Canes, Hornets, Wyndham, and… Shibumis…

I sent out a tweet last week when I was at the beach, and now if you're on a North Carolina beach, if you look to your left and to your right, there's a good chance you'll see some shaboomies. Oh yeah, it's shaboomie season. It's shaboomie season, it's hardcore. And now we've gotten to the point, shaboomies are what, like five years old maybe? Yeah, I think so.

About five, maybe six? Yeah. So like some people have OG shaboomies that have been out so much that the light blue part is like almost white. Maybe it's a little shredded.

I think it helps determine your beach cred. We'll ask Luke DeCock of the News & Observer how faded his shaboomie is, but let's pretend to talk about sports things first. Luke, how are you doing, sir? I'm good. Yeah, I've got an OG shaboomie.

Love it. Yeah, pre-COVID on the waiting list and everything, and yeah, that thing is blue and white. There's no light aqua or whatever left. When you got a white shaboomie, it's cool.

Yeah, and that's cool. To be honest, we kind of rock multiple tent situations. We've got the shaboomie for windy days, which is obviously most days, but the calm days, we've got an old faded cool cabana too, which is your low wind option. Do you take them both out there, or do you walk out to the beach, determine the wind factor, and then tote only one? Tote only one, so we usually drive to the beach.

Not a long drive, but we drive, and we keep both in the car in the summer. Gotcha, yes. So we have options. I will say, there is nothing, like I'm a ride and die shaboomie guy, but it is a little disheartening when you're sitting there in your beach chair and the shaboomie is just draped on you. Can't stand it. Kind of puffy, windy days, but then it's dropping and you're like, I know the wind is going to pick up, I'm not giving up. I know after noon the wind is going to be just enough to get it going, but for right now you're just wearing your shaboomie. Pre-shaboomie, Hayes, I'll be honest with you, we had a cool cabana that we would use, and in the high winds, actually one of the arms snapped, and that was when we decided we were going full shaboomie.

So I'd say we're about 80% shaboomie, 85-90% shaboomie, but that cool cabana for those calm, hot, steamy, salty, you know, the sultry days where the wind is just not moving, that's your shade. That's good to have. The Hornets passed on Scoot Henderson. I don't know why I'm being this way.

I would rather be the morons, idiots, once again, stupid, never get it right. But then like, drafting is so much of a we can't really grade in three years thing, can we really, truly call this like a dumb, monumentally stupid move? Not yet. I think it certainly has that potential. You know, look, when you make a draft pick and your mascot hates it, like that's unlocking an achievement.

That is amazing. Like the mascot gets paid to pump people up, and the dude in the Hornet suit was like, oh, you gotta be kidding me, man. Look, would I draft Brandon Miller in that spot? Absolutely not. But, you know, for the Hornets sake, if he turns out to be some sort of Kevin Durant light or, you know, the big rangey guy, go inside and shoot the three and is a threat to do a bunch of things. You know, he'll be a good player for whatever team he forces a trade to in four years.

So, you know, in that case, it probably works out well for the Hornets. I would have taken Scoot in that spot because I think even if you're worried about him and LaMelo playing together, you know, in the end, those guys are both assets. You can trade the one who you don't want.

Maybe you get more for one than the other in the long term. I think the long term play was to take Scoot. And I'll be honest with you, if I'm the Hornets and I'm looking at that roster and a new owner and all those things, and I'm thinking for the real long term, I'm going to trade down to a team that really wants one of those two guys. And I'm going to take the light, the lighter, smaller French kid, the ball, cool Bali kid and say, hey, you know, this guy's got a chance.

He may be a complete flop, but this guy's got a chance to be something, you know, maybe not like Victor, but something pretty special. So I think they had options there and they took the most obvious least dramatic one. And maybe they'll turn out to be right in the end.

But to me, Brandon Miller wasn't the guy the Hornets needed. Maybe he is. And they've got it right.

And we'll find out. But but, you know, as I said, maybe they got it right. I'm with you. You can't really judge these things. It's not what I would have done.

I guess there's also part of me that's like so much in sports. We, you know, chide owners or general managers, whoever, for just taking the safe route. Right. Like if if I'm not trying to convince you that Brandon Miller is the pick. Right.

But like on some level, if you were inside the room and it all got explained to you, let's say there is some piece of knowledge of like, you know, we we really think Scoot is a terrible shooter and is going to be, you know, whatever. There's got to be some level of the easy thing to do would be the same thing. It takes good because then nobody will criticize you and you can just throw up in your head and say, oh, we took the guy everybody said we should.

