Musings of an Old Sportswriter

On the Braden Smith story, Kelvin Sampson, the Pacers and Alex Ovechkin's goals record.

Musings of An Old Sportswriter…

If you haven’t had a chance to read Joel A. Erickson’s extraordinary Indianapolis Star piece on Colts right tackle Braden Smith, do yourself a favor and read it now.

It is a devastating portrait of a man in the throes of serious mental illness, a man who felt he was within weeks or months of taking his own life.

Over the years, the Colts haven’t always handled injuries in the most forthright manner – nobody does, if we’re being honest – but on the Smith situation, they dealt with it in a sensitive and proactive way. This is an organization that has sunk millions into the Kicking the Stigma cause; they understand, and Jim Irsay really understands, the torment of mental illness.

I give credit to the Colts for giving Smith the time and support he needed. I give credit to Smith and his wife for taking the extraordinary step of finding alternative modalities down in Mexico – it’s weird, sure, but when you’re desperate, you’ll turn to almost any possible palliative – and I give Smith and his wife, Courtney, credit for being willing to tell their story in such a compelling way.

And I give credit to Erickson, who is one of the grinders on the beat, shows up every day, works the locker room, works sources, creates personal connections with the coaches and players. I used to have young writers ask me how I broke the occasional story back in the day, and I’d tell them, “Show up. Being there every day tells the players you’re as invested in your job as much as they are theirs. Give them every reason to trust you.” Because the day will come, as it did with Erickson and the Smiths, where the Smith family determined they could entrust their story to a particular writer.

There’s still a stigma out there about mental health, and football teams tend to feed into that. When a player misses time to address a mental health situation, the club reports that he’s out for “personal reasons.” Why don’t they say it’s a mental health issue, just the way it would be with a broken leg or a sprained ankle? Understand, I’m not giving the Colts a hard time for not being completely transparent – nobody would in this case – but I’d like to see a day when clubs treat mental illness like a malady no different than the aforementioned injuries. That would help kick the stigma, don’t you think?

Now, in Braden’s case, I get the reasons behind saying “personal reasons.” I understand why he’d want privacy, and by announcing it’s a mental health situation, it could very well create even more tension for the player in question. Clearly, he already had a lot on his emotional plate without multitudes reaching out and wishing him well on his mental health journey. But again, it’s not embarrassing. It’s not something you need to hide. But we still do because the stigma still exists.

Bottom line, I thought it was an important story, especially for those of us who deal with mental health issues. I thought it was important that Smith and his wife opened up. And I thought it was a wonderful job by Erickson, who wrote it beautifully, didn’t over-write it (that’s what I would have done) and let the story breathe, letting the Smiths tell their harrowing personal story.

A good day for mental health. A good day for important journalism.

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Don’t sleep on the Pacers.

Granted, they mostly sleep-walked through a six-point victory over a tanking Washington Wizards team Tuesday night, a game when the Wizards benched their two best players (Alex Sarr and Jordan Poole) in the final moments, all but ensuring the Wiz would lose down the stretch.

But don’t look now: The Pacers have the third best record in the NBA since Jan. 1. Just as impressive, the Pacers have improved dramatically on defense, ranking 11^th in the league in defense since Jan. 1. They’re not quite as prolific offensively as they were last year, but as coaches like to say, defense travels and defense wins in the playoffs – something the Pacers learned last season on their way to the Eastern Conference Finals.

Even on a Tuesday night when they shot 38 percent from the field, their worst shooting percentage all season, the Pacers found a way to limit the Wizards to just 63 points in the last three quarters after surrendering 35 in an abysmal first quarter.

The Eastern Conference field isn’t fully set – Milwaukee’s comeback win Tuesday night means the Pacers still have a little work to do before clinching the fourth seed – but this is a team on a roll, having won 13 of their last 16 games. I would make the case the Pacers are a better team than they were last year heading into the playoffs. This time, they’ll have Bennedict Mathurin, who will be a wildcard this spring. There’s still a lack of depth behind Myles Turner and Thomas Bryant (Isaiah Jackson played well in last year’s playoffs) and rebounding is a perpetual problem, but I look at this team and see one that has every chance of repeating last year’s epic run to the conference finals.

I like them in a first-round series, likely against the Bucks, even with Giannis Antetokounmpo playing this time around. I see that one going seven.

I think they can beat Cleveland, although it would be a long, epic series and the Cavs would have homecourt.

Boston, well, that’s another story, although the Pacers made them sweat in a four-game sweep. (Which sounds crazy, but three of four games went down to the final possession or two.)

“We feel like we’ve really built something special here in the last two years,” Tyrese Haliburton said Tuesday night. “Obviously, when I got here, the majority of this team was not here outside of T.J. (McConnell) and Myles (Turner). It’s cool to see what we’ve built and what we’ll continue to build moving forward.”

Again…don’t sleep on these guys. Last year was not a fluke. Trust me.

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There’s been a lot of revisionist history written about Houston coach Kelvin Sampson as his team reached the NCAA final game against Florida.

Now, we’re supposed to root for him. Suddenly, he’s worthy of our admiration, having gone through all this “adversity,” like all that adversity, including a rare show-cause penalty that chased him out of college ball, wasn’t self-imposed. The guy cheated. He cut corners at Oklahoma. He cheated at IU. And do not tell me, “Well, by today’s rules, what he did was nothing. Improper phone calls. Hell, they pay the players these days.”

Situational ethics.

Back in the day when there were rules governing college sports, Sampson skirted the system, tried to gain an unfair competitive advantage that was counter to the rules all coaches are required to follow. It DOES NOT MATTER that improper phone calls seem quaint by today’s standards of comportment; the fact is, there were rules (whatever you think of them) and Sampson broke them. And please, let’s not make the mistake of saying that phone calls were the reason things fell apart for Sampson in Bloomington. This went much deeper, guys blowing off classes, drugs, all sorts of behavioral issues. So please, don’t tell me IU never should have fired him. That’s absurd, on its face.

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Alex Ovechkin scored his 895^th goal this past weekend, bypassing the greatest player I’ve ever seen, Wayne Gretzky. (I didn’t see Gordie Howe play until very late in his career, but imagine how incredible you had to be to dominate a six-team league.)

I’m going to make a brief case for something that might not be popular:

Ovechkin’s goals mark is more impressive than Gretzky’s, and not just because he has one more goal than the Great One. See, when Gretzky played, the NHL was an offensively wide open league; as someone who knows a lot about bad goaltending, the quality of goaltending was sub-standard in Gretzky’s day. (and the equipment was smaller) According to a story in The Ringer, teams averaged 3.50 goals a game during Gretzky’s career; they averaged 2.86 goals per game during Ovechkin’s career. Scoring has increased in recent years, but Ovechkin scored an enormous number of goals during the so-called Dead Puck area, when defensive systems like the left-wing lock and rampant clutching-and-grabbing turned games into gritty slogfests.

Now, as far as the most points scored by a player, I have a very hard time seeing anybody surpassing Gretzky’s number (2,857) in my lifetime, or any lifetime for that matter. But, then, I never saw Ovechkin or anybody reaching 894. He did it Saturday.

Remarkable.