Is Duke point guard Kyrie Irving the best fit for the Cleveland Cavaliers? (USPRESSWIRE)

Jalen Rose has been down this road before. His recent comments about Duke University players sparked a media frenzy, so you would think Rose would back off slamming Duke for a little while.

Well, Rose was at again recently when he suggested that the Cavaliers should take Arizona’s Derrick Williams with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft over Duke’s Kyrie Irving, who most basketball experts say is the best player in the draft.

“I’d take him with the No. 1 pick,” Rose said of Williams. “Look at the NCAA Tournament. He jumped off the television. He’s a 6-10 player that can play the 3 and 4, shoot the three, jump off one foot, two feet, and if I’m the Cavs I’m trying to get two for a dollar in the top four.”

Rose continued, “I take [Williams] No. 1 and then I take [Brandon] Knight fourth, from Kentucky, so now I get a point guard that’s dynamic.”

Rose says if you’re going to take a point guard with the No. 1 overall selection he better be a great athlete, someone who is off-the-charts in terms of speed and power.

“Look at where the game is going,” Rose said. “You got Derrick Rose, you got Russell Westbrook, you got Deron Williams. These guys are tremendous athletes.

“Not that Kyrie Irving is not gonna be a good player, I think he is. But he’s not a fantastic athlete.”

Rose’s point is that Irving is not going to be catching lobs and throwing it down over 7-footers at the rim. Irving has all the ingredients to be a solid point guard in the NBA, but Rose doesn’t consider him an “explosive” player, someone who can take over a game and dominate with his athleticism.

Rose may be on to something here because, even though Irving only played one year (half a season really) at Duke, he still fits the mold of a Duke point guard.

“Let’s talk about the point guards from Duke: we’ve had Williams Avery, Bobby Hurley, Jay Williams, Chris Duhon. That’s what [Irving] has to fight.”

Rose added, “Just like a quarterback in college that comes from a certain system who has to who that he can make it in the NBA, Duke point guards have to prove the same thing. It’s not a diss, it’s a fact.”

In Rose’s defense, coming out of high school, Irving and Knight were neck-and-neck in terms of ranking, and some even had Knight ahead of Irving. So, why all of a sudden did Irving jump to the head of the class when Knight played just as well in his one season at Kentucky?

Rose makes a valid point, and the Cavs should seriously think about taking Williams at No. 1 and hope that Knight will be there at No. 1.

Former NBA player and Michigan standout Jalen Rose, right, arrive at the Nokia Theatre with Terrell Owens during the ESPY Awards in Los Angeles. (GETTY IMAGES)

First of, I like Jalen Rose. He’s very well-spoken and honest. Not enough athletes today spew opinions with brutal honesty, and Rose is in the minority. However, Rose went a little too far with his raw, uncensored commentary regarding the black players on Duke University in ESPN’s documentary feature on “The Fab Five” that aired on Selection Sunday.

In describing his hatred for Duke, the outspoken leader of University of Michigan’s famous freshman class in 1991 revealed that he thought Duke’s black athletes, specifically Grant Hill, were subservient to the white establishment and called them an “Uncle Tom.”

To borrow a line from my good friend Jason Reid, who is a columnist for the Washington Post, the term “Uncle Tom” is the worst thing one black man can direct at another black man. Reid later wrote that Rose’s “Uncle Tom” reference, misguided as it is, asserts that academic achievement and professional accomplishment affluence somehow reduces or eliminates a person’s “blackness.”

Rose had an opportunity to soften his stance and recant his statement on ESPN’s First Take a day later, but he wasn’t exactly apologetic.

Rose said, “As a 17-year-old recruit, that’s exactly how I felt. At that time, I felt like I was not good enough for certain stages. That’s just a fact. But also that’s something I used as motivation. Now, I understand what their program represents because I’m a mature adult. I know that it’s a private school. I know that do recruit from well-to-do, affluent families. But also understand some of the reason why so they do see some of their players selling their goods for money. Also, they want to get kids that would represent the program the right way. I get all of that. But, that’s the minority. I was speaking for the majority. That’s exactly how I felt then. It wasn’t an individual, it wasn’t somebody 20 years later.”

When Rose was asked if Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski would recruit him now, Rose said “I think would recruit my kids.”

“I don’t think they would have recruited me. I never seen Coach K in Detroit. But that’s just me,” Rose said.

Rose was an honor roll student in high school and is clearly well versed in cultural issues. But, he’s way off base in his assessment of Hill or any of Duke’s black athletes. Just because Hill grew up in affluence doesn’t reduce his level ethnicity or his standing in the black community. To call Hill an “Uncle Tom” is absolutely absurd.

Rose explains that his comment had nothing to do with being a racist. Basically, Rose said “it’s being somebody who is socially conscience and you’re paying attention to what’s going on around you.”

