A fan’s perspective

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Law & Order: LSU

Football coach Lane Kiffin and men’s basketball coach Will Wade have been a lightning rod of controversy. Both have waded far from shore into the deep water which can prove dangerous. I’m not going to detail Kiffin only Wade but the path chosen by both is similar. Understand this, ESPN’s college basketball page indicates the roster is complete. Contrast that with the roster of the school website, it only contains four players.

Wade has brought on board RJ Luis Jr., who played at St. John’s. He was the 2025 Big East Player of the Year however he’s signed multiple two-wade contracts with NBA teams. There are two other 5th year players Wade hopes will be declared eligible, wait there is more. The four players listed on the school’s website are Euro prospects whom Wade hopes to be cleared to play. Wade’s been a winner at all his stops with 105 total out of 156 games played so his coaching resume is certainly solid. How would I cast Will Wade, a coach who walks as closely as he can to the edge of the cliff who manages to avoid falling off the edge.

On the east side

Our friends in St. Louis might suffer NBA withdrawals as well as many of us in Kansas City, it’s been a great deal longer for them. The Hawks departed for Atlanta in May 1968, the Kings left Kansas City in 1985. So the 18th most populated region of the 50 states is without NBA basketball. As for the St. Louis connection it goes like this, the Basketball Association of America began play in 1946 with 11 teams. Among that number in that initial season was the St. Louis Bombers. The team would play its first three seasons in the BAA and the 1949-50 season their last in the NBA. The history says the Bombers went out of business due to low attendance and poor play on the court. The team did manage to win a division title in 1948 however that appears to be the only bright spot for this club.

It wasn’t only the Bombers,  the history indicates they were one of six teams that either folded or departed after the 1949-50 season. St. Louis would remain without an NBA team until 1955 when the Milwaukee Hawks relocated and began play as the St. Louis Hawks. The Bombers had one player who would distinguish himself with the Celtics and Hawks. Ed Macauley played his college basketball at St. Louis University naturally the Bombers drafted him but he would only play his rookie year in St. Louis. The next season with the team folding the Boston Celtics selected him, Macauley was chosen in the dispersal draft. In the 1956 NBA draft the Hawks selected Bill Russell with the second pick and immediately traded him to the Celtics for Macauley and Cliff Hagen. 

One town, two teams   

The greater Los Angeles metro contains 18.4 million souls that’s certainly a large enough population base. Attendance is not the issue but I thought I would toss that into the mix. Despite my love affair with the Lakers I don’t have a “earth-view” of events in the metro, Joey Linn does. Linn is a beat writer who covers the Clippers and he wrote a column that was insightful to me. I have no desire to steal his thunder but I want you to focus on a sentence Linn wrote. “This is an organization (Clippers), that whether they wanted to admit it or not, have operated as if they are trying to get out of the Lakers shadow.”

Is there an issue with two professional teams in one city, it depends. The baseball Yankees appear to have no problem with the Mets, we could make the same statement for the Giants-Jets. In Chicago we have the baseball White Sox and their south side neighbors the Cubs. Because were discussing Los Angeles it the Dodgers or Angels. The point in my view, these cities with two teams appear to be in more competition with the league than their city counterparts. The Clippers have resided in the shadow of the Lakers since they moved from San Diego in 1984. This from an incident during the time Doc Rivers was coach of the Clippers, this occurred. Prior to the Intuit Dome being built the Clippers and Lakers were co-tenants at Crypto.com arena then known as Staples Center. Rivers had building maintenance cover the Laker retired jerseys for Clipper home games.

They are one of the few

In March 1979, a group of schools came together to form what became the Big East Conference. What made the conference different was its foundation in basketball rather than football, the sport around which most major athletic conferences were built. The Big East remained primarily a basketball conference until 1991, when several schools were added as football-only members. At its founding, Providence, St. John’s, Georgetown, and Syracuse invited Seton Hall, UConn, Holy Cross, Rutgers, and Boston College to join. Holy Cross and Rutgers declined, while Boston College, Seton Hall, and UConn accepted.

In those early years, the conference quickly became known for primetime matchups featuring Syracuse, Georgetown, St. John’s, and others. Patrick Ewing playing for Georgetown was hated whenever his team played St. John’s in The Garden, the vitriol would change much later once Ewing began play for  Knicks. The Big East is no longer the conference of its founding, schools have left while new ones have arrived. St. John’s remains a power member however Georgetown basketball has suffered and no longer is the power it once was. In recent years it’s been up to UConn to retain the prestige for the conference it once held, Bobby Hurley’s Huskies have won back to back NCAA championships in 2023 and 2024. The college basketball landscape has changed so significantly the Big East is unlikely to return to its glory days.