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This week's fantasy hoops column on NBA.com is live... picks for the week include:
I'm watching the game on ESPN tonight, and that kid playing small forward for Syracuse is just great. I think he may have a future in the NBA.
The 'cuse can't seem to stop Nowitzki, though.
Possibly the best ESPN commercial since Charlie Steiner appeared in war paint...
TrueHoop has the complete set. The wax figure of Jeff Van Gundy in the spot with KG, Pierce and Allen looks particularly lifelike.
(UPDATE: Apparently these got yanked from YouTube... but are available from ESPN.com directly. Links and embedded file have been updated.)
Indiana University hired Kelvin Sampson despite the fact that he was facing NCAA sanctions for making illegal recruiting phone calls while at Oklahoma.
Hired him even though he was banned from making any phone calls to recruits.
So what happens, now that Sampson's been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, er... on the receiver... for the second time in two years?
An assistant is taking the fall, obviously.
Rob Senderoff, a 34-year-old assistant on Sampson's staff, will resign from his position as a result of the latest -- or is it the ongoing? -- scandal. Sampson is not expected to face any additional punishment from the NCAA -- though the university took away a scheduled $500,000 raise and one scholarship when reports of the illegal calls surfaced last month.
You could register your displeasure at the latest development -- and the fact that Sampson is apparently going to get away with this -- at FireCoachSampson.com, though you'll note a distinct lack of activity on that site.
Did we mention Indiana is expected to have a top-ten team this year?
Think that has anything to do with the apparent lack out outrage?
Wondering what would have happened if a coach that wasn't running one of the NCAA's flagship programs pulled a stunt like this?
Me too.
The St. John's basketball program ranks with programs like North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky and Duke in terms of all-time wins*. But the Red Storm has fallen on hard times of late, bottoming out badly during the tail end of the Mike Jarvis regime with off-court controversies, player transfers, and NCAA sanctions.
And lots and lots of losses.
The university is taking steps to right the ship and emulate some of the other programs on that list.
Unfortunately, one of those key steps is "soak the fan base for every cent you can extract."
St. John's recently unveiled a new method for assigning seat locations for season ticket-holders -- the best seats will go to those who have donated the most cash to the university.
This is a common practice at universities where basketball tickets are as hard-to-get as opening night seats for Young Frankenstein the Musical. But the Johnnies play to mostly-empty houses, except when teams like Connecticut or Duke are in town.
Perhaps the athletic department should consult with one of the professors teaching Economics 101. See, you're only supposed to raise prices when demand is high... not when your squad has been picked to finish 14th out of 16 teams in the preseason coaches' poll.
* Remarkably -- or perhaps not so remarkably -- the NCAA hasn't updated that list since 2004.
Fair & Balanced Reporting
One note on the New York Post article linked above... the author quotes Ron Naclerio, a "season ticket holder since 1975" as saying:
They are saying, 'Thanks for 30 years of loyalty - see you later,' and the last few years have been hard to watch. "I understand that it is a business, and you have to generate money, but it doesn't seem right that it has to be on the backs of the loyal fans."The article doesn't identify Naclerio as the coach of Cardozo High School -- or as someone who has reportedly campaigned for an assistant coach position with the Johnnies on more than one occasion.
There are more rules governing recruiting of big-time college ballplayers than there are governing what is and isn't allowed in carry-on baggage. And yet, in both cases, people will continue to find loopholes.
Here's a recent example, as reported on the ever-informative Redmen.com forum. Because this is a third-hand account and cannot be verified, I'll refer to the players and coaches involved in the vaguest of euphemisms.
A big-time college coach is speaking at a rubber chicken dinner/high school sports banquet. The town's star player is in attendance... but because the dinner is scheduled during a recruiting "quiet period," the coach cannot so much as say hello to the player without risking sanctions from the NCAA.
During the Q/A portion of the speech, the coach is asked what he looks for in a recruit. Without missing a beat, the coach goes on to describe, in great and obvious detail, the star player that he's not allowed to approach.
Legal? Probably.
Ethical? Questionable.
Effective? Let's just say the player in question will be suiting up for the coach in question next fall.