Certain schools recruit a certain kind of guy. That is a fact. But, again, a black player shouldn’t be called an “Uncle Tom” just because he joined a private school in Durham, N.C. It’s undeserving. When I was 17, I may not have been smartest kid on the block but I was smart enough to know that you don’t call a black kid an “Uncle Tom.”

The bottom line is this, Duke should be allowed to recruit its type of players as well as Michigan should be able to recruit its type of players. As much as Rose was correct in saying that Duke would not consider a player like him because of his background, he was wrong in bringing up the term “Uncle Tom.” Rose could have made his point just as clearly had he just said Duke recruited a bunch of rich kids.

Joel Huerto is the editor and publisher of OneManFastBreak.net. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/onemanfastbreak.

Whether it is self-inflicted or not, the Washington Bullets…oops, I mean Wizards…have been a huge disappointment this season, and the team’s problems go beyond Arenas and his penchant for carrying weapons and storing them at the Verizon Center in case someone calls him out on a gambling debt.

Washington is only 11-22 for the season and has dropped seven of its last 10 games. The latest loss was a 121-98 thrashing at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers on Jan. 6.

Those are very dismal numbers for a team that was projected to be a playoff contender in the East, boasts three legitimate NBA All-Stars in Arenas, Caron Butler and Antawn Jamison, and owns a resume that includes four postseason appearances in the last five years and an offense – when all three stars are healthy – considered one of the best in the league.

And, as if the team needed more bad news, Arenas was recently involved in a troubling gun incident with teammate Javaris Crittenton in which Arenas admitted to pulling out unloaded guns from a strong box stashed in his locker.

Arenas – who has five years remaining on a $111 million contract he signed in 2008 – says it was all part of a “practical joke” and denied threatening or assaulting anyone. He reasoned that he brought four guns to the Verizon Center to keep in his locker in order to get them out of his house and away from his children.

Well, NBA commissioner David Stern didn’t find the humor in Arenas’ so-called prank, as Stern suspended Arenas indefinitely without pay and the incident is still under investigation by the police.

Even some of his peers are having a tough time defending Arenas.

“Gilbert has been a little quirky at times on and off the court. This should get him straight,” former NBA player and current TV analyst Jalen Rose said on ESPN’s First Take. “If he doesn’t get a felony, he doesn’t get any jail time and he has a misdemeanor or anything less, if I’m David Stern I suspend him for the rest of the season.

“[The season] is only halfway through, and the Washington Wizards are the most disappointing team in the league anyway,” Rose continued. “They’ll get a lottery pick and it gives them and their fans a fresh start for next season.”

Washington’s implosion was definitely a mystery to many oddsmakers and handicappers, including Las Vegas Sports Consultants, which had the Wizards at 50-1 to win the NBA championship at the start of the season. Did the oddsmakers simply overrate them?

“Absolutely we overrated them,” said Mike Seba, sports book manager with Las Vegas Sports Consultants, who dropped the Wizards down to 200-1 in his latest power rankings.

“This is a classic case of the parts being greater than the whole,” said Seba, who added that the Wizards’ troubles started well before the Arenas-Crittenton situation.

“You have great individual players, but this is a team that doesn’t play together. They don’t look like the same team as they did before,” he said. “There are not enough basketballs to keep them happy. Too many offensive weapons and there’s a lot of animosity.”

It’s quite obvious that the Wizards are not playing with the kind of free-flowing style that they enjoyed under former coach Eddie Jordan and, so far this season, the players have not bought into Flip Saunders’ more structured approach.

“Flip has tried to come in and change things. With this kind of a team, they’re better off letting them play,” Seba explained.

When Arenas, Jamison and Butler are in sync, which was in the 2006-07 season, the Wizards were fourth in the NBA in scoring (104.3). This season, they are in the middle of the pack at 17th (99.1).

But whatever the team’s issues are, the firestorm starts and ends with the eccentric Arenas, the noted self-proclaimed goof ball whose been known to drift in and out of reality from time to time.

Often times, Arenas seems to be more concerned with his statistics than his team’s success, which hasn’t exactly endeared himself to his teammates. “Arenas is not the same player since the injury,” Seba said. “He’s still a good player but he just doesn’t like the players around him. He’s kind of an individualist.”

When he was healthy, Arenas was a 28-point scorer and comparable to Kobe Bryant when in comes to late-game heroics. But after two injury-plagued seasons that limited him to just 15 games from 2007-09, Arenas’ scoring average has dipped to 22.7 and the multiple surgeries have robbed him of his explosiveness off the dribble.

Now with this latest gun incident, Arenas may have robbed himself of his freedom.

“The problem for Gilbert in dealing with the commissioner is he’s not the first NBA player to have issues with guns,” Rose said. “You saw it with Stephen Jackson and now you see it in the news with former Net Jayson Williams. Gilbert may unfortunately be the example, and you don’t want to be the example like Michael Vick was.”

This article also appears on Covers.com.