I’d be remiss if I didn’t officially acknowledge and mourn the passing of Red Auerbach, one of the true legends of the game.  Through his control of the Celtics, Red played a huge part in defining the modern game of basketball and his legacy will on.

John Feinstein, who enjoyed a close relationship with Red, says all that needs to be said in an excellent article (registration required, but well worth it) in the Washington Post.

Heaven just gained a helluva of a coach…..

Very strange news coming from down under where former NBA All-Star sharpshooter Mark Price was fired as head coach of the South Dragons, who play in Australia’s National Basketball League (NBL), after losing the first five games of the season.

Price claims in an article that he was essentially thrown under the bus by one of his players, Australian hoops “legend” Shane Heal (who played sparingly for 49 games with the T-Wolves and Spurs stateside), who in turn was named the team’s new player-coach after Price’s sacking. In one of the most egregious examples of PR coverup, the Dragons website states that Price “resigned for family reasons”.

The Dragons are a relocated team playing in Melbourne and had tried making a big PR splash by bringing in a semi-high profile former NBA player as their head coach, but in all honesty, Price probably wasn’t ready to become a head guy with his prior coaching experience limited to a few years as an assistant with Georgia Tech and at the high school level. And while the NBL is not the NBA, it is a fiercely competitive league on its own terms and it would undoubtedly involve some type of learning curve.

Nevertheless, this sucks for Price who had just moved his family over to Australia and was starting to settle in.  I guess no one ever enters the coaching profession if job security is their primary goal.

In a related story, Todd Fuller was released as a player by the Dragons on the same day Price was fired, making this the approximately 259th team to waive Fuller in his 10 year professional career.

The always awesome Uniwatch Blog has some great stuff on how the new four-panel NBA ball might or might not affect NBA logo and uniform designs.

They also have some stuff on these new Washington Wizards’ third/alt jerseys…. I hate that shoulder piping as it screams WNBA to me. I’m going to hold out judgment as to whether the new adidas era of the NBA will pan out.

The new color scheme actually looks like it should be the uniform for either Vanderbilt or Army, down to even the stars.

In another strange chapter in Celtics’ guard Sebastian Telfair’s NBA journey, the Boston Herald reports that he spent the second half of the Celtics’ Tuesday night exhibition game studying police lineups after he was robbed at gunpoint of jewelry on Monday (the incident occured around 10pm as he was leaving dinner).

What’s notable is that Celtics’ coach Doc Rivers actually covered for Telfair stating that he was out with a stomach ailment.   I’m not bothered by that frankly, as it’s really not Rivers’ spot to reveal something like that without knowing Telfair’s feelings about it.

The whole thing is a non-issue to me at least in regards to Telfair’s role.   He was a victim of crime, plain and simple and trying to make anything more out of it is just heaping on.  If the incident had happened later in the evening (such as rapper Fabolous getting shot later that evening at 2 AM)  there might be a story.

Talk amongst yourselves…..

Sports Weekly, USA Today’s weekly sports news magazine that started covering only baseball but has gradually added the NFL and NASCAR as well, makes an attempt to expand to yet another sport with its inaugural College Basketball Preview edition.  Priced at a very un-newspaper like $4.95 (well except for maybe the Sunday NY Times), the actual Preview is very clearly a descendant of Sports Weekly, printed on the same tabloid style news print (although it seems like a much higher grade of paper) and featuring the familiar graphics of USA Today.

Now while college basketball may be a new step for Sports Weekly, college basketball heads know that the USA Today has long been a valuable resource for news about the game.  The annual Tournament preview edition of the daily paper that comes out the Monday after Selection Sunday is still one of the most valuable tools for researching and preparing for the tournament and was worth its weight in gold in the days before the ‘net.

The same style of coverage is brought to this venture and it’s good for a quick read, but lacks a lot of the depth that other previews offer.   It’s primary disadvantage is lenght, clocking in at only 60-odd pages.  The only teams that get genuine in-depth previews are their preseason Top 8 who get full-page profiles.  For the others, it’s a paragraph or two under the conference previews, with larger conferences getting slightly more coverage per team. Interestingly, while rankings for each conference are included, the rankings actually come from the Sports Xchange which is an Elias or Stats, Inc. style information bureau.

Overall, it’s the type of preview good for a short plane trip, but nothing that you’d really keep around for the season.  It ranks particularly low on the bang for the buck ratio as you can pick up much more comprehensive and detailed previews for only a dollar or two more going down the Sporting News or Street and Smith (preview on its way) route.