It appears that gambling among NBA referees is far more widespread... and far less serious... than many had feared.
ESPN's Chris Sheridan reports:
Emphasis mine. The "no referees had admitted to wagering with a bookie" part is sort of amusing, no? Was the league really expecting a lot of refs to step up and cop to placing bets with Chris Moltisanti and Paulie Walnuts behind the Bada Bing?Stern said an internal review had found that all of the league's 56 referees violated the contractual prohibition against engaging in gambling, with more than half of them admitting to placing wagers in casinos. But Stern said none of the violations was major, and no referees had admitted to wagering in a sports book or with a bookie.
Fantasy hoops enthusiasts take note: the first of my weekly columns was published today on NBA.com.
Once the season tips off, we'll use the column to find fantasy value from the players sitting on the waiver wire in most leagues... for this preseason installment, we're mostly looking at the guys -- like Portland's Martell Webster and Philly rookie Jason Smith -- who may earn jobs based on strong training camp performances or roster changes.
Here's a link to the full article -- feedback, as always -- is welcome.
Here are ten reasons to hate Red Sox fans.
We'll be using many of these to explain why we hate Celtics fans later this year, I'm afraid.
I'd like to thank the New York Jets for ending their season nice and early... gives me plenty of time to concentrate on hoops...
But while we're charting the demise of the J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets, I'd like to ask one question...
Please don't take this as heresy, Jets fans, but if Eric Mangini is so freakin' smart, why can't he come up with a defense in which his two big-ticket first-round draft pick keystones aren't liabilities?
Even when they were winning last season, the Jets' run defense was atrocious. People blamed the fact that DT Dewayne Robertson and MLB Jonathan Vilma aren't ideal fits for Mangini's preferred 3-4.
So here's my question...
Isn't it the job of the coach to play a system that maximizes the strengths of his players?
Laurence Frank wouldn't put Jason Kidd in the triangle offense and let Vince Carter or Richard Jefferson initiate plays from the wing... well, not for long, anyway. Terry Francona wouldn't ask Manny Ramirez to slap singles through the first-base hole or bunt runners over... or ask Big Papi to steal second.
So why does Mangini get a free pass for asking these guys to play a 3-4?
Most of the key players on the Jets defense were drafted when Herm Edwards was running the show, and playing a 4-3 "Cover Two" base D. Vilma and Robertson are well-suited to that system. They're both small for a 3-4... which makes the Jets very vulnerable up the middle... as evidenced by the fact that they made Kenny freakin' Watson look like Emmitt Smith yesterday.
Would Bill Belichick stick with a defense if he didn't have the right players for it?
C'mon, coach. You need to do better. (I hope.)
A couple of weeks ago, over on the NBA.com fantasy blogs, I questioned Allan Houston's judgement for even considering a comeback attempt with the Knicks.
I'm all for a comeback -- hell, the NBA could use as many Allan Houstons as possible. But the Knicks, aside from nostalgia and "ease of commute" from his home in Connecticut, were perhaps the worst possible destination. New York already had more than the max number of players under contract; in order for Houston to make the team, Isiah Thomas would have needed to cut at least two players. Meanwhile, there are several potential contenders who could use a spot-up shooter of Houston's skill. Why play for a potential cellar-dweller when he could chase a ring with the Cavs or Heat?
Apparently he's come around to my way of thinking -- Houston has left the Knicks, but hasn't ruled out one last shot at playing in the NBA. I'd like to see him land in Miami, in the Jason Kapono memorial "I'm going to stand still and wait for Shaq to pass out of a double-team" role.
Today's stories should be about the new-look Celtics, who pasted New York by 40.
Or about Kobe Bryant -- because everyone loves a good trade rumor.
Instead, we get a bunch of reminders that several NBA players, coaches and organizations seem to have problems treating women properly.
LL Cool J said it best... "Don't call it a comeback... I've been here for years."
Well, maybe not years.
And though I haven't been posting much, I've been active writing about basketball -- primarily fantasy basketball -- for NBA.com, Rotowire and Yahoo. (The Yahoo stuff is part of their premium package.) I also had several articles published in NBA.com's fantasy preview magazine, which is available now at the sorts