Right. Is there some level of hey, like they may be wrong, but I guess at least they were sticking with what they thought because they clearly weren't just going by public opinion. Yeah, I think that comes into play more with franchises that you trust. You know, at this point, you know, when you look at sort of the Panthers current administration, you know, now that it seems like sort of Scott Fitterer has been given the keys fully and they're not chasing after every shiny thing that comes on the market. You know, I think I trust the pant, like, again, Bryce Young is probably not the guy I'm going to trade up to draft number one. But at this point, Frank Reich and Scott Fitterer, you know, they've earned my trust a little bit that they have a plan and they're going to go about it. We've got to see how it how it goes.

I don't think with the Hornets and look, the Hurricanes to what I thought a couple of years ago, this going way back when Matt Duchesne was on the market, that that was the guy the Hurricanes needed. And it was kind of explained to me like you're talking about. Hey, here's kind of what's going into it. This is why we, that's not a move we want to make. And I thought, okay, that's fine. Like, okay, that makes sense to me. Now that was a hurricanes regime that we trusted less.

That was the Ron Francis. We won't make a trade unless you hold one of our children hostage regimes. But now this current regime, you know, like they want to let Dougie Hamilton walk or let Tony DeAngelo walk. People are like, okay, you know, there's a plan there. I don't think the Hornets have earned that trust from anybody. And that's why even if Brandon Miller was the right pick, people are going to question it. As I said, maybe it is the right pick. It's not what I would have done, but I'm, I'm not an NBA GM. And, and, you know, I think we'll, we'll see how it goes.

I just, I don't ever remember other than the jets every year, a draft pick that unpopular with a team's own fans. And that went over just could not have gone over worse. I mean, people give it surrender cobras and yelling.

The video is incredible. And they had time to prepare for it. Like what would you told them it was coming? Like you that you may have held out hope that he was wrong, but I felt like people kind of thought it was going to be Brandon Miller.

And they still were like, well, maybe it'll work. Is MJ Michael Jordan as an owner? Did he do is his number one most successful move as an owner changing the name from Bobcats to Hornets? Is there anything better than that?

Yeah, no, I mean, there's, I don't know if there's anything that comes close, close really. I mean, he, he got it though. Right. He understood that part of it. He didn't want to buy the Bobcats. He wanted the Hornets. Everybody wanted the Hornets. It was the franchise that people originally fell in love with. Not some franchise named after a dude who founded a sports network that bottomed out before all the other sports networks have suddenly bottomed out. He was way ahead of the curve on that. But no, I, I, I, the Hornets is right in the way it should be. And they got that one right for sure.

You know, back in the day, there used to be a joke. S.A.T. is probably the wrong place to try it. But on your standardized test, there was a like, well, if you just put C on everyone, you might get a 30, right? Like at worst, you should only get 25 percent right.

And maybe you luck out because C is the most, you know, if you just put C, you get 30 percent. Is there like an owner equivalent of that? Like if you just plugged in somebody that wasn't Michael Jordan and said, all right, every time you have to make a decision, we're just going to, you know, either flip a coin or whatever and just let total fate decide the franchise. Could things have gone worse for the Hornets under Michael Jordan?

I don't know. I kind of felt like that's the way they were operating from afar. You know, that's not like, look, I'm not up on that franchise and the inner workings of that front office the way that I am, you know, like the hurricanes are to a slightly lesser extent, the Panthers. I mean, Hornets kind of exist out there over there and we just sort of make fun of them like that cousin who can't keep a job. But there's no question that Michael Jordan's tenure as an owner was not great. But hey, look, man, really smart guys buy NBA teams and do things like Matt Ishbya putting Isaiah Thomas in charge. That is the last thing I would ever do if I bought an NBA team. How do you not know anything about his history as a general manager? He's like pulling a Costanza with his own franchise. That's unbelievable.

Lou DeKock of the News & Observer joining us. All right, speaking of the NHL, they made a decision this week to get rid of the pregame jersey routine. On the one hand, this seemed like an obvious reaction to some of the issues that came up this year with players, you know, choosing not to go out there and pry jerseys. So on the one hand, you could say they're backing down. This is a weak decision in the face of, you know, taking a stand. I will say slightly in their defense in today's polarized world. Sometimes it could seem like no win situations when you see marketing snafus that people walk into and you just you never know what the public is going to demand of you.

