…but he’ll remain with the Knicks in an unnamed role.  Makes sense.  They owe him a lot of money still.

“I can’t really tell you where he failed with the club. I think that we reached a point this season when our team didn’t compete for a long time,” new team president Donnie Walsh said. “The bottom line is that we haven’t won and the team didn’t look like it was motivated to try to win and be competitive.”

Walsh said that isn’t always the coach’s fault, but Thomas is blamed for enough already — sometimes unfairly, Walsh added.

“I feel like some of the bigger events that happened on the way with Isiah have overshadowed some of the good things he’s done for the franchise,” Walsh said.

Walsh said no player brought up Thomas’ name during their exit meetings Thursday, though Walsh said he wasn’t going to be asking for it, anyway.

Thomas, the coach for two seasons, will remain with the organization in an unnamed role, reporting directly to Walsh, who said he informed Thomas of the decision Friday. (Via ESPN)

If I had to guess it’d be in some sort of scouting capacity.  Zeke’s a pretty good judge of talent, just not so much on character.

Thanks to PN reader, Chris, for pointing this Tube out to me. The dude who hits Vinnie (hopefully not Johnson) on the head with the shovel in this TVBoss.org commercial bears a striking resemblance to Philip Saunders. Remember our other Piston tv commercial separated at birth?


In the newest issue of SLAM magazine (#118 with D. Howard on the cover) Vincent Goodwill has written a very good article on the prodigious enigma that is our man in th middle (and beyond the arc) Rasheed Wallace. It seems like the masses are starting to get it, Rasheed Wallace is a revolutionary talent and a real cat. Sheed is where “what you see is what you get” and “more than meets the eye” intersect.

I’ll highlight some of the points from the article that had me bopping my head saying yeah, yeah. For the rest I’ll highly suggest you spend the 5 bucks like I did or just hit up the newsstand and read in the aisle. Special thanks to friend of the site Thomas for putting me up on this article. I’ll say a big GO SPURS GO for Thomas.

Ali, Malcolm, Wiley, Chappelle, Pryor…Rasheed Wallace? Ahead of their time, smart, possibly too conscious for their own good. Most times, true geniuses are considered quirky, crazy even. It isn’t until way down the line that their brilliance is discovered.

I believe that’s true about Rasheed. Although, the more pieces like this that come out and the more the talking heads change their views of Rasheed from malcontent to hoops savant the sooner Wallace’s b-ball brilliance will be universally accepted.

This will mark the third year in a row and fourth of his career in which Sheed had at least 100 blocks and 100 three-pointers. Big deal, you say at first? Well, Sheed is the only player in NBA history to have more than one such season.

That pretty much speaks for itself and reaffirms Charles Barkley’s statement that we’ve never seen a player like Rasheed in the NBA before.

Best players in the game? Those guys don’t average 13 and 7, like Sheed is this season. Well, who’s the best PF in the game? Tim Duncan, maybe? Sheed put 23 and 15 on him when the ‘05 Finals adversaries met in January, adding three steals and two blocks. Against last year’s MVP, Dirk Nowitzki? Twenty-one and 9, with four swats and three thefts in a February Motown matchup. Oh yeah, and he held Diggler to 3-18 in a 23 point drubbing.

That’s something we as Piston’s fans have come to realize. He plays well most nights, but the better the opponent, the bigger the Sheed. Chauncey said it earlier this year on Jim Rome’s ESPN show, Sheed gets bored against lesser talent. It wasn’t necessarily a knock on Rasheed, it’s just his adaptation to the conditions. He could be a 20 and 10 guy, but on the nights he doesn’t need to be he puts the team ahead of stats.

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