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Beau Vine

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Beau Vine

  1. 37 minutes ago, rickyspub said:

    I honestly couldn't go through any recent drafts and tell you which guys were complete busts, so I'll leave it for people who follow the NBA. Though I did read an article about an Eastern European phenom that is supposed to be a lottery pick this year. The article said that some NBA execs were still talking about not taking EE guys because of Darko Milicic! The article then noted a handful of successful EE guys in the NBA since then. It makes me wonder if the number of busts for any particular group is over inflated and the reality is just that some teams are better at identifying and developing talent. Those that fail are the ones who blame high school busts or Eastern European busts for their own lack of ability.

    If the NBA owners could get away with it, they'd put in a rule that says that everyone, even these European guys, has to play one year in college.  That's their free minor league that allows them to more accurately assess each draftee's skill.

    The Spurs and other smarter teams wouldn't like it, but getting to see someone play a year of college ball to get an accurate and easy frame of reference of their ability dramatically reduces the risk of spending a high draft pick on that guy. 

     

    Of course, the Spurs are usually picking late in the draft, so if they whiff on an EE guy or a HS guy, it's not that big of a deal.  The problem is spending a very high draft pick and millions of dollars on someone like Eddy Curry or Bargnani.

     

    (And for the record, I'd love to see no restrictions on the draft.  I love seeing some teams having to take risks and having it possibly blow up in their faces.  But that's what the NBA owners hate.)

     

  2. 27 minutes ago, rickyspub said:

    No doubt there is some wishful thinking on my part. But I also figure Silver isn't just going to say whatever he pleases, but will say what pleases his masters. Of course talking up revisiting that rule now could be laying the groundwork for it being a bargaining piece against the NBAPA in the future.

    I can't imagine it being anything more than that.  Like I said, that rule has dramatically reduced draft risks for owners.  They're not giving that up just to altruistically benefit the NCAA.

  3. 9 minutes ago, Jhawk said:

    If you look at everything the NBA is doing with the G-League I think you have to say they are preparing to repeal OAD.  I would expect the rules on 2 way contracts to expand and for the G-League draft to change a little.  I could see a situation where the g-league draft is abolished and the NBA draft expanded by a round.  Anyone not picked above some arbitrary position (lottery?) is automatically given a 2 way contract.  Then you'll have top talent taken first (mix of HS and blossoming college players), then probably solid college contributors, and finally the end of the draft would probably have ultra raw players that have great athleticism/size who are picked last and shuffled directly into the GL so they can develop and have their rights secured during development.

    The problem is that the repealing OAD and expanding the G-league doesn't actually reduce the big risk for NBA franchises.

    The big risk is wasting a high draft pick and a lot of money on the guys who were dominators in high school but couldn't hack it against bigger more talented competition (Kwame Brown, Eddy Curry).  If you force those guys to play a year in college, then they'll get exposed, and franchises wouldn't draft them as high and waste a bunch of money on them.  

    If they're expanding the G-league, it's to be an alternative to college -- they're not doing it to replace the current rule and allow guys to get drafted straight out of high school.  They're not repealing OAD -- they're offering another place where HS grads can play against better competition so that they can get a more confident scouting report.

     

    Personally, I think they're investing in the G-league to develop the marginal players, late 1st-rounders and 2nd-rounders who would previously spend years sitting on the end of the bench or going overseas where they have no control over them.  

  4. Ricky, I don't agree with much of what you said, but that's just purely opinion vs opinion, and I don't think either of us has actual facts on our sides relative to what you said.

    I will say that Adam Silver can say what he wants to say, but he works for the owners, and a rule change would be a result of negotiations between the owners and the NBAPA.

    The "one-year" rule was established through collective bargaining between the owners and the PA, and the owners gave up significant concessions to get the NBAPA to agree.  I don't think the owners would drop that rule without a return of at least part of those concessions (just out of principle/stubbornness), and I can't imagine the PA agreeing to that.

    Regardless, the current NBA CBA doesn't expire until 2024, so nothing's going to happen for six years, which makes it even more ridiculous that Condi's report led off with that contingency.

     

     

  5.  

    201161_5_.jpg

     

     

    rickmonday.jpg

     

     

    636081562081495490-rick-monday.jpg

     

    I basically remember it being impossible to hate RIck Monday when I was a kid.  Unless you were an Expos fan...

     

     

     

  6. 52 minutes ago, El Diablo said:

     

    How long has it been since colleges had JV teams? Just go back to that.