Hating the ACC has become as much of a college basketball tradition as chants of Rock Chalk Jayhawk or Big 5 games at the Palestra. Whether it’s complaints about the incessant media coverage and hyperbole of Dick Vitale or accusations of being overrated (particularly in light of the relative mediocrity of the conference last season) the ACC is the favorite whipping post of many fans. Well all the haters can add one more thing to the list: the conference gets its own nationally published preview issue and it’s actually pretty decent.

The magazine in question, the 2007 ACC Basketball Handbook, has been going at it for 34 years and does a tremendous job at providing excellent in-depth coverage of its only topic, the ACC. At 162 pages, the issue is filled with content including countless great color photos a good range of feature stories including their own national top 25 rankings.

The heart of the “Handbook” are the individual team previews, clocking in with at least eight pages for each team that almost make it a mini-media guide. There are even headshots, all-time best players and records, full stats from last season, and rather good preview text written by a local beat writer covering the team on a regular basis.

I won’t go into much more but I definitely recommend picking it up if you can find it locally (I’m in Dallas and picked one up at a Barnes and Noble) or it can be acquired here. I’m not an ACC shill by any means, but I respect good quality coverage filled with relevant info and this qualifies in all respects. I just wish they had one for every other conference!

I’ve got a bunch of new content lined up over the next few days including looks at the Street & Smith’s as well as Blue Ribbon. I also will upload updated meta-rankings from all the magazines.

Now this is more like it….. After despairing over the mostly dissapointing CBS Sportsline Preview effort, the 2006-2007 version of the Sporting News College Basketball Preview changed my mood considerably for the better.

The beauty of the Sporting News, both as a weekly magazine and in their preview editions, is that they dispense with a lot of the fluff you normally encounter and focus instead on pummeling you with a welcome stream of info. This philosophy is apparent immediately when opening this season’s preview as the feature sections, which have been nearly 50 pages long in the other publications reviewed so far, clocks in at less than 20 pages (and that includes tourney previews and All-American rankings).

Whoever is doing the graphic layouts for this edition deserves high praise as information is very clearly presented and laid out. Big conference previews are a dream, with schedules and full rosters included for each team. Each team summary follows a format consisting of three sections: What We Like, What Scares Us, and X-Factor. Sticking to these categories results in a very logical flow in each article and provides a balance of the good and bad and really sets up themes for reach team’s season. While the hard facts about lineups and depth charts might be missing from the summary, the rosters complement them tremendously, including bolding the names of the projected starters.

I mentioned about how nice previews for the bigger conferences and I want to say again how nice they are for anything not named Blue Ribbon (which my sources tell me ships tomorrow, October 13). Even the bottom-feeders get no less than half a page for the preview.

The major weakness with this publication is similar to that of the others in that the mid-to-low major conferences get far less coverage.  While I can understand the reasons from a mass market perspective, it still steals away from the total usefulness of the magazine.   Each smaller conference gets two full pages of coverage with team previews a few paragraphs each.  Even though short, there is still some good info packaged including listing projected starters and some info about the coaching staff.  Given the nature and target audience it was ok, but I would have liked to see a little more space and attention paid to the mid-major’s, particularly conferences like the Colonial.
Overall Ranking: 7/10   Very solid contributor.  This was the best overall preview issue to this point.  It’s no Blue Ribbon but does provide a very balanced mix of analysis and facts and is worth a read.

Last season was supposed to be a breakout one for Sixers’ center Samuel Dalembert. Coming off an ‘04-’05 season where he averaged 8.2 pts & 7.5 rbds, Dalembert failed to grow on those stats (actually dipping in scoring to 7.3 ppg) and was an overall dissapointment. He would seemingly dissapear for stretches and was largely ineffective.

Whatever the motivation, his performance during the Sixers’ preseason tour of Europe thus far has been a total revitalization of the promise he showed two seasons ago. I’m watching Philly play CSKA Moscow as I write (on tape delay) and the energy shown by Dalembert, particularly on the glass and blocking shots, has that type of spark I usually see out of players poised for a big year. Granted it’s the preseason, but the tone for the year is usually set now, and I like what I see out of Dalembert. If you’ve got a fantasy squad looking for a good alternative at the very soft center position, Dalembert should be a very strong consideration.

(Update: Dalembert finished the game with 15 points, 18 rebounds and 5 blocked shots in a 85-71 Sixers victory of CSKA Moscow, a team that actually beat the Clippers 94-75 a week ago)