Yes, yes, we know it's really pronounced New OR-lins. Tell that to the guy who wrote, "Do you know what it means to miss New Or-LEENS?" Great song. Still a great city, albeit one now catching another right cross from the economy after the first one from Katrina.
More and more empty storefronts and clearly more and more people on the streets with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Sad.
Still, it's a city with a soul, like San Francisco, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore _ and not like Phoenix, Charlotte and all of the strip-malled towns around this country
We digress, but now some interesting little tidbits as the Knicks wrap up their latest trip to nowhere.
For instance, Byron Scott, like so many other coaches of contenders, has been lamenting the state of his bench.
Well, you know, some wise-guy reporter asked him, their could be a former All-Star guard you used to coach in New Jersey available at some point if he can work out some kind of a buyout agreement (on which there's been little talk the past week, according to Donnie Walsh) . So, Byron, whaddya think?
"He ain't getting one here," Scott said, meaning a contract.
That's what we've always loved about Byron: a coach who talks without a filter.
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Then there was the red and blue cell phone cover that sat on the floor of the Knicks' locker room before their morning shootaround with "Giant" on it _ the "s" missing because someone presumably stepped on it after Al Harrington tossed it aside.
Harrington, a Jersey guy, is a die-hard Giants fan while Malik Rose, a Philadelphia guy, is a die-hard Eagles fan and the two had a bit of a bet on Sunday's playoff game that had nothing to do with Harrington tossing away that cell phone cover in disgust, he said.
Stuck in a locker room full of real and adopted New York sports fans, Rose said he's suffered, "defamation, degradation, all kinds of 'a-tions,'" but now, in the wake of his Phillies' World Series victory, he's basking in Eagles 27, Giants 11 _ and what that'll mean for Harrington.
"He's going to put his [Eagles] helmet in my locker," Harrington said in a tone of resignation. "I've got to take his [Eagles] jersey home and hang it up for two weeks. And we've got video-game controls that we play with, Giants and Eagles, and I've got to play with his controller."
One imagines there might've been some financial considerations as well, but no one wants to raise any flags that David Stern might see.
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Finally, there's Eddy Curry, out indefinitely again, this time with a problem in his left knee, not the right one on which he had surgery last year, then a bone bruise in a weight-bearing area he insisted had no relationship to the surgery, but which sidelined him more than two months.
Just to make it clear, because when it comes to Eddy's knees, left and right has been confusing.
There's no confusing the size of him, though, for as Woody Allen (as Alvy Singer) said of the spider in Annie Hall's (the then-and-now marvelous Diane Keaton) bathroom, "It's the size of a Buick."
And that could be Eddy's problem.
Our suggestion after the so-called Chicago conditioning expert Tim Grover and all the Knicks people have clearly not gotten it right with Eddy: The clinic at Duke where the likes of Sid Fernandez and Clarence "Big Man" Clemons went. Or someplace else of that ilk.
The guy has too much athletic talent to waste, whether it be in New York or elsewhere. And he's untradeable until he gets it right.
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