No . Could have had a starting lineup of Strickland / Ellis / Elliott / Barkley / Robinson and instead ended up with a starting lineup where Avery Johnson and Vinny Del Negro shared starting PG duties, Antoine Carr and JR Reid shared starting PF duties, and then SG Ellis / SF Elliott / C Robinson. What a ing joke to go from a team that would have dominated the conference for years to a yearly first round and out thanks to McCombs being a cheap piece of .
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/...-robert-sarver
Apparently this is not over.
I’m surprised people are surprised about this. It’s basically every single executive in this world, just that the other executives are not that stupid and be this explicitly toxic, they just know how to hide it. Executives don’t become executives because they are nice people, it’s because they are willing to throw people under the bus to advance themselves.
I’m just wondering which organization is next to get exposed. The kings, nets and rockets seem dysfunctional enough to allow this type of behaviour to go unchecked. Dallas was so close and I’m surprised it didn’t get worse. The lakers is basically a ticking time bomb. Both pop and Riley seem like the type of people that would piss off everyone around them but they are smart enough to cover their tracks (primo was a close call but even then nobody went after pop directly). The Knicks though are my odds on favourite, the team suck and is in the largest market, I can see silver trying his hardest to get rid of Dolan and make the Knicks a much more profitable franchise.
You're correct that this sort of leverage exists on pretty much anyone. In elite circles it's a rite of passage to offer up blackmail to hit the next level.
Some think they want to get the next level or maybe are pressured into it i (e.g. Martin Lawrence), but when they realize what is at stake and the sorts of horrible things they have to do they go "insane" (their moral grounding/faith is too strong) and their handlers (e.g. Harley Pasternak) have to drug them up and try to mentally build them up to the crime or put them down somehow.
And if you've ever wondered why there are no good people in politics, well some of them do start out good and then a guy like Harley shows up and gets them on the path to working with the cabal.
I've never been sold on the idea that the Suns could have gotten Garnett in a package centered around an overpaid hustle player who had 1-2 years left in his prime & who's game was going to age like milk as he got older and couldn't rely on his athleticism to grab rebounds over bigger players. IMO they had to give up Amare to get Garnett (would have still been worth it, but the point is a Stoudemire/Garnett frontline was always a pipedream), and even then the consensus seemed to be that McHale wanted Al Jefferson more than Amare.
Beating a dead horse but the biggest Suns mistake from that era was selling the draft pick that could have taken Iguodala & not paying Joe Johnson. Instead of being loaded with long, athletic wing players they could have thrown at Parker & Ginobili, they had a team that needed Raja Bell to play 37 minutes a night (which led to him tearing his calf muscle in the 2006 WCF + having absolutely nothing left in the tank to match up with Ginobili at the end of the 2007 series). Joe Johnson running the point was also the closest thing the Suns ever had to a Nash backup until Dragic emerged in 2010.
Snyder of the former Redskins looks dug in. Protect his name maybe even himself from charges.
Ambchang is correct. Silver/NBA will continue to use the winds of change to rid the League of undesirables to them. Some justified and others possibly not.
You're right and I haven't paid much attention to the Snyder thing, but in the case of Sarver, he had it coming...
The fans hate him even though the Suns might be good now because of how notoriously cheap he is + the decade-long era of awfulness in the 2010s that Sarver was largely responsible for
The players hate him after the greedy CBA he tried to push for in 2010 that would have created a hard salary cap and a $12 million the max contract
There's been countless examples of front office personnel leaving the Suns specifically because they hated and then thriving with another team (Steve Kerr, David Griffin, Rick Welts)
The administrative staff and employees clearly hate Sarver given how many of them lined up to throw him under the bus
The other owners hate him simply because he's an asshole
Sarver has done nothing but make enemies since the day he bought the Suns, and the result is that almost no one was willing to come to his rescue and vouch for him when these allegations came up. That's his own doing; all of the people who've wanted to get rid of Sarver for years seized on this as an opportunity. When there were similar hostile workplace allegations in Dallas, Mark Cuban was able to clean that up very quickly with little to no national attention since Cuban is adored by fans and there wasn't any preceding desire to get rid of him.
Yep he got destroyed at home to a lower seed
Last edited by lefty; 05-12-2023 at 08:35 AM.
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