No. Of course not. I don’t think he should be fined either unless the other party pays the exact same amount to a Salt Lake City charity for children. There is no way in hell you only penalize one party in a situation where the decision making was flawed by both parties.
Do I empathize with Russell Westbrook’s frustration with racist white people? Of course I do. Just read my blog and you know where I stand on all of this. I’m not white—I’m brown.
I totally get it and am on his side in this matter. I’d march with him and Ray Felton if they ever want to march in downtown OKC. Let’s go.
My father shared this story with me as a kid. In 1952, my dad as a college freshman had a summer job in downtown OKC at a Conoco service station. One of his co-workers was a young man the same age as my father. Only thing is–he was black and his name was Joe Carter, Sr.
They went to lunch one day together at a downtown café and were refused service because Joe was black. My father told the owner to go to hell and they walked out. I think they went to a convenience store and bought some sandwiches and ate them sitting on a curb.
This was the catalyst of a lifetime friendship between my father and Joe. My dad went on to become a lawyer. Joe went on to have a wonderful life as a father and grandfather. Best fisherman I’ve encountered in my life. He was literally buried with fishing gear draped all around him in his casket. And oh, by the way, his namesake…Joe Carter, Jr. had 396 career home runs and one especially big one against Mitch ‘Wild Thing’ Williams to win the Toronto Blue Jays a World Series. I was at the Carter home in northeast OKC at a watch party when that happened.
So while I don’t have black skin per se. I understand what Russell Westbrook was feeling…somewhat. I just think that instead of handling it like he did–he should instead be talking openly and honestly about racism in America and what we can do as a country to get beyond this issue.
I’m going to go ahead and post this, then sleep on what I write about this on my blog in conjunction with the very column Berry Tramel wrote on March 11th on newsoksports. This is one of those times you don’t just blurt something out without all the facts.
Let’s put this Ray Felton statement on here as well this morning. Felton is a solid dude and someone I’d listen to in regards to all of what happened last night in Utah between Russell Westbrook and the married couple.
I completely agree. We should have civility between all parties in public settings. Fair enough. But here’s what I’ll also say to Ray Felton. Your teammate needs to grow up. In a hurry.
Isn’t it odd I featured Westbrook’s deal with Mitt Romney on my small blog before last night’s game. You know why I did it? I did it because I was almost certain Westbrook would at some point in the evening lose his composure with either Ricky Rubio, Jae Crowder, or with a fan. Rubio was a DNP, Jae Crowder was somewhat mild last night and the fans were subdued for the most part because their team couldn’t make a shot.
Here’s what Ray Felton didn’t say. Russell Westbrook leads the entire NBA with 17 technical fouls of which two have been rescinded. He never stops talking during a game. He complains and curses about every call he doesn’t get. He’s constantly chirping at opposing players. In Denver, he once had an incident with the mascot, and then just several weeks ago there was the ridiculous episode with the eight year-old boy and his parents. Maybe it’s just me, but just maybe Russell Westbrook tweaking the maturity knob just a turn wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Here’s another thing and Ray Felton should know better. Russell Westbrook treats the local media like trash if they ask him any kind of adult oriented question which isn’t of the jock sniff variety. Just recently… I posted on this very blog an interview where after answering a few fluffballs from his pet gerbil, Little Nick Gallo, he then rudely would not answer questions from Erik Horne, Maddie Lee, Royce Young, and Berry Tramel. All of their questions were super soft—not even tough. Yet Westbrook opted to go this rout.
Anyone’s who’s ever read my blog knows I have little patience with dumb white people. I also have little patience with any people who are overtly rude to others. I wouldn’t coddle a racist for a second. I deplore the stupidity which has currently overtaken our country in regards to race.
But here’s the thing, Russell Westbrook. It’s a two way street. Game officials are human beings. Opposing players are human beings. Opposing fans are human beings. Your local media which is just trying to do their jobs are all human beings. The management of the Oklahoma City Thunder needs to stop babysitting you.
Respect begats respect.
Give it a try and see what happens.
You might be surprised to find how many people agree with you if you give them the chance.
