A flurry of thoughts on the Rainmen

Here are some posts that I put on Chris Parsons's fansite about the Rainmen, with some minor edits and additions for context.

On Rick Lewis's coaching ability:

If a game is lost with 12 minutes to go, try subbing in the guys who wish they could play enough so they might actually make a difference. Being down 20 points going into the fourth, against Vermont no less, means that this leaves 12 minutes for our bench warmers to get some real time, not the garbage 90 seconds that Lewis deigns to give them.

Rick Lewis seems like a nice enough fellow and gives good interview on the Q, but proper player utilization, gametime decision making and clock management are not his fortes. Maybe he could be the PR talking head for the team, but please can we have a different head coach? How about the 2 assistant coaches? Give them a crack at running a game or two. Why not? At least they know the players and their respective strengths and weaknesses. We may have next year’s coach already on the payroll and I don’t mean Rick Lewis.

On Halifax vs. Vermont:

Looking at the box score of this game, it seems like it was the Lantrice and Eric show. Fine, they are supposed to be our best scorers, but 2 guys can’t match up against 5. Looking at the amount of time the starters played makes me cringe. Of course we ran out of gas! Eric played all 48 minutes of the game! Lantrice, Brian and Ferg got a combined 15 minutes off! Lewis treats his backups like they were made out of glass and he doesn’t want to risk breaking them by taking them out of the wrapper and actually playing them.

On the rest of the season:

I was looking forward to watching the Rainmen whup the Maywood Buzz (3-21), but now I think we’ll be lucky to split the games with them.

I highly doubt the Bahama Pro Show will come all the way to Halifax, considering they only have 6 games under their belts, according to the ABA website (if that site can be trusted). The Bahama website is current as of November 2007, so no help there.

I admire Mr. Levingston for trying to finish the season off without missing any home games, but it seems that just as the Rainmen are getting some PR traction in Halifax, our team is collapsing on the court. I hope we can finish off the season in a strong way, to bring our record closer to .500. Luckily, we have a home stand of games with only Vermont being a clear favourite against us. I would love to see us take at least 4 of the 6 games to end the season.

On the Rainmen's recent additions to the team:

I am glad they sell programs at the games, it’s hard to keep track of our players. Is this common for ABA teams or is Mr. Levingston trying to find the right mix, even as the end of the season approaches? The two new additions sound promising, we certainly can’t do much worse.

James Tyler is listed on a basketball recruiting website as 7′1″ and 360 pounds!!! That’s heavier than Shaq, although he is also 16 years younger than the Diesel. In fact, his nickname was/is “Baby Shaq”.

I hope his weight doesn’t make him too slow. If he has some speed, he will definitely make his presence known on the court. Another website shows his strengths as: “Low Block Scorer” and “Rebounding”, while he needs to improve as a “Finisher” and his “Intensity/Passion”. This site also mentioned that Tyler “got serious about basketball and shed some weight, thus opening up his low post game.” Some other sites list Tyler at 310, 320 and 330 pounds, respectively.

As for Akeem Clark, a few years ago he was praised as being one of the U.S. best 3 point shooters. Interestingly, Booyer and Clark were on the same USBL team Gary Steelheads and were activated at the same time last year. In addition to being teammates on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis team for a year, they were also together on the Black Hawk East Junior College team in 2002. Either they were separated at birth and are karmically connected, or James is one heck of a salesman at getting Akeem on his team. Hopefully Akeem can stay healthy and contribute to the Rainmen this year, unlike Booyer, who was released again due to a chronic leg injury after playing only 5 games for the Rainmen.

On the 2008 ABA playoffs:

I just found this 2008 playoff tree, reportedly from the Manchester Millrats.

Apparently we will be playing the Atlanta Vision, in Georgia. The top 4 teams (Vermont, Beijing, Manchester and Texas) get byes, as does the host team Quebec. 4 California teams as well as Atlanta and Halifax make up the rest of the roster. For some reason, there is no 10th seed.

I don’t think a team (Atlanta Vision) that has played only 8 games should be in the playoffs. The Atlanta Vision have beaten the Gwizzlies 4 times, the Bahama Pro Show twice and lost to Beijing twice. That’s it. That is their whole season so far, with 15 games cancelled. The Vision will play the Gwizzlies 3 more times and Bahama once more. So we get to play a team that has played a total of 3 other teams, while Mr. Levingston and the rest of the Northeast division, who have worked to provide as complete a schedule as possible, are penalized by not advancing to the playoffs.

edit: Apparently the link above was a bracket that another fan had made up, as his projection of how the playoffs will go. It is not an official playoff bracket. Read the entry below to see that this fan playoff bracket is the best info that we have so far on the playoffs, since no one, not even the CEO of the league, is giving the answer of exactly how the playoffs will be seeded or played.

Here is correspondence between a Rainmen fan and Joe Newman, the CEO of the ABA.

This just shows that Newman has no idea how the playoffs will go. In a real league, the format would be set well in advance, with teams — and fans — knowing ahead of the end of the season whether or not they will be in the playoffs.

Having most of the teams fold or play incomplete seasons messes up the seeding, but there should be a rule that teams must play at least 50% of their scheduled games (50% is the absolute lowest, it should probably be higher, like 67% or 75%) to qualify for the playoffs. Otherwise, a team like the 6-2 Atlanta Vision who are only successful at beating up on the Gwizzlies (1-7) and the Bahama Pro Show (1-5) would get in while a team that actually plays different teams, including ones that are better than they are, gets the shaft.

The fact that the league CEO doesn’t directly respond to a fan’s e-mail is disappointing. The fact that there is no apparent clear-cut rule on which teams will make the playoffs is disturbing. I smell a rat in the state of Denmark, to mix my metaphors.

On the Rainmen's end-of-season home stand and another blast at Halifax's newest free tabloid, Metro:

I think the new guys may be the key to rounding out our formerly guard-heavy team with some big offense. Will Lewis’s program fit them in to actually make a difference? That remains to be seen, but we will have a half-dozen chances to see it, over the next 3 weeks.

I read this Metro article on the Rainmen. Chris and I consistently write longer passages on rainmenblog.wordpress.com than that 178-word footnote. Other than talking to Mr. Levingston for a couple of sound bites, the reporter did less research than Chris (or I) do for most of our posts. While I am pleasantly surprised that there is even local news in the paper, the length of the piece shows what I said about the tabloid’s editorial slant towards stories that can be read in 30 seconds or less.