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Popeye Jones to Denver?
Marc Stein: Popeye Jones has emerged a strong candidate to join Mike Malone’s coaching staff in Denver, league sources say. Jones had a successful playing stint in Denver and just saw his hockey-playing sons Seth Jones and Caleb Jones team up in Chicago via two trades by the Blackhawks.
With the Stanley Cup Final starting tonight, he’s rooting for the Predators because their franchise has never won. He’s also a fan of Nashville defenseman P.K. Subban. “It’s tough because one of my best friends is (Pittsburgh assistant coach) Rick Tocchet,” Barkley said. He said his NBA buddies have started paying more attention to the NHL because of Seth Jones. He's the son of former NBA player and long-time coach Popeye Jones.
Jay-Z's foray into sports agency is getting mixed reviews. True, he's signed Robinson Cano, Victor Cruz, Geno Smith and is rumored to be in line to rep the top picks in the NBA (Nerlens Noel) and NHL (Seth Jones) draft. But he has problems...not 99 of them but enough. The NBA won't certify him till he divests his minority share in the Nets and the MLB players union thinks maybe he should dump his interest in Barclays Center, on whose board he sits. Now, the NFL players union wants to know if he had an unfair advantage in signing Smith. He's not certified yet (and there's the issue of the NFL players union requiring agents to have a college degree.)
Seth Jones probably should have wound up a basketball player. He is tall, with a great vertical leap, and his father is Popeye Jones, who played 11 years in the N.B.A. and is now an assistant coach with the Nets. But instead, Seth Jones, 18, is projected to be a top pick in the N.H.L. draft and may be on his way to becoming hockey’s first African-American star. “I’d be shocked myself if I heard a story like that,” Jones said, when asked if people are surprised by the combination of a basketball father and a hockey son. “Me and my two brothers all play hockey, so it was weird, I guess, that none of us played basketball.”
On the ice he is a commanding presence, a hard hitter. But more often he is the rare defenseman who can control a game’s tempo with his stickhandling and passing — a “full-package defenseman,” in the words of Phil Housley, the United States coach. Probably not what anyone expected from a son of Popeye Jones. “No one wants to live in their father’s footsteps,” Seth Jones said this week when the United States team held a three-day training camp at the Rangers’ practice rink in Greenburgh, N.Y., before heading to Europe. “I think the time will come when I stop getting those questions and everyone knows the story. That’s just my family and my background and part of my life.”
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You may remember Popeye from his brief stint with the Celtics, or his years as a well-traveled but serviceable rebounder, or his numerous coaching jobs around the league or his role as captain of the NBA’s all-time All-Ugly team. (Dale Ellis, Gheorghe Muresan, Jeff Hornacek and Sam Cassell round out the starting five). But I bet you didn’t know that Jones’ son is currently one of the best hockey prospects in the entire world. (I didn’t either, until I read about it this morning on Ben Rohrbach’s tumblr.) Seth Jones is a projected top-three pick in next year’s NHL Entry Draft and the 17-year-old is USA Hockey’s top rated underage prospect. He’s also the son of a well-traveled NBA player and coach. “I guess when you sit back and think about it, it is odd for a professional basketball player’s son to play hockey at such a high level,” Popeye Jones said in a phone interview with CSNWashington.com.
Seth Jones – whose Western Hockey League rights were acquired by Portland from Everett this season – is one of the top junior prospects in the country. The captain of the under-18 team with the National Hockey Development Program, he would have been one of the top 10 picks in this year’s NHL draft, though he was too young to be eligible.
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