By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

And so begins the great Stephen Jackson exodus from Warrior land.

How else to interpret the scene Friday night at the Forum during the first quarter of the Warriors’ 110-91 win over the Lakers, where Jackson allowed his physical battles with Kobe Bryant to turn into a five-foul, one-technical, banished-to-the-locker-room-by-the-coach, all-in-the-space-of-nine-minutes meltdown?

I’ve joked to a few people in the weeks since Jackson’s trade demand that no one’s going to be able to tell if he’s tanking it. After all, this is a guy who hoists up 3-pointers with 18 seconds left on the shot clock three or four times a game — and that’s when he’s playing at the TOP of his game.

But after last night . . . well, that’s certainly one way to make it clear you don’t want to be around.

The Warriors face a dilemma heading into tonight’s outdoor exhibition game against the Phoenix Suns: What to do in response to Jackson’s actions?

Simply ignoring the outburst runs the risk of giving Jackson carte blanche to run roughshod over the Warriors. It’s one thing to pout your way out of a meaningless exhibition game in a long-abandoned former NBA arena. It’s quite another to do that on Oct. 28 against Houston when the regular season begins.

Jilted fans who feel Jackson has stabbed them in the back with the very pen he used to ink his three-year, $28 million extension would love to see him suspended, but that would almost certainly turn this into an open war that makes the Al Harrington break-up look like an amicable divorce and rivals the insanity that was Stephon Marbury’s final season in New York.

Read the rest of this entry…

PRINT MEDIA

Orlando Sentinel (Brian Schmitz, Josh Robbins): Orlando Magic GM Otis Smith told the Sentinel that “I think it got personal” in talking about the Magic’s failed attempts to acquire C.J. Watson from the Warriors this summer via a sign-and-trade deal.

Smith played with the Warriors for a season and change before being selected by the Magic in their expansion draft. After his playing career ended, Smith returned to the Warriors and spent three seasons working in Community Relations before becoming Executive Director of Basketball Operations in 2002-03. He left after that season to rejoin the Magic as Director of Player Development.

My first thought was that Smith is suffering collateral damage from the fallout between Chris Mullin and Robert Rowell, but Smith worked under Garry St. Jean in ‘02-’03, not Mullin, who back then was just a special assistant learning the ropes in preparation for taking over. So who knows. Maybe the Warriors just really, really like Watson.

(BTW, in researching Otis Smith’s time in the Warriors’ front office, I stumbled across this account of Mullin’s ascension to power in 2004:

Read the rest of this entry…

Damn you, Twitter, damn you. If athletes are going to keep breaking their own injury news, what’s left to help a poor Web journalist pump up their page views?

– Geoff

TWITTER

quietstorm_32 (C.J. Watson): 1st of the 2a days down wasn’t bad more learning then nething hurt my knee lil hope its nutn off for a nap til the next 1 in a couple hours

quietstorm_32 (C.J. Watson): the knee is still kind of sore and n pain hurt it this morning n the 1st practice goin2 see the doc n the morning hopefully its nutn serious

quietstorm_32 (C.J. Watson): and i can get bak on the court sooner then later cuz watching is killing me makes me want to get bak out there even worse

Read the rest of this entry…

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

For more than a half century, the Serenity Prayer has been a cornerstone of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

The Warriors accepted the things they cannot change about themselves Friday night, and in doing so become something greater than they previously had been.

By forcing Chris Paul to shoot, shoot and shoot some more, the Warriors were able to control the Hornets’ All-Star point guard in a 111-103 victory.

At first blush, the fact that Paul went off for 43 points and nine assists doesn’t look like a victory. But seven of Paul’s nine dimes went to David West, who finished with 31 points. That’s a nice number, but what the Hornets need from Paul is to get the rest of the roster involved with some spoon-fed buckets, especially since Peja Stojakovic is battling through a bad back and James Posey and Tyson Chandler are on the bench with injuries.

Instead, Hornets not named Paul or West shot 10-for-38 on Friday.

Read the rest of this entry…

There’s been a lot of chatter in the wake of Monte Poole’s evisceration of the Warriors’ two leading front-office lights — team president Robert Rowell and coach Don Nelson — about the Warriors cutting Nelson loose before the end of his contract, which has another $12M and two years to run, thanks to an extension agreed upon in October.

I don’t see it, for a variety of reasons:

** The allure of topping Lenny Wilkens’ all-time NBA coaching victories total is too much for Nelson and the marketing-obsessed W’s to pass up.

** Rowell didn’t ascend to his pinnacle of power by kissing off the majority of $12M on a guy who’s smoking cigars and watching for the green flash at the end of another Maui sunset.

** To fire Nelson would be for Rowell to admit making a mistake in choosing him over Chris Mullin. In four years covering this team, I’ve never even heard of that happening, let alone seen it displayed for all the ticket-going public to see.

** If Nelson moves from the bench to a corner office and replaces Mullin as the EVP in charge of basketball operations, what coach in their right mind is going to believe that they’ll be allowed to do their job without interfence from Nelson?

Read the rest of this entry. . .