Whiteside’s comeback out of nowhere
It’s getting ridiculous now. Hassan Whiteside was a nice little story for a while, but as he ascends to relevance with the Miami Heat, NBA teams find themselves wondering, “Wait a minute — how did we miss on this guy?”
The Warriors are among those teams. They’ll be fine in the postseason if they have a healthy Andrew Bogut and Festus Ezeli, but what are the odds on that? And who wouldn’t want a 7-foot player suddenly racking up rebounds and blocked shots at a mind-blowing rate?
Nobody’s quite willing to call the 25-year-old Whiteside an elite starting center in the NBA, but this is a man who blocked 12 shots in a game against Chicago, keeping all but one of those blocks in play instead of swatting them into the courtside seats. He posted two 16-rebound games after gaining significant minutes in late December, and he took down 24 rebounds in 29 minutes (you read it right) in Friday night’s loss to Dallas. He’s also shooting 65 percent from the floor, staying within his limits and seldom venturing outside the paint.
In the words of John Hollinger, the former ESPN insider and now the Memphis Grizzlies’ vice president of basketball operations, “Nobody saw this coming.”
The memories certainly aren’t sweet in Sacramento, where Hassan was a secondround draft pick out of Marshall University in 2010. As reported by ESPN’s Tom Haberstroth, “Whiteside was either the product of a toxic environment full of immature youngsters or the driver of it.” He played just 19 games in two seasons, spending most of his time in the D-League, and was finally released.
The scouting reports labeled him as flighty and temperamental, and with no NBA teams showing interest, he spent the next two seasons playing for three D-League teams, two teams in China and another in Lebanon. Memphis took a shot at him in November, but waived him the very next day and he was back in the D-League.
Just two days later, Whiteside put up 24 points, 16 rebounds and four blocks against Miami’s D-League team, and that was the turning point. As one Heat official told ESPN, “He kicked our ass, and we signed him later that night.”
Now, according to Miami’s All-Star forward Chris Bosh, “He’s a bigger, younger Tyson Chandler,” making a huge impact nearly every night for a team ranked seventh in the Eastern Conference standings and gunning for the playoffs. “He’s so long out there, it’s incredible,” the Mavericks’ Dirk Nowitzki said. While he remains decidedly raw, he’s getting invaluable tutoring from Miami assistant coach Juwan Howard and former Heat star Alonzo Mourning.
“I never thought of giving up,” Whiteside told Bleacher Report. “I had too much confidence in my dream. My mom always told me I was made for something special.”
Around the NBA
There’s a hint of Jeremy Lin in Whiteside’s sudden rise to stardom, and Lin can only dream of his magical days with the Knicks. Lakers coach Byron Scott hasn’t trusted him from the moment the season opened, publicly questioning his toughness and decisionmaking. Lin recently sat out a game while Jordan Clarkson and Ronnie Price handled the point-guard position, and as a potential free agent in July, he’s guaranteed to be moving on.
For all the talk about Atlanta’s Kyle Korver potentially replacing injured Dwyane Wade in the All-Star Game, don’t forget Brandon Knight. Coach Jason Kidd has turned Milwaukee into a solid East contender, and Knight runs that show.
Name that team: Nowitzki, Damian Lillard, Monta Ellis, Tony Parker, Zach Randolph, Dwight Howard, DeAndre Jordan, Goran Dragic, Mike Conley, Ty Lawson, Gordon Hayward and Draymond Green. That’s the left-off-the-roster crowd in the Western Conference, proclaiming, “We got next.”
As solid as the Chicago Bulls looked in defeating the Warriors on Tuesday night, they have since lost to the Lakers and Suns, with reports swirling about a serious rift between coach Tom Thibodeau and management. The team isn’t playing its customarily tough defense, and Thibodeau’s theory of players sticking out the relentless grind, instead of playing fewer minutes, hasn’t sat well with executives John Paxson and Gar Forman.
Just don’t tell Gregg Popovich that Thibodeau has “lost” the team. “That’s a bunch of bull—, nothing could be further from the truth,” the San Antonio coach told reporters. “He’s not gonna lose any team. Sometimes players just don’t listen. Timmy ( Duncan) stopped listening to me a long time ago. I don’t even coach him. You guys think I’m kidding. He just plays. I talk to him once in a while, but sometimes guys just don’t want to hear it.”
Klay Thompson’s 37-point quarter broke the record of 33, set by San Antonio’s George Gervin on the final day of the 1978 regular season. Gervin was a man possessed that night, knowing he needed 58 points to steal the scoring title from Denver’s David Thompson, who scored an astounding 73 earlier in the day. No problem: Gervin went for 63 — and by the way, “I don’t feel Thompson broke my record,” Gervin told Bleacher Report. “I’d like to see him try to get 33 or 37 in a quarter when there was no three-point line.”