    Lol.  Yeah, that's going to happen.  

     

    Look, Sonny Vaccaro predicted this a long time ago, even before this testimony:

    Quote

    In 2001, while working for Adidas, Vaccaro was invited to testify before the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group that sought to keep commercialism out of college sports. “Why should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?” Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, said. “They shouldn’t, sir,” Vaccaro replied, according to the historian Taylor Branch. “You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir, but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

    If you're trying to figure out what's going to happen, "Follow the money" is never bad advice.

    The NCAA men's basketball tournament is the cash cow for Mark Emmert and his crew.  The conferences have hijacked football, and none of the other sport tournaments make big money.  So the people in charge are almost entirely reliant on its cash flow to fund their huge salaries, and they aren't going to do anything to jeopardize that.  

    Condi Rice is a long-time friend of the people who run the NCAA.  It's no surprise that she was named to head this committee, even though she had basically zero ties to college basketball.  Someone like Jay Bilas would be much more qualified, but hell, there's no way the NCAA would do that.  

  7. 42 minutes ago, Jhawk said:

     

    To me, it is comical that they even put that in there.  To put it in there as the first change that needs to be made just shows that this report is there to blame others for the failings of the NCAA and to distract from the real issue that players should be allowed to use their skill set to make money

    Bingo.

  8. 46 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

    The report specifically discusses the fact that the NCAA doesn't control that rule and what their recommendation will be if the NBA does not change that rule.

    Come on, man, the chance of the NBA changing that rule would about as high as the chance of Kate Upton showing up at my front door begging me to sex her.

    It's idiotic to consider that possibility. 

    That rule has been wonderful for the NBA.  It guarantees them a completely free minor league that they can use to evaluate draftees.  They no longer have to risk wasting high draft picks on guys like Kwame Brown and Jonathon Bender.  They're not going to give this up.   They made significant concessions to the NBAPA to get this rule, and that's not going to undo itself just because the NCAA wants it to.

    It's idiotic to put that in the report because it's not going to happen.  Assume it's not going to happen, and make a recommendation reflecting that.

  9. 20 minutes ago, rickyspub said:

    I ultimately think the NCAA and NBA get on the same page and the NBA opens their draft to high school players again, but I doubt they will agree to rules like in baseball that require a college player to be 3 years removed from HS before being draft eligible again. 

    The NBA loves having a free minor league, which is what the NCAA is.  It lets them more confidently assess who is ready to play NBA ball, which drastically reduces the risk of committing a high draft pick and millions of dollars to a teenager.  

    What's their motivation for "getting on the same page" with the NCAA?

     

    As far as the one-and-done, that overwhelmingly benefits the NCAA blue bloods and the P5 conferences.  If you require freshmen to sit out (which probably would drive the best players to Europe or wherever), that's going to hurt those schools.  And those schools are the ones that call the shots.  So that's not going to happen, either.  

  10. 1 hour ago, Antidean said:

    Last night while watching a cooking show:

    I was trying to watch and wife was babbling on about something.

    Wife: Hey, rewind that so I can hear what ingredients he was adding (she was talking through the entire segment).

    I rewind the DVR to the ingredients add  point and hit play. Wife immediately starts talking again and misses what the chef says, again.

    Good grief.  This happens soooooooooo much.  

    I think it was the week before the NCAA tournament, someone on TV suggested that a team would be better off losing in the conference tournament.

    Without giving us a chance to hear the rest of his argument, wife blurts out...

    "That's crazy, why would it be better for a team to lose?  Aren't you always supposed to try to win, how could it be better to lose blah blah blah?"

    "I would almost guarantee you that he was about to explain why he said that, but neither of us could hear that because you were talking."
     

    She gets up and leaves the room, and I rewind and listen to his explanation.

    60 seconds later, she comes back in the room.

    "I still don't understand why he thinks it would be better to lose."
     

    "THAT WAS LITERALLY THE NEXT FUCKING THING HE TALKED ABOUT, BUT YOU LEFT THE ROOM SO YOU DIDN'T HEAR IT."

    Tone.

  11. 57 minutes ago, rickyspub said:

    One way I read that the NCAA could try to force the NBA's hand on one-and-dones would be to not allow freshmen to play. 

    There is zero chance of that happening because these freshmen make big money for the NCAA member schools.  Would you be buying tickets to watch Kevin Durant sit on the bench for a year in street clothes?

    The NCAA fucking looooooooooooooooooooves money.  That's the entire root of all of their problems.  

