Dr. Strangedraft, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Geoff Petrie

(Blogger’s note: my apologies for my absence since Thursday, but I was felled by a combination of busyness, tiredness and temperature — Stockton just got hit with its first heat wave of the year.  That’s why I’m finishing this around 10:45 p.m.  What follows is what would’ve been Friday’s column; my planned entry for Saturday will go up Monday, and since I didn’t have a plan for after that, I’ll just get back to winging it.  Enjoy!)

To be a sports fan is to be a second-guesser.

Rocky Bridges, a longtime minor-league baseball manager, once said that “there are three things the average man thinks he can do better than anybody else — build a fire, run a hotel, and manage a baseball team.”  He’s more or less right.  When a team loses (or sometimes even when they win), there is no shortage of people who can explain in (excruciating) detail what the manager/coach should have done differently.  Every time a trade is made or a free agent signed or an amateur player drafted, those same backbenchers are there to question the particular team executive’s judgment, horse sense, math skills and/or eyesight.  It’s the nature of the game, as much as hand-eye coordination or overpriced beer.

So it’s no surprise that, in the days after Thursday’s National Basketball Association draft, folks hereabouts are commenting, not always positively, about the Sacramento Kings’ selections of center/forward DeMarcus Cousins and center Hassan Whiteside.  As have I.  The only difference with me is that I’m pretty sure it is I, not Kings general manager Geoff Petrie, who’s in the wrong.