Late Night Bullets

** With Wallace or not, I'd say the Bulls should still go 4-3 on their upcoming West Coast swing. Road losses to Phoenix and Utah wouldn't be that unsettling, and I guess the Clips are playing better as of late, so that might be tough as well. But Seattle, Portland, Golden State and Sacramento are all winnable. I suppose I could live with 3-4 (which would be three times better than last trip out west) and I'd obviously be REALLY pleased if they can somehow manage 5-2. Color me ecstatic if they do better than that, and talk to me again about Gasol in another week and a half if they don't manage 3 Ws.

**About a week ago, I read Jack McCallum's book on the Phoenix Suns, :07 Seconds Or Less. I'd recommend it, if only because it takes 7 hours or less to read. Of all the players and coaches who star in it, my personal favorite was Suns' Assistant Coach Alvin Gentry, who comes off as an absolutely hilarious straight shooter. He's an NBA lifer, with a wealth of great stories, and my favorite was this one: He's talking with McCallum about psyching up players in the locker room, and he mentions this one time when he was an assistant with the Heat, and a 11th man enforcer/rebounder named Ledell Eackles hoped to inspire the team. He goes up to the chalkboard and writes "Know Your Role" on the board, only he spells it, "No Your Roll." Glen Rice just looked up at him and said, "Sit down, dumbass."

**Finally, there's a new book coming out this May that everyone will want to check out: Jeffrey Lane's Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball. (There's an Annotated Table of Contents here; look it over and tell me you're not interested.) I'm hoping we might be able to put together some sort of TYI "Blog Event" around it when we get closer to the pub date--an interview with Jeff at the least, or maybe, Jeff willing, some sort of seminar like the good folks over at Crooked Timber did with the dopest fiction writer alive today, China Mieville. This doesn't have to be just TYI posters either; if any of you kindly folks from other blogs are interested, let me know in the comments and maybe we can do a cross-promotional thing, get the whole synergy thing workin'.