HEAD OF THE CLASS: Rashad Anderson's crime was without precedent |
For those of us Boston sports fans who are not too broken up by last week’s weed-and-brass-knuckles arrest of former New England Patriot Rabih Abdullah — probably the dumbest Patriot incident since the Kenyatta Jones era — the time has come to take a jurisprudential look at the upcoming NBA draft. The annual pre-draft buzz has long since replaced the playoffs as the chief spring pastime of the Celtics’ increasingly inconsolable, angry fan base. Instead of watching ’Nique and Larry duke it out in the fourth quarter of game seven, we slobber over crudely planted reports that Al Jefferson has discovered the bench press and we pray, actually pray, that come June, Ainge will hit a homer. This is what it means to be a Celtics fan these days, and it’s a tough business, made more difficult by the hideous peculiarities of the NBA amateur draft.
Unlike in professional football, where it is sometimes desirable that your draft choice be a felon (or at least act like one), in the NBA the discovery of even one knife-wielding criminal on your roster can sink your franchise’s fortunes for years to come. Fast as you can say Eddie Griffin or Vin Baker, a thriving sports franchise can splinter and sink to the ocean floor, where not even James Cameron will discover it again.
All of which makes scouting the behavioral predilections of the new talent that much more important. This year’s crop is the worst conceivable combination — low in talent and comparatively high in past-extracurricular incidents. For the Celtics, who at the moment will pick in the number-seven slot, the only player with an ambiguous past who could conceivably fall to them is UConn’s razzle-dazzle point guard Marcus Williams, who famously helped launch last year’s laptop-theft trend. A short list of this year’s
draft miscreants:
Daniel Horton, G, Michigan: A meat-and-potatoes point guard with a nice size and a long wingspan, which he used two years ago to choke his girlfriend, resulting in a 2004 Valentine’s Day assault conviction. Horton is a bearer of the great Wolverine-indictment tradition that dates back to the Fab Five days.
Eric Hicks, F, Cincinnati: No draft is complete without a Cincinnati Bearcat with an arrest record. Sadly, Hicks never punched a police animal. (Fellow Cincy alum Art Long allegedly punched a city-police horse named Cody; the same animal would be victimized in another assault involving a peace protester years later.) But he was arrested for allegedly throwing a beer bottle at a woman in a bar, a crime popularized by Glen Rice and recalled in the roadside end of onetime-NFL-player Justin Strzelczyk, who threw a bottle at pursuing police before crashing into a tanker truck in Herkimer, NY, in ’04.
Rashad Anderson, G, UConn: In an arrest without precedent in college-basketball history, Anderson, famous for his tourney-saving three-pointer against Washington this year, was busted in 2002 for jumping out of the bushes to scare people on the UConn campus while wearing a mask and holding a fake knife. After jolting his vi
ctims, he would take off the mask and apologize. Police, unlike this author, were un-amused.
Terrell Everett, G, Oklahoma: Everett was busted in March of last year in one of those “unmistakable odor of marijuana” campus arrests. Generously, he handed his exting
uished joint to police, and apparently told them — with some regret — that he had none left.
Nik Caner-Medley, F, Maryland: Maine’s former “Mr. Basketball” was once arrested in Portland for a nighttime disturbance. Ironically, scouts may be attracted to his shades-of-Gil-Arenas statement during the fracas: “I’m from Maryland, and nobody can beat me.”
Hassan Adams, F/G, Arizona: Speaking of Arenas, fellow and similar-size Wildcat Hassan Adams is one of the few draft hopefuls with two arrests, although both were relatively minor — one for failing to leave the scene after breaking up a fight, and the other ... well, the other was a DUI. Adams was suspended from this year’s PAC-10 tournament and is one of the true sleepers in the draft. The kid has Trailblazers written all over him.
It says here the Celts will end up with arrest-averse Dukie Shelden Williams — but what do I know?
When he’s not googling “marijuana” AND “free throws,” Matt Taibbi is writing for Rolling Stone. He can be reached atM_Taibbi@yahoo.com
