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John Lucas III did something pretty great, to make up for an asinine policy at a Salt Lake City elementary school. From our friend Jody Genessy of the Deseret News:
Like many, John Lucas III was appalled when he found out Salt Lake City elementary school students had their lunches taken away and trashed a couple of weeks ago.
Lucas called his agent and told him, "Hey, man, that’s not right."
Feeling annoyed and compassionate, Lucas decided to do some things that are very right.
Though we may not have trust JL3 to lead a NBA team, there is no denying that he is a great teammate and a great person. From someone that would know:
the thing about JL3 (and many pro athletes) is he does so much more than ever gets reported because he's not doing it for the attention.
— Holly MacKenzie (@stackmack) February 10, 2014
Everyone's new favorite thing is some sort of ranking system for the tanking teams. Here is CBS Sports' take, from Zach Harper:
A four-game losing streak started restoring my faith in the power of tanking with the Jazz and Tyrone Corbin's coaching this season. The Jazz dropped conseuctive games to the Warriors, Clippers, Raptors, and Mavs (all very respectable losses) and looked like they may be back into the business of losing games. Then they decided to beating the Miami Heat would be fun for old times' sake. Not only did they beat the Heat but they did it behind limiting LeBron James to just 13 points (lowest total of the season) and riding the hot hand of... wait, that can't be correct... Marvin Williams?
In seriousness, BZ to the Jazz for a great performance on Saturday night. They looked like a real NBA team, capable of real NBA defense, and it should give us all hope for the future.
Click on through the link above. The post is pretty funny.
Here is a rough (VERY rough) sketch of Alec Burks, via the awesome Tumblr blog Double Scribble. I'm a fan of NBA related art, and there is actually a lot of great stuff out there. I've mentioned this particular blog before, but its not a regular part of your blog feed, make it so. You won't regret it.
One of the things that we have been able to witness the last few years is Gordon Hayward's hot shooting in the second half of the season. So far, we haven't seen much of it, and this got me thinking "why?" About the best answer I could come up with is his shooting off the dribble. I'll have to check Synergy to confirm this (I just want to get this thing posted right now), but the "eye test" tells me that Gordon has been shooting a lot more off the dribble shots, and his shot chart (side note: when I first typed that it came out shart, which is kinda what his shot chart looks like at this point) indicates a lot of long jumpers (as we've mentioned plenty on this site).
My speculation is this is not by design and that most of this is coming because of lack of execution of the offensive sets. There are so many broken plays on the offensive end, each game, and that definitely contributes to a bevy of last second heaves, and attempts to create shots from the likes of Hayward, Burks, and Burke. Ultimately, it is affecting all of their numbers. This would also account for the Jazz excruciatingly slow pace (Currently 93.5, good for 27th in the league).
I always say I don't care and I won't watch unless there's a Jazz player involved, but my TV always ends up there for quite a bit of the weekend, if for no other reason than background noise. Does Trey and The Mailman being involved in events at All Star Weekend up your interest? What events are you looking forward to, if any, or are you looking forward to a break from basketball?