Tag: San Antonio Spurs

Buck Harvey: Ex-Spur loses his seat as the GM

Chris Paul lobbing to Blake Griffin will be fun. Knowing the Lakers will be envious in the same city will be, too.

David Stern will receive a few compliments, and the New Orleans franchise will receive a few offers. The Hornets, with both a sensible payroll and a promising future to market, will be easier to sell.

But there’s someone who doesn’t know what his job is after this, or even if he has one. The general manager of the Hornets was off to the side while the NBA ran his team for him, and what happened Wednesday didn’t help him.
Before, Dell Demps’ peers thought he’d gotten a raw deal.

Now, didn’t Stern do a better job than Demps?

Demps knew the NBA ride could be a rough one. He made the Spurs’ roster in 1995 as a free agent; when he took his seat on the team plane for the first road trip that season, he felt a sense of accomplishment.

He felt something give, too. As the plane took off from the San Antonio airport, his seat became untracked along with that of a teammate, Chuck Person.

Both were injured, with Person suffering a herniated disk.

Demps sat back up. He patched together a 10-year playing career that stretched from the Philippines to France and beyond. Later, he took a job in the D-League, then scouted for the Knicks before coming back to the Spurs.

Here, he learned how to run his own operation with the Toros. Those who worked with him in the Spurs’ organization thought this: Demps was competitive and smart, and aggressive in both his thinking and his execution.

Little wonder he teamed with a former Spurs teammate, coach Monty Williams, in New Orleans in the summer of 2010. And from the first day, his challenge was Paul.

Paul was already impatient then, wondering if he should go elsewhere. Demps met with him immediately upon becoming the Hornets’ general manager.

“They made the right choice hiring Dell,” a source close to Paul said then. “We knew the Spurs talked very highly of him, so that’s all we could go off. But (Paul) said it was a great meeting.”

Demps did what every other GM in the league would have tried to do. He massaged his star. He outlined for Paul what was possible, knowing all along that his star might change his mind. Paul did eventually.

But Demps wasn’t any other GM. He didn’t have to answer to one owner, or even a group of owners. He had the league.

Stern should want to get out of this conflict of interest as soon as possible. It looks bad, and it feels worse. Various officials around the league see too many possibilities.

Such as the lottery. It’s always been a moment of game-show paranoia. Now it’s possible an NBA-owned team will have two chances.

This trade was as messy. Stern and Demps tried to frame it Wednesday night in a teleconference as a cooperative effort. When Demps came to the league with the three-way deal that involved the Lakers and Rockets, Stern said they talked in gentle terms.

“OK, let’s see what else we can do?”

In truth, the NBA vetoed Demps’ trade and took over his responsibilities. Demps was crushed.

Many around the league thought a lot of his initial proposal. Demps had gotten three veterans (Lamar Odom, Luis Scola and Kevin Martin) who would have made the Hornets competitive.

Still, it was a middling mix, as well as one whose budget and lack of star power wouldn’t have impressed potential buyers. The NBA accomplished all of that — without Demps’ assistance — when it landed a younger talent in Eric Gordon and the promise of Minnesota’s unprotected lottery pick in a deep draft.

Wednesday night, Demps said he was excited for the Hornets, and maybe he is. But this wasn’t his trade, and he wasn’t running his team. He was untracked again, and likely to be unemployed.

bharvey@express-news.net

Mike Monroe: Big Shot Rob finds more thrills

When Robert Horry’s 3-point basket with 5.8 seconds left in overtime gave the Spurs a 96-95 victory in Game 5 of the 2005 NBA Finals, the game’s announcers called it another dagger from “Big Shot Bob.”

It was a name Horry accepted but didn’t really like, so after the game teammate Tim Duncan delighted in his teammate’s minor discomfort.

On Tuesday afternoon, someone at the White House called Horry “Big Shot Bob,” and it was perfectly fine with a player who ranks among the greatest clutch shooters in NBA history.

“President Obama walked up and said, ‘Big Shot Bob, it’s nice to meet you,’” Horry said after returning to his home in Houston from a week-long USO tour that took him to Kuwait, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Germany.

“It was very cool meeting him. It’s OK that he called me Bob. It really doesn’t matter that much to me, ‘Big Shot Rob’ or ‘Big Shot Bob.’ Either one is OK.”

The occasion was the return of the United States Forces-Iraq colors, the battle flag under which U.S. troops had served during the Iraq war. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden received the colors in ceremonies at Andrews AFB.

Horry had been aboard Air Force Two, the aircraft used by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, along with the other participants in the USO tour — comedian Thomas Miles, actress Minka Kelly and RB singer Jordin Sparks — when it landed at Andrews with the colors.

“That was the part that really hit you,” Horry said. “Bringing that flag home, well, it just hit you what that meant.”

The NBA reached out to Horry several weeks ago when the USO coordinators asked for a retired player the troops would enjoy meeting. A member of seven NBA championship teams in Houston, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Horry was a natural.

“It was an amazing experience,” said Horry, now 41. “Visiting with the troops was what it was mostly about, just hanging out with them, taking pictures with them and talking. Just trying to break up the monotony of the war.

“I don’t know if we were in any dangerous areas in Afghanistan or not, but we kind of figured out that if they were asking us to wear IBA (individual body armor), it was probably a little dangerous.”

Amazingly, Horry ran into two old friends.

“Willie Locke was my company commander in ROTC (at Alabama),” he said. “My other friend from my hometown was Claude Burnett. His mom always baked my birthday cakes.”

Back on his home turf in Houston, Horry will try to reconnect soon with another old friend. He hasn’t spoken to Antonio McDyess for more than a month because McDyess hasn’t been answering his phone.

Horry knew McDyess’ decision to retire was final, despite the Spurs’ attempts to get him to change his mind.

“When you’ve had knee injuries like he had, you know when it’s time,” Horry said. “That last year I was with the Spurs, I knew it was time after I banged knees in a game in Sacramento. It just wouldn’t heal. Every morning I’d get up, and it would kill me just walking to the bathroom.”

Horry believes the Spurs will be well served in a short season by a core that has been together for years, instead of weeks or months. Lack of time to school new players offsets some of that edge.

“They can sneak out some wins because they’ve got their core back,” he said. “It’s hard to get in a rhythm with new teammates. I know its going to be difficult to beat those young teams, especially Oklahoma City, the Clippers and, well, yeah, the Lakers, too.

“To be honest, I’m thinking 5 or 6 seed, just because of the age of the team and not being able to incorporate new guys into the system in a short season.”

mikemonroe@express-news.net

Butler impressed with Spurs after visit

Free agent forward Caron Butler apparently is at the top of the Spurs’ replacement list after the team decided to use the amnesty clause in the new CBA to jettison Richard Jefferson.

Butler met with Spurs officials Wednesday and came away and his opportunity to help San Antonio.