UCLA’s Mick Cronin coming around on what a crappy, exploitative sham the NCAA is

UCLA coach Mick Cronin is peeved about Dashien Nix playing in the G League instead of the Bruins.

Interestingly, Cronin’s gripe isn’t so much with Nix getting paid to play basketball, but that he lost a key recruit, which, fair enough, is annoying. Cronin sees the flaw of the system that requires players to be out of high school for at least a year before entering the NBA.

“It’s America,” Cronin said on ESPN Radio. “A guy can go to war when he’s 18. He can grab a gun and get killed for his country, but he can’t put his name in the [NBA] draft? Come on, man, it’s ridiculous. I just don’t like the two-faced lies and acting like we didn’t recruit the kid.”

Of course, Cronin wouldn’t be saying any of this if Nix had chosen to go to Kentucky or Duke, but that’s within the college basketball system, or as Cronin earlier described it, a “free farm system for 40 years for the NBA.”

There used to be another “free” farm system in Ameri—you know what, let’s not go there at this moment, because the point is that Cronin is oh so close to coming around to the logical conclusion: pay the players.

Today in “time having no meaning whatsoever anymore,” the Boston Pride and Minnesota Whitecaps won their NWHL semifinals on Friday night, setting up an Isobel Cup matchup of the teams that were supposed to play for the title last year… in a season that was supposed to wrap up in February, before a COVID-19 outbreak scuttled the league’s Lake Placid tournament.

The semifinal losses by the Connecticut Whale and Toronto Six ensure that the NWHL will have its first multiple-time champion, as the Buffalo Beauts and Metropolitan Riveters also have won the Isobel Cup along with the Pride and longtime defending champion Whitecaps.

Blake Griffin went back to Detroit and dunked.

Griffin’s two jams in the game were his first in the arena that he called home for three years, which, even with as rough a time as he’s had healthwise, is bizarre when you see how easily he gets up to rock the rim now.

The return to Detroit also included Griffin getting Isaiah Stewart ejected, and drawing himself a technical foul for flopping in the process, over an exchange of elbows.