So I have do have some sympathy for them. How did you see the NHL's decision to just punt on pregame jerseys? I mean, I feel like they just kind of caved like, look, like, OK, so pride jerseys are shouldn't be controversial. Pride jerseys are controversial. People don't want to wear a jersey that says, hey, you're different than me and you're welcome here.

We support you like, OK, fine. That's how you feel are these same people are going to get really aggrieved next year when they show up for military appreciation night appreciation night. And the hurricanes are in camo jerseys like this is so stupid. These things are meaningless. They wear them for warm ups. They auction them off for charity. Show some support.

Be a real human. We're the stupid jersey. It's just it's such a stupid made up controversy. Like nobody gets all all bent out of shape when the team comes out in in in lavender hockey fights cancer jerseys. Like, is there some player who's extremely his religious beliefs make him pro cancer so he can't wear the hockey fights cancer jersey? It's just we're the pride jersey. It's all you're doing is showing some respect for a fellow human being.

It doesn't mean you have to go out and march in a parade. It's just something you're doing for your fans. So I I just think this is stupid.

I thought it was stupid from the beginning. I just think it's a symptom of our of a sort of thing in our culture. We just don't care about other people's feelings anymore.

It's just all about how do I how does it make me feel? And there's just no respect for anybody else. Well, I do think that's the way it should be viewed. But what popped up this year and you correct me if I'm wrong, obviously, you will be the expert on this one. The canes, did they skate in their pride jerseys before the game or did they just have pride jerseys in a pride night? Because they had. Yeah. So they had I'm trying to remember.

I know I know I remember parts of the summits a little hazy because there's a former canes who became sort of the flash points of people who didn't want to wear the projects. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

One one in particular. So, yeah, no, there were definitely I don't believe they wore the jerseys because I think they don't want at least one team had already been through it. They did give players the option of using pride tape on their sticks in warm ups. And I would say about two thirds of the players, half to two thirds of the players did use it.

We were we were I do remember in warm ups for that game, sitting there trying to, you know, with my terrible middle aged vision, trying to see who had pride tape on their stick and who didn't. Not to call anybody out, but just to kind of get a sense, like I said, of what the fractions were. It's it just strikes me as the kind of thing like, you know, like look what they did to Mahmoud Abdul Rauf when he didn't stand for the anthem. You know, or I can't what it was that he bowed his head or whatever, whatever it was he did. Like, it's just, you know, we're doing this all over again. But the opposite way, it just it's also stupid to me.

No, I agree. And I would like to ask players sometimes of like so I hate that it has been elevated to a level of you're not just showing support for a fellow human. It's been taken to mean, oh, well, this says something about you, what you're wearing. It's like, well, you guys wear jerseys with logos for them all the time.

You don't think about that doesn't mean you're supporting that business and everybody in and everything they do. Right. Like these are the people who make your uniform.

Yeah. Let's say there's a player who's a Quaker and a pacifist. I mean, I think he's probably not going to make a big deal about wearing the military appreciation appreciation night camouflage jersey, even though it may conflict slightly with his beliefs, because you're showing respect for the troops, for the person.

And somehow that's, you know, mandatory in this in this country, whereas showing respect for people who are different is not. Yeah, it doesn't come down to it. Maybe if we want to Français or Rhonda.

If you want to go ahead and see what happened, then that's cool. We're talking aboutriad speed Colton oruffer college sports. You know, I don't know that the college sports market has the sort of international. You know, the thing about the NBA and to a lesser extent, the NHL and definitely golf, definitely Formula One. Obviously soccer is it has that global market. So that's attractive for a kind of, you know, you know, the let's call it these sports washing approaches to things where you're going to you're going to do that whether it's live or now the PGA Tour or the Capitals and Wizards in this case, but what I think we learned from the PGA Tour part of it.

So I don't think college has that resonance. I think that's probably a ways away. But I do think that this is just the beginning and you're going to I think what's happened is some of these, you know, Middle East Middle Eastern countries with oil money that that want to improve their image for whatever reason whether they bone-sawed a columnist or whatever else they've done are going to start buying sports teams because they realize with this PGA Tour thing that the prices that we put on things, you know, let's say the Ottawa Senators cost a billion dollars and there's four groups nickel and dining it from nine hundred fifty million to a billion dollars, you know to the Qatari investment fund with a Saudi investment fund.

