Sports

Draft. Resign. Cut. – From High School Straight to the NBA

By December 27, 2011June 18th, 2018No Comments

All three players jumped straight from High School to the NBA and were lottery picks. To say that they didn’t live up to expectations would be like saying that people in Cleveland were only slightly displeased with Lebron James decision to take his services to South Beach. Today we select between: Darius Miles, Jonathan Bender, and Sebastian Telfair. 

We would draft Jonathan Bender, resign Sebastian Telfair, and cut Darius Miles.

Jonathan Bender definitely was the worst player of the three. He played seven seasons with the Pacers and one with the Knicks. Over that time he only played in 262 games and started 28. With 656 games possible to have played in over that time Bender only appeared in 42% of the games, starting just 4% of them. Those numbers are actually a good thing considering how poor of an NBA player he was. He shot only 41% from the field, never averaged more than 7.4 ppg, and was more worthless than Allan Houston dishing the ball and on the boards (which is extremely hard to do). Since he was injured often we’ll draft him and not have to worry about the extreme level of crappiness that he’d bring to our team. After a few years he’ll be gone.

I never liked Sebastian Telfair even though I’ve never met him. I think it stems from him being on the cover of Sports Illustrated and also appearing in that documentary “Through the Fire” all before he even left high school. He thought that he was God’s gift (not the St. John’s player) to basketball and had an arrogance to him that made Kobe Bryant look bashful. Telfair’s stat line is completely awful. He’s a point guard but plays anything like one. He only averages 3.8 dimes per game while shooting a putrid 39% from the field. So why would we decide to resign him? Simple, in his seven seasons he’s only made $15 million and that’s a huge bargain. To put that into perspective, over the course of their careers Jonathan Bender made $30 million and Darius Miles made…gulp…over $61 million. If we are going to get zero production out of player at least we can pay him very little. Telfair fits that criteria so that’s why we’ll resign him and hope that Dan Dickau starts finding his J.

Darius Miles averaged 10 ppg and 4 boards and 47% shooting for his career. This is by far the best numbers of these three players. The problem with Miles is that he got paid so much and disappointed so many people. It’s OK if a player ends up being Jonathan Bender and doesn’t live up to expectations. After a few seasons everyone gives up hope and moves on. With Miles you could see that he had talent. He was NBA All Rookie first team but he had off the court issues and at the end of his career severely injured his knees. Head Case + Big Salary + likes the sticky icky = no room on our team. I don’t want to put our fan base through the torment of knowing if Miles will show up baked one day, curse out our coach, and then ask to be traded. I’d much rather live with knowing the Jonathan Bender will just do nothing and be content with that. See ya Miles but you’ve been cut.

As an extra bonus we’ll leave you with the trailer for the movie “The Perfect Score” in which Darius Miles was the star . Yes, you read that correctly, he was a star in a movie (obviously we are using the term “star” very loosely). What’s worse is that I’ve actually seen this movie.

 

Rob Cressy

Rob Cressy

Sports loving free throw specialist and yinzer living in Chicago who is awesome most of the time, has run with the bulls in Spain, and is a graduate of Second City's Improv program.