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Jerry Colangelo Rumors

The chairman for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame announced the finalists for the Hall, and stuck around Friday after the likes of Dwyane Wade and Pau Gasol took the stage. He was part of the Suns’ expansion group, and he believes the league is ready for more teams now. “Personally, I do. OK, I do,” Jerry Colangelo told Yahoo Sports. “And I think you just hit on a couple of markets that make the most sense, [Seattle and Las Vegas].”
“The stars continue to come,” Colangelo said. “[Mikal] Bridges in Brooklyn, he gets 45 in his [third] game. That’s a new [star]. I don’t worry about, ‘Well, how are you going to populate these new teams?’ There’s plenty of talent and more stars on the rise. I think basketball is in great shape. I think the game has grown so much. And I can think back. I used to hear things said about other players in the league. Well, who’s gonna replace Oscar Robertson, who’s gonna replace Jerry West? Who’s gonna replace Bill Russell, there was another wave of people, and another wave and the waves keep coming.”
Jerry Colangelo, who sold the team to a group led by Sarver in 2004 for a then-record $401 million, told ESPN that he’s optimistic about the franchise’s path ahead. “I believe this — it’s one of the great markets in the country as it relates to the future,” Colangelo said. “It was a great free agent destination at one time. There’s no reason why it can’t be going forward.”
The also was a nod of appreciation to former NBA executive Jerry Colangelo, the chairman of the Hall of Fame, and to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and late NBA Commissioner David Stern, with Hardaway having offered years of contrition on the wake of anti-gay comments in 2007. Hardaway called the three, “men who never wavered in their belief in me.”
But the Basketball Hall of Fame is different from its brethren in two striking ways. The first is that the other halls focus only on inducting members from their sports’ professional ranks in North America, whereas Naismith encompasses all levels and genders of the entire sport globally: the NBA, WNBA, college, high school, international, men’s, women’s — you name it. This is the case despite the fact that there are halls of fame for college basketball (in Kansas City), women’s basketball (in Knoxville, Tennessee) and international basketball (the FIBA hall in Madrid). “I think that sets us apart,” says Jerry Colangelo, the hall’s chairman since 2009. “We represent the game of basketball, on all levels. And whether there are other hall of fames within basketball doesn’t matter. That’s fine.”