Nba Players

Have you heard what Milwaukee Bucks center Andrew Bogut said about his fellow NBA players? If you regularly soak up every newspaper, magazine and major sports Web site you can get your hands on ... you probably have no idea what he said. Too bad for those news outlets, and too bad for us. What Bogut told a paper in his native Australia two weeks ago (yes, two weeks ago) about the American league in which he plays and the players, most of whom are black, populating it ought to open up another good avenue to discuss the issue most desperately in need of sane discussion: race in American culture.

Some nights, when she looks down at the other bench, Trudi Lacey, head coach of the WNBA's Charlotte Sting, might see someone in a pantsuit similar to hers. Mainly though, her counterpart these days is wearing a suit with a tie, and that makes her scratch her head. "Yeah, an endangered species," said Lacey with a chuckle, "women that coach women's basketball. I think the W is still in front of WNBA. But that's OK. It's a challenge. I'm a competitor." A look around the WNBA, which has begun its eighth season, reveals decreasing numbers of women head coaches.

WASHINGTON - If Orlando Magic coach Doc Rivers is right, a video copy of last night's Magic-Wizards game should be kept in a vault for posterity, but not necessarily because Washington's 113-110 victory was such a rarity. Rather, Rivers is worried that the historic new set of rules that comes into play next season, agreed to Thursday by the NBA Board of Governors, may cause free-wheeling offensive contests like the one last night to go the way of the dinosaur. "I hope I'm wrong. I really do. I'm open to trying new things.

WILMINGTON, N.C. - For now, call Jared Jeffries the Stealth Rookie. While the glare of the spotlight during the Washington Wizards' training camp this week has been focused on such well-known targets as Michael Jordan, Jerry Stackhouse and Bryon Russell, Jeffries has been able to elude attention, mainly by keeping his 6-foot-10 head down and focusing on the task. "That's the great thing about having guys like that on your team," Jeffries said. "It kind of takes some of the attention away from you, and I can get comfortable and do what I have to do, to learn my role on this team and learn from guys who have already proven themselves in the NBA."

THE EASIEST THING for most of us to say to someone like Carmelo Anthony is, "Get away from those negative forces in your past, and don't ever go back." The hardest thing for someone like Carmelo Anthony to do is - well, exactly that, to get away from those forces and never come back. No matter what it looks like, no matter who is there and what they are doing, no matter how much sense it makes in both the short term and long term, it's home. "I don't know what he could do differently," Calvin Andrews, Anthony's agent, said yesterday.

BEIJING - The U.S. men's basketball team is about to face 2004 gold medalist Argentina in this morning's semifinals, and you know what that means. Not only is it an honor to play the Argentines, they're a great team. Actually, they're not merely a great team, they're like an NBA team! Actually, they're not merely like a generic NBA team but the Boston Celtics in Bill Russell's prime! Actually, what it probably means is bad news for Argentina, which, by its record (5-1) and the way it has looked, might be only marginally better than Spain (which the U.S. squad beat by 37)

So, the NBA players have spoken. They don't want to be like Mike, after all.To which there is only one simple and obvious response:Good.No one cared about the complicated labor dispute that threatened to kill the 1995-96 NBA season.There were lots of issues, money and angles involved, but all anyone other than David Falk and Michael Jordan cared about was whether there would be a season.Like we should care about anything else?Anyway, the answer is yes, there will be a season -- or so it seems with yesterday's news that the players had voted to keep their union intact, effectively ratifying the collective bargaining agreement to which their leadership and the owners agreed last month.

True to its tradition of trailblazing labor deals, the NBA has achieved something that the other pro leagues have only dreamed about: a limit on how much a veteran player can be paid.The tentative agreement the league reached with its players yesterday still contains exceptions for certain players -- chiefly the so-called Larry Bird exemption for re-signed free agents -- but the appearance of individual salary limits is a first for modern sports."It's a very important event in the field of sports labor," said Roger I. Abrams, a law professor at Rutgers University and an expert in collective bargaining.

STEVE FRANCIS IS TAKING advantage of the system. Again. Nearly two years ago, critics were questioning if he could make it big in the NBA after playing only one season, his junior year, at the University of Maryland. Could he handle the point guard position in the NBA? Did he lack discipline because he only stayed in the system for a year? Would the physical style be too much for him on a nightly basis? And then came the ultimate insult: Some people insinuated that if Francis left Maryland early, he wouldn't come back to get his college degree because he was too dumb.

WASHINGTON - I find myself in the unpleasant position of defending Larry Bird. Guy shreds my heart in the '84 Finals, his evil Boston Celtics defeating my valiant Los Angeles Lakers, and now, just 20 years later, here I stand between him and the torches and pitchforks of the mob. Still, Larry Legend is getting a bum rap, and I can't stand by and watch that, even if he is a former Celtic. It seems that during a televised roundtable on ESPN on June 10, Mr. Bird was asked whether the NBA could use more white stars.