Selfish thoughts on Game 1 of the Western Conference Semis:
1. The Spurs can run--those graybeards are fast. Bowen had a great first quarter, but I don't think he should play 34 minutes if that means Parker or Manu have to sit.
2. As advertised, Paul and West are the show. If they are playing well, the Hornets will always be in the thick of it. Horry, Oberto and Thomas looked like statues trying to guard West.
3. Paul reminded me of Baron Davis the way he drove to the hole. When his outside shot wasn't working, he drove and dished.
4. Parker is unbelievably good. Fast as lightning with a great outside shot. Manu is a great shooter in traffic.
5. Bowen should have been called for all the shoulders he put into Paul during the game.
6. Bonzi is a Spurs killer. If he can produce 10 points a game in twenty minutes, the Hornets will win. I would start him instead of Mo Pete. The fact that he can play both SG and SF gives Scott flexibility.
7. DON'T BLAME HUGO!! Blame the Hornets' organization and the New Orleans Arena staff.
8. I expect a big game from Duncan in game 2. I think he will be guarding West on the defensive end.
9. Chandler's ability as an offensive-zone rebounder was a key factor last night.
10. I was surprised to see the Spurs doing less complaining after each foul called against them.
Chris Paul is the face of the New Orleans Hornets, the franchise embodied in one person. If he were here, walking down the streets of New Orleans, the locals might yell to him “Hey, Chris, where y’at dawlin’?
For those of you in Rio Linda (thank you very much Rush Limbaugh) “where y’at” is a familiar greeting to friends and family in the Crescent City which means “how are you” or “how have youbeen?”
CP3 would hear it …if he were here.
Paul made an appearance at the NBA Draft fest for Hornets fans at the New Orleans Arena back on June 28. To his credit, he has not been idle, either. I checked Chris’ website, Chris Paul .com and I found some of the things he has been doing:
--Chris sponsored a Habitat for Humanity event in Winston-Salem, NC in June and will host another Habitat Fundraiser there over a weekend in September. No doubt his growing up in the area and attending Wake Forest forged very strong ties there.
--Chris has held a basketball camp in Oklahoma City and just completed one in Winston-Salem. Oklahoma City has hosted the Hornets for most of the last two NBA seasons since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August of 2005. Paul was drafted just two months before the storm, so Oklahoma City has been the only home he has known in his professional basketball career.
Said one mother at the Oklahoma City event as quoted in The Oklahoman:
“I was really curious whether they were going to have the camp because I knew the (Hornets) were going back to New Orleans. I think it means a lot that (Paul) stayed here and did this for the kids. And he's present at the camp. That was one of my concerns, would he actually be involved? And he is.”
My question is: why was no CP3 camp scheduled for New Orleans? Why has Chris not shown the commitment to kids and fans in New Orleans that he has in OKC?
In New Orleans, youths are starved for summer goings-on every year. A CP3 basketball camp may have helped keep some “at-risk” youths off the street and, possibly away from trouble. The Hornets have indeed held a basketball camp in New Orleans, and it was attended by Hornets F-C Hilton Armstrong.
But, Chris Paul was not there. The face of the franchise. According to the team website, there will be one more camp in the area from July 30th-August 3rd with a Hornets' player to-be-named-later. Chris, can you volunteer for that one, please?
Please do not misunderstand. CP’s commitment to charity is not in question. His commitment to charities in storm-ravaged New Orleans, almost two years after the fact, is. If the Hornets are here for the long haul--a debatable question for sure--then Paul must be prominent in the community, like, say Reggie Bush of the New Orleans Saints has been.
City Park's Tad Gormley Stadium was underwater after Katrina
Bush made a $50,000 donation to a local high school and is involved in a charity to restore Tad Gormley Stadium, one of the city’s only venues for high school football. Surely there is a gym or basketball court that needs refurbishing somewhere in New Orleans. The CP3 Memorial Gym has a nice ring to it.
The Hornets have tickets to sell. The key to selling those tickets is having the Hornets' highest profile player in the public eye constantly. Being the part of the recovery of the city of New Orleans gives Paul many opporunities daily to make a positive impact. As people move back to the New Orleans area, with a Saints team with a waiting list for season tickets, it sure makes sense to make people aware that the Hornets have more tickets to sell than they have buyers at this point. Why not get a running start on those sales with Paul leading the charge?
