Cultural deference to the Europeans among us.

Of a trend, has anyone ever heard Charles Barkley talking about his failure to ever win an NBA championship? When he talks about his forcing a trade from Philadelphia to Phoenix, he always uses a similar line about looking around at his first practice in Phoenix and thinking about Kevin Johnson and Dan Majerle and how he had never played with teammates like that. The Philadelphia team that drafted Barkley was one year removed from being among the greatest professional basketball teams ever assembled. During Barkley's first two seasons, Philadelphia fielded a team boasting 5 future members of the NBA Hall of Fame. They also had Andrew Toney, who belongs in the Hall of Fame, was arguably the greatest offensive player of the 1980s not named Michael Jordan and was nicknamed "the Boston Strangler" due to his repeatedly destroying the Larry Bird era Boston Celtics.

None of those terms mean anything to me.

Additionally, Danny Ainge was on those Phoenix teams with Barkley. He actually played professional basketball (with an awe-inspiringly, shameless streak of cheap shots and dirty play) before becoming a coach and then team running executive. Over his entire career, Danny Ainge never lost a first round playoff series and only lost three Conference Semifinals series. His 193 playoff games over 12 seasons averages out to 16 playoff games per season, and he played in NBA Finals series with three different teams. He also inspired the classic Boston newspaper headline, "Tree Bites Man".

2-time NBA Championship
4-time Finals Runner-up (to the 2 best Showtime Lakers teams and the Jordan Bulls)
3-time Conference Finals Runner-up
3-time Conference Semifinal loser (twice in 7 games to the eventual NBA Champions in their closest playoff series of their championship runs)

7 playoff losses to the eventual NBA Champions.

For added spice, he and Robert Horry (the most successful roll player in the history of NBA basketball) absolutely hate each other. Although, Robert Horry has never, to my knowledge, impregnated Ainge's wife or girlfriend. :oP

"Has anyone ever heard Charles Barkley talking about his failure to ever win an NBA championship?"

Not exactly. Charles is not lacking in ego or self-confidence, but in Episode 6 of The Last Dance (Netflix) he does discuss being ouplayed by Michael Jordan in Game 2 of the 1993 NBA Finals: "I played as well as I could play, and Michael just outplayed me." Barkley played a fantastic game, scoring 42 points and grabbing 13 rebounds, but Jordan led the Bulls to a 111-108 victory. Barkley is also shown in Episode 6 saying, "That was probably the first time in my life that I felt like there was a better basketball player in the world than me." That was AFTER he played alongside Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird on the 1992 Olympic "Dream Team."

Yeah, but implicit in all of that stuff was the claim that his best years were wasted in Philadelphia where his teammates let him down.

But if you want to have a sense of how good Barkley was, take a look at his stat line over the 7 game Philadelphia loss in the 1986 Eastern Conference Semifinals against Milwaukee. Then remember that that was Barkley's second season in the league and he was playing with 5 future Hall of Fame players (Dr. J, Moses Malone and Maurice Cheeks with Bobby Jones and Bob McAdoo coming off of the bench) and Andrew Toney. Plus it was a losing effort against the forgotten fourth great team of the 1980s in the Sidney Moncrief Milwaukee Bucks.

Game 1 (W): 31 points 20 rebounds 6 assists 6 steals 2 blocks
Game 2 (L): 26 points 15 rebounds 4 assists 3 steals 1 blocks
Game 3 (W): 29 points 13 rebounds 3 assists 3 steals 1 blocks
Game 4 (L): 37 points 14 rebounds 9 assists 1 steals 3 blocks
Game 5 (L): 29 points 08 rebounds 5 assists 0 steals 1 blocks
Game 6 (W): 23 points 21 rebounds 2 assists 0 steals 2 blocks
Game 7 (L): 18 points 12 rebounds 2 assists 4 steals 0 blocks

