Remember that whole issue with Jamal Sampson? Well, it turns out that he still hasn’t been released from his contract by Smart Gilas. Last week, he wrote in with some bad news:

Well, this story gets better. The knee I hurt in Dubai, that the team was mad that I didn’t play in the final two games, well I took an MRI when I got back to the Philippines, and they told me it was basically tendinitis in my knee, and I was fine.

It’s been two months since Dubai, and I’ve been home here getting therapy on it, and working out and trying to stay in shape, but it’s still bothering me and hurting. So yesterday, my agent made me an appointment with the Los Angeles Clippers team doctor, and I took an MRI, and he told me I have a torn meniscus in my knee, and I need surgery. This was also confirmed by the Lakers team doctor. Two NBA doctors. I’m scheduled for surgery on Tuesday.

And Smart told me my knee was fine.

Sampson followed up by saying that the surgery went well, and he’s scheduled to begin rehab next week. Still, it can’t be a good feeling for Sampson to end up with a knee injury after an ugly contract dispute with his former team, especially since he’s claiming that Gilas still owes him money. (Sampson furnished Fire Quinito with a recent email from an SBP employee discussing details of a wire transfer for his January salary.)

To be fair to the Philippine doctors who checked him out, maybe he didn’t have the torn meniscus yet when he had an MRI here in the country. Still, it’s a good thing that Sampson listened to his body. Otherwise, he would’ve ended up with a much worse injury while stuck with a team that hadn’t been prompt about paying him.

Forgetting about Sampson for a minute, this can’t bode well for Smart Gilas’ chances in getting a top-flight reinforcement for its campaign, with the team already struggling to sign a prospect as it is. It’s the kind of thing that spreads quickly in those American minor league basketball circles.

In fact I asked Sampson about this, and it turns out that some Gilas prospects have already gotten in touch with him: “A couple of their replacement options have contacted me, to ask what happened while I was there, so I told them. So I’m sure that hasn’t helped them.”

Meanwhile, the search continues for Gilas. On Twitter, Charles Tiu (Chris’s brother) reports that the team is looking to bring in former UCLA center Michael Fey, who spent the season with the LA D-Fenders of the D-League.

Last Thursday, in the wake of Dwayne Jones signing with the Phoenix Suns, I wrote about some other D-League prospects that Smart Gilas might want to check out. Scott Schroeder of Ridiculous Upside singled out former University of Wisconsin center Greg Stiemsma as a promising player that should interest the Gilas brain trust.

In a story that came out yesterday in the Manila Standard Today, Rajko Toroman told Rey Joble that they were indeed looking at Stiemsma as their top choice. Scott emails me quickly: “Apparently the guys who run your team really do read your blog.” Well, Toroman has been known to make his presence felt around these parts.

(By the way, how about another scoop from Joble? Toroman was right there in the stadium last Friday, open for anyone to ask him questions, and Joble was the only one who bothered to ask him anything? What were the rest of the reporters doing, scratching their balls in the press room?)

Today, after scintillating performances in the D-League playoffs, Stiemsma gets called up by the Minnesota Timberwolves. While it’s already the last week of the NBA season, Stiemsma is thisclose to making it as an NBA regular that there’s probably zero chance that Gilas will be able to sign him. Imagine, if this Wolves thing works out, he’ll be backing up Darko next season!

According to Toroman, Smart Gilas will be looking at former Iowa State big man Jared Homan if things with Stiemsma don’t work out. It should be noted that Homan is currently playing a very important role as a starter for his current team in Greece, Maroussi BC, which made its first appearance in the Euroleague this season. It remains to be seen if Gilas would be able to entice someone like Homan out of a very high-profile gig in Europe to be on a team where, as former import Jamal Sampson put it, players are treated like kids by Toroman.

Just remember: if Shawn Daniels ends up being the naturalized player for Gilas, I called it here first.

Rafe Bartholomew makes an excellent point in the comments section of the previous post about Smart Gilas’ search for an import:

How solid were the Jones/Barron/Butch/Sims rumors to begin with? Just because Gilas is interested in the player doesn't mean they're about to sign. Also, thanks to the intrepid reporting of the PhilStar writers who cover Gilas, I never once saw a quote from any naturalization candidate or his agent that the interest was mutual. How serious were these guys about joining Gilas? We don't really know, all we heard were Frankie Lim and Noli Eala saying positive things, which is what they're supposed to do. It's really the media's failure to report these stories thoroughly.

Also, it seems like trying to naturalize a big man out of the D-League is a mistake, not because those guys are not the best players available -- they probably are -- but because their choice to earn pennies in the NBDL instead of big bucks in Europe and Asia means that these guys haven't given up on the NBA dream. They might be willing to come play a conference in the PBA after the D-league season, but they probably won't want a long-term, open-ended commitment like Gilas, which would take them off the NBA map for years and effectively end their careers at the highest level.

I hate to say it, but Giles may have been Gilas's best option.

I completely agree with him that most of the sportswriters who have been covering this whole affair (not just Philippine Star writers) have done a piss-poor job as reporters. I would dare say, though, that the Dwayne Jones signing was as close to happening as reported; I couldn’t imagine Gilas team manager Frankie Lim telling reporters that Jones was close to signing if he weren’t reasonably close to doing it. At the very least, Lim probably thought that he had a really good chance at getting Jones.

As an example, in a report by the Star’s Joey Villar about Jones’s possible signing with Gilas, Lim was quoted about the move. In his follow-up story, after Jones was called up by the Suns, Villar brought up the possibility of acquiring Courtney Sims without quoting Frankie Lim directly.

