Your Karl Malone/HOF Links

The ceremony gets underway tonight at 5 pm. mountain.  If you have NBA TV, they're also showing a Karl Malone highlight show right before the festivities get under way.

So to tide you over until then, here are some of the best link from around the net on Karl and the HOF:

JA Adande

(Probably my favorite article although it was when Karl played for the Lakers)

Even his work ethic had temporary effects on O'Neal. In a preseason game, O'Neal wanted to sit out, but suited up when he saw Malone was going to play despite a nagging injury. He forced O'Neal to get more aggressive on the boards, because if O'Neal wasn't quick to the ball then Malone would surely snatch it. The 11.5 rebounds O'Neal averaged were the most among his final three season in L.A. and represented the last time he averaged more than 11 rebounds per game.   

Mike Pradaa, SBNation, Making excellence look routine

Most importantly - and we're going to italics for this one because it really bears mentioning - Karl Malone did all this until he was 40. From 1986 to 2003, Malone missed a total of ten games. His two MVP awards came at age 33 and 35. In 2001, Malone led an aging Jazz team that started Olden Polynice, an ancient John Starks and a young Donyell Marshall to 53 wins, averaging 23 points and eight rebounder per game with a 24.7 PER and a 57.2 true shooting percentage ... and he was 37. His season-ending injury in 2004 - when he was 40 - arguably dashed the Lakers' hopes at winning a title.    

Kelly Dwyer, BDL

19 years, and he never let up. He wasn't a product of the system, he was the system. He set the screens, he made the moves, and he finished from everywhere. He also finished 1459 points shy of breaking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's all time scoring record, and though the idea behind someone like Malone (just one of the greats, your instinct tells you) topping what might have been the best player at the most important position this game has, Malone would have been a rightful and deserved owner of that record had he hung around.    

Steve Luhm on his work ethic

The timer on the Stairmaster that Malone asked hotel management to put in his room indicated he'd been using the taxing exercise machine for 45 minutes.    

Thinking about the two practices the Jazz had just endured, the two scheduled for the next day and Malone's just-completed individual workout that no one else would have considered, Stockton, Hornacek and Keefe looked at each other and laughed.    

He was cut from a different cloth

When the 1992 Dream Team took time off to visit golf courses in Barcelona, almost everyone on the team was itching to bust out their golf clubs out and take their cuts. Karl Malone saw the well-manicured greens, uninviting bunkers and deep roughs, and called it a "waste of pasture."

Jazz Fanatical

Karl Malone has a special place in my heart, because if it weren't for Karl Malone, I would have missed out on the great passion of my life. Karl Malone is the reason I became a Jazz fan, and for that-for all the joy and bliss and emotional roller coaster rides that being a Jazz fan has brought me-I am grateful.    

Shreveport Times

"Even when he came to Tech as a freshman in 1981, Karl had a desire, a focus, a dedication to the game, that not many 18 to 19-year-olds have," said Bailey, a former Tech assistant coach now at Nicholls State.    

Charles Barkley (via the DesNews)

"Very few guys were that big, strong and that fast," Barkley said of Malone, who was 6-foot-9 and a muscular 256 pounds in his playing days. "I mean, think about it. You play against big guys, you play against fast guys, but you don't play against big, fast guys."    

Jerry Sloan, (WWLP has more)

The man himself