TJ Simers Catches Peter Vecsey 'Borrowing' From a Blogger

Rough day for me over here at Fanhouse HQ. As some of you may or may not know, I'm a big fan of Chicago Tribune NBA scribe Sam Smith. After the way he trashed bloggers, well ... who knows. I'm on a forgiving kick in 2007, so maybe he deserves a second chance.

Perhaps worse than Smith's cliched depiction of bloggers - I'm typing this in jeans and a long-sleeve gray t-shirt in the 'family room' of our two-bedroom apartment while watching The O.C. - is another NBA scribe hero of mine, Peter Vecsey, 'borrowing' from a blogger. (Vecsey is the white guy in the photo to the right.)

TJ Simers of the Los Angeles Times has the gory details, and one wonders if Vecsey will be suspended for this:

Once into the column, I got to the meat of it, where Vecsey really started to go after Kobe as only he could.

"Exempting Bryant, no Laker apparently understands how to play the game - when it's on national TV, anyway. Every time they're showcased, and the floodlights are directed at him, I could swear, Kobe makes sure two or three times minimum to lecture someone on the team (usually Smush, his favorite whipping boy, I'm told) as if he's the coach - almost always on the offensive end."

I'm not surprised someone might quote Vecsey as NBA gospel, so I wasn't surprised that it sounded like something I had already read. As you might imagine, if Kobe is being trashed somewhere, I'm not going to miss it.

I did some research, and sure enough, Alan Elliott, a Lakers fan with a blog who is pushing to get Kobe traded (and you think I've lost it), had written almost the same thing word for word, but two days before Vecsey.

"And every time there is any nationally televised game," Elliott wrote, "Kobe makes a point of making sure that at least three or so times during the game he is seen lecturing someone on the team as if he is a coach ... but usually it is almost always on the offensive end."

I returned to Vecsey's column: "More and more often [Jackson's] targeting the team, player by player, in the press, with one notable exception. More and more he and[Lamar Odom] are speaking out about the team's delinquent defense, noticeably never taking the name of Bryant in vain."

Elliott, meanwhile had written: "... Phil is calling the team out in the press more and more (with one notable exception) ... Phil and Lamar say it after almost every game (without saying who's responsible)."

"I've never seen his blog," Vecsey said, "but we talk, we e-mail and obviously I believe most of what he says."

Could this be why Vecsey is wrong 90 percent of the time? Because he's borrowing from bloggers, who, to paraphrase Smith, don't know jack?