Wow. I did not know that it was this bad. I don't even know what to make of this. I am starting to think that there is something possibly wrong with coach Sloan's approach to his craft - a little of an outside-the-lines-disciplinarian and my-way-or-the-highway type of a coach? Or did Amaechi overstep his boundaries? Read on...
As a Basketball player I never saw any value in Amaechi. When he was with the Orlando I said to my myself who is this guy, I am glad he's no a Rocket. Then when The Jazz signed him... I said to myself, I thought they were smarter then that. When we got him I said, WHY--- are we crazy.....One of the most overrated players of all times.
Yeah this was written before he became a Rocket. The article is from a british web site called britball.com. He did play well uring his time in Orlando, and was offered $20 million over 4 to become Shaq's backup as a Laker. He spurned this offer to stay with the Magic for one more season after they promised to give him his big pay day when they had more cap room which never happened. He could have had 3 championships and 20 million in the bank but now he is retired and significantly less well off than he could be.
Yeah it is quite old but I just wanted to explore it especially with the latest Sloan battle with Aroyo. I have a lot of respect for the hall of famer but on second thought maybe Aroyo and Amaechi are not as bad as they were painted by Jerry Sloan. Jerry assistant coach calling Amaechi, an offspring of African father and Caucasian mother + the father of two adopted caucasian children, a "white hater" and other bigotry words was uncalled for. Maybe there was something Amaechi did to warrant this it is still unfortunate. Also should love any game before he plays it professionally? Now Aroyo was rumoured to be in the dog house because of a "small" disagreement maybe similar to Amaechi's. Maybe coach Sloan should review his style again.
Exactly, and a valuable lesson it is. Because everyone knows that when a lesser talented player potentially gets screwed over by a group of people in a totally different city at a totally different time, it will definitely happen to a totally different person by totally different people on a totally different team. So Boozer had to screw them over first, because they would have inevitably given him the shaft. Totally.
In restrosspect it kinda makes sense. I will not say Carlos did a honorable thing but it was not wrong either. Cavs fans can boo all they want but Carlos and his wife collectively made an unpopular but arguably wise decision.
Amechi came out looking like the good guy in that article and Sloan and the Jazz organization look evil. We'll never know the whole story, but Amechi's side is pretty convincing and I could see what he said to be true.
when was this guy ever a Rocket? I thought i knew my team better than this, but I cannot recall any time period that Amaechi played for HOU
Jazz only a lament for Amaechi Mark Woods "Yes, my stats are horrible but if you go into a game with 1:30 left every seven or eight games, which is pretty much what I played, all you need to do is go 0 for 1, then 0 for 2, pretty soon your percentages drop. I’m not going to play well like that and besides, I’m 32 years old. I’m not going to be spry coming off the bench." There may have been bad blood between Sloan and Amaechi for reasons that we may never know. However, that last statement I bolded by Amaechi just tells me that he MAY NOT have been trying hard to play. Look at Deke, JBarry, DWesley, and BSura, all of these guys are in their "twilight" years and they bring it no matter what. I am not going to downplay how Amaechi feels, but each and every moment is what you make of it and to enter a game, even for a few moments you need to prove that you: A) want to be out there and; B) deserve to be out there. I think that is why so many people were enamored with Boki, because he was all over the place... at least he tried.
I never thought I'd have to look up a word that a basketball player is quoted saying in the dictionary.
Unless maybe it was a hiphop dictionary. Are Jerry Sloan and Bobby Knight possibly related? Possibly same mental illness, same genetic broken dna strands? Something for the center for disease control and the genome project to look into.
Really? Reading the article, I can see exactly why Sloan didn't like Amaechi. He's very arrogant, he belittled his boss, and he isn't much of a team player. He doesn't think that those things should cost him minutes -- but then there a lot of things he doesn't understand, judging from his decision to stay in Orlando when other teams were guaranteeing him $20 million.
I guess we didn't read it the same way. If anything I felt that Sloan and the Jazz were arrogant. Amaechi just seemed to want to be treated like any adult would want to be and instead the Jazz seemed to throw out obvious lies and talk down to him. I mean the bit about calling him a bigot towards whites was absurd.
Obviously, Sloan didn't treat him nicely. I wouldn't dispute that. But, you can see Amaechi's attitude in the quotes in this very article. "The only ones who have problems with me are those who think they can walk over me and I’ll just stand there and take it. I’m not." Strikes me as overly-defensive. Too concerned with him and his, with respect paid him. Could be after-the-fact sensitivity, ok. "A member of staff came into the locker room and in front of (Jazz owner) Larry Miller, he told me, and I quote: ‘you hate white people, you hate Americans and you think you’re smarter than everybody else.’ I told him that one of out of three of those might be right. My mother was white. The two kids I’ve adopted are white and American. So that shows how well they know me.” Admits thinking he's smarter than everyone else. Implying to the staff member that he thinks he's smarter than that guy. Also combative. “Jerry called me a stupid f***ing c**t and then suspended me when I went right back at him and told him that wasn’t going to happen again,” he states. “That’s not old school. It’s just rude. Who says that to a grown man?” Combative again. He can't let anything go. “I am not overly sensitive; I went to an English Grammar school where the masters walked around with canes. I just thought that when I reached adulthood, that other adults would treat me as I treat them. I could probably take a few decades of distain, five years or so of contempt, but I will not be walked over like a piece of diseased meat. I have worked too hard in every facet of my life to endure that type of treatment.” Overly sensitive. Overly sensitive to accusations of being overly sensitive. Obviously can't stand being wrong or at fault in anything. “It’s laughable [that he wasn't liked by teammates]. Ask them. Greg Ostertag just built a house next door to me in Phoenix and Karl and Mark Jackson have asked me about coming over here to visit this summer.” Pretty paltry counter-evidence. "Yes, my stats are horrible but if you go into a game with 1:30 left every seven or eight games, which is pretty much what I played, all you need to do is go 0 for 1, then 0 for 2, pretty soon your percentages drop. I’m not going to play well like that and besides, I’m 32 years old. I’m not going to be spry coming off the bench." Making excuses for himself. If he can't be effective coming off the bench, he's worthless. Doesn't he understand that? What, he thinks he should have been the starter? And why, because he takes a couple minutes to warm up? "Part of the reason I’ve been upset about this season is that all of a sudden, I’ve got this community in Salt Lake who haven’t had a chance to know me. The media don’t often talk to me and when they do, they don’t print anything I say. They just go along with the idea that John is lazy, John has a bad attitude, John’s an uppity Brit. So I have a group who are of the opinion that I don’t care about basketball, which is not true, and that I’m some kind of evil malcontent. It’s just nonsense." Now, it's the media's fault. Maybe he just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I read all his quotes in the worst possible light. But, I didn't dislike him before reading the article, and now I do dislike him.
