Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
Sure, we'll never know for sure, but if you want to look at a situation where if it happens anywhere, it would happen there,
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Sure. Fair enough.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
...take a look at Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf's second Sacramento season.
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Right. That's the one I was referring to. He sucked that year. Was it due to less playing time, or was the less playing time due to sucking? We don't know, but it happens all the time. And if it was due to less playing time, was that due to his protest of over a year ago (from that point)? Perhaps. Unlikely, I'd say, but possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
Also the fact that Abdul-Rauf was replaced by a guy who was arguably even worse than he was is... interesting (I assume Anthony Thompson was a better defender if only because he had to be).
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Again, if Rauf would've seen a drastic cut in his minutes
right after the hubbub & return from suspension, that might indicate some sort of retaliation. But since he played a full season in Sac's rotation, and
only after that saw a dropoff in minutes & productivity, it seems questionable to me that retaliation was a factor. Especially considering that the controversy had faded (IOW, over a year later there was less motivation for retaliation).
More likely, the dreadful Kings - at that time in a perpetual rebuild (that would soon, finally, pay off, btw) - were checking out a rookie pointguard over a veteran. Again, being the Sacto Kings (similar to how we mentioned the NY Jets), Occam's Razor suggests that playing Johnson over Rauf was more-likelier to have been a basketball decision that didn't work out, than it was some grand scheme to retaliate against Rauf.
(Johnson, btw, while never anything approaching a star, ended up carving out a nice 13-year NBA career. So it would not have been at all unusual for even a floundering franchise such as Sacramento to see something in him as a rookie... In fact, you can set your watch by half of all NBA franchises seeing "something" in their sleeper second-round pick, only to see that guy usually end up overseas or in another career two years later.)
At any rate, I take some of your points and have said all along that it's possible Rauf was afforded fewer opportunities for tryouts; much less-likely - but not impossible - that he was actually blackballed. But I do not agree that
"both Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Colin Kaepernick lost their jobs because some white guys went full snowflake." The facts simply to not support that. I'll concede that perhaps you wrote that quickly and were trying to colorfully make the larger point, rather than being 100% accurate, which is certainly not a crime. I dunno. Only you can say
