I Feel Sleazy…
By Coup
Part 195 in the never-ending Darius Miles story. I’m beginning to wonder if he is ever going to go away…and at this point I believe the answer is no. On to the story, from today’s Boston Globe, a question if the Blazers are ‘adding insult to injury?’
“While the Celtics have been praising Darius Miles, two NBA general managers said the Blazers have been bad-mouthing the free agent forward to potential suitors.”
“He can still play and he also hasn’t played in two years, so you have to understand that he will get better,” one NBA GM said. “Too bad Portland is putting out bad information that he is not a good kid. Anything and everything they can say bad they are. It’s too bad. He’s a nice kid with a bad injury who has fought back. Right now, he’s still an NBA player and he’s going to get better. He’s going to improve. It will be a smart pick-up for someone.”
(Disclaimer for those who like grains of salt: This of course could be a bitter GM who got ‘Pritch-Slapped’ (still hate that term) but then again this isn’t Wikipedia throwing this quote out here, and he reported getting the news from 2 GM’s.)
You can see what I emphasized and you can see what this post has its title. When he got picked up by the Celtics and was getting all the pub about being a potential rotation player…I felt a hinge of sleaziness about the whole thing. I mean this is a guy we let stew under the Rose Garden and even brought in a doctor to get him off the books. Granted it was a league appointed doctor. But…even though it was a league-appointed doc who declared the injury ‘career-ending’…we played a major part in giving his career the death sentence. It’s as if he shot the gun but we bought it, supplied the bullets and probably bought him an iced tea afterward. This whole situation would be easier to swallow had Darius a) made the Celtics or b) shown he was no longer able to play. But neither are the case…sure he didn’t make the Celtics but it’s not as if he can’t play in the NBA anymore. As a matter of fact if you take that quote at face value it’s quite the opposite. And from what I saw…he can contribute. The majority of people are saying he still has skills and he’s still getting looked at. There’s something a little off about all of this…and I don’t like it. These allegations are hefty. It’s one thing for us to wash our hands of the situation because it clearly was not going to work on many different levels. It would be ok to bring in the league-appointed doctor to get him out of there. But it’s not like our hands are exactly clean. He’s shown that he can play. Add in the drama from the whole possible ‘Miles got suspended’ leak and now these allegations make me think something fishy is going on. To try and keep D-Miles from making a living for cap room? As my moms would say ‘That ain’t right.’
We may not have all the facts…and we may never have all the facts. But I can’t help but feel a lot more sleazy about this whole thing.
Comment if you can ‘talk me down’ from my ledge on this one.