Round-up of leftover quotage
** Phil Johnson on Mo Williams: He is not a true point guard. He is a combination guard, but he can shoot the basketball from the perimeter, and he’s going to help them defensively. So what he’ll do offensively is, you know, he’ll get the team into the offense. He’s not a great pass-first type point guard or anything like that, but he’s not a selfish player at all. I thought that was a great move for them because of his toughness and his leadership.
** Phil Johnson on C.J. Miles: He [is] loaded with talent, and it’s just a matter of consistency and doing it every night, and every day in practice and so forth. I thought he was a good kid. He tried to do the right thing. I think he listened to some of the wrong people as far as what he should do instead of just try to go ahead and make your decisions yourself and go for it. Hopefully, not getting maybe a big contract or whatever, getting signed with a team and having to go play, maybe it’ll help him.
** Phil Johnson on Derrick Favors’ best position: Truthfully, I think he’ll be an outstanding five man…everybody would like to see him play four. He’ll play some four I’m sure, but eventually with his size and defensive ability and shot-blocking ability, I think that he’d be an excellent five man…I would lean towards him being a five man myself…Actually the four and five players are interchangeable in the Jazz system anyway, so it’s not a big deal.
** Phil Johnson on summer workouts, back in the day: I go back many years in the NBA, many players, once the season was over, in fact, a lot of players didn’t even make enough money in the early days, they had off-season jobs. They couldn’t work out that much. In the early days, players didn’t work out in the off-season. In fact, Jerry [Sloan] was one of the few guys, when I was with the Bulls in the early 70s, that did a lot of work. He did a lot of work in the summer, and not necessarily basketball, but working out, running, conditioning-wise. He was one of the few.
** Randy Rigby on expectations: I think our fans, I’m hoping, well, I know, and, ’cause I hear it out in the community, our fans are saying how excited they are that they’re seeing the commitment that the Millers, the Jazz organization is making to having a competitive team. I’m seeing and hearing from our sponsors, of people saying, “I want to be a part of this and we want to be a part of this team and be out there and cheer them on.”
I think also at the same time, that we, our fans are believing in us, and, but they are wise fans. I think hopefully people aren’t trying to build too fast and too big of expectations but hopefully trying to monitor, you know, those to the right kind of level, but, ’cause I think this is going, we are improving. We are getting better. We can potentially even surprise ourselves even to the degree of how fast we are, but I would try to hopefully, I want to control our expectations and not go crazy.
** Kevin O’Connor on the Raja Bell situation: We’ve had conversations. They haven’t agreed to anything we’ve offered.
** David Locke on the Raja Bell situation: What happened with Raja is very clear. He agreed to a buyout with the Jazz under the presumption that he was going to get signed by somebody. Therefore, when he got signed by somebody, he was going to be able to get that money. Raja and his staff must have had such an esteemed view of himself that he thought there’d be multiple bidders, and so he didn’t want to get caught in the waiver system if he got amnestied, and so [he decided to pursue] a buyout.
And then, as it turns out, there are no bidders, so he doesn’t want a buyout because he’s going to lose, like, $1.3 million on the buyout which he doesn’t have a chance to replace. Or, the other scenario is that he completely lied, completely snookered the Jazz during the amnesty just to make sure he wasn’t amnestied.
** Finally, Gordon Hayward UDQM:
jazzfanatical 
And all that time we thought G’s #improveeveryday was about basketball… Being him, he could mean Starcraft, though. :P
Reading Phil is so refreshing. :)
I like Raja and never thought his season ending comments were all that bad (even though he could have spared us the “totally unprofessional” headline). But oh boy, have his comments come back to haunt him…
Okay. Locke here is what I am talking about in when I referred to the habit of framing former players in a bad light.
He could have said: Raja expected that teams would be more interested in him than they turned out to be. He expected that he would get an offer that made his new contract + the buyout money turn out to be about the same. Unfortunately for him, this seems to not have turned out to be the case. And so we’re stuck where he doesn’t have any incentive in accepting a buyout.
There’s no need to hypothesize lying. There’s no need to snark that he must think of himself as four times the player he is. I wish the team and official voices on the Jazz payroll would STOP IT!
I agree that if he was a PR person he could have done better, but come on. Hypothesizing lying when it comes to players and agents trying to make the most money is far from crazy and as long as there are no baseless accusations, it is fair to raise the possibility (even if I don’t see it making much sense in this case).
Besides, he’s just Locke. He is not the voice of the Jazz or anything. He’s entitled to free speech and because he is human and has to talk so much, eventually he says dumb stuff. But I really don’t see reason to care so much as to communicate screaming with capital letters for a single sentence on Raja. :)
I actually disagree with this. He is employed by the Jazz and isn’t merely, say, a radio personality on the Jazz-owned radio station. If you look at his bio on Twitter or Youtube or his blog on the Jazz’s own site, he is billed or has billed himself as the radio voice of the Utah Jazz. As such, he is a representative of the team.
If you watch the video, he isn’t just hypothesizing. He could’ve said what he had to say without all the insults, and this is part of a bigger problem where Jazz personnel feel the need to trash players when they leave the Jazz or even a year after they’ve left the Jazz
Lastly, Locke’s bit started off with “Raja agreed to a buyout” and went on from there about how he either backtracked or lied, and KOC had said Raja’s side hadn’t agreed to anything.
I really think this is too small to merit much attention. Raja himself said he was pretty much a free agent, so I don’t think Locke was unfair in this one and I don’t see any insults in what he said. Plus, the way things are with agents and players, had Raja lied and got the better out of it, the Jazz would be the ones looking silly here.
I went and watched the video. Now that I watched, I must say he definitively hypothesized, because he ends up stating reasons that don’t support the hypothesis (Raja’d lie to avoid the amnesty, but Jazz had no reason to amnesty in the 1st place).
Even if Locke is featured on the Jazz web page, it is very clear that he is by no means stating official things for the team. He makes drum sounds with his voice to open podcasts he records on his pijamas (lol). Raja also could have left his exit interview without calling his coach unprofessional and make national headlines, that was way less appropriate than Locke’s remarks on this particular video, in my opinion.
I was pretty shocked with the comments on SLCDunk on Friday, which sounded like people actually think Locke is a manipulative puppet controlled by the FO to keep an ignorantly happy fanbase. I am not sure what’s going on with that.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree, then :) But as always, thanks for your comments and sharing your thoughts!
:) As always, I am the one thanking for the great blogging.
Compare with Phil Johnson talking about CJ:
He uses the words “loaded with talent”, “a great kid”, saying maybe he listened to the wrong kind of advice and voices as he tried to become a regular player … and then he wished him luck and hoped that things work out with his next team.
That’s how we need to be treating former players. I really like Phil a lot.