This should be a pivotal game for both teams in how the Western Conference standings shake out 4-8 when the final game of the regular season is concluded.
Utah comes in two games down in the loss column behind the predictably sinking Thunder as both teams have hit polar opposites as far as strength of schedules. Unless you’re Little Nick Gallo or Michael Cage this shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’re a serious fan of the NBA.
OKC’s Thunder enjoyed one of the easiest schedules in the league to begin the season, and in all candor, OKC should have come out of those easier games with at the minimum six more wins than they did. Wouldn’t those six wins come in handy just about now?
On the other hand, Utah started the season with a difficult schedule and has never really got untracked as a serious contender for a top three seed in the West despite having rather easily dispensed of the Thunder in last season’s first round while advancing to the Western Conference semi-finals.
Quite frankly…I think tonight’s game in Salt Lake City is the biggest game of the season for the Jazz if they want claim the No. 4 seed in the West over both the sinking Thunder and the hard to predict Portland Trailblazers. One other observation to be made is that the Spurs and LA Clippers just don’t appear ready to concede that either is ready to accept a No.7 or No. 8 seed.
I’m going to quit labeling the Thunder as the league’s biggest underachiever because that’s not accurate any longer after witnessing the meltdowns by the teams LeBron James and Anthony Davis played on this season. Clearly…the Lakers and the Pels have been by a defining margin the two biggest underachievers in the West.
So… tonight’s game? Vegas opened this game with the Jazz at -3.5. The line has since dropped with the Jazz at -3 with 54% of the money being bet on the Thunder. This means Vegas feels this should be a one possession game and that the additional half point is tough to give given the fact in most big games this season the Thunder have competed fairly well.
I’d wouldn’t take either team in this game. That’s a razor thin margin for error. Three of the Thunder’s best performances of the season have come at Portland twice on the road and in the miraculous win in Philadelphia. Whether you’re a Thunder fan or a Utah fan… tonight’s game will be another playoff game of sorts.
Simply look at Utah’s schedule after this game and you see why. Unlike the Thunder, after tonight they have one of the league’s easiest schedules with only four playoff level teams left in their remaining sixteen games.
Conversely, the Thunder’s next seven games are against playoff caliber teams and the question is not if the Thunder will drop in the standings, but how far they will drop.
This marks the final game in the Thunder’s murderous Western four game swing. Everyone knew this would tough. If OKC could escape Salt Lake City tonight and finish the swing at 2-2 it would be an enormous positive for a Thunder team which for over two months has been one of the league’s worst defensive teams. Only the Phoenix Suns and NY Knicks have ranked lower in this regard.
Big game tonight in Utah. I bet Mitt Romney will be sitting courtside heckling Russell Westbrook. Is there anyway Westbrook can get his 15th technical for verbally assaulting a sitting United States senator? That would be a new one.
Of all Dan Jenkins’ best-selling novels–the one closest to my heart is Dead Solid Perfect. It’s the fairytale story of golfer Kenny Lee and his improbable run to the U.S. Open Championship. Like all of Dan Jenkins books it has life and romance interwoven into the storyline.
After selling the rights to Hollywood for the making of Semi-Tough, Jenkins swore never again would he allow a screenwriter to change his story into a film adaptation of his work. If I remember correctly…he almost or did sue the producers of Semi-Tough for butchering his story.
Consequently, Jenkins wrote the film adaptation for Dead Solid Perfect and was involved in the production of the movie as well.
As with all Jenkins stories the characters breathe both comedy and heartache to the story.
The main characters in Dead Solid Perfect are Kenny Lee, Beverly Tidwell (his wife and the most liberal young woman in Ft. Worth), Bad Hair Wimberly (his oil ‘bidness’ tour sponsor), Spec (his ever loyal caddie), Jani Ruth Rimmer ( his girlfriend after Beverly walks out on him), and Donnie Smithern (his one time best friend on the tour).
In the end you probably need to be at least a casual golfer like I am to enjoy the story from a golf and life standpoint.
But as in all Dan Jenkins novels there’s a love story interwoven into the storyline.
