BallerBlogger.com » Points in the Paint

» August 20, 2009 4:54 PM | By Brandon Hoffman

Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports: “How many calls have gone to Iverson’s most recent employer, one of the basketball’s most respected front offices? ‘Not one,’ a Pistons front-office source said. No one has called the Pistons because there’s no mystery about Iverson. This has to be one of the most fascinating falls in modern NBA history – a $20 million-a-year player spiraling this fast without an injury, an arrest, something. He was still popular enough that fans voted him as a starter in the 2009 NBA All-Star Game. Now he’ll be fortunate to get three of the worst franchises in the NBA – Charlotte, Memphis and the Los Angeles Clippers – to offer him a modest, one-year contract. Iverson comes out of a different NBA, a different time, and sometimes it feels like he’s hanging around a high-school party a year or two after his graduation.”

FanHouse’s Matt Steinmetz, who covered the Golden State Warriors for the Contra Costa Times back in the late nineties, recalls the day Latrell Sprewell assaulted P.J. Carlesimo.

Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle tweets: “Yao arrives at Toyota Cent at 8:30 most days. He shoots hundreds of balls from a chair. Wouldn’t it be great if every player worked so hard?”

The AP: “A Muslim woman has been told by Swiss basketball authorities she can’t wear a headscarf when she plays in league games. Sura Al-Shawk, a 19-year-old Swiss citizen of Iraqi origin, is to debut in a regional women’s league when the season starts next month. Her team, STV Luzern, sought permission for her to wear the scarf. However, the Swiss association ProBasket said Thursday it follows the rules of FIBA, the world governing body. FIBA says the sport has to be neutral, forbidding religious symbols and headcovers. ‘If basketball is priority No. 1, international rules have to be respected,’ ProBasket told the Swiss newspaper Neue Luzerner Zeitung. ‘If religion is priority No. 1, then you cannot play basketball.’”

Dime Magazine wrote a good cover story on Derrick Rose. Rose fans should read the whole article. Here’s one part that stuck out to me: “Rose, quiet by nature and sometimes painfully shy and humble, admits it was weird being expected to lead a group that included 25- and 30-year-olds when he was just 20, and that it’s still a work in progress for him. ‘I know I gotta be more vocal and talk more. I gotta work on that,’ Derrick says. Another knock on him coming out of college was that he wasn’t assertive enough on the court; that for all his talent, he wasn’t selfish enough. I learned that you can’t take anything light in the NBA. You gotta be in kill-mode every game,’ Derrick says. ‘Everybody here is tough. Everybody is here for a reason. Some nights it’ll be somebody that’s stronger than you, then you might go up against somebody that’s not as strong, but they’re quicker or they’re more experienced. It’s hard to play in the NBA. You gotta get your mindset right, but if you do that you’ll be alright.’”

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