Cleaning Out the Inbox

     Cleaning out the inbox returns with some various notes and links of interest from around the world!

I was looking at a few articles from the SI.com site with their daily cover series and found a few older articles on the site for the inbox.

The first covers the six-year run of the Vancouver Grizzlies before the NBA expansion franchise would move to Memphis. 

The article is pretty extensive and discusses the problems in having players interested in playing in Vancouver, the issues with the Canadian dollar, front-office problems, and the infamous selection of Steve Francis, which proved to be the final blow to the franchise.

The second article looks back at the 50th anniversary of Secretariat's Triple Crown in 1973.

As an avowed fan of Sham as a five-year-old in 1973, I've always disagreed with those who pick Secretariat as the greatest racehorse of all time.

I may concede that his Triple Crown was the most impressive ever (did you know that Sham's second-place finishes in the Derby are still the second faster ever and his Preakness second place is still the fifth fastest ever) but his lack of an older horse career and his defeats both before and after the Crown races work against that claim in my opinion.

The final article, this one from 2020, looks at the life struggles of former Austin Peay and Spirits of St.Louis scorer James "Fly" Williams since ending his basketball career.

Williams, who inspired perhaps the greatest chant ever in sports in his days with the Austin Peay Governors "The Fly is open, let's go Peay!", was at that time serving prison time for running a heroin ring while working as an administrator at a youth rec center.

The Bluefield Daily Telegraph isn't a host that appears here very often but the news from that source may be the first but it won't be the last as the Princeton (WV) Whistle Pigs of the Appalachian League announced their decision to go out of business.

The Appalachian League was the entry level for minor league baseball before MLB took over the administration of the minors and dropped the league to a summer league for college players.

I thought at the time that MLB was tossing a bone to the lowest level leagues with summer leagues with college players and was waiting for the lesser product to fail to let them off the hook and give them the ability to say their decision was for the best because "they didn't want it".

Princeton's city and donors decided that with the MLB's demands for park improvements and other investments continuing to rise they had better things to spend their community's dollars on and I can't blame them.

Princeton may have been the first to go but they surely won't be the last.

Hoops Wire and Sam Amico, who I have followed for years with terrific NBA writing, write about the Ron Harper trade thirty-four years after it happened.

The trade is blamed by some Cavaliers fans for taking away any chance of the very good teams of the era to defeat the Michael Jordan-led Bulls by losing the only player that Cleveland possessed that could make Jordan work hard on the defensive end.

I'm torn on whether keeping Harper would have been enough to push Cleveland by Chicago although there is little doubt that the Cavaliers didn't improve themselves in swapping Harper, two first-rounders, and a second-rounder for Danny Ferry and Reggie Williams.

Ferry never approached the hype that accompanied him into the league, although he eventually became a solid role player, and Williams only played thirty-two games in Cleveland before being released.

The Clippers didn't reap gold with their first-rounders from Cleveland in Loy Vaught and Elmore Spencer but Cleveland lost the trade losing Harper at all.