Musings of an Old Sportswriter

On Anthony Richardson's (temporary?) return to the Colts, the Fever's opener and the disappointing draft lottery results.

Musings:

FRIDAY

If the idea is to show potential trade partners that Anthony Richardson is healthy and his vision has returned, it makes some sense to have him active and participating in voluntary minicamp this week.

If the idea is to set Richardson up to truly compete with Riley Leonard for the backup quarterback position, that makes no sense to me. If Richardson and Leonard are sharing reps, that makes no sense to me. Richardson is begging to be traded or released; remember, he requested a deal and the Colts failed to pick up the fifth-year option on his contract. There’s too much water under the bridge. This relationship is over.

I think.

Everything about the way the Colts have handled Richardson from the very beginning is a mystery. None of it makes sense, from the time they gave him the QB1 job over Gardner Minshew after one preseason game. This, despite the fact the two quarterbacks seemed to be performing at roughly the same level throughout training camp. Hell, they even made AR a captain, this young man – kid, really – who played just 13 college games.

So what’s Richardson doing at voluntary minicamp?

Reporters asked Shane Steichen in several different ways Friday, and his responses made it clear as mud.

How would you evaluate having Anthony Richardson Sr. back in the building?

“Yeah, I mean he’s back in the fold right now. That part has been good. He’s working, going through his fundamentals, details, out there throwing with the guys. That’s where it’s at right now.”

At least for the offseason work, how do you go about reintegrating Anthony Richardson Sr.? There is a time very soon where you’ll be back doing 11-on-11 and figuring out the depth chart. How have you thought about that?

“That’s part of it. Obviously, he’s here. He’s going to get reps, just like Riley (Leonard) will get reps. We’re in Phase Two right now. We’re throwing routes on air and doing walk-thru stuff, and both those guys will get reps.”

Is he competing for the backup job?

“Right now, we’re in May. We’ll see how it goes obviously with all that. But he’s working, he’s here, he’s in good spirits. He’s cleared to play with the vision stuff, so that part is good.”

Have you seen limitations at all with the vision?

“No, he’s been good. I mean, he’s been here for four days but we’re just throwing right now. We haven’t done any team stuff, but he’s been good.”

Do you notice improvements from him from where he was in late December and early January?

“Yeah I think he’s getting back into the fold right now obviously throwing again. He’s been working obviously down in Florida doing workouts so he’s been good. He came back in really good shape. So, that was good. So yeah, he’s been good so far.”

If you know what any of that means, you’re a whole lot smarter than me (which isn’t a high bar, I admit).

Which brings me back to Richardson and the way this whole thing has been mismanaged since his first day on West 56^th.

Now, could all of this have been a Jim Irsay mandate? I’m talking about the decision to select Richardson and the decision to play Richardson his rookie year – well, for as long as he could stay healthy.

Irsay always said, when it came to quarterbacks in the draft, his vote was the one that mattered most. .

And he’s made mandates on quarterbacks before, most notably when he called for Sam Ehlinger to start over Matt Ryan.

Maybe he thought back to Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck, who both hit the ground running in their rookie years. Irsay had seen young quarterbacks survive the early fire and come back even stronger. But Manning played 45 games at the University of Tennessee. Luck played 38 at Stanford. I could be completely wrong here, but I’ve always thought Chris Ballard and Shane Steichen were too smart to throw Richardson into the deep end of the pool right away; that’s why they acquired Minshew as a very capable starter/backup to use as a bridge to Richardson.

Irsay was a great owner, but in his final years, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t all there. His physical and mental health were declining quite precipitously. Remember when he fired Frank Reich and hired Jeff Saturday? Is that the decision of a man fully in his right mind? He always said he didn’t want to be like his father, Robert, who was both hands-on and deep into alcoholism. And for a while, Irsay was different, ceding almost complete control to Bill Polian, who built a powerhouse. But in the last five-six years of his life and tenure, there were too many troubling signs to ignore.

The whole thing is very curious, and it keeps getting more curiouser.

Has been from the very beginning.

SATURDAY

• My first thought, watching the Fever and Wings play an epic if defensively shoddy season opener was this: Thank heavens the owners and players association signed that new CBA.

  It took a lot of missed deadlines and rancor with players calling out commissioner Cathy Engelbert, but they got the deal done, and right on time. We are in the midst of the league’s greatest heyday (thus far) and that was firmly on display Saturday afternnon at Gainbridge as the last four No. 1 overall picks were on the floor. That’s Aliyah Boston (2023), Caitlin Clark (2024), Paige Bueckers (2025) and Azzi Fudd (2026). The result was a wild 107-105 Wings victory over the Fever, the home team falling short when Kelsey Mitchell’s buzzer-beating three, a good look by any standard, rimmed out. Dallas, the worst team in the league the last two years, shot 59 percent from the field and a ridiculous 52 percent from three. Defense was optional.

The larger point being, the WNBA, with so much momentum and star power, could not afford to get stuck in a morass of bruised feelings and a play stoppage. This is a big league now, with salaries and travel arrangements to match, and a work stoppage would have been disastrous. So thank God they got it done.