To be sure, there are still other talented big guys in the D-League. I asked Scott Schroeder of the excellent D-League blog Ridiculous Upside about names that Smart Gilas ought to look into, and he graciously wrote back with a list of the best bigs in the D-League. The list, he said, was the same one he made for an NBA coach looking for prospects:

PF (Pretty top heavy)
Alexander Johnson
Rob Kurz
Lance Allred
Rod Benson
Paul Davis
Brian Butch
Raymond Sykes
Sean Sonderleiter

C
Greg Stiemsma
Kurt Looby
John Bryant
Dwayne Jones
Earl Barron
Marcus Campbell
Michael Fey
Luke Nevill

I had to pick 8 guys. The italicized guys, I said, were those that I thought would have a chance at NBA prospects with a good Summer League or preseason next year - that might be a good place to start.

There's another Asia Challenge going on next week, too - there might be a few prospects there. As far as I can tell, the bigs on the D-League roster that's going will include just Noel Felix and either Alade Aminu (cut today by Miami) or Sean Sonderleiter.

Tough to tell who would be willing to commit to playing in the Phillipines for the duration is the only problem. I like Greg Stiemsma quite a bit and he's played in Korea, so that might make sense.

Like Rafe and Scott, I also think that getting any prospect to commit to playing for Gilas is very difficult. However, if Jones really was as close to signing as I thought he was, then Lim must have made a pretty serious offer to the leading rebounder of the D-League.

Curiously, former import Jamal Sampson was hesitant to sign up with Gilas because the team, then managed by SBP executive director Noli Eala, offered a much lower salary than what teams in the Chinese Basketball Association offered. I’m assuming that Lim is going to these D-League guys with a much better package than is being offered in China, lest he be laughed out of the gym by his prospects.

If this is true, where would Lim get a bigger pile of money to offer to imports? It’s not inconceivable that SBP President and Smart Gilas sponsor Manny Pangilinan would increase the budget for that import’s salary.

Or perhaps, Lim’s takeover of Gilas operations cut a lot of fat. One of the first orders of business for the San Beda coach was to dismantle a Smart Gilas team management committee composed of Butch Antonio, Rico Meneses, Bernie Atienza and Joey Bautista, all personalities identified with Eala.

The four guys were reassigned by Eala to work elsewhere with the SBP. However, as Eala himself confirmed, they are no longer part of the payroll of the Smart Gilas program.

You almost have to feel sorry for Frankie Lim, who has worked tirelessly since taking over the management of Smart Gilas lining up import prospects for national team coach Rajko Toroman. Lim, if various newspaper reports were to be believed, was days away from coming to terms with prospect Dwayne Jones before the D-League’s best rebounder was called up by the Phoenix Suns.

Lim’s import search had been extensive, so much so that the excellent D-League blog Ridiculous Upside even wrote a snarky post titled, “Want to play for the Filipino National Team? Be tall, play in the D-League.”

What struck me about Lim’s efforts was just how ambitious it was. Consider the profile of the past two Smart Gilas imports. CJ Giles, while an exciting athletic prospect, had a lot of baggage and didn’t exactly tear the D-League apart. Sampson, on the other hand, just happened to be in Asia looking to sign in China when he was called in by Gilas. As talented as these guys were, their NBA prospects were pretty slim; the gulf between them and the Association was as wide as the Pacific Ocean.

In contrast, the guys Toroman and Lim had been looking at this past couple of months had been on the cusp of making it to the big show. One prospect, Courtney Sims was far and away the D-League’s best player last season, earning looks from teams like Phoenix and New York. Those same teams snagged up Jones and another prospect, former Red Bull import Earl Barron, late this season. It takes a lot of chutzpah for Lim to come in and tell those guys to eschew their NBA dreams to come play for Gilas.

It almost worked too, in the case of Jones, and that would have been a major coup for the efforts of the the Gilas build-up for the 2011 Fiba-Asia qualifier for the London Olympics. Jones was far and away the best big man in the D-League this season, beasting for 16 rebounds per game on top of 17.6 points. To compare, the next best rebounder in the D-League, Brian Butch, only grabs 11.9 boards per. (Butch has also since been called up to the NBA, signing with the Denver Nuggets.)

Valley of the Suns took a close look at Jones’s game and how he would fit alongside Steve Nash and company, and how he might help mitigate the loss of starting center Robin Lopez to injury:

On the scoring side of those double-doubles, Jones averaged 17.6 points per game while not a focal point of the offense for Austin. As the screener on pick-and-roll situations, Jones set solid picks while not normally looked at on the roll.

The majority of his points came from offensive rebounds, where he averaged over six per game, and free throws. Jones doesn’t have a go-to move in the low post, but his knack for drawing fouls is uncanny. I’ve thought before that Jones’ game is perfect for a big man rounding out an NBA team’s bench.

One has to wonder, in fact, what took Jones this long to catch on with a team. Earlier this season, two teams, the Portland Trailblazers and the Dallas Mavericks, brought Jones in for a tryout, and neither seemed impressed enough with the center to bring him in. That left the door momentarily open for Lim to come in with the Gilas offer.

Jones failing to make either team could be a red flag, or a red herring. Mark from Sham Sports even cracked, “I'm starting to think Dwayne Jones walks into workouts and shits all over GM's desks. He should have had a multi year NBA career by now.” On the odd chance that there really was something off with Jones, then hey, maybe Gilas dodged a bullet.

Meanwhile, reports now say that the team is looking at bringing in Sims, who just finished a stint in Puerto Rico. I hope that Lim finally settles the import search, both for his sake because he has worked so hard at this, and for the sake of the team’s Internet fanboys, because they die a little inside every time there’s more bad news about the team’s buildup.

At the rate we’re going, we might end up naturalizing ‘the Incredible Bulk’ Shawn Daniels for Smart Gilas. I don’t think the fanboys will be too happy about that but me? I think it’d be AWESOME.