Sad Kendrick Perkins Is Now Rich Kendrick Perkins, And All Is Well

Kendrick Perkins was reportedly weeping for the entire day when the Boston Celtics sent him to the Oklahoma City Thunder before last week’s NBA trade deadline, and who could blame him? He went from playing on a title contender with his best friends to a team in the middle of the country with a bunch of guys he’d never really met before.

A few weeks before getting traded, with his contract set to expire this summer, Perk was asked about the possibility of playing with somebody else:

“I really can’t, you know,” Perkins said. “I think about this every day. I tell my wife that I just can’t picture myself anywhere but Boston.”

So how exactly did Kendrick Perkins feel when he got Oklahoma City?

Well, as usual, a picture is worth a thousand words.

...And then that picture creates a Tumblr full of Perkins jokes, because hey, the internet!

But the story comes full circle now, because Perkins signed a $35 million contract extension with his new team on Tuesday, and the Celtics were left to scrap for Troy Murphy, and instead of an aging team slowly fading into the sunset, Perk is closer to where he grew up (Texas), he’s got the contract he’s always deserved, and he’ll anchor one of the best teams in the league for at least the next four seasons, and probably beyond.

Don’t you love when things have a happy ending? Sports Illustrated looks at Perk in OKC:

The Thunder are right to think Perkins fits their roster beautifully. Kevin Durant has never run around screens like the ones Perkins will set along the baseline, and Durant does a lot of Ray Allen-style running in Oklahoma City’s offense. Perkins has improved as a finisher on pick-and-rolls and on those curl plays, where his guy often leaves him on the baseline to jump out on the shooter who has just squeezed around Perkins’ crushing screen. And he can hit little jump hooks over smaller centers. He should fit with this system and this personnel.

But this deal is about defense, obviously. He’s about as good as it gets at defending one-on-one in the post, even if Dwight Howard had figured him out late last season and this season. Even more important: Perkins has dropped weight over the years and learned from Kevin Garnett how to jump out on pick-and-rolls to cut off point guards and then rotate back to his own guy. He’ll never be as quick as Garnett, but his technique is sound. He and Serge Ibaka should form an elite defensive front line.

Kobe and the Lakers may be proof that karma has no bearing whatsoever on NBA success, but here’s to hoping that Durant, Perk, and Russell Westbrook can swing the pendulum in the other direction this spring. This should all be happening in Seattle, yes, but even with the stink of Clay Bennett looming in the background, it just keeps getting harder to hate Oklahoma City.

With that... More links!

Sports Illustrated has a hard-hitting(!) new study on college football and crime, and while it’s billed as groundbreaking and includes salacious statistics like this...

• Seven percent of the players in the preseason Top 25 -- 204 in all (1 of every 14) -- had been charged with or cited for a crime, including dozens of players with multiple arrests.

• Of the 277 incidents uncovered, nearly 40 percent involved serious offenses, including 56 violent crimes such as assault and battery (25 cases), domestic violence (6), aggravated assault (4), robbery (4) and sex offenses (3). In addition there were 41 charges for property crimes, including burglary and theft and larceny.

• There were more than 105 drug and alcohol offenses, including DUI, drug possession and intent to distribute cocaine.

...Most of the methodology behind the study is debunked over here, and in the end, Sports Illustrated looks a lot like the local news show desperate for ratings, determined to put together a hard-hitting investigation into some alarming new trend that is, um, total bullshit:

Let’s start with the initial premise: That college football players are a lawless band of hooligans, running roughshod through your community. According to the statistics given (and remember, this inexplicably only includes a sample size of the Sports Illustrated Preseason top 25), seven percent of players have been charged with or cited for a crime. Of those seven percent, “nearly 60 percent…were guilty or paid some penalty”. If we assume “nearly 60 percent” means 57% (shockingly, the actual numbers and survey methods aren’t given), then 4% of players on top 25 football teams have been actually convicted of, or plead guilty to, a crime.

The number of average college students with the same criminal record? According to this article from Corvallis, Oregon’s Daily Barometer, 3.45%. That’s right: Your typical college football player is one-half of one percent more likely to have a criminal conviction. To put that in perspective, a team of 85 players has half a person more convicted criminals on it than a sample of 85 students drawn randomly. Hide yo kids, hide yo wife.

Spencer also does a nice job poking holes in all this at EDSBS, and really, it’s pretty egregious that Sports Illustrated could do a six month investigation into crime and college football, and not even mention that best part about the unholy union there. That’d be The Fulmer Cup, obviously.

Who’s your favorite NBA Center/Actor?

Young men may be failing in life, but they’re WINNING in bed, AMIRITE?

Speaking of WINNING, the sea of Charlie Sheen news has been building for days now, and at this point, it’s probably best just to leave it alone for now, at least until we can give Sheen’s heartbreaking genius the treatment it so richly deserves. In the meantime, yes, he’s on Twitter, and it’s awesome.

Michael Vick missed a charity event this week, and Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio says it just gives the doubters more ammunition. And when he talks about “doubters there... Florio’s not talking about himself, right? I mean, it’s not like Florio wrote a blog post about Vick missing a charity event and failed to note the hundreds of other charity events Vick has headlined over the past twelve months. Of course not. That would be such bad journalism!

‘Course, it’s also a little ridiculous to compare Michael Vick to Jesus Christ:

“People talk about Michael Vick like he was a convicted felon, well so was Jesus Christ, yet he was able to do things above and beyond the naysayers,” Michael Muhammad an official for the Arts Association said.

The NFL’s “lockout Insurance” we mentioned last week? In a rare case of billionaries getting held accountable by the justice system, the owners won’t be getting their hands on that $4 billion.

Okay, Rob Mahoney at the New York Times says the Knicks cut Corey Brewer because his advanced stats prove that he can’t work in New York’s system. Meanwhile, Henry Abbot says at True Hoop that cutting Brewer is proof that the Knicks should pay more attention to advanced statistics. And you wonder why some people still find this stuff confusing...

And finally, since I got to mention Raaaaaaaandy in a post this morning...