June 30 Notebook
June 30, 2006 11:04 AM | General
June 30, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – I got my first whiff of professional basketball in a long, long time the other night watching the five-hour NBA draft and I can tell you, it stinks. That’s five hours of my life I can never get back. If that is the best the NBA can do, well, hockey still has a chance.
 |
 |
| Mike Gansey | Kevin Pittsnogle |
Of course we Mike Gansey and Kevin Pittsnogle fans were greatly disappointed. Despite being rated among the top 50 prospects by everyone who does these things, neither player was picked. One expert had Pittsnogle going in the first round and the rest predicted both players going by the middle of the second round. About the only other place you can get that type of good, solid information is at a Dick Cheney WMD press briefing.
Sixteen foreign players were taken in the 60-player draft and more than half of them won’t even cross the pond to play in the league next season. The defection rate hasn’t been that high since Vietnam.
There were 15 trades made on draft night -- six by a single team. First-round picks were being interviewed wearing ball caps of teams they weren’t going to play for, and one team drafted a player in the first round that didn’t even average 10 points per game in college.
Old bird dogs like Jerry West and Rod Thorn were once again given the keys to the lock box: West had Connecticut’s Rudy Gay fall right into his lap and all he had to give up was a warm six-pack (Shane Battier). Thorn wound up getting the best point guard in the draft in Connecticut’s Marcus Williams, although he does come with baggage.
PR conscious commissioner David Stern frequently rolled his eyes and shook his head before addressing the audience, and once lectured the ESPN announcing crew about criticizing each draft pick. It seems the commissioner wasn’t happy that ESPN wasn’t cooperating with the league’s planned five-hour infomercial.
As for Stephen A. Smith, ESPN’s loudmouthed know-it-all, I can now see why people are leaving in droves for the suburbs. At one point he said he was speechless, and then spent the next 10 minutes explaining why he was speechless.
We’re all speechless.
Briefly:
“Mark Cuban told me he was very high on me,” said Gansey of a phone call he received from the Dallas Mavericks owner late Wednesday night.
Cuban may have been high on Gansey – but not high enough to use the team’s second-round pick on him, instead taking GW’s J.R. Pinnock and then moving him to the Lakers.
That was easily the best question of the night.
Could you imagine Mel Kiper asking an NFL GM that same question? He would have been punched out on live television.
 |
||
| Laura Kane |
Women’s soccer coach Nikki Izzo-Brown’s coaching tree is growing. Former WVU standout player Laura Kane was recently named assistant coach at Purdue. She joins former WVU players Katie Barnes (Alabama) and Lisa Stoia (Jacksonville) in the assistant coaching ranks.
One word of caution, though, about all these glowing web reports you’ve been reading: The team I saw them play against Thursday afternoon was made up of players from a West Virginia Double-A school that they beat by more than 50 points. That’s a far cry from Connecticut, Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Louisville.
Mainieri is the son of Demie Mainieri, a member of the Potomac State College Hall of Fame. Paul was actually born in Morgantown while his father was working on his master’s degree at WVU.
 |
||
| Jim Amick |
Amick is still involved with the Arizona Western basketball program as a consultant and sits on the bench at home games.
“I will not travel and I will not sit up near the front of the bench,” he said. “I want to be at the end of the bench so I can criticize the coaches just like the players.”
Amick also takes part in staff meetings.
“We have staff meetings and they have two assistant coaches and whatever (the head coach) says the assistants nod their heads and say, ‘Yeah coach that’s right.’ I’d say, ‘That’s not worth a crap.’ If everyone around you agrees you don’t need anyone around you.”
Amick is planning on returning for another season in 2007 – his 49th year of coaching.
“We’ll be very good,” he said. “We were in the Final Eight this year and we were ranked No. 1 in the country the year before and we have the nucleus of our team back.”
Amick donates his salary back to the school in the form of a basketball scholarship named in memory of his oldest son James Edward, who died a few years ago of a heart attack.
Amick says Gardner and athletic director Leland Byrd just didn’t see eye-to-eye.
“I always told Joedy, ‘You’ve got to be careful who you pick your fights against.’ He and Leland were constantly bickering about things and they weren’t big things.
“It was little things like, how far can we go to play a game? How far can we recruit? Leland was a good, honest man, but he thought you could get every good player you needed within a 75-mile radius of Morgantown,” said Amick.
“We could see that that wasn’t going to work if they wanted the Mountaineers to compete at a national level. They bickered and bickered like a newlywed couple that had made it four years and then said that’s it.”
Amick remained in Morgantown after Gardner left to help with the transition of the new coaching staff.
“I completed the recruiting and tried to hold things together until they hired Gale (Catlett),” Amick recalled. “I had a couple of job offers to be an assistant coach in the East but I said, ‘No, I think I’ll head back West and see what happens.’ We like Yuma (Arizona) so much. There comes a point when you value the quality of life and those things more.”
Gardner and Amick followed Bucky Waters’ pattern of trying to land prospects outside WVU’s normal recruiting territories, focusing primarily on junior college players.
“In football there were a lot of good players within a 100-mile radius,” Amick said. “Basketball wise that wasn’t necessarily true back then.
“I heard it many, many times: there is a player down at blank, blank high school and he’s another Jerry West. If I heard he’s another Jerry West once, I heard it a thousand times while I was there. Obviously there wasn’t another Jerry West.”
Amick says he still has many friends living in Morgantown.
“I’m friends with Ed and Mona Pastilong,” Amick said. “I’ve had a long friendship with Buddy Quertinmont.”
Amick’s son Kendall owned the La Casa restaurant down in the Wharf district before selling it last year and moving to Arizona to be closer to his parents.
Amick says his salary was $16,000 his first year at WVU.
“Joedy got $22,000 as the head coach and I was pretty close to him. I used to joke with Joedy, ‘You better watch out because I’m right behind you.’”
Both had one-year, rollover contracts. Catlett was the first University coach in any sport to receive a multi-year contract.
“That was one of the things we fought,” Amick said. “(Other coaches) would tell a player, ‘How do you know they’re going to be there next year? When you’re recruiting against Pitt and the others they’d say, ‘The rumor is they’re not going to be there next year.’ That’s the way it went.”
Literally.
Have a great weekend!
Note: The views and opinions expressed here don't neccessarily reflect those of West Virginia University and the Mountaineer Sports Network.
