Rowell/Ridder=Rove/Fleischer & Mullin=WMD

Over the weekend, the story broke that Warriors executives have been trying to coerce a Chris Mullin smear job out of the local media. The team has prepared talk points and quotes and everything. They have successfully smeared countless players in the past and even now, with Monta Ellis and Andris Biedrins suddenly expendable or worse, to hear the message spreading in between ticket sales promotional spots. So really, who's surprised?

No names have been leaked as of yet so I'll presume we're talking about Ray Ridder, Robert Rowell, and perhaps the creepy bald dude and the douche bag goateed guy who sit on the Warriors bench during games. I don't trust them, ever since the Stephen Jackson "energy drink" scandal. At any rate, the Cohan Warriors' storied inferiority complex and anal retentive neuroses are clearly firing on all cylinders as the coach sabotages his Hall of Fame putsch since he knows he's not getting in and as the players begin to openly mock Nelson and management's approach to talented youth on local TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8-44SuQ2AQ

Next up:
"Anthony Randolph has an attitude problem!
Nelson was right to pound him!"

Tim Kawakami wrote about this first. Geoff Lepper corroborates and posits that the "Team Mullin" epithet Warriors executives are freely lobbing toward suspected Mullin sympathizers targets local writers Monte Poole and Lowell Cohn. Poole, of course, wrote a scathing story about the Warriors' executive dysfunction and Cohn has been in the curious position of occasional Nelson confidant (he broke the Nelson 08 return story) but constant "hard question" asker. Such questions have no doubt been asked by others, questions like:

"Should Randolph have played sooner, like maybe while you were dicking around with Al Harrington as a captain despite his discontent and ongoing requests to be traded?"

The Poole article:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_11929138?nclick_check=1

Kawakami has some Bill Simmons national exposure and seems to be read online by an increasingly vast audience. He was once accosted by Raiders front office executives and, rumor has it, Don Nelson can't stand him and would love to throw empty beer cans in his general direction. It's always a plus to match the Raiders' dysfunction. Always.

The executive team's spate of media baiting on the Mullin issue amounts to full admission of open hostilities in the front office, as if we needed further confirmation of the Cohan Tradition. Their broad paranoia about media coverage outside the glossy press release versions of reality they must honestly believe in some stubborn performative sense is national legend, much like the Warriors' lack of defense makes for the dominant TV talk point in the opposition's play-by-play. This executive malaise is precisely what Ric Bucher reported at the start of the season.

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=bucher_ric&page=warriorsbucher-081223

Nelson scoffed off Bucher as having only ever gotten one thing right, that "one thing" being Chris Webber and the last Nelson-Warriors messy divorce. But Bucher has quite a bit right whether Don Nelson can handle it or not (he can't). Nelson's famous love affair with the media ended this year as he failed to master a different mediascape, one he really has no clue about and has never bothered to keep up on. He's been irritable and defensive all season and the offseason figures to find him in Maui, incommunicado, as Robert Rowell and Larry Riley draft with Larry Harris whispering sweet nothings in their ear about sales gimmicks and floor spreading. Griping about Bucher is par for the course this year. More like rut.

http://chriscohansucks.blogspot.com/2009/02/we-should-have-hired-larry-brown.html

Nelson is, quite frankly, used up for this league. Keith Smart's recent coaching turns suggest Nelson is still plotting his escape route. Once he figures out how to keep the cash, he's gone. This Hall of Fame correction to his ego should finally make him care less about the volume wins record, since it's not enough for him to make it. Lenny Wilkens made it in with the wins record, a history of impressive team building, and even the title of Inventor of the point forward. Oh, plus a championship and far fewer charges of "asshole" thrown around the national media with his name attached to them.

On the point forward:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/luke_winn/03/10/terrence-williams/index.html.

Nelson is nothing more than a money-grubbing, power-hungry pain in the ass who knows how to screw with the opposition until games turn into sloppy track meets sans accountability or defense. Bucher was free to disregard the irrelevancy of the Warriors and the drunk, bitter, washed-up Nellie media-baiting because he has more important work to do and knew the team's dysfunctional ownership and management had lost it YET AGAIN. He'd already "won" whatever Warriors vs. Media distraction Rowell and Ridder had cooked up in lieu of honest hard work on legitimately competitive longterm basketball infrastructure.

Bucher won't bother with Kawakami's brand of "I told you so," though I like Tim's approach to a rabid and passionate readership. But Bucher doesn't have to engage the Warriors' passive-aggressive, faith-based fan populus directly, and they would only be more encouraged to blindly support the dysfunction if they thought the nation was against them and they hadn't figured out the truth on their own yet. Kudos to Ric for letting us learn at our own pace and allowing a few to close up their wallets before their egos forced them to spend, spend, spend on crap, crap, crap.

There are no other explanations for the depth of bullshit the team wades through to finish terrible season # 14 out of 15 in the Chris Cohan ownership. It's all on Cohan and his minions.

Don't quote me the 49 wins last year, Stephen Jackson, because 1. you only won 48 and 2. it was blowed the fuck up during the offseason only because the interpersonal crap during the real season was so heinously botched and jabbed at with a pointy Nellie stick. Only the playoffs get a pass of any sort and even THAT has become just another cog in the RRRRRR (Robert Rowell-Ray Ridder Reality Regulation) machine with the bloom off the rose that was that gimmicky dream matchup with a major Nellie score to settle and a major Baron Davis payday to secure undergirding the team play we all enjoyed completely.

Read it and weep:

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/kawakami/2009/04/03/warriors-vs-mullin-the-multi-media-off-the-record-pr-campaign-is-well-under-way/
http://48minutes.net/2009/04/04/game-76-warriors-111-hornets-103-the-warriors-serenity-prayer-gets-answered/#comment-3757