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Interesting.It looks like Claudio Crippa deserves a slight raise.
Great hire by Spurs FO back in 2009.
On a Friday afternoon, he called the GM and said a knee was hurting and he would skip practice.
Instead, he travelled to Milano (200 miles) to meet and party with a friend.
He left the car keys in the restaurant, couldn't find them and was stupid enough to ring up the GM in the middle of the night and tell him he had no idea how to go back to Treviso.
He got suspended the next day and never played for Treviso again.
Interesting.It looks like Claudio Crippa deserves a slight raise.
Great hire by Spurs FO back in 2009.
Every time this story is published, it makes me mad again- not even at Neal or the Spurs, but at the comments people post below it that try to paint him as the victim.
Not really. Tim could have said "he didn't really earn our trust, he ran a train on it, hitting it multiple times between his jaunts to the pisser and the blunt party on the porch. Gary was all over that , trust, thy name be ed".“He didn’t just earn our trust,” Spurs captain Tim Duncan said. “He took it.”
Did anyone else find that to be a very, very poor choice of words in the context of this article?
So you've had the train run on you a few times?
Choo choo mother er
You guys might want to be careful about playing the rumor game. Stories have a way of getting twisted after being told and re-told a few times. I'll give you an example:
Right after Neal was waived by Benneton, there were stories that he had partied with another American player, and they had subsequently failed a drug test. Where did that whole story start?
To begin with, Benneton signed Bobby Dixon to replace Neal. The team that hired Neal, Unicaja Malaga, had just waived Juan Dixon. Yep... for failing a drug test. Neal and Juan Dixon both went to Calvert Hall College High School, so they know each other.
All of that got twisted into rumors that Neal had failed a drug test. Grownups screw up stories just as badly as kids playing the gossip game.
For the record, the player that Neal did go to dinner (and, I presume, drinks) with was Alex Acker. The "drug" that Juan Dixon was suspected of taking was some type of anabolic steroid.
Malaga was already VERY hot to get Neal. It looked like a done deal that he would sign with them the next season, but they had been in talks with Benneton about acquiring him in the middle of that season. Malaga wasn't happy about that, and they weren't happy with the fact that he was going to be leaving them at the end of the season, no matter what.
There was a lot of reason to believe that the coach blew things out of proportion because of that. The local media immediately started talking about his problem in college, and suddenly everyone talked like he was a bad guy. But it was a love fest just a short time before that.
Oh, and the reason Benneton beat Sebastiani 169-29 was that Sebastiani had gone bankrupt, and couldn't pay their professional team. Instead they sent a youth team.
Last edited by GSH; 02-16-2011 at 09:34 PM.
A friend of mine e-mailed me a little more info about this, and confirmed most of what I wrote. Apparently the upcoming game against Sebastiani was a joke, and should have been cancelled. The team got suspended from the league the following season, because they couldn't pay their players; and at that time they were fielding a team of kids. But they didn't cancel the game, because neither team wanted to miss out on any little bit of revenue.
The "best guess" is that Neal thought it was ridiculous to be travelling to play a middle school allstar team. And, yes, he called in sick and went out with Alex Acker. The part about him being too trashed to find his way home is probably sour grapes on the part of the coach. The newspapers had already reported that there was trouble between Neal and the coach, because it was clear that he was going to Malaga the next season. He probably shouldn't have taken the game off, but then again he probably shouldn't have been going to play a bunch of kids. The coach was pissed off and petty. The papers began to trash him about the problem in college, but some of them also said that the incident could easily have been downplayed, so that the team would not have lost its best player.
A side note - Sebastiani has "re-organized" and now calls itself Martos Napoli, but they are still fielding a junior team because they can't afford to pay real players. They lost a game last November 120-57. The referees didn't call a single foul for the entire game. Sounds like a good way to get a freak injury and end a promising career - for nothing.
I'm not saying that Neal was right, but it's a lot easier to understand than the stories that have been floating around.
Probably? He is a professional athlete being paid to play a sport. You are just making excuses for his poor conduct.
Edit:
Never mind. I didn't notice that I was replying to one of the Euro-bigots on the board. "Anything a European coach or team does is good, and all American players are s ." That's pretty much how you guys see things and nothing is going to change your mind.
Professional? Seriously? What was "professional" about playing a team full of junior-high kids and beating them 169-29? I guess if you think circus freak shows are professional.
This isn't about basketball, it's about culture. BTW - just how are all those street riots in Greece working out for you? It looks like a lot of you Greeks must not be very "professional", since you aren't willing to do your jobs.
Or are things not so black-and-white when Greeks are involved?
Last edited by GSH; 02-17-2011 at 12:00 PM.
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