BTW, recognized nicknames according to Basketball-Reference: "Sir Charles, The Round Mound of Rebound, The Chuckster, The Chuck Wagon, The Prince of Pizza, The Incredible Bulk, The Leaning Tower of Pizza, Bread Truck, Boy Gorge, Love Boat, Food World, The Crisco Kid, Wide Load from Leeds, Ton of Fun, Goodtime Blimp"

I see what you're getting at. Barkley has a point: If you look at all those names on the Sixers when he arrived, the two true stars were Dr J and Moses Malone. In 1986 Dr J was already 36 and on the decline. Moses Malone was a rock star, but he missed the '86 playoffs with an eye injury, then got traded the next year. Bobby Jones and Bob McAdoo were 34 and playing their final season. And to win a championship, besides Milwaukee, the Sixers had to contend with the Lakers (Magic, Kareem), Celtics (Bird, McHale), Pistons (Isaiah, Rodman), Bulls (Jordan), and Rockets (Olajuwon). Against that crowd, even Jordan, as great as he was, didn't win a title until 1991, his 7th year. But yeah, it's sour grapes for Barkley to blame it on his teammates. He always was a bit of an asshole.

With about 13 articles per speaker, apparently the Inari Sami Wikipedia is has the highest proportion of articles per speaker. Unless you count constructed and dead languages.

Sidney Moncrief and Michael Cooper were unquestionably the two best defensive wing players of the 1980s, with Dennis Johnson (Bird's more proper second fiddle with the Celtics over apex Gopher McHale) as a likely #3. Moncrief ranked Andrew Toney as Jordan's equal as a challenge to guard, and Michael Cooper ranked Toney as a significantly harder challenge than Jordan. Cooper's argument was that Toney had far fewer identifiable tendencies as a ball handler than Jordan, Toney was unrivalled at simply getting to his comfort spots to initiate offensive play making whereas Jordan could more easily be denied freedom of movement to get to his preferred spots and that Jordan was the complete focus of his team's offense so that he was much easier to focus on and game plan for. The Bird era Celtics had to dramatically remodel their team in the mid-1980s entirely in response to "the Boston Strangler". Andrew Toney had recurrent foot problems that dramatically shortened his career given the medical technology and practice of his era. He basically only played 5 seasons over like 7 years. He was also pressured to play through intermediate level injuries which were then aggravated, ultimately becoming career threatening. Kawhi Leonard comes to mind, if people have ever seen peak, healthy Kawhi do miraculous things against elite competition.

As a Houston Rockets fan from childhood, I cannot look at Victor Wembanyama or Chet Holmgren without seeing Ralph Sampson. Besides having been a supremely gifted basketball player and an almost stunningly unselfish team player, he was singularly focused on basketball. Rather like Kevin Garnett, he simply had no personal interests outside of basketball; it consumed more or less his entire life. To demonstrate his dedication to the team concept, recognize that he voluntarily shifted from his natural position of Center to play Power Forward because Olajuwon did not have the skills at that early stage of his career to effectively play out of position. Sampson made the NBA All-Star Game as a Center his rookie season and then the MVP of the All-Star Game his second year playing Power Forward for the first time. The Lakers actively explored trading Kareem in 1982 for a 50% chance of being able to draft Sampson if he entered the Draft early. Knee and foot injuries meant that his career was effectively over by the end of his fourth season. As Holmgren is already on his second serious injury and Wemby is done for the season basically at the All-Star Break.

I have a few fun ones because sports is life!

During the time period in which Usain Bolt won the 100m dash in the Olympics, he ate nothing but McDonalds. When asked why, he stated that he didn’t want to risk getting food poisoning from the local cuisine

Jose Altuve is the only MLB player to ever play the All-Star game for the same team in two different conferences (Astros). The Houston Astros realigned conferences in 2013 which allowed this!

The word ‘soccer’ originated in England (take that!)

