All Publicity is Good Publicity? Not so much.

Grow Up, Ed

For Houston writers everywhere, Christmas came early this week. Shawn Chacon gave us a little gift when he threw little Ed Wade to the ground after Wade demanded that Chacon join him in Cecil Cooper’s office. Obviously, Chacon is a moron and an enormous waste of talent. I could have told you that before this incident as Chacon has always been known as an underachieving head case. But there is a more troubling aspect of this story that has been underreported by the local press (although the national press has picked it up) is Ed Wade’s role in the malay. Look, no one is excusing Chacon here, but the general manager of a major league baseball club actually got into a fight with a player. Wade admits that he “lost his temper” which I suppose is fine, we all make mistakes. But consider that during this exchange, the two men (tiny Ed Wade and not so tiny Shawn Chacon) stood chest to chest, clearly indicating that something was about to go down. Regardless of how hot the situation was, someone please explain to me how the hell Ed Wade doesn’t have the good sense to get the hell out of there and figure out what to do. If the fact that fighting one of your own players embarrasses both the individual (Wade) and the franchise (the Astros) were not reason enough to back down, one would think that Wade would have backed down so that he wouldn’t get his ass kicked. But neither of these reasons compelled Wade to withdraw himself from the situation, the two men ended up rolling around on the floor, and now the Astros are at the center of a national media circus for all the wrong reasons.

The Astros were right to cut Chacon, but there should be consequences for Wade as well. I don’t know what they should be, but Wade acted like a fool by not being the mature one (which is his job) and as a result the franchise has been made the laughing stock of baseball. Grow up, Ed.

Rockets

If you look at the history of the NBA draft, you quickly realize that the success rate for draft picks, even at the very top of the draft, is remarkably low. As a result, it would be a mistake to get overly excited about the Rockets’ selection of Dante Greene and Joey Dorsey. I personally doubt that Dante Greene will ever turn into much of a player, but I suppose I could be wrong and given where the Rockets selected him I feel like they got pretty good value since you really won’t find many guys with as much potential as Greene that late in the draft. Along the same lines, I was very pleased to see the Rockets pick up Dorsey, particularly at 33. Dorsey is undersized (only 6’7’’) but the kid is beast on the defensive end. At today’s press conference, Dorsey (who is pretty damn funny) likened himself as “Ray Lewis with a basketball.” I like where his head is at so long as he never finds himself arraigned on first degree murder charges. Even if Dorsey ends up being below average (although if he tries I think he should be a decent role player in the league for a while), his presence should bring an end to people messing with Yao. Ain’t nobody going to mess with Joey.

All of that said, if you are going to take anything away from last nights draft, it should be that the Rockets have themselves a quality general manager in Daryl Moray. Moray turned the 25^th pick overall (Nicolas Batum of France) into Greene (who they wanted), Dorsey, and Memphis’ 09 second round pick. I was at Toyota Center for his press Conferences on draft night and yesterday afternoon and when he speaks it’s very clear who the smartest guy in the room is: him. The Rockets have a bright future as a franchise if Les will let him do his thing.