Can someone please solve the mystery?
By now you probably know that the U.S. men’s basketball team won the gold last night. It was a game worth staying up for — a lot of fun.
But there’s one question I haven’t been able to answer this morning. Why didn’t Rudy Fernandez, the newest Trail Blazer heart throb for sure, play in the first quarter? It wasn’t even mentioned on the broadcast and all the stories I’ve found this morning on the Web don’t address it, either. The Americans writing about the game are all so focused on the U.S. team they barely mention anything about the opposition.
Perhaps someone who speaks Spanish better than I do can find an answer somewhere out there in cyberspace? I promise to keep looking and as the day goes on, more information will be available. I’d like to know if there was some discipline thing that caused him to not play for the entire first 10 minutes. When one of your top players doesn’t play in the first quarter in a game as big as this one, something’s going on. This used to happen to Rasheed Wallace or Darius MIles when they missed a shootaround.
So if you stumble onto anything from the coach of Spain or Rudy himself, please post it in the comments or email it to me, OK?
In this one, by the way, Rudy played by far his best game. He was fearless and explosive. But his defensive problems led to some dumb fouls, which eventually caused him to foul out too fast. The guy is a fountain of charisma and if he gets a chance to play significant minutes – and the fans are going to go completely nuts if he doesn’t – he’s going to own Portland.
NBA, Olympics, Trail Blazers | Dwight Jaynes | August 24, 2008
That’s just the way the spanish coach distributes minutes. No “starters” only team members. Rudy has rotated in and out of the starting 5. The coach has weird substitution patterns too.
Dude, that picture of you on the houseboat is just sick, I envy you so much! Keep on writing, we will keep on reading.
I spent a couple hours on Spanish sites and didn’t come up with anything, other than looking at box scores and noticing what Nathan did.
Isn’t it pretty common practice for a team to NOT put your star against the best of the opposition if your team clearly can’t match up, and wait for them to tire or sub out? We used to do it a lot in Hockey.
Since Kobe and Lebron got in foul trouble, it sort of worked.
Going into the Olympics, Rudy was touted as Spain’s “6th Man,” with Navarro scheduled to be the starter. The gold medal game seems to have been the one and only time of the Olympics where the pre-Olympic depth chart was actually followed…
Fernandez still managed to foul out of the game, so it’s not like Spain were depriving themselves of his presence by bringing him off the bench later than anticipated.
I enjoy your blog, keep up the good work!
t
……………………….. I will add: after getting torched by 30 the first time the two teams met, the Spanish coach probably felt like changing things up a little in the rematch against the Americans wasn’t such a bad idea. Navarro underachieved throughout the Olympics and he probably hoped that putting the ball in his hands would start him up.
You can’t fault the results, from their perspective.
t