The Minnesota Vikings, in 2022, had one of the statistically luckiest seasons of all time in the NFL. The very next year, they had one of, if not *the* statistically unluckiest season in NFL history.

If you had to bet your life on either: A- Steph Curry makes a 3 pointer, or B- Tom Brady wins the Super Bowl, statistically you should bet on Tom Brady winning a Superbowl. The odds are 48% (Brady) to 43% (Curry)

Popeye's Fried Chicken was named by Al Coupland for the character Popeye Doyle played by Gene Hackman and not for Popeye the Sailor Man. Gene Hackman, his wife and their dog died yesterday, presumably from Carbon Monoxide poisoning. He was 95 years old, and his wife was 63.

Former MLB catcher, Harry Chiti, is the first player to be traded for himself.

Chiti was traded from the Cleveland Indians to the New York Mets for a player to be named later. The Mets eventually found themselves in need of a backup catcher, and made the trade with the Indians using that pick to acquire Chiti to fill that role.

Under EU rules, no cheese produced in the English town of Stilton can ever be classified as Stilton cheese.

Remember everyone that under EU rules, if not born within the borders of the Mexican State of Chihuahua, the eponymous dog must be classified as a sparkling, pale rat.

Gopher, your '80s basketball posts got me reading up on the Sixers. Turns out, when Charles Barkley arrived at camp as a rookie, he weighed close to 300 lbs. He struggled at first. He asked Moses Malone why he wasn't getting more playing time. Moses looked him up and down and told him, "You're fat, and you're lazy." Told him to lose 10 lbs. and show up at the gym an hour before practice the next day to train. When he lost the 10, Moses told him to lose another 10. According to one story, Moses even lived in the same building as Barkley. One night he sees a pizza being delivered and smells pizza coming from Barkley's apartment. He starts banging on the door. Tells him, "Charles, you can't lose weight eating pizza." Within a few months, Barkley was down to 255 and in the starting lineup every night. Barkley always credits Malone for making the difference in his career.

Bill Russell is perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time. In college, he led the University of San Francisco to consecutive national championships in 1955 and 1956, including a string of 55 straight wins. In 1955 he averaged over 20 points and over 20 rebounds a game in the regular season and in the NCAA tournament. Legendary UCLA coach John Wooden called Russell the best defensive player he'd ever seen. He was the first player to block shots, having ignored the accepted coaching wisdom of the 1950s that you shouldn't jump on defense because it threw you off balance. The NCAA instituted two rule changes due to Russell's dominance: widening the lane and introducing the goal-tending rule. Russell and USF teammate K.C. Jones invented the alley-oop.

As a pro, Russell led the Boston Celtics to the NBA Finals in each of his 13 seasons and to 11 NBA Championships. He was beaten only twice: in 1958, his 2nd year, when he missed two games of the finals with a foot injury, and in 1967, when Wilt Chamberlain led the Philadelphia 76ers to the championship. Russell led the league in rebounding five times, averaging 22+ rebounds per game over his career. He was a famously quick and dangerous shot-blocker, though we have no stats as the NBA did not record blocks until 1973. After Russell retired in 1969, the Celtics continued to be a strong contender, but no longer the dominant force they were with Russell. They won only two championships in the 1970s before Larry Bird arrived in 1980. The Knicks, Lakers, Warriors, Milwaukee Bucks, and others were once again permitted to win championships. Sadly, Russell played before the television era and there is precious little footage of his exploits on the court.

Fun fact: Baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson was one of Russell's teammates on the McClymond High School (Oakland, CA) basketball team.

Can irrelevant American sporting data please make its way to the Irrelevant sporting data for Americans thread.

This thread should be for irrelevant non-history and non-American sporting data.

Unless you wish to argue that American sports discourse has failed to be "super irrelevant", "non-historical" or "factual", I don't see your point. Also, I started this thread and began it with America basketball, so its purpose seem pretty clear. :oP

If we discuss Josh Giddey's recently improved performance, would that satisfy the Australian mafia?

