BLAIR HORNSTINE INFORMATION CLEARINGHOUSE: The Blair Hornstine project. Via Joanne Jacobs. And here's Moorestown grad Jonathan Last in the Weekly Standard. I'm a Moorestown grad myself but I just can't get worked up about this; it was a neat little scandal for a couple weeks but at no point did I have any particular insight into it. I asked my mom if she had any gossip and she said that Judge Hornstine's wife was very nice. My dad thinks the Judge--so humiliated at being salutorian in his high school--burned for revenge for the rest of his life and made sure his children would never suffer the humiliation of being second. The Judge, in my opinion, has done way too much for li'l Blair--one of the BH Project links has a story about him delivering food to shelter's on Blair's perhaps--proving that in parenting and everywhere else that evenhandedness is a virtue. There you go--the word from the Moorestown STREET.

AND ANOTHER THING: Why did the Kings trade their pick? They really should've gotten Luke Walton out of the Lakers' hands.

DRAFT ANALYSIS V: Lacy Banks in the Sun-Times. That's the second A+ I've seen Detroit given. That had to be Joe Dumars drafting all foreigners--there's no way Larry Brown would get that creative draft-wise. He's a great coach--the greatest ever at taking a team from mediocre to good--but looking at the Sixers now there's no way you want him making personnel decisions.

JACKIE STILES WATCH: The NCAA's all-time number one scorer is sitting at home unemployed. Via Women's Hoops. Did you know despite all those points she's never won a championship? Not even when averaging 46.4 points a game in high school? Jeebus. Mama warned me to stay away from great players on bad teams--the oft-mentioned Juwan Howard type--and maybe Jackie is the greatest Great Player On A Bad Team of all time.

END OF ANOTHER BASKETBALL DEBACLE, OR AT LEAST SOME CLOSURE: Joe Smith, with Anthony Peeler, traded for Sam Cassell and Ervin Johnson. Not a lot of fanfare to end one of the more famous NBA scandals. And they hardly tried playing Sam and Gary Payton together. Dang.

DRAFT ANALYSIS IV: From Sportsline. Mike Kahn: Round One . Tony Mejia: Round Two. Mike and Tony got their own little Stern and Granik thing going on, apparently.

DRAFT META-ANALYSIS: Bill Simmons.

THANK YOU, JOHN HOLLINGER: For serving up the Dickie V. HATE!:

Worst Comment: Dick Vitale
There's a backlash coming against all these international guys. Yep, any second now. I think I know where it's coming from: college basketball analysts who haven't seen any of them play. Yo, Dickie V, you want a real backlash? How about one against college seniors? Check out the five taken in the top 20 last year: Melvin Ely, Fred Jones, Juan Dixon, Curtis Borchardt and Ryan Humphrey. Did any of those guys even get 10 points in a game last year? Combined?

John concurs with my Lampe-love:

Best Pick: Maciej Lampe, Knicks
Other teams ran away from him like he had the plague because there might be some issues with his contract. But for goodness sakes, the guy is only 18 years old. Even if he can't come to the U.S. for three years, he'll only be 21 when he's liberated from his team in Spain and joins the NBA. And with his size and shooting ability, he's worth the wait. I can't imagine why teams passed this up for college mediocrities like Josh Howard and Jones.

And gives us one more reason to despise Donald Sterling:

Worst Pick: Chris Kaman, L.A. Clippers
Take a look at the centers that have been picked between No. 5 and No. 15 in the last 10-15 years or so. The best one is Bryant Reeves. Otherwise it's a minefield of Felton Spencers, Rich Kings, DeSagana Diops and Olden Polynices. Centers who can play go in the top three; later on they just get picked by teams that are desperate. Kaman, who doesn't leap well and has unusually short arms, should be joining the ranks of the busts.

DRAFT ANALYSIS III: Marty Burns. Here he is on the Mavs:

They didn’t even try to address their issues in the frontcourt. Nor did they get a top-notch prospect with upside for the future. Howard might be a decent player, but it’s hard to see where he’s going to get much time with ironman Michael Finley around. Why not take Maciej Lampe and wait on him?

He gave them a 'D'. Yeah, why didn't they, of all teams, take Lampe? They had to have known about him. Maybe Lampe isn't the drizzling shits.

"BARK, SWOFFORD! BARK, TRANGHESE!": Jeff Jacobs' hate letter to the University of Miami. And everybody else.

DRAFT ANALYSIS II: Mike Huguenin in the Orlando Sentinel.

MEANWHILE: The hyper-tabloid New York Post is all over Lampe. Thank god for sensationalist journalism.

MIKE LUPICA MUST'VE LEFT AFTER THE FIRST ROUND: No Lampe here. And here's the Daily News' sports writer yammering on about Mike Sweetney. We know what Sweetney can do. Where's the Lampe intrigue and speculation? Where's the fun? And when he says "The Knicks applied a time-tested formula to last night's NBA draft. They selected the best big man available from Georgetown" he means a time-tested formula for mediocrity, right?

DRAFT ANALYSIS: Check out Chad Ford's.

