Points in the Paint

» September 17, 2009 5:56 PM | By Brandon Hoffman

I’m a little late to this ESPN the Magazine story on Trevor Ariza (subscription required), which is excerpted at TLN: “Like everyone else, Morey was taken with Ariza’s selflessness, athleticism and offensive uptick, all of which made him a snug fit in Rick Adelman’s free-flowing attack. But in his analysis, Morey, the league’s top number cruncher, discovered something else, too. ‘We found Trevor’s defensive impact to be at the top of his position,’ he says. ‘He was always our top free agent target, but on his defense alone, he was worth the money we had available for him.’”

This tweet from Bill Simmons caught my eye: “1 more KG note: This wasn’t a typical knee injury. They had to re-attach tendons to his kneecap with staples.” This definitely contradicts Boston’s press release, which indicated Garnett underwent a procedure to remove bone spurs in his left knee. In fact, team physician Dr. Brian McKeon stated that there “were no unexpected obstacles” when he operated on KG’s knee back on May 26th. It’s impossible to separate fact from fiction, but it’s worth noting that the Celtics went to great lengths to downplay the severity of Garnett’s injury last season before shelving him for the final nine games of the regular season and the playoffs. With training camp less than two weeks away, it’s only a matter of time before the truth is revealed.

Scott Souza files a report from Boston’s involuntary workouts: “Training camp may still be more than a week away, but Ray Allen is already finding ways to win with prized offseason free agent pickup Rasheed Wallace. Allen said earlier today at the team’s Shamrock Foundation Golf Tournament that many players have been practicing informally at HealthPoint for the past couple of weeks and that Wallace has been a key to his success in ruling the pickup games. ‘We played a couple of days ago and a couple of people were mad at me because they think that I cheated,’ he said. ‘That’s typical for us because we always get in arguments about who’s doing what and how. But a couple of guys think that I stacked the team in my favor. But, I mean, who wouldn’t do that? It wasn’t that I stacked the team, it was that I wanted to make sure everybody had guys they were matching up against from their position. On my team, I just had guys who were really moving the ball. Rasheed was one of those guys on my team and Rasheed was … one game he must have hit every shot. I would come off a pick-and-roll and throw it right back to him. You’ve got to help on me and Rasheed is wide open. So he just knocked them down. He’s backpeddling down the floor saying: ‘Somebody better get out on me! I’m hot.’”

David Aldridge on the league’s labor agreement negotiations with the referees: “The referees have agreed to some reduction in their annual compensation, including a wage freeze for this year and cuts in their travel budget and per diems, but the union says the league is seeking more, pointing out that the current recession has led to massive financial losses in the last year. Two sources with knowledge of owner finances say that the league collectively lost hundreds of millions of dollars last season, with the prospect of even more red ink this coming season. Renewal orders for season tickets for fans and corporations went out in the spring for most teams, and although several clubs have instituted more generous payment terms and conditions, most teams are expecting the worst.”

LeBron James has signed on to star in a comedy about five guys from different backgrounds who come to Vegas to live out their fantasy by attending the LeBron James Adult Basketball Camp.

Via Dan Steinberg: “Gilbert Arenas has the faces of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama and Malcolm X tattooed across his leg which forms what he has dubbed ‘Black Rushmore.’”

Tim Povtak reveals a little-known fact about Pistol Pete’s death: “Maravich died in 1988 of an undetected heart defect, moments after playing a casual game of pick-up basketball with friends and acquaintances at a church gymnasium. He was born without one of the two artery systems that supply the heart with blood, an affliction that often kills before a boy becomes a man.”

Nick Friedell knocks it out of the park with this profile of Tim Grover’s ATTACK Athletics facility. It’s well worth reading the whole story. Here’s a highlight: “‘We sit down every day and have a plan together. The days of working out with one individual or only seeing one person, those days are over with,’ Grover says. ‘To get an athlete better, injury-free and everything, you need a team of individuals. ‘If you see what goes on in here, an athlete will touch, maybe four or five people on that same day. Each one has an expertise, each one has a protocol that’s been put together, that needs to be followed and when that happens, that’s when the results come in.’ One of the most important people in that group is Reavy. He joined Grover’s team a little over three years ago and he’s one of the first people that the athletes see when they walk into the door. ‘If you look across the league in sports, a lot of people keep getting injured, a different injury. They made their knee strong so their knee’s not gonna hurt anymore, but their back hurts, or vice versa , or it’s their shoulder, or their foot. It just goes up and down the whole kinetic chain,’ Reavy says. ‘So if you lose motion somewhere, your body’s gonna compensate for that lack of motion and then the body becomes inefficient at that point cause certain muscles are designed to do certain things.’”

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