For some time now, Chronicle sportswriter John Lopez has been writing the most insightful pieces on the local newspaper’s sportspage. In his column today, Lopez continues that trend by expanding on the theme of this post from over a year ago — the bad management decisions of the Houston Rockets:

The reason [the 12-25 Rockets’ season] all has come apart, you might believe, is all the injuries suffered by this team, beginning the day after the opener when Tracy McGrady first strained his back.
But don’t get so caught up in the pain that you neglect what really caused it. If Rockets owner Leslie Alexander, general manager Carroll Dawson and coach Jeff Van Gundy miss the real source of the trouble, the affliction will be lingering.
While injuries might have hastened the fall and brought on overwhelmingly bad nights like Wednesday, the Rockets should face the realization that the biggest problem has been bad decisions. . . .
It’s not just Yao’s toe and McGrady’s back that needs to get better. It’s decision-making from the top of the organization on down.

As with this earlier article on the Texans’ personnel decisions, Lopez goes on to expose the Rockets’ dubious strategy of attempting to plug holes on the roster with aging players.
Thus, after being the toast of Houston a decade ago, the Rockets are now an afterthought on the local sports scene. Even though the Houston Texans football team just completed an even worse season than the Rockets are enduring, the Texans at least remain a common topic of conversation around town as they decide whether to select Reggie Bush or Vince Young in the upcoming NFL draft. Not so with the Rockets. Even on local sportstalk radio call-in shows, the Rockets are rarely a topic of conversation. In short, the Rockets have entered the twilight zone that all professional sports franchises fear most — i.e., the zone where local sports fans respond to a question about the team with a curt “Who cares?”
By the way, speaking of Vince Young, Lopez also explains in this blog post why Young is a far riskier choice for the Texans than Reggie Bush.

As noted in earlier posts here and here, I find it difficult to generate much enthusiasm for the local professional basketball team, the Houston Rockets. This year’s club is mildly interesting, with one of the best perimeter players in the league — Tracy McGrady — teamed with one of the best big men — Yao Ming. They are both in the prime of their respective careers, so you would think that the team would be a title contender. However, as has been often the case for the Rockets throughout their existence, the team has not found the point guard who can push all the right buttons (remember Matt Maloney?) and propel the team into the NBA’s elite teams. This year, the Rockets are trying Rafer Alston at the point, but it remains to be seen whether he is the answer.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the Rockets, I did notice during the last NBA season that the games were much more interesting than in the previous three seasons or so. A number of really special young players had arrived on the scene — notably Cleveland’s LeBron James and Miami’s Dwayne Wade — and the pace and intensity of the play made NBA games enjoyable to watch again. Along those lines, Patrick Hruby of ESPN.com notes in this article that many of the complaints that one commonly hears about the NBA are myths. One of the more interesting observations is what really distracts players while they are shooting free throws:

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Oscar Robertson is one of the five greatest players in the history of basketball. At 6-5 and 215 pounds, the Big O could play any position on the court and averaged an incredible triple-double (i.e., 10 or more points, rebounds and assists in a game) for the entire 1961-62 NBA season. Not surprisingly, he continues to hold the NBA record for triple-doubles with 181 and remains the single-season leader with 41. He was the first player to lead the league in both assists (9.7 apg) and scoring average (29.2 ppg) in the same season (1967-68).
You know that blogging has really arrived when the Big O decides to blog the current NBA Championship Series.

Mickey Herskowitz is the dean of Houston sportswriters, and several of his previous columns have been highlighted on this blog. Mr. Herskowitz is at his best when his columns address the legends of sports, so the death earlier this week of the National Basketball Association’s first true big man — George Mikan — gave Mr. Herskowitz an opportunity to pen another strong column. Here are a couple of tidbits:

In the fall of 1949, Slater Martin was an All-America guard out of Texas, a 5-10 rookie hoping to land a spot on the roster of the Minneapolis Lakers. Mikan was a foot taller, in his fourth year and the greatest attraction in a league struggling to survive.

Martin remembers his first glimpse of the legendary center . . .

“I was just shooting at a basket from the side of the court, and he walked over to where I was and said, ‘Hey, throw me that ball, I’m going to shoot some free throws. Will you fetch ’em for me?’ I said, sure.

He was a very, very good free-throw shooter. Shot them the old way, underhanded, between his legs. He finally missed one and then he said, ‘That’s enough, you can go now.’

“He thought I was the ball boy.”

Mr. Martin goes on to describe Mr. Mikan’s playing style:

Mikan was, in Martin’s words, “a teddy bear off the court.” But he played the game without mercy. One of his victims was his brother Ed, a 6-8 center for the short-lived Chicago Stags.

“He had to guard George,” Martin said. “I felt sorry for him. After the game, we went to a tavern his parents owned. Ed was all bruised and nicked up. He had a cut over his eye, scratches on his face.

“Their folks were Croatian. His mother called him Georgie. This night she said, ‘Georgie, why you beat up your brother like that?’

“He said, ‘Mama, if you had been out there I’d have beat you up, too.'”

Read the entire piece.

One of the alluring characteristics of the NCAA Basketball Tournament each season are the undercurrents that bubble to the surface when certain teams end up playing each other. One of the more delicious background stories of this year’s tournament pertains to this Thursday’s game between the number one seeded University of Illinois Illini and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, which is making its first appearance in the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament.
What makes this game so interesting is that Bruce Pearl, the UWM coach, was the central figure over 15 years ago in a recruiting scandal that haunts the Illinois program and its fans to this day. Pearl, then an assistant coach at Illinois recruiting rival Iowa, taped a conversation with Deon Thomas — a hot high school basketball prospect — and then turned the tape over to the NCAA Enforcement Division. The resulting investigation landed the Illini program on probation and the NCAA banned the program from the NCAA Tournament for a year. A couple of Illini assistant coaches lost their jobs over the affair, and Illinois and Iowa basketball fans re-confirmed their mutual and everlasting distaste for each other.
Although Illini fans allege that Pearl turned on the Illinois program simply because Illinois had won the battle for Thomas and that Pearl himself was guilty of recruiting violations, the NCAA did not cite either Pearl or Iowa for any violations in connection with its investigation of the affair. Nevertheless, many in the cozy basketball coaching “fraternity” deemed Pearl a “snitch” and blacklisted him. Moreover, inasmuch as the state of Illinois was Pearl’s main recruiting territory while he was on the Iowa coaching staff, his tarnished reputation in Illinois at the time prompted him to leave the Iowa staff and start over at a Division II school. Even though he had been a rising star in the coaching profession at Iowa, Pearl toiled for 12 more years in the backwaters of college basketball before finally getting a chance to coach at a Division I school, and then only at the obscure Milwaukee campus of the University of Wisconsin. Four years later, his team is the Cinderella story of the tournament.
So, you might want to take a few minutes tomorrow night and watch a bit of the Illinois-UWM tournament game. Even though the players on both squads were just pups at the time of the Pearl-Thomas affair, you can rest assured that the Illini fans — as well as Coach Pearl — will bring a special intensity to this particular game.
And if Coach Pearl’s Cinderella team were to prevail over the mighty Illini? Moments such as those are the reason why the NCAA Basketball Tournament remains a colorful thread in the fabric of America life each March. Don’t miss the opportunity to see it.