Sorry had to Google who Josh Giddey was.... (probably answers your question gopher)

Here's a fact: North Korea is surprisingly good at women's football. They've won the under-20 world cup three times, the same goes for the under-17 cup. It's weird considering how much NK sucks as a nation (and also their pretty bad performance in men's football)

What are the odds that they cheat by lying about ages? Have they had any success in competitions without age restrictions?

In 1977, Sporty McSportsperson did a great sport, scoring many sporties. In fact, the sporties were so many, they were even more than 90! That has never happened before or after. However, just two years later, McSportsperson did even more than 562 sporties in just two sports! Nobody could believe it.

Compared with the great rival of McSportsperson, Andy Shamandy, it has often been noted how Andy Shamandy actually managed to score so many moves in the season of 1863 movies, maybe even a lot (2!?) that the sportscup for greatest sporting should rest with Shamandy. However there are clear arguments for separating the sporties and the movies since sporting and moving might correlate, but not necessarily cause the other. Just like a Jacuzzi is a whirlpool but a whirlpool is not a yacht, but a yacht COULD theoretically sport a jacuzzi.

The issue is still dividing the primary school sports league of Lima into separeted and united Sporty and Movie Leagues, although the matter is supposed to have been long resolved by the Olympic committee resolution in 2023.

Sporty McSportsperson was nothing compared to his namesake, Sporty McSportsface.

And just for that...

There is a pretty academically serious Liberal Arts College in Iowa called Grinnell. It is the alma mater of Bob Noyce, the founder of Intel, the inventor of the microchip and the unofficial "Mayor of Silicon Valley". Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Grinnell's basketball team strung together 25 consecutive losing seasons. In 1989, the school hired a new coach named David Arseneault. After a few seasons, he concluded that an academically rigorous school in semi-rural Iowa without athletic scholarships simply could not compete under the traditional norms of collegiate basketball, and so he decided to deliberately play a more entertaining brand of basketball that was then more fun for the players and built a radically different basketball culture. Instead of trying to recruit and train an 8 man rotation of the most elite players he could find, he invited walk on players from the student body and implemented platoon substitutions of all 5 players at every stoppage of the clock cycling between 20 or more players. Then they press and trap on every defensive possession and either run the fast break for a lay up or take a quick 3 while crashing the glass for offensive rebounds.

Not surprising, Grinnell College now holds nearly all individual and team scoring and rebounding records in American college basketball while occasionally winning and consistently filling their arena playing super-entertaining basketball.

Most famously, Jack Taylor scored 138 points on November 20, 2012, in a 179–104 win over Faith Baptist Bible College. Largely overlooked is the fact that David Larson scored 70 points on much more efficient shooting for the opposing team in that game. In any other context, Larson scoring 70 points in a competitive college basketball game would have made national news.

Jack Taylor subsequently set a record for building the world's largest snowman.
https://a.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=%2Fphoto%2F2022%2F1116%2Fr1092033_3000x4000cc.jpg&w=570&format=jpg

I would like to see GOD, himself, try to build a larger snowman.

I cannot tell wether you are trolling me back, but I feel like starting to research would make you win.

I had a friend who went to Grinnell. Another fun fact about them: students at Grinnell only take one class at a time, and classes last two or three weeks (I forget how long exactly).

@gopher
Good point, they could be lying, it'd be quite easy for them. Or maybe they just exploit their players a lot.

Aaron Hernandez has the same amount of charges for murder (attempted and completed) as he has postseason NFL games played (6 each)

He shot up a car containing 3 men, none of which were gravely harmed, and had killed 3 different people before going to prison.

Only 50% conversion percentage across opportunities. Same as his playoff winning percentage.

There are more than 150 thousand Koreans in Uzbekistan.

