When Joe Alexander finally strayed from his quest for solitude, he made something of a promise. You see, every so often WVU will hit the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden when the New York Knicks are in town. It’s not hard to get a seat to a game, but it can be difficult to get a good seat even for the Trail Blazers, as was the case last year.

So as the conversation with Joe wandered into different areas and came to an end, I pleadinglyjokingly asked that if by some weird quirk the team that drafts him is in NYC just before the Big East Tournament, or if the Knicks drafted him and they were home just before the Big East Tournament, could he perhaps leave me some tickets.  

“I can do that, but you have to do something for me.”
“… OK …”
“You need to write another story about Mazzulla’s parrot. That was one of our favorites.”
“Deal!”

So I caught up with Mazzulla the other day and told him the deal: I needed to write a second story about the parrot his roommates, Da’Sean Butler, Johnnie West and Cam Thoroughman, gave him for his birthday last year. The four of them then nurtured the bird, trained it to conquer obstacle courses, spoiled it with every bird toy imaginable and slowly taught it to speak. It was time for an update.

Mazzulla laughed. “We got rid of that thing a while ago.”

This, of course, was about the same time I’d driven about half of the trip to Pittsburgh to see the players in the Pittsburgh Basketball Club’s Pro-Am League, only for Mazzulla to alert me the players weren’t going that day. 

It seems to me, though, that Alexander can solve all of these problems. He can easily buy a parrot and a pay for a caretaker and also buy me tickets to whatever Knicks game precedes the Big East Tournament because he’s come into quite a bit of money.

Rookie forward Joe Alexander signed a contract with the Milwaukee Bucks on Tuesday, a deal that guarantees him $4.15 million over the first two years.

Under the league’s rookie salary scale, the Bucks hold options for the third and fourth years of the deal, at $2.3 million and $2.9 million, respectively.