Bilbao Basket isn't something you find in the Shire, it's a finalist in the Spanish basketball league. Aaron Jackson is their PG and he looks like he could start for half the NBA in this video. The other team's PG is Ricky Rubio. Unlike Rubio, Jackson is a FA.
Maybe they're upset he's going to be coughing all over the trophy?
MIAMI—Broadcasters covering the NBA finals for Spanish-speaking fans from different parts of the world do it from a Tower of Babel where a dunk is not a dunk, but the play-by-play guys disagree about just what to call it. As the Miami Heat and Dallas Mavericks vie on the basketball court for the championship title, two of their broadcasters are duking it out with each other. "Some say donquear. That'd be Spanglish," says José Pañeda, the announcer calling the play on Miami's WQBA-AM radio. But donquear doesn't work in Argentina, where dunk is volcada, he says. In Spain, it's mate, which literally means "the kill," as when a matador administers the lethal thrust in a bullfight. None of those terms work for Victor Villalba, radio KFLC's Latino basketball jock, who is handling the finals this week for the Dallas Mavericks. Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English, makes his Texas audience uneasy, says the 51-year-old broadcaster. So for the word dunk, he prefers clavada, which comes from clavo, the noun for "nail." Messrs. Pañeda and Villalba are just two of the broadcasters who are confronting the vagaries of Basketball Spanish for an immigrant audience increasingly interested in the game. Basketball in English is already tricky, full of arcane terms like "cross-over dribble," "tomahawk dunk" and "alley oop pass." In Spanish, the challenge is magnified because listeners to Spanish broadcasts hail from or live on three different continents where language and dialects vary. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304906004576369841345801116.html
Take what Langlois says for what it's worth, but I'd like to think a guy that is actually employed by the Pistons has a little knowledge of what's happening. I'll paraphrase: -Woodson makes sense as the frontrunner as having ties to the Pistons and being a successful head coach. -Sampson impressed him by beating an overrated MSU team that included Paul Charmin Davis. -Mark Jackson is already hired. Also, he didn't fit into Keith's three types of coaches: previous head coaches, assistants who are ready for the head job, and guys with ties to Detroit. Apparently he forgot to include a category for Mark Jackson called "completely asinine since he has absolutely no coaching background". Then he says he wouldn't be surprised if Jackson was very successful, but the last time he said that about a first year guy with "perspective, communication skills, and basketball intellect", it was about Mike Curry. Yikes. -Laimbeer should be taken more seriously this time around than the past two times the Pistons have been searching for coaches, although he would be surprised if the Lamb even landed an interview. -Budenholzer, Newman, Casey are all lumped into one group as long shots. Curiously, there's no mention of Lawrence Frank, who I would put third on my list behind Budenholzer (after reading Matt Watson's piece on him) and Laimbeer. I don't want Woodson since Joe wouldn't go after Josh Smith, and I sure as hell don't want Kelvin Sampson's sad face on the bench. My thoughts. Now yours.
ESPN's Eamonn Brennan on Kelvin Sampson's strange journey from NCAA pariah to NBA coaching prospect.
Joe Dumars has yet to make contact with the 3 top Detroit coaching targets, Kelvin Sampson, Mike Woodson and Lawrence Frank, sources say.
Yahoo! Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA)"We need a coach that's not gonna take any nonsense, first of all," he said. "He can't accept any of the things that happened this year."
I've already stated my preference for Mike Budenholzer, but Perry Farrell of the Detroit Free Press throws out fellow Spurs assistant Don Newman as "another name to keep an eye on." Farrell writes: "Newman, 54, is a physically imposing person. He played seven seasons in the Canadian Football League and attended training camps with the NFL's Seattle Seahawks and New York Jets. He started his coaching career working with football and basketball teams at an Idaho high school. He went on to coach at the college level -- including five seasons as head coach at Sacramento State and time as the interim head coach at Arizona State -- before stints as an NBA assistant with the Milwaukee Bucks and New Jersey Nets."