Paul helping the recovery and helping sell tickets seems like a win-win proposition for the Hornets and the city.
I don’t know where Paul is these days, now that we’re well into the NBA off-season. But I know there is a city, somewhere--at 30 degrees north latitude and 90 degrees west longitude--desperate for a hero and a champion. In Post-Katrina New Orleans, we cannot have enough of them.
CP3, where are you?
Post Script 7/21/07: I read in the NFL Czar's Blog an entry from May in which he reported that Reggie Bush has actually made another $50,000 donation to the same school again in 2007. Just another hundred-thousand reasons to thank Bush and wonder when Chris Paul will make that kind of impact in New Orleans. See link below for details.
The Buzz is not back at the University of New Orleans. It never had a chance to arrive.
UNO men’s head basketball coach Buzz Williams announced his resignation on Friday to become an assistant coach at Marquette University. Williams lasted only one year on the job with a three year contract. Last year, former head coach Monte Towe resigned to become an assistant coach under Sidney Lowe at North Carolina State, where Towe helped lead the Wolfpack to the 1974 NCAA Championship.
Williams would have made $150,000 per year as UNO’s head coach. As reported in the New Orleans Times Picayune, he is set to make $200,000 per year at Marquette. While no one can blame him for leaving for the money, he leaves a UNO basketball program in desperate need of stability in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Buzz was 14-17 last year for the Privateers, and a not-too-shabby 9-9 in the Sun Belt Conference.
Why this is troubling is that UNO was just getting back on its feet after Katrina damaged much of the Nat Kiefer Arena on the Lakefront, UNO’s home for basketball. Laying dormant since the storm, appropriated money had begun to flow, and the Arena was tentatively set to open in the 2008-2009 season. Williams was to be the driving force behind restoring UNO basketball (and the entire athletic department with it) to the prominence of the Tim Floyd days.
It would be harsh to call Williams a carpetbagger for packing his bags after such a short stay, and he may well have experienced frustrations that he thought may have hampered his ability to do his job to the best of his ability. Among those challenges certainly were the lack of a suitable arena and the long time scale to fix it. UNO played last season and will play this season in the Human Performance Center, the equivalent of a college recreational facility or loosely compared to an average high-school gym. Not exactly Division I standards, but after Katrina, much work still needs to be done here in New Orleans.
The bigger picture is that, as we’ve seen here amongst ordinary folks, qualified people, essential-to-the-recovery people, are still leaving New Orleans like torrential rains on a summer afternoon. The loss of doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, and Fortune 500 Companies from the area is staggering. To make matters worse, they were trickling out of New Orleans before Katrina. Williams was contributing to the recovery by doing what he loved at a university that needed him. Had he succeeded, Nat Kiefer Arena may well have been the “House that Buzz Rebuilt.” That job will have to go to someone else.
UNO’s slow recovery from Katrina was not unexpected. Long the “red-headed step-child” of the Louisiana State University System--yes, UNO was once LS-UNO and has the same crest as LSU--UNO was not among the priorities of a state university board looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to deal with. Possibly, the UNO administration gave a too-rosy picture of what UNO was going to look like to Williams before he accepted the job.
Here’s to wishing Buzz success at Marquette, certainly much more of a prominent D-I basketball program than UNO. Here’s to hoping as well that UNO can find a replacement in someone who wants to be there, even relishing the opportunity to rebuild a basketball program with some history from scratch.
Now that the NBA is "officially" returning to New Orleans for the 2007-2008 regular season, all eyes will be on the local market and the way the community responds in the Hornets' season ticket and suite sales for the upcoming season.
The proposed practice facility, still in limbo, is the key to the Hornets remaining even in the short term. As a concession to leave Charlotte, the city pledged $6 Million for building a practice facility. Shinn said he expects the city and state to make good on that pledge, though he has preliminarily agreed to a proposal to build the facility on top of the loading dock at the New Orleans Arena. It likely will cost more than $15 Million, and you can bet Shinn expects the state and city to pay for it.
