Damien and Bob Hill Kiss And Make Up (ewww)
"I hate the fact that we get booed at our house, I hate the fact that we have not played up to expectations that we've set for ourselves. I'm sure everyone's frustrated with that. It just came out the wrong way. What I said was in my heart and it was honest, but it just didn't come out the way it should have come out. I apologized to him for that. He apologized to me."
Props to David Locke for his practice blog yesterday. Chock full of great stuff.
The Sonics worked really hard offensively on how to react when team bring the extra player over to ball side to deny Ray and Rashard’s drives. When Ray and Rod are getting the ball on the wing, opposing teams are bringing one of their bigs over and placing him on the free-throw line ball side to eliminate any drive. The Sonics were working on their spacing if teams do that to open up other players for easy looks.
The next area of focus was that when they go to Rashard in the post teams will double him and they will not leave Ray on the weak side which creates one man to guard both of the Sonics bigs and they need to space the floor correctly to get openings off the opponent's double teams.
I guess we'll see if it works tonight.
And check Francis Williams' comments:
Let's all take a deep breath and realize that even one win starts to turn this thing around. A Fortson update's included at the bottom. We were discussing him yesterday so I'll pull quote it:
Meanwhile, forward Danny Fortson said he is a couple of weeks away from returning to the lineup because of his troublesome left knee. Fortson, who has missed the past six games, practiced Tuesday but said he wants to play more than in just spurts.
"I am nowhere near ready to play basketball, not yet anyway," he said. "It feels good. It's getting there. When the swelling goes down, I should be fine. ... When I come back, I want to play more than five minutes. I want to prepare myself to play at least 15."
Fortson said doctors told him that he will not require surgery.
Dude. Either the knee works or it doesn't. Either you scope it and be out a couple weeks and get with the program or you don't.
NBA Quote Of the Day. I was overjoyed when Skiles took over for Cartwright and stuff like this is why.
Asked three years ago what a promising youngster named Eddy Curry could do to improve his rebounding, Skiles didn't hesitate.
"Jump," he replied.
Sweet.
Percy Does Practice 2: The Wilcox Tapes
"I don't like to show my teammates up," he said. "I like to go out there and have fun and try to get everybody involved. But it's coming to a point where I'm going to have to demand the ball and get us some points down low because that's what we're missing right now."
No man, it's cool. Show 'em up. Go right ahead.
Even sh*t starter extraordinaire Frank Hughes admits that the locker room storm has temporarily passed.
Wilkins admitted that the thing that ignited his frustrations was the reverse dunk he had on Spurs forward Tim Duncan. Immediately after that play, Rashard Lewis substituted for Wilkins, something that became an issue on the bench during the next timeout.
“That was frustrating to me at that time,†Wilkins said. “But just because I make that type of play doesn’t entitle me to say, ‘Coach, you should play me more because I made that play.’ I thought it was a good play to make, I thought it got the crowd back into it a little bit. I wish I could have been able to hitchhike on that a little bit. But that didn’t happen. He went with Rashard. I have to live with that. Today is a new day. Tomorrow will be another day. We will just have to go from there.â€
The dipsh*tic ramblings of Steve Kelley. Actually not bad for a Kelley article considering he very likely hasn't watched a single Sonic game yet this season. There is evidence that seesawing minutes could be the cause for Earl and Damien's erratic production. Minute numbers on the graph courtesy of popcornmachine.net. I was going to include Nick and maybe Petro in there but ran out of time. Earl's minutes fluctuate more than Damien's have.