Prior to the corporate~political coup that led to the illegal annexation of Hawaiʻi into the "United" "States", the entire island of Kahoʻolawe was a penal colony for decades. Even prior to the introduction of ungulates in the 1700s, it had very little freshwater sources and thus a very low permanent population, and was then further denuded and depopulated by private ranching until and through the territory period. At the start of the US's involvement in WWII, the US Army acquired bombing rights to the island for 1$ (even with inflation, this is only ~20$...) during a time of martial law. This bombing continued for decades, and in 1965, "Operation Sailor Hat" was done [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Sailor_Hat_Shot.jpg] which had a comical minecraft-looking pile of explosives, and apparently was so destructive that it cracked the island's core and has left the island unable to adequately hold what little groundwater it stored previously. The entire island was off limits, despite the cultural significance of the island to Native Hawaiians (Kānaka ʻŌiwi). After work by PKO (Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana), including guerilla landings on the island which led to the deaths of Native Hawaiian activists, Kahoʻolawe was changed into an Archeological District in 1981, then Father Bush Senior ended live-fire training in 1991 [despite opposition from the Navy and Army who said continuing to bomb a red, devastated, dust-covered rock in the middle of the Pacific was somehow vital for the survival of the US]. There's been a lot of work to clean up the island, but even now there's a significant amount of unexploded ordinance. Although restoration efforts have been steady and promising over the past two decades, funding the recovery of this island is going to be greatly hampered by the rise of oligarch~totalitarianism in a large building ~4800 miles away from here. Even before this horrific future became the present, the US Navy had decided in 2024 that they should essentially triple the amount of bombing done on another smaller island, Kaʻula Islet, which is also in its entirety a seabird sanctuary! Great.

A (kind of?) positive note is that the transfer of Kahoʻolawe's land from the Army to Hawaiʻi was just in time; right before the transfer, Hawaiʻi sent all sorts of scientists to survey the state of the island. In 1992, two botanists found a single population of a strange shrub on the southern cliff edge of the island, where only two living plants were surrounded by many others now dead. It turns out these plants represented a completely undescribed species and genus in Fabaceae (pea family) now named Kanaloa kahoolawensis! This entire genus and species of plant, entirely endemic to the Hawaiian Islands, would have evaporated, unknown to history, probably within a decade if this transfer had not happened when it did. Super interesting (to me at least) is that pollen very similar to that of K. kahoolawensis has been found in fossilized core samples from other islands where the plant had not existed since at least the time of European contact, and almost certainly for hundreds of years prior to that with the clearing/destruction of the majority of lowland/coastal forest by early settling Hawaiians. That means a whole genus, potentially each the same or different species for each island, was widespread throughout the islands, and only because of the hard work of people who care for the land did we learn of its existence! More can be read on this site: [https://ntbg.org/stories/a-partnership-in-pursuit-of-revival/]

Texas, leading the world in Draculas killed since 1897.

Sorry, Netherlands, not sorry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk-q46VCCIY

Two points somewhat relevant to discussing the troubling trend of damn, dirty Australians invading American college football...

1) Brigham Young University (BYU) built a nationally competitive football program (and one time national champion) as a private, Mormon religious school in what is basically America's whitest and most boring state to a significant extent on the fact that Mormon men go on religious missions for two years when they are 19 or 20. This meant that BYU would put 18 year old boys on serious, specialized weight training regimes, these selected young men would be sent by the church to places where they could have access to weight training facilities and then they would return two years later to start actually playing. While BYU attracted attention as Quarterback U and leaning hard into passing offense earlier than most college programs, a big and less commented upon aspect of their success was a seemingly endless supply of 23, 24 and 25 year old "grown ass men" filling their offensive line and squaring off against 21 and 22 year olds. The Mormon Church's missionary success in Samoa and then Tonga and Fiji also created a recruiting pipeline of boys from the South Pacific who seem to have shown some genetic advantages as both offensive and defensive linemen. The systematic playing of older guys at the college level has been exploited before.

