The reason, it turned out, is that Duhon’s wife, Andrea, was pregnant with twins, and Duhon decided he needed to remain near her rather than make the trip across the Atlantic. It turned out to be a sound decision, as last week, Andrea Duhon gave birth to twins, two months premature. The babies and their mother are healthy.
“Obviously, Chris wants to play, he has a lot of basketball left in him and he was excited to get started again,” Duhon’s agent, Kevin Bradbury, said. “But when he went over the situation, he felt like is family needs him to be home.”
Caserta wound up signing another guard, former Siena star Ronald Moore, instead of Duhon, a 31-year-old veteran of four teams who has appeared in 606 NBA games. The Lakers are still paying him the nonguaranteed portion of his contract ($1.5 million) that was owed after he was waived last year.
Duhon still intends to come back to basketball.
“Chris is going to stay in shape and he is going to return to the game,” Bradbury said. “He obviously appreciated the willingness of Caserta to sign him and give him the opportunity. But it just wasn’t quite the right time for him to start playing again.”
COME ON BOARD!
After several days of speculation and earlier reports that former Bulls and Lakers coach Phil Jackson was offered, and then heavily considering accepting, an offer to join the Knicks' front office, Turner Sports' Greg Anthony reported on Wednesday night that Jackson had officially accepted a position with the Knicks.
No details were immediately available about the nature of Jackson's position, other than that he would be a "member of the front office." Jackson won 11 NBA titles as the head man for the Bulls and Lakers. He has no experience as an executive.
Carmelo Anthony said Wednesday that he has heard Jackson will be "coming on board" with the New York Knicks, the strongest indication yet that the 11-time NBA champion coach will soon be taking over the team's basketball operations.
Anthony went as far as to suggest that it's no longer a question of if Jackson will rejoin the Knicks, but when.
"Everything's in his hands now," Anthony told reporters in Boston at the Knicks' gameday shootaround practice.
Knicks guard J.R. Smith seems to approve of New York's hire.
"Can't wait to work with the great @PhilJackson11 #TheZenMaster" — JR Smith (@TheRealJRSmith)
Knicks president and general manager Steve Mills will stay on with Jackson in an adjusted role, as Mills' agent and GM contacts are too vital.
Jackson will serve in a role more important to the Knicks' day-to-day operations than he did as a consultant for the Detroit Pistons during their coaching search. The Pistons eventually chose Maurice Cheeks, who was recently fired, as head coach.
The former Bulls and Lakers coach typically had tense relationships with those running the front offices of his teams. He was initially friends with Bulls GM Jerry Krause, but that relationship soon soured to the point where Jackson and Krause stopped speaking. Similarly, Jackson and Lakers head honcho Jerry West had a frosty, if less confrontational, relationship. By the time Jackson left the Lakers in 2011, team president Jim Buss was eager to cut all ties to Jackson, including his assistant coaches.
Jackson was not heavily involved in the day-to-day business of running those teams, of working the ins-and-outs of the salary cap and the collective bargaining agreement, or of evaluating players in the draft. Those are all must-haves for a modern league executive.
During his talks with the Lakers in 2012, word leaked that Jackson had demanded more control over roster decisions as a condition of returning as coach.
WHAT TANKING?
You call it "tanking."
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver calls it "rebuilding."
That's what the league's new boss said Wednesday when asked whether the NBA needed to do more to discourage teams from pinning their hopes on the draft lottery. Limiting the definition of tanking — at one point referring to it as "the T-word" — to intentionally losing individual games, Silver says he doesn't think it exists.
"The coaches and players, or some subset of that group, trying to lose, I don't think that's going on anywhere in the NBA," he told reporters after a speech to the Chief Executives' Club of Boston at a downtown hotel. "And I would take action immediately if I thought it was."
Silver didn't rule out changes that would eliminate the perception that teams aren't trying to win.
"We have a system in place that encourages teams to rebuild," he said after the talk sponsored by Boston College in the hometown of the Celtics, who are among the league's rebuilding teams. ""They are responding to the incentives that are built into the system. If the incentives aren't right, we have to change them."
The year's draft is expected to be stocked with superstars like Andrew Wiggins and Jabari Parker, giving teams the hope that they will land a franchise player to lead them out of the lottery.
So when the Celtics traded away Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce — and even let coach Doc Rivers walk — they could at least hope that help would be coming soon. Same for the Philadelphia 76ers, who after traded away Spencer Hawes and former No. 2 overall pick Evan Turner in February had lost 17 games in a row heading into Wednesday night.
Silver noted that winning the draft lottery is no guarantee of getting back to the playoffs. And he added that having the worst record only gives a team a one-in-four chance of landing the first pick (though this year, with a deeper draft of potential superstars, the team with the worst record would be guaranteed the chance to pick one of them).
Silver said that as long as the players and coaches on the floor are trying to win games, he doesn't have a problem with organizations trying to rebuild. Asked if fans were getting their money's worth for season's worth of games in which their team was hoping to lose, he said fans are usually patient if they think the lottery will pay off.
"Fans want to be part of a vision," Silver said.
BIRD VISION
Few folks saw Paul Pierce leaving the Celtics, not after he had played through 15 seasons in Boston and brought a title to the city in 2008.
Count Larry Bird among them, as the Celtics legend told the Boston Herald on Tuesday that he had hoped to see Pierce end his career in Boston.
“My thing is you would always like to see Paul finish up there, and maybe he will,” Bird said. “But it’s tough. These decisions today are more scrutinized than they ever were. But you just hate to see a guy spend his whole career there and win a championship and then see him have to leave.
“But Danny knows what he’s doing. And maybe Paul can circle back around and finish up there.”
Bird played on one team for his entire career, but he understands this is a different NBA. He knows the new collective bargaining agreement and its stiff penalties for tax payers has changed the way teams operate.
And that had a role in the Celtics' decision to arrange a trade for Pierce and Kevin Garnett to the Brooklyn Nets. Of course, Garnett had a no-trade clause, and he was willing to waive that because Pierce joined him in Brooklyn.
“It’s tough,” Bird said. “The tax is brutal now. I know Boston’s been in the tax a lot in the past, but now 90-something percent of the owners don’t want to touch it. We like it here, because it makes it a level playing field.
“A lot of teams that are in the tax are trying to get under it and get out of it, and they give away players or picks. It’s a different league now than it was in the past, but I like it because it gives us an opportunity to put together a better team. But there are always going to be a couple of teams that the tax doesn’t mean anything to them.”
Contributors: Sean Deveney, DeAntae Prince, The Associated Press
