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Syracuse Baksetball: Jim Boeheim continues to commit the heinous crime of telling the truth

You're never going to believe this but people are taking an inocuous Jim Boeheim quote out of context and spinning it.

By Sean Keeley
Elsa/Getty Images

Honestly, this non-story is so boring to me that it's barely worth wasting much effort on. As part of his post-Olympics discussions about winning gold and the legacy of Carmelo Anthony, Syracuse Orange head coach Jim Boeheim was talking about how Melo might be remembered if he's never part of an NBA Championship team.

"He's unlikely to win an NBA title,'' Boeheim said. "He's never been on a team that even had a remote chance of winning an NBA title. As a player, all you can do is try to make your team better and every team he's been on he's made them a lot better. Denver hadn't done anything prior to him getting there and he took them into the playoffs. They weren't going to beat the Lakers or the Spurs. In those years, they won the championship most of the time."

First off, let's acknowledge that Boeheim was effusively praising his former player for the entirety of that press conference.

Second, what is wrong with that paragraph?

It's true, isn't it? It is unlikely that Carmelo Anthony, as a member of the New York Knicks or otherwise, will ever win an NBA Championship. Other than Derrick Rose, does anyone think the Knicks are going to overcome LeBron's Cavaliers and Durant & Steph's Warriors this season? Or any season?

But of course sometimes we all just want to watch the world burn. So Boeheim's quote was removed of context and simply became "Jim Boeheim doesn't think Melo will win an NBA Title," so that jerkoffs like Stephen A. Smith have a talking point to fill five minutes on their shows.

I thought Rob Dauster at College Basketball Talk summed up the nonsense best.

...here’s the thing: focusing on that one line totally ignores the point that Boeheim was making in the interview. As always, context is critical, and if you read the story that Waters wrote, it’s pretty obvious the message that Boeheim was trying to get across. Melo is not going to leave a legacy in the NBA beyond being a guy that got a lot of buckets. It just didn’t work out for him that way. Ask Karl Malone how that feels.

Boeheim isn't above saying something regrettable. You can argue about whether or not its right for him to criticize players going pro early or whether or not he should make political statements. But even if you disagree with everything he says, he says it because its something he believes. Unlike so many other coaches out there, he speaks his mind. In this case, he spoke his mind about something that wasn't all that shocking. But the act of speaking your mind is so taboo that it became a story anyway.

The funny thing is that Boeheim said all of those things in his original comments as well. He doesn't need to repeat himself. He just needs people to actually listen to the whole story.

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