Rafe Bartholomew
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Rafe Bartholomew’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Absolutely. And players like Steph, Dame, Trey Young have actually had full seasons in their career when their average made three came from beyond 27 feet. Oh, Caitlin Clark had hit this, by the way. Her average made three is like 28 something. They're players who it's not, they're not looking to shoot it from that distance. But if you put a line there.
Sure. So since the very beginning of the league, all 50 years ago, PBA teams have traditionally hired one foreign reinforcement player to beef up the local lineups, to add flavor to the game, to bring sort of that American style that, especially if you think back to the early days of the PBA, they couldn't just pop on TV and watch great American athletes.
So they did the next best thing, send someone back to the States, find the best players they could, the best players outside of the NBA, and pay them to come play for the PBA.
They wanted the Goldilocks amount of foreign star. And that, at least in the PBA, turns out to be one player. And they also think about a Goldilocks level of height. Just how tall should... Because it is a shorter league, right?
The traditional height limit for an import is 6'6". And so they hire players, and the first thing that they have to do is pass the height test. They measure them every time. You get off the plane.
Up to the 90s, the league measured imports standing up. But what they found was that there are too many ways to game that system. Players would try to lean a little bit just to get an extra inch off, or they would bend their knees a little bit. And even though, and there are pictures of this, they would have team and league officials pressing on their knees to try and straighten them out.
Incredible. The players would just hold tight, lock them up and say, no, this is how I stand.
And so the league's response to this was to move to a system in which they measure player imports' heights laying down. So you have to go to the league office and lay down there for them. And so I'm curious, what do the imports then think of the four-point line? Most of them didn't know that the league was going to have a four-point line when they first got hired.
But the traditional role of imports on PBA teams is to be the leading scorer. Get your points, get 30, get 40. So the imports who are expected to do the most scoring are also the players who have the brightest green light to put up that shot. And they're also some of the ones who've been the most aggressive in taking it so far.
Played college ball at Colorado. He played there with Derek White. Made it to the league on a couple of 10-day contracts. And again, later in his career with the Dallas Mavericks, been in the G League, played in Germany, Poland, Israel.
So in George's case, he was coming off an injury and had been rehabbing and... I didn't have, you know, any real offers in Europe or anywhere like that.
Because the team that hired him started the season with another player who was not scoring as much as they needed him to. And... Then they reached out, you know, they looked around. They actually wanted another player who shares the same agent as George. And that player wound up going to play in another country. And so the agents reached out to the team and said, well, we do have George King.
He's 6'6". He fits the mold. He can shoot.
And after he goes through that, he's able to go to his first practice and suit up for this team called the Blackwater Bossing.
Blackwater in the Philippines is the name of a men's cosmetics company. And Blackwater specifically is, it's like Axe body spray. It's a cologne. And bossing basically means boss. So welcome, George King, to the Blackwater bossing. You are the bossing of bossings now.
Well, he didn't even know that it was part of the league when they hired him or when he arrived in Manila or even, to tell you the truth, when he went to his first couple of practices with his team because that team, which rents its gym space for practice, is not allowed to put a four-point line on the practice floors.
So George King doesn't really find out that he's going to have this potent weapon until he gets to the arena for his first game and finds out it's right there. My team, no one knew who I was.
And it, you hear him talking about it. It's like he discovered the superpower that he had, that no one else was either ballsy enough to do or good enough to do at the same rate that he could.
He is all in on this shot. He attempted more fours than threes. And once he realized, once it was unlocked for him, he started looking for it. He wanted to step back and shoot fours. He wanted to shoot them as a trailer. But let's talk about that statistic nerd thing for a second here. 40% from four, Is 80% on twos. You hear in the NBA, 50, 40, 90.
What would it be in the PBA with the four-point shot? It sounds crazy. Shooting 25% on four-pointers.
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