Season ticket sales are tepid at best, but you can excuse New Orleanians for being less than excited considering the team has called Oklahoma City home since Hurricane Katrina. Corporate partners are also waiting on the sidelines and reviewing their options.
Just how much all the uncertainty around the team's future clouds the minds of potential season ticket holders remains to be seen. There is no question in my mind that the area can support both the Saints and the Hornets, even post-Katrina. But, the NBA likely will never draw 17,000 a game here, and I suspect in terms of average attendance, New Orleans will always be somewhere between Orlando, Indiana and Atlanta. That will only be good enough for Shinn if the state of Louisiana sweetens the pot with concessions on rent, food & beverage sales, and of course, a free state-of-the-art practice facility.
One prediction: it won't be three home games back in New Orleans before the national media points out the disparities in average attendance between OKC and New Orleans. Shinn mortgaged the house last season in OKC bringing in Peja Stojakovic and Tyson Chandler, and this season has already stated he will not go on a similar spending spree. Anticipating a short stay, perhaps?
Post Script: New Orleans was last in the NBA in average attendance the season before Katrina primarily because of the team's 18-64 record, not the lack of support of the market. Remember that this is a town that has watched the Saints lose much more often than win. Watching a losing team can become hateful. The Hornets, at one point, were 2-29. How many fans are going to pay to watch that team? The Atlanta Hawks averaged just 200 more fans per game that season and had four times the pre-K population of New Orleans. The constant? Atlanta had the worst record in the league.
George Shinn is a man of many faces. In New Orleans, he praises the city, pledges to return, but then slams the slow pace of recovery. In Oklahoma City, he wines and dines the locals, tells folks that his preference is to stay there (hearsay, but entirely believable) and rakes in millions from OKC's passionate fans.
Would the real George Shinn please stand up?
Trouble is, he can't at the moment, so he has become the Shinn that Charlotte remembers: praising the city he's in with a ####-eating grin while making all haste to "get out of dodge." The NBA and Shinn are placating the fears of New Orleans Hornets fans by pledging to return for the 2007-08 season. Here's my flyer-in-the-breeze: sometime next season, look for the NBA to announce that New Orleans cannot support an NBA team and that Oklahoma City will be chosen as the permanent home for the Hornets. The NBA will graciously award the city of New Orleans an NBA All-Star Game, but it will allow the Hornets to set up shop permanently in Oklahoma.
In Charlotte, Shinn tried in vain to get the new arena built for him. The city thumbed their collective noses at Shinn, let him leave, then built the arena to attract the Bobcats. New Orleans has a similar and less expensive choice: build the practice arena next to the Superdome or he's gone. His lawyer, Bill Hines, has stated this publicly already.
Shinn's not a dummy. He's covering his ####-ets, as it were. By saying the politically-correct things about staying and helping the recovery of the city of New Orleans, Shinn is buying time for the political process to work itself out in New Orleans (quickness being measures in decades) with the ususal result of nothing being done. Afterwards, he will express "bitter disappointment" that he will be "forced" to leave New Orleans for greener pastures when the move to OKC is what he's wanted since his team went 18-64 before Hurricane Katrina.
The city of New Orleans, having to chose between the two, will always choose the Saints first. Shinn knows this. He wants to be the top dog--and being the only game in town in OKC will fit him nicely. He just can't move yet. NBA fans in New Orleans just have to hope that the recovery is quick enough and the practice facility built to put the smile back on Shinn's face.
Until then, fans in New Orleans and Oklahoma City will be curious as to which face they are seeing.
Though I am a life-long Southerner, ice hockey is my game. I was likely the first hockey-specif ic sportswriter in the state of Louisiana when the ECHL arrived in 1995. I was a freelance hockey sportswriter for local fishwraps between 1995-2000.
Being from New Orleans, I follow the Saints, Hornets and LSU in that order. I have been from Los Angeles to New York City to watch Wayne Gretzky play, and I attended my first hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1985. The greatest hockey ever played was the 1987 Canada Cup Final between Canada and the USSR.
Post Script 7/21/07: I read in the NFL Czar's Blog an entry from May in which he reported that Reggie Bush has actually made another $50,000 donation to the same school again in 2007. Just another hundred-thousand reasons to thank Bush and wonder when Chris Paul will make that kind of impact in New Orleans. See link below for details.