2) American college football has been forced by the courts to allow players to receive compensation for the use of their "names, images and likenesses" (NIL), which began from video game rights. This has already been completely perverted with awe-inspiring swiftness. Boosters and donors have created artificial, shadow markets for NIL licensing which are clearly nothing more than buying players. HOWEVER, F-1 and F-2 visa rules at the federal level for "international students" classify this as "full time" paid work which is forbidden. This means that Australians who come to the US and play American college football are explicitly blocked from being compensated in the same manner that is unquestionably driving the decision making of most of the highest quality American recruits.


As an even more digressive aside, BYU has been accused of exploiting its students taking two year hiatuses and sticking around to later ages in academic competitions as well. Ken Jennings, who hosts the American quiz show Jeopardy! after having been a highly successful and popular contestant, is a product of the BYU College Bowl program, which clearly operated on a system modeled after the BYU football team. College Bowl is the American trivia competition upon which University Challenge is based: the American version failed as a television program but continues as an intermural competition. Back when there were rules limiting graduate student participation in College Bowl, BYU was noticeably more successful in the competition than they have been since graduate student participation was made less restrictive.

I just saw that Junior Bridgeman died yesterday. For those who are unaware, Junior Bridgeman was a retired American professional basketball player in the NBA, who eventually became a billionaire, and like 4 months ago, he had bought 10% of the team he most famously used to play for. Of the handful of really super-rich elite level former athletes in the world, he is basically the only one to become incredibly wealthy entirely outside of sports based neither on his salary in sports nor leveraging fame from athletics through either endorsements or sports related businesses. Jerry Richardson could also qualify, but most of his wealthy ultimately came from owning an American football team and its appreciation. Dr. J being an early significant equity investor in the video game publisher Electronic Arts resulted from his taking pre-IPO stock instead of cash for his "Name, Image and Likeness" rights used to market the original EA Sports title back in the early 1980s.

In 2016, Junior Bridgeman was estimated to be the 4th wealthiest former athlete in the world behind Michael Jordan, David Beckham and the golfer (and porch drink inventor) Arnold Palmer. Last year, he was one of four billionaires to have played on an extended basis in the NBA along with Jordan, Magic Johnson and LeBron James.

Playing just before player salaries escalated with increased popularity, he was also a major player on the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team in the early-to-mid-1980s as they were one of the four very elite teams throughout the 1980s. Because three of the four were crowded in the Eastern Conference, the Bucks were always in the position of having to play the Boston Celtics or the Philadelphia 76ers to then have to play the other to then be able to play the Los Angles Lakers from the Western Conference in the Finals. The Bucks were left as the one team among the 4 to not win a championship and are thus overlooked, despite having been the most tactically sophisticated and innovative of the four big teams of that era.

If anyone has every seen the movie "White Men Can't Jump", the character Raymond, who gets hustled by the main characters and pulls a razor to try to kill them, was played by Marques Johnson, who was one of the four major players on the Junior Bridgeman era Milwaukee Bucks.

his nickname was the " Torch ", thanks Gopher I was a big Bucks fan in my youth. Junior was an incredible success story making money in the Wendy's and Chili's franchises among other things.

Cocaine

Somehow all the assorted cocaine posts from Kaner tells me he's guzzling his Dark Ale direct from the keg ;)

I learned today that three women who have been selected #1 overall in the WNBA Draft of female basketball players were graduates of one suburban high school outside of Houston, Texas. The high school in question is Cypress-Fairbanks (Cy-Fair) High School.

When my dad was growing up, my grandparents were itinerant public school teachers who moved from little town to little town across South Texas when the local schools needed both a Math teacher and an English teacher at the same time. My grandmother's first teaching job out of college was at Cy-Fair High School when it was a little rural school out in the countryside before the exurban development tentacles of Houston swallowed it and the country road it was on has become a major highway. She was working there when my dad was born. She also personally planted the line of (now quite mature) trees in front of the school.