The difference between a billion and two billion is negligible. So I think you're going to see a lot of hey, they've realized, you know what? We can buy stuff that's on TV and make ourselves look good. So I think soccer was just the beginning. I think you're going to see them by baseball teams. The NBA is the big one. I mean, that's an international global sport.

I think that's going to be the next sort of wave of it after soccer after golf Formula One. Obviously, that's a big one. They've realized that their money means a lot less to them than it does to us. And look, hey, man, if I own an NHL team and I paid 275 million dollars for it or 450 million dollars for it and some guy comes in and offers me two billion dollars. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's what you're going to take it.

That's the hair. You are and we should all just read Harold Varner's script on what we do in that situation. They're like, yeah, this is life-changing money for me. That's his life-changing Harold credit. Yeah, because he he acknowledged it was the most on moral complications of it. You know, he said I did the math and then so a couple of weeks ago, he's out at Old Chatham playing 36 souls on a Monday trying to qualify for a US Open that if he were still on the PGA Tour, he would have been exempt for and I talked to him about it after his random. He's like, hey, man, I've done it before.

I'll do it again. It's just, you know, he gets it. He's not saying this is unfair. He understood what the consequences of his decision were and went and did it.

You know, that's the thing I think about Harold that's so refreshing is there's none of that faux posturing that you get from Mickelson. Some of these other guys that growing the game or this is a chance to blah blah blah here. I was like, dude, it was about the money. They made me an offer. I couldn't refuse. I'm going to take it. A hundred percent.

Luke Tkach joining us. I was saying earlier. You better be careful before you publicly take a stand on how you feel about Qatari money in some sports because pretty soon it's going to be involved in your sport and your team and don't get caught saying one thing about it. And then when it's your team, you feel different.

The only thing I think about universities, it would have to be more subtle. Perfect example. My sister works for Cornell while medical school and I remember watching the World Cup and there was all this talk about World Cup and cutter and all that stuff.

And the first time I saw this is what you forget is coming. The the just like when we watch college sports and you see the like hey Clemson University is a great place for innovation. Right when you're watching sports involving these nations. Now, you're going to see Saudi Arabia is a great place where women drive and we do all that. We have great beaches. Right?

And the first one I saw I love Saudi Arabia. Yes. Yes.

Yes. The first one I saw was like come to cutter and all of a sudden there was a Cornell while medical school and I hit up my sister. I was like, wait, is there a medical school in Qatar? She's like, yeah, I'm speaking of their graduation this ring. So I could see no, I don't see the Saudi fun saying we were endowing the Alabama football coach position, but I could see Alabama medical school and some Middle East, you know team partner up and just starting the money flow that also maybe some money will go to athletics as well.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, maybe in the long run, but I you know, I do think sort of that that University look man. Nobody likes money more than University. I know I know that's what I that that so I think you'll see it more as you said of sort of that academics. I mean look Duke has global campuses in China and they might have one.

I know the basketball team went to the Middle East 20 year. I can't remember if Duke has a campus there or not, but you're going to see more and more of that because that's where the money is and look I've written this but you know Bill the worst idea that Bill Friday ever had. He had a lot of really good ideas. I mean Bill Friday was was a genius in a lot of ways and saw a lot of this coming worst idea he ever had was putting college presidents in charge of athletics because if they're all like Bill Friday, we'd be fine. Right. But in the 21st century the way you get promoted as a university president is by raising money and these guys are going to squeeze every last nickel out of college sports guys and girls because it's it's both it's not just you know, obviously it's college presidents period are going to squeeze every last nickel out of college sports because that's all they know how to do.

There's no stewardship. There's no best interest of the program or the sport or the conference or the school. It's oh, can we add UCLA and USC and add $12 to our television deal even if our athletes are basically become you know, hollow-eyed sleep-deprived zombies. Yeah, heck let's do it. What the why now we can get another $8 out of Fox.

They're going to squeeze every last nickel out of this to the detriment. We've seen it with all the conference realignment. There's no reason that Clemson and Boston College should be playing in the same collection of universities, but that's where the money was. Lou to cock joining us. Sorry. I went along with you, but I always enjoy time with you Friday follow him on Twitter at Lou to cock check out his award-winning work for the News and Observer as a columnist and hopefully you'll be around next Friday. We could do it again. My friend. Maybe we can do it from from the beach the annual Lou to cock from the beach interview with guest host taste per on the Adam Gold show. It's a tradition. Thanks, dude. Talk to you soon.