringing your hands and again lamenting the social ills of the NBA. Yes, back in 2001, Charles Oakley decided that maybe 50 to 60 percent of the players in the NBA used marijuana. A few years later, the Rocky Mountain News surveyed NBA players and from a sample of about 60 decided that some 30 percent of the players were using the drug.
 
Both of these accounts followed a 1997 New York Times report of substance abuse among NBA players and threw out a figure of 60 to 70 percent, though lost in the fine print was no real distinction between alcohol and marijuana.
 
And, yes, there’s the rub.
 
I know, I know, marijuana is illegal and alcohol is not.
 
But this should give pause to everyone who reads and reacts to headlines of NBA players using or being arrested in connection with marijuana.
 
I don’t know how many players in the NBA use marijuana, though we do know now about Noah. We’ve previously heard issues with Allen Iverson, Chris Webber, Robert Parish, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Rasheed Wallace and at one time most of Portland, though it is a particularly liberal place.
 
Of course, we’ve also heard the same about former President Bill Clinton, who insisted he didn’t inhale, and now U.S. Senator Barack Obama, who also wrote in his first book about experimenting with “blow,” the street name for cocaine.
 
Using Aristotelian logic, perhaps this means more NBA players than we think could be running for president, though in the Democratic party. Which might not be a bad thing because perhaps they’d be too mellow to be declaring war so often.
 
But I digress.
 
Actually, two issues strike me when these NBA drug scare stories arise.
 
One, of course, is the shocking notion that young men in their 20’s might be experimenting with a mild drug that men in their 20’s who’ve gone on to be the leaders of our nation experimented with when they were in their 20’s.
 
That is what your 20’s generally are for. There’s an old saying about socialism from Winston Churchill that says if a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart.

If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain. The point is your 20’s is for asking and answering questions and experimenting with life.
 
So marijuana should be legalized, right? It’s not legal, so that’s the answer for now. It’s also illegal to file taxes that do not perfectly represent your income and expenses and to go over the speed limit when driving. But I’m told it’s happened.
 
The larger question to me being around the NBA is the effect of alcohol.
 
The NBA has a drug testing policy, probably the toughest in sports and for the longest time since cocaine use was a major issue in the late 1970’s and the players wanted it cleaned up. All players are tested for drugs including marijuana up to four times per season.
 
Do some players in the NBA still get away with using marijuana? Sure. I’ve heard some names, though they don’t invite me along. What’s the percentage? Who the heck knows?
 
I believe it’s far less than any of the estimates thrown around. Though I do know alcohol abuse is rampant and I’ve witnessed that for many years.
 
Because there is drug testing, the stimulant of choice in the NBA now perhaps more than ever is alcohol. I’m told the fellas enjoy their vodka and Red Bull. And, of course, beer, which had been widely distributed in sports locker rooms for years before St. Louis Cardinals player Josh Hancock was killed in a car accident last year driving home from a game.
 
This is the trickiest issue of all for all of us because while alcohol is legal, it is frequently abused. Do you think more people are killed by drunk drivers or pot smoking drivers? How do you feel in the parking lot after your favorite major league baseball game knowing that guy sitting next to you with 12 cups stacked high is driving home? But with the games often sponsored by your favorite brew, what’s the choice?
 
I recall during the winning years of the Bulls franchise in the 1980’s and 1990’s seeing players like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen dropping several six packs in their gym bags after the game. Drinking on the way home? Who knows? Maybe they had drivers. I don’t know.
 
I recall being in the team hotel and seeing the waiter taking empty liquor bottles on the tray from the room of Vin Baker. It was widely known around the NBA at the time Baker was drinking heavily. But it was legal. Should I as a reporter have written about it? It’s not like Baker was doing anything wrong but throwing away his career as he’d later go into rehab.
 
The team knew about it and teammates did as well. So did Baker’s representatives. But the stigma of going into rehab could cost him a contract, so no one ever said anything.
 
I know of several players now around the NBA who tell me teammates have serious drinking issues. They say the team and their agents know. But no one wants to do anything for fear of losing, A. The player as an asset; B. The player having a chance to get a better deal or new contract when his current one expires.
 
What’s my responsibility to write about it? What if the player drives and kills someone or himself? Could I have warned someone by reporting it? But what right do I have if he’s doing nothing illegal? And the people closest to him and for whom he works aren’t doing anything?
 
It seems to me these are the bigger issues facing the NBA—and all sports—today. Yes, there’s marijuana use in the NBA, and to anyone who saw Noah with his white suit on draft day in 2007 you figured there was a marijuana arrest in his future. But the league has bigger substance abuse issues, which don’t seem to be addressed by anyone.