Haha

In an ongoing half-assed quest to find the funniest football club/player names worldwide, I present to you: Turkish club Batman BS.

Also notable are apparent cross-town rivals Batman Petrolspor, who play, inevitably, in solid black. Tremendous.

You Suck At Lying

Ricky Rubio whines

A note to the saturnine cockwizards pulling this urchin’s strings: if you’re going to have one of your charges heave his lips about at a press conference, give him some better lines to wrap them around because if you’re actually interested in the PR results of his words then this is spectacularly counter-productive. If you’re looking to come off well, you do not claim that the NBA is your priority at a press conference detailing your move from Joventut to Barcelona; you do not enter the draft under well-known previously existing rules and then pull out citing those same rules when everyone knows your real objection is to the team which drafted you; you do not claim that you’re happy at #5 overall and then cite that draft slot as what’s keeping you out of the league. You do not do this because you make yourself look a fool, not because of what you’re saying so much as your expectation that anyone else would buy it. And finally, you do not whine about how moving to the NBA would “complicate” your life when you’ve already gone through the draft process and taken advantage of the expectation of good faith behavior to essentially trick a team into wasting a draft slot and an enormous amount of time and energy flying cross-continent in order to sign you to a contract- one you evidently had no intention of signing given that its terms are prescribed by collectively-bargained formulae known in advance to all parties. By that point you’ve complicated other people’s live quite enough.

I don’t really blame Rubio much in this, since he’s young and seems fairly naive (and a bit dull), but the dick-jugglers making decisions for him have behaved very shabbily in this. Minnesota were courting the whirlwind by drafting Rubio in the first place, but of all the ways Rubio’s babysitters could have responded to that challenge they’ve essentially taken the ugliest and most disruptive- especially since it’s brutally obvious that this go-round is likely only the precursor to attempts to force a trade in two years’ time. It’s an ugly deal, and it’s one that’s probably going to hurt Rubio’s career in the long run: forcing a trade tends to put very high expectations on a player especially from fans of wherever he forces that trade to, it won’t help potential endorsement deals, and it’s going to cost him some contract money. And with him seemingly placing sucha igh value on himself, it’s going to encourage NBA GMs with interest to spend the next two years pick apart every aspect of his game to find out why he’s really not that good. Even if he’s twice the player then that he is now, his perceived value is going to begin to decline. That won’t affect him financially on his first contract, but it will hurt him on subsequent ones, battles over PT, his leverage in forcing his way to certain teams, etc.

On a side note, why am I not surprised that Barca are a part of this? Throwing giant sums of money around and profiting from shady dealings, denying having done so and already selling Rubio replica shirts- it’s the Barcelona way. They really are the biggest fraud in sports worldwide.

EDIT: Chris Sheridan had a good article on this today delving into the contract specifics behind Rubio’s people’s decision making. Personally I make it 50/50 on whether he ever plays in the NBA, depending on how corrupt his handlers are or are not.