Who would have ever guessed Dan Jenkins was a hopeless romantic.?
Here’s the opening of Dead Solid Perfect and Kenny’s initial meeting with his soon to be sponsor Bad Hair Wimberly.
To start…I don’t think there’s any conspiracy whatsoever by NBA refs to take sides against the Thunder. The refs in this league haven’t been the problem for the most part. The problem is the Thunder are basically around a No. 4 or No. 5 seed type of team in the West. I had them as a No. 4 on my West bracket sheet–so I guess by the same token I should stop calling them underachieving and just refer to them as overhyped a bit.
I do think though that the refs in this league are tired of listening to Russell Westbrook complain as much as he does. There’s a psychology involved to winning refs over to your side. I would suggest Billy Donovan and his staff teach this approach to their players. Refs are human, they get tired of listening to the same people complain over and over and over.
OKC’s defense is the primary problem as in it’s one of the worst in the league since January 1st giving up 118 ppg… which is exactly what they just allowed to the Clippers. Only bottom dwellers Phoenix and the New York Knicks have been worse during the same time span.
Bottom line…OKC has to get its minutes and its defense figured out. They have to design a plan which can somehow ‘hide’ or ‘disguise’ how weak Dennis Schroder is defensively. Coaches in basketball and hockey have to do this all the time—so it can be done. I don’t think all the sudden Steven Adams has become a bad player. I think he’s just worn out to a certain degree.
Here’s Billy Donovan’s post game presser last night following the loss to the Clippers.
What an absolute piece of dogshit officiating in LA tonight where the feel good Clippers defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder by a final margin of 118-110.
I’m pretty sure this is the first time this season I’ve even mentioned officiating one way or another. I’ve harped on Billy Donovan being the Ward Cleaver of NBA coaches. I’ve harped about Little Nick Gallo being the obvious successor to Sarah Huckabee- Sanders in the Trump White House. And, of course, pretty much every game I bitch about the Thunder being one of the league’s underachievers for the second straight season…only this time without Carmelo Anthony.
But tonight I m going to talk about officiating…as in this was the worst I’ve seen this season in an NBA game. Let’s put aside the fact the Clippers were 26-34 from the line while the Thunder were 17-26. That doesn’t even bother me because on the second night of a brutal road back to back I expected the Thunder starters to be tired and probably not moving their feet at times in the game. They were tired and their feet didn’t move at times.
But here’s the thing on this night when Westbrook, George, and Adams all fouled out–the sixth fouls on both Paul George and Russell Westbrook were absolute bullshit calls. I’m a tough critic on my blog at times on the Thunder, but again I feel I need to be given the fact Big 12 writers and college writers who cover this team in this market aren’t exactly what I would describe as shall we say… experience tested objective.
When I coached hockey I stood up for my players and if this was my team tonight in LA I would have been ejected after the sixth foul calls on either Paul George or Russell Westbrook. I might even be in jail right now. For sure…I’d be getting a heavy fine at the least. Both calls were horrific and basically negated any chance in the last three minutes for the Thunder to steal a road win on the second night of a difficult back to back.
As far as the game went…OKC was a Vegas 2.5 underdog and rightfully so. The Thunder aren’t as good as we hoped they’d turn out to be and the gritty Clippers are along with Denver and Indiana one of the genuinely feel good stories in the NBA this season. I admire the effort and grit this Clippers team has shown NBA fans all season long and I applaud their team character and grit.
But still, those two calls were absolute bullshit.
Before I close out…I thought the Thunder bench showed some fight in the third period and that’s a positive. Markieff Morris appears to be rounding into some sort of reasonable basketball shape and that’s a positive. I love grinders…and Abdel Nader is winning my heart with his ‘grindiness’. If the Thunder were smart they’d have some sort of award called ‘The Collison’ which publicly recognizes the importance of your team grinder.
One more game left on this brutal western road swing and that one is on Monday evening in Salt Lake City where the Jazz and their fans very much realize this is a line in the sand game for their season if they want to climb into the fifth or fourth seed in the West by season’s end. It will be a war. It will be like in Portland with the playoff-like setting.