• We saw part of the future of the league Saturday. As I mentioned, the last four No. 1 picks were on the floor and with stars like A’ja Wilson, Brenna Stewart and others, the league is in a very strong position to continue to grow. exponentially (thank you, Caitlin). I can’t wait to see the TV ratings numbers for this Fever-Wings opener, which was shown on ABC on a day when there was little to no TV competition. Expect them to be through the roof.

• I thought Clark looked good but not great in her first game back after missing most of last season with a series of nagging and problematic soft tissue injuries. She finished with 20 points on 7-of-18 shooting (2-of-9 from three) with seven assists and five rebounds. Early on, you could see the nerves, plus the breakneck pace was leaving everybody on the floor, including Clark, searching for their second wind. Probably not a reason to be concerned, but a number of times, Clark left the floor, returned to the locker room and had her back adjusted.

She said it was nothing.

Coach Stephanie White said it was nothing, just basic maintenance.

We’ll see.

She did play 30 minutes, it should be mentionedl

But it sure was great to see Clark back on the floor, and to see the Fever at close to full strength for the first time in a long time.

“There’s just like a different juice inside of your body when you’re putting on your uniform and you’re mentally locked in to go play a basketball game,” Clark said prior to the game. “Obviously, I was excited for my teammates last year, 100 percent. I was their biggest fan. But it’s not the same.”

Again, she looked good but not great. But that will come in time. Without question. But somebody – anybody – has got to play some defense.

“Started off a little slow, just the anxiety of the first game, trying to work through that,” Clark said. “But overall, felt good, felt fast out there. Felt I was literally a couple of buckets away from putting together a really good game and helping us win.”

Patience, friends. Patience.

• The two teams combined to attempt 45 free throws, and the game lacked continuity with so many whistles stopping play.

That’s ordinarily a bad thing.

White, who along with the league’s other coaches has pined for less physicality and more freedom of movement in the WNBA, loved it.

“Look, like I told (our players), like I told (Wings player) Alanna Smith as we were standing on the sideline having a conversation, this is what we want,” White said. “We need to overcorrect, so to speak, so that we have freedom of movement. So it’s a free-flowing offense. In all of our offseason, we have asked officials to call everything. The challenge and the questions sometimes is, is it consistent? So that’d be the next growth area. But this is what we need to clean up, some of the stuff we saw last year.”

Once the players adjust – and they will – the whistles should diminish.

• It’s only one game in a 44-game season and a disappointing result, but in the end, I see the Fever returning to the WNBA semifinals, at the very least. And if they can stay healthy, especially the Big Three of Clark, Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell, they have a shot at reaching the finals. It’s not championship-or-bust, not this soon, not with the Las Vegas Aces dominating the league and teams like New York and Atlanta making noise, but this team has every chance to make a deep run once again.

SUNDAY

Dammit.

But it was a risk. The Pacers knew it was a risk. And Ivica Zubac, one of the top 10 centers in the league, is a tremendous consolation prize. Trust me on this. He makes the Pacers a contender in the East.

But this hurts. This hurts like the 1985 Draft when the Pacers barely missed out on Patrick Ewing. We’re looking at arguably greatest draft class since 1996, 30 years ago. It’s heavy with franchise-changing talent and it’s deep. Are they organizationally snakebit in the Lottery? History would certainly suggest so.

The best-case scenario was the Pacers would get a top-4 pick and reprise what the San Antonio Spurs did in 1996 and ’97. For you young’uns out there, the Spurs were a playoff team in 1995. Then David Robinson and Sean Elliott were injured, the Spurs sunk to the bottom of the league and earned a spot in the 1997 Lottery. There, fortune shined on Gregg Popovich and the Spurs; they won the No. 1 pick, they drafted Tim Duncan and became a dynasty.

In the moments after the Lottery, TV showed A.J. Dybantsa, the likely top pick, sitting and listening to the ABC/ESPN commentary. In the background, buried in their feelings, were the Pacers braintrust of Kevin Pritchard and Chad Buchanan. What could they have been thinking? They knew this was possible, but as they say, reality sucks.

This is a generational draft.

A draft the Pacers are going to sit out.

It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback and question why the Pacers made this deal that only protected the top four picks, but that’s the price of doing business in the NBA. Again it was a calculated risk. Without the lottery piece, the Pacers couldn’t have acquired Zubac. It just wasn’t the haul the Pacers had prayed for in the end.

Dammit.

Without the pick this summer, the Pacers will still have a chance to contend in the Eastern Conference. This core group has gone to the Eastern Conference Finals and the NBA Finals in the last three years; now add Zubac to the mix and you have a team that’s going to matter A LOT again next year.

But if they could have won a top-four pick, a franchise-altering pick, they could have been elite for a generation. Hell, one championship, maybe two. They would have been a juggernaut. The stakes, well, they were enormous, this being the most consequential draft in 40 years, at least.

As a good friend texted me shortly after the Lottery, “(Bleep) me.”

I think we can all relate to that sentiment.