On the flip side, white European players are generally less physical than their American counterparts, as well as being demonstrably inferior on defense.

Here are the best players in each category.

Euros: Andrea Bargnani, Andris Biedrins, Jose Calderon, Rudy Fernandez, Pau Gasol, Zydrunas Ilglauskas, Andrei Kirilenko, Linas Kleiza, Nenad Krstic, Dirk Nowitzki, Mehmet Okur, Sasha Pavlovic, Peja Stojakovic, Hedo Turkoglu, Beno Udrih, and Sasha Vujacic.

Americans: Steve Blake, Matt Bonner, Nick Collison, Mike Dunleavy, Jeff Foster, Matt Harpring, Kirk Hinrich, Chris Kaman, Kyle Korver, David Lee, Mike Miller, Brad Miller, Troy Murphy, Brian Scalabrine, Wally Szczerbiak, and Luke Walton.

In a playoff series, I'll take the Europeans to beat the Americans four games to two.

Travels with Charley

This is Part II of a two-part story. To read Part I, please click here.

There were two serious structural problems in the beloved confines of the Wharton Fieldhouse:

There was an extremely narrow aisle separating both teams' benches from the first row of bleacher seats behind them, and the aisle was covered with a long flimsy strip of rug that was always wrinkled.

Even worse, the entrance to the visitors' locker room was immediately adjacent to an exit door.

It happened that after losing an extremely close and aggravating game to the Thunder, my players rode the rushing tide of the quickly exiting crowd and approached our locker room. However, the door to our space was locked, which meant that my sweating players had to stand in the hallway about a foot from the exit door waiting for someone to arrive with the proper key.

To add to the problem, standard procedure in the CBA was for a team's warm-ups to be taken from the bench to their locker room minutes before the game ended. This was done to prevent theft.

Worse still, the outside temperature was several degrees below zero. And because of the migration of the capacity crowd, the outside door stayed wide open.

Plus, the jamming of the crowd through this one door created a solid wall of wrong-way traffic that prohibited the players from battling their way back into the relative warmth of the court itself.

Freezing winds on bare sweating skins. I had visions of team-wide pneumonia.

Because I was trailing my players, I succeeded with great effort in making my back to the scorers' table. With as much restraint as I could muster — which wasn't much — I explained the situation to a security guard. His reaction was to shrug and claim he had no idea who might have the key.

I got the same reaction from the official scorer, who was still at the table collating the game stats.

By now, I was irate. Pounding my fist against the table, I started shouting: "Who has the blankety-blank key!"

Nobody knew nothing.

Intent on kicking down the locker room door, I quickly wheeled around ... and tripped on a huge wrinkle in the cheapo rug, lost my balance, and was about to fall head-first into the first row of bleacher seats.

But there was somebody sitting in my landing spot. A young boy, perhaps seven or eight, holding a plastic telephone. "It's for you, Charley," he said with a big smile.

To avoid crushing the boy, it was all I could to stretch out my arms so that they straddled the boy as they crashed into the seats. I suffered severe bone-bruises on the palms of each hand, and I couldn't prevent myself from slightly brushing the boy with my left shoulder.

The boy, of course, was frightened and started to cry.

"Sorry," I said. But I was distracted when a maintenance man hurried past me with the key in hand.

Okay, no harm done.

Right?

Wrong.

Headlines in the local newspapers and the local telecasts claimed that I was raging mad after the loss. I was so angry, in fact, that I had assaulted a young boy in the stands.

The league, of course, was ready to fine and suspend me. But I went unpunished when I told my side of the story.

In my subsequent visit to Wharton, the fans weren't quite so friendly.

After another "It's for you, Charley" routine, one loud-mouthed fan yelled this: "It's the state police, Charley! They want you to coach the team in Attica!"