  12.  

    For Condi's report to lead off with "fix the one-and-done" just shows that her committee is completely tone-deaf fantasyland dwellers.  As is anyone else who says "We need to fix college basketball by getting rid of one-and-done."  

    Anyone who says that has their head up their ass.  Yes, you, Condi.  You don't control that rule.  That rule is an NBA rule, collectively bargained between the NBA and the NBAPA.  And it's not going to change at least until their current CBA expires.  That's not a complicated concept.

    How about if you make some specific recommendations to the NCAA on rules they actually have control over? 

    I mean, it's just fucking unbelievable to continually hear people say that the NCAA needs to fix the one-and-done rule.  That's like saying that Greg Abbott needs to fix the August weather in Texas.

     

  13. 2 hours ago, TheFlagship said:

    It’s Acuna time in ATL.

     

    Yeah, he was just tearing up AAA, so these four weeks convinced the Braves that he actually belonged on the major league ros...

    Wait, he was slugging .304 in AAA?  These stupid service time games need to go ASAP.  

     

    BTW, I think this was in the shaggy thread, but here's a great way to see how the top prospects are doing: 

    https://www.mlb.com/prospects/stats/top-prospects

    Check out what Little Vlad is doing in AA at 19 years old.

  14. Quote

    Last year, a nine-year scam came unraveled when a delivery driver called the office of the Cameron County Juvenile Detention Center to ask where he should unload the 800 pounds of fajitas he had in his truck. The staffer who answered the phone was confused—the cafeteria didn’t serve fajitas—and an ongoing, nine-year hustle from employee Gilberto Escamilla unraveled. Escamilla, investigators quickly learned, had been receiving huge quantities of meat on behalf of the facility and reselling them for nine years. The retail value of the meat Escamilla had requisitioned and repurposed? $1.2 million, according to The Monitor.

    Escamilla was busted in October, and investigators at the time said that he quickly admitted to the crime. He had regular customers (several of whom cooperated with the police investigation) and, according to the Brownsville Herald‘s report from the fall, would pre-sell most of the meat as part of the operation. In testimony, Escamilla explained that “It was selfish. It started small and got bigger and out of control.”

    Of course, it’s worth questioning whether anyone can truly control that much meat. But while Escamilla seems repentant in that statement—and he ultimately pled guilty to the crime of Theft by a Public Servant—his sentence was far from lenient: State District Judge J. Manuel Banales recently sentenced Escamilla to fifty years for the crime.

    Theft of more than $300,000 is automatically a first-degree felony in Texas. On top of that, Texas treats theft by a public servant differently from other kinds of theft. The theory behind that is that theft committed by a private individual harms the person or people who were stolen from; but theft by a public servant harms the taxpayers who pay their salary, and harms society at large by eroding trust in those who’ve agreed to serve us. In cases where a public employee is accused of stealing less than $300,000, charges involving public servants using their official positions to facilitate the crime are automatically escalated to the next-highest level of felony. In Escamilla’s case, the value of the meat he stole meant that it was already the highest class of felony—which helps explain why his sentence was so high.

    Still, Escamilla is 53 years old, which means that a 50-year prison sentence is essentially a life sentence for a non-violent crime. The ACLU estimates that there are 3,278 people in this country facing life without parole for non-violent offenses, a fate the organization describes as “living death.” Escamilla, of course, wasn’t sentenced to life without parole—with good behavior, he could find himself serving only half of his sentence, which would see him released sometime after his 78th birthday. Which means that, while meat theft is a quirky crime and Escamilla’s situation is newsworthy, the stakes of it—both his life sentence and the $1.2 million stolen from taxpayers—make it a little less chuckle-worthy than it seemed last fall.

    Quote

    The total value of the fajitas, which were stolen during a nine-year period, was $1,251,578. That figure does not include the brisket, pork chops, sausage and various types of chicken Escamilla also admitted to stealing, court testimony revealed.

     

  15. 5 minutes ago, EMAWesome said:

     

    BTW if you do anything in Clayton, NM you are doing it wrong.  The only possible excuse for winding up in that town would be if you were put into the Federal Witness Protection Program because no one would want to kill you bad enough to go there.  You can drive about 80 miles in any direction from there and not even see a prairie dog town.

    ???

    How else do you drive to Colorado without going through Clayton?

    And that taco truck there is legit.  

    We always stop at the Allsups in Texline to get me burritos for breakfast, and then stop at the truck 20 minutes later to get the wife and daughter tacos.

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