I’d guess OKC will be a 4 to 4.5 Vegas road underdog.
I can’t wait for these type of games. This is why you either play or coach sports. You want to compete.
The Thunder need to compete on Monday and maybe get a little love from the zebras as well.
This will be the second obit I’ve written in my life. The first was the one I wrote on behalf of my father.
It saddened me to observe the passing of legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins this morning. He didn’t die at the age of 89. No, that didn’t happen here. Dan Jenkins will merely move along and pop up somewhere else in the cosmos as one of the funniest novelists and sports writers of the ages.
And yet, as I write this, I realize Dan Jenkins wasn’t just a golf writer at Golf Digest. He was a writer who would write on any subject or any sport and do it with a deftness of keyboard or typewriter which always left me ready to read his next book or article before it was already written.
Dan Jenkins was god-like to me. He got me in trouble in my 11th grade American Lit class when I was supposed to be reading The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn during a class reading session. Not me. I had a copy of Jenkins’ pro football novel Semi-Tough hidden behind the assigned book. My teacher, a tough seventy-year old named Juanita Elijah, came down my aisle and discovered what I was up to. She was a tough no nonsense national teacher of the year winner and you didn’t do things like this in her class. She took my book away from me and told me she was going to drop my semester grade at least one letter grade.
A week later, she approached me after class when no one was around. She handed me the book and said, “Michael, I’m not going to drop your grade. I enjoyed the book.” She correctly figured at least I was reading on my own… period….even if the characters were Billy Clyde Puckett, Shake Tiller and Barbara Jane Bookman instead of an old man battling a fish on the open sea. Hence there and then…Dan Jenkins and Juanita Elijah fostered my love of reading.
In his prime at Sports Illustrated, Jenkins was the guy who covered the Super Bowl, the Final Four, and the Masters. These were his events to write about in an age of sports which seems almost laughably innocent compared to what we witness in the present day.
His writing style was a combination of keen insight paired with a subtle sense of humor which at times could leave you laughing hysterically.
Maybe it was the fact Dan Jenkins was a Texas guy who was born in Fort Worth and attended TCU back in the day when the Horn Frogs were one of the college football elites which drew me to his writing. Jenkins was one of these guys with a slow Texas drawl with the insights of a Harvard PhD. He never wanted to let you know just how smart he was, but if you kept reading his work you came to understand how smart he was.
He wrote books. Both novels and non-fiction. Four of his novels will always rank in my heart where I store places for pieces of writing I hold close to my soul.
He wrote about the side of the NFL we never knew about in Semi-Tough. He wrote about the U.S. Open golf tournament in Dead Solid Perfect when an unknown from Ft. Worth named Kenny Lee made it thru the qualifying rounds to win the Open. He wrote about surviving cancer with someone you love in Life It’s Own Self. And he wrote about what it’s like to live in a place like Texas in Baja Oklahoma.
Maybe in retrospect, it was the Texas touch in Jenkins which made a kid living in Oklahoma love him so.
He’s moved along. But I hope in this age of the 24/7 news cycle a reader here and there will still find Jenkins relevant in our current state of mind.
I love Dan Jenkins.
This is Dan’s daughter… Sally Jenkins. She’s an accomplished writer in her own right. She’s a sports columnist for the Washington Post and like her father, she’s quite a writer. I’ve read three of her books… It’s Not About the Bike: The Lance Armstrong Story, The State of Jones (non-fiction Civil War historical), and The Pat Summit Story. You see, I just can’t get enough of hoops and history…two of my passions. Here’s Sally discussing the book she wrote about legendary coach Pat Summit of Tennessee.
I loved the game last night. This was a playoff basketball game setting. Keep in mind this was the first Thunder road win since February 3rd. I like the fact OKC pulled together and finally embraced a street fight mentality and didn’t play like they were entitled to anything.
It’s just one game, but my hope is this is the spot where the half assed bullshit stops this season and this marks the beginning of an attitude for this team. A team which should be embarrassed about their first round exit to Utah last season.
The fact Westbrook and Paul George took so many shots doesn’t bother me all that much. They came through when they had to. Other guys chipped in as needed. Adams, Grant, Ferguson, Schroder and Markieff Morris did some nice things.
I thought it was one of Billy Donovan’s better games. He coached it like a playoff game. If you doubt me take a close look at the box and examine the minutes.
What I really liked though was he realized the defensive liability Dennis Schroder has been of late and sat him the last ten minutes of the game. Yet, I think he still played Schroder enough earlier in the game to not crater what Schroder can still add to this team if you are careful not to play him too many minutes with Westbrook.
At this time of the year it’s about defense, stops and execution on the offensive end.
Westbrook had a bad turnover night, yet I thought the rest of his game was excellent and amidst all of what happened last night Westbrook amazingly didn’t pick up a technical.
The Westbrook vs. Lillard duel was classic. You just hope Westbrook has something left in the tank tonight versus the Clippers.
Clippers tonight in Staples. This game is pretty big as well.
Let’s hope this is the catalyst for a run of good play heading into the goal achieving portion of the season.
There have been some huge Thunder wins this season with the Divine Intervention in Philly and the epic double overtime win over the Jazz leading the list, but this win in Portland could very well be the biggest as far as season changing momentum and playoff seeding for the Thunder.This was a game Oklahoma City absolutely had to have to slant the seeding math in their favor to secure home court in the first round. If you looked at the standings and examined the final five weeks left on the schedule this was the game the Thunder needed in the worst way on this brutal four game western road swing.
Mission accomplished.
This was playoff basketball in its purist sense for the Thunder. The starters went heavy on the minutes. The bench was used more sparingly. Dennis Schroder for defensive reasons never saw the floor in the final ten minutes of play. Westbrook played 40 minutes, Paul George played 43 minutes.
This was a game for the stars on both teams standing front and center with the role players understanding this in a sense was a seeding game.
Westbrook scored 37 points on a 14-28 night. Paul George scored 32 points and went 17-20 from the line. Combined they gave Billy Donovan 69 points and a truckload of leadership from wire to wire. This is what your stars are supposed to do in playoff basketball.
Damian Lillard scored 51 points. McCullom added 25 points. Combined they had 76 points, but the Thunder did a good job with the rest of the Blazer roster.
Maurice Harkless had only two points. Nurkic was held in check with 13 points. Enes Kanter only managed 3 points and in no way mitigated the defensive liability he still is as an NBA player.
This game had everything. It was chippy. The Thunder played with an edge. Westbrook dumped Nurkic on the floor from behind. Paul George stung Nurkic with an elbow to the jaw which led to the game’s biggest play minutes later as Nurkic was ejected for head butting George.
Billy Donovan was right on the mark managing the minutes in the game. His rotations made sense. He knows his defense is a sieve with Westbrook and Schroder paired together…and they were never together the final ten minutes of this game.
The Thunder leave Portland at 40-25 with sole possession of the No. 4 seed still in their pocket plus a 4-0 series sweep of the Blazers.The Thunder in LA tomorrow night to play the second night of a road back to back. The goal on this four game road swing was to go 2-2. With a win either in LA or Salt Lake City the Thunder can take a deep breath and regroup for the final 15 regular season games.
I have to admit with the Thunder sinking like the Titanic my attention is easily diverted to other things. Of course, Sean Spicer was Trump’s first enabler, but I still always kind of liked Spicer if for nothing else his sense of humor.
So as I observe Russell Westbrook continually troll the Oklahoma local media with Nick Gallo nuzzled up next to him like his pet puppy…it does make me somewhat see Sean Spicer’s face superimposed on Little Nick Gallo’s body during these Oklahoma City Thunder postgame pressers.
I love the opening skits on SNL and if the Thunder season does go all the way south…we at least have to be able to have a sense of humor and laugh at ourselves at times.
I see a lot of Nick Gallo in Sean Spicer and if you can be Russell Westbrook’s press secretary…then I’m thinking the Trump people might want to keep Nick Gallo in mind whenever Sarah Huckabee-Sanders gets fired.