WOTTA DRAFT: I'm really hyped for the NBA season now; the only basketball that can hold me over now is the occasional Storm or Sparks game (I saw them play each other a few nights ago, and now I'm convinced they're the only two watchable teams in the WNBA. Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson are doubly watchable, if you get my drift. HAH!) But you had all the hype for the three prospects who went 1-2-3 as planned, then you had the inexplicable turn against unproven European players--what, one Tskitishvili and you give up? And you had Lampe going first in the second round to the roars of the hometown crowd. What fun. Some thoughts:

--Yes, my two most hated teams, the Knicks and the Lakers, seemed to make out like bandits. The Lakers get the Big Ten player of the year and the billionaire's Mark Madsen, Luke Walton, who you know is going to make two or three crucial plays in the playoffs, if Sports Guy is to be believed. And the Knicks get Maciej Lampe in the second round because they went safe-yet-dumb and picked Georgetown's Mike Sweetney in the first round. He was supposed to be a lottery pick. The NBA invited him because he was supposed to be a lottery pick. And he had to sweat it out and almost started crying waiting there. Thank god he was the one the Knicks fans really wanted. Maybe Layden will be able to have his cake (Sweetney, the kind of guy the Knicks have like twelve of) and eat it too (Lampe, who could bust like Frederic Weis but could also be the Next Great European.) Everyone's rooting for Lampe now, including me--this is about the only way I could start liking the Knicks again.

--Tom Tolbert was busting on the Warriors for taking Mickael Pietrus and not getting a point guard. Apparently he missed the whole "Earl Boykins has arrived" saga, one of the better sub-plots from last season.

--At no point did Dick Vitale not convince me he wasn't protecting his little Dickie V. college basketball cottage industry with his constant--and I mean constant--harping on why this-and-that team was going to regret not taking whatever college great Dick had first sighted in 8th grade or whatever. I mean, just naked self-interest.

--I was thinking to myself, for no reason, "The Bulls are the blackest team in the NBA. They're taking a black guy." And sure enough, they took Kirk Hinrich over T.J. Ford. Diversity NOW! Or something.

--Just a fun draft that we're not going to learn the ramifications of for a while. I think LeBron and Darko are unproven, so we won't know how the Cavs and Pistons made out for a while. I think the Nuggets did well, the Lakers and Knicks did as well as they could and everybody else is wait-and-see. Looking forward to Lampemania hitting the streets of New York and Warsaw. That's it.

"THEY TRY TO ENGAGE THE WORLD AS MUCH AS THEY CAN AND WE WILL CONTINUE UNTIL THEY LEAVE OUR LAND": Comical Ali returns.

BUSY DAY FOR THE SUPREMES: The Slate usual suspects wrap it up for you. There's O'Connor intrigue and Scalia-mocking.

AS THE DEBACLE TURNS: Bob Ryan tells you what you need to know.

THE SELFISH MACHINE: Say, has anyone noticed that The Matrix is like the perfect metaphor for the Dawkinsite view of biology? You know: machines need humans to survive, don't give a whit about human culture and society but allow humans to go on thinking human culture and society is important, we humans can rise up and beat the machines in some nebulous way if we're properly informed (the last chapter of The Selfish Gene.) I think there's something to this, if only proving yet again that the borders between science, culture and religion are pretty badly drawn.

DEBACLE WATCH: Some good stuff in the Palm Beach Post today:

No way this is what Miami wants.

No way this is what Miami wanted, or expected, back at the very beginning of the Atlantic Coast Conference-Big East swordfight that's going to end bloody, or at least with enough bad blood to fill South Beach.

Never mind. That's what the Hurricanes have to be thinking right about now. Really, just never mind.

Because this is a mess.

More:

It appears as though Miami is going to have to choose between staying put in the Big East or making a migratory flight in switching its nest to the ACC not with Syracuse and/or Boston College, but with Virginia Tech.

If anyone in the UM family had known months ago what they know now, it's more than a pretty good guess the 'Canes would have told the ACC not to bother.

There was yet another conference call Tuesday night among ACC presidents after which nothing was announced.

What's abundantly clear, though, after the calls and a lawsuit and political involvements is that the ACC moved too fast too soon and the Big East got too angry too quickly and the Hurricanes got too confident too immediately.

Meanwhile the Miami Herald continues to stink at their debacle coverage, probably because--like all newspapers covering their local sports scene--they can't burn their bridges with the Hurricanes. But--I mean--this is not what the University of Miami wanted, but you're not going to read that in the Herald.

Jeff Jacobs in the Hartford Courant reports on one of the more interesting debacle characters, Donna Shalala:

Shalala, the Miami president, can't move her tiny feet fast enough to escape the Big East. League commissioner Mike Tranghese and Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, have broad-sided her integrity, exposed her duplicity and she is furious.

Miami has been called out for falsely assuring Big East schools it isn't leaving, watching schools spend untold millions and bolting anyway.

The Palm Beach Post even quoted one of the school's board of trustees as saying Shalala vowed to never allow the Hurricanes to play at Rentschler Field. Hey, Donna, if Miami picks up the $91 million tab on the new place, we'll call it even. Otherwise, see you in court.

By the way, I'm still waiting for someone to tell me how this makes a huge amount of sense for Miami. The upgrade is mainly Florida State over Virginia Tech (if Tech doesn't leave) which isn't a huge upgrade. The rest of the ACC stinks on ice in football like the rest of the Big East stinks on ice in football. You switch Rutgers jokes for Duke jokes. The hey? The only advantage I can see in the original plan is long-term destabilization of the Big East and the subsequent recruting advantages this would give the ACC, but their braintrust has not proven themselves capable of foresight throughout the Debacle.