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Two games, two different Laker teams! |
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November 02, 2006 |
 Jekyll & Hyde |
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Los Angeles, November 2, 2006 – Are the Lakers ready to turn into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? After just two games in this young NBA season, it’s apparent that there are two – count ‘em – two Laker teams. One plays at Staples Center, is coached by Phil Jackson and features 19-year-old center Andrew Bynum and third-year shooting guard Sasha Vujacic and the other plays on the road and is coached by Kurt Rambis, featuring center Ronny Turiaf and rookie point guard Jordan Farmer. At least until Jackson can return full-time from hip surgery, Turiaf – himself returning this season from open-heart surgery – will get a long look, as will Farmar, who has the tools to take over at the point: he passes first, shoots second and can, as long as he is healthy, play good defense.
In the opener against Phoenix, Bynum was sensational, playing 23 minutes and scoring 18 points while Vujacic played 24 minutes but didn’t score. Last night at Golden State, Farmar’s minutes jumped from 14 to 24 and he scored nine, Vujacic played only seven minutes and at center, Turiaf scored 23 points in 31 minutes and Bynum played only 10. No problem as long as the Lakers keep winning, but this is a team that will have to get adjusted to each other, to which coach is on the bench and what to do when Kobe Bryant returns.
>> Pac-10 Basketball Media Day was on at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton Hotel today and although there weren’t very many media members in attendance, there was plenty of food left over for those who were there! Ben “Humble” Howland’s UCLA Bruins were picked to win the league again in 2007, getting 21 first-place votes to Arizona’s 13 in a poll of 35 members of the media. The best line of the day was from Washington coach Lorenzo Romar, whose team will likely start two freshman and three sophomores: “We’ve got a lot of embryos, we just have to see how they develop.”
>> UCLA and USC will visit the Bay Area in separate football games this weekend for what is believed to be the first time ever. In full-page ads in the Daily Bruin, Daily Trojan, Daily Californian and the Stanford Daily, two Deans, a Vice President and a Vice Chancellor begged students at UCLA, USC, Stanford and Cal to “set a positive example both in and out of the stadiums.” Comment one: the amount of control shown by the students and alumni attending these games will be directly related to their blood-alcohol content, so are there entry-gate breathalyser test stations next to the mandatory bag search? Comment two: a bigger danger in both stadiums is boredom: Cal is favored by 17 over the Bruins in Berkeley, where UCLA hasn’t won since 1998 and the Trojans are 29 over the Cardinal, which hasn’t defeated USC at home since 2000.
>> Hurricane watch: even though current Rutgers football coach Greg Schiano would seem to be a perfect candidate for the Miami head coaching job, there are some hard feelings in South Florida about the former Miami assistant coach. Like most coaches, he runs a summer camp right on his own campus, but also a second camp in South Florida, a valuable tool in recruiting as the Scarlet Knights, located in sunny Piscataway, New Jersey, have a surprising total of 20 Floridians on their current roster! Not everyone at Miami likes that.
>> Attention UCLA and USC athletic directors Dan Guerrero and Mike Garrett: on Wednesday, the famed Italian football club Juventus of Turin became the fourth individual club in Italy to launch its own television channel! It’s by subscription for eight Euro per home per month (about $10.20 U.S.). Isn’t it time for one or both Southern California universities to create their own channels, to replay some of the famous games in their history, to show live events in sports not covered on over-the-air or cable television today and to work with the university to showcase academic and campus programs during the daytime hours?
>> The NFL is fan-tastic: one of the more amazing statistics coming out of the NFL this week is that for the eighth consecutive week – every week this season – every game was sold out and there were no local television blackouts. The blackout rule went into effect in 1973, but it wasn’t until 1997 that there was a single weekend in which every game was a sell-out.
>> More NFL: the league helped ESPN become the no. 1 prime-time network on cable for the month of October, with an average of 3.5 million viewers nightly, a 23% increase over last year. Of course, Monday Night Football was the difference-maker and ESPN had the top five programs of the month. However, some of ESPN’s success came at the expense of its sister, ESPN2, which fell off 17% from last year’s ratings.
>> NBA slang: the Miami Herald reported that staff members of the NBA champion Miami Heat have gotten very friendly with the league championship trophy. Formally known as the Larry O’Brien Trophy after the late NBA Commissioner, some Heat employees just call it . . . Larry!
>> South of the border basketball: former Utah coach and dining critic Rick Majerus may take on the coaching duties for Mexico at the final qualifying tournament for Western Hemisphere teams for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, to be held next year in Las Vegas. Rick loves the buffet almost as much as basketball!
>> Baseball dilemma: agent Jeff Borris thinks his client, 42-year-old Barry Bonds should be attractive to all 30 Major League teams, even with an asking price of as much as $14 million for a single season. But there’s also an element that no one wants to discuss . . . not Bonds’s age, or his recovery from injury or his salary . . . but what team – perhaps outside of San Francisco – where Bonds is tremendously popular – wants to tackle the issue of having to arrange a celebration if and when he passes Hank Aaron to become Major League Baseball’s all-time leading home run hitter, certain to be a media circus and one at which accusations and asterisks will fly as far as Bonds’s 756th home run.
>> Olympic report: little more than a year after winning the right to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, the biggest sport in London is back-stabbing, followed by name-calling. The Daily Telegraph reported that American Jack Lemley, who was leading the massive engineering and construction effort, left the organizing committee because, as he told the Idaho Statesman, “I went there to build things, not to sit and talk about it.” London now faces a tighter-than-hoped for time schedule and potential cost overruns.
>> Asian Games report: Doha, Qatar will be the site for the 2006 Asian Games beginning December 1, an event almost as large in scope as the Olympic Games. Unfortunately, the organizing committee is a little short on space at the inn. The Japanese delegation was informed that although they are planning on bringing a team of 811 athletes, coaches and officials, that there will only be space in the Athlete’s Village for 693! The Japanese Olympic Committee has asked the Japanese Embassy in Qatar and local affiliates of Japanese companies for help finding space.
>> Props for the “World Champion:” Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, in the middle of ripping the Los Angeles Times a new one on Hugh Hewitt’s nationally-syndicated radio show on Tuesday, had nice words for Randy Harvey and The Times world-champion sports section, quote: “The L.A. Times’ strong suit are two sections: the sports section and Calendar.
“Calendar has evaporated, because they don’t have anybody covering entertainment that anybody cares about. Gone are the days when people turn to the L.A. Times to see what the new movie was going to be. The Sports section’s still pretty good, but you can’t run a newspaper on a sports section. So I don’t see any hope for the L.A. Times, even if they were to swing back to fair and balanced, which they won’t do, because they believe that they’ll stay alive just by catering to the West Side Angelenos, who want the liberal dose every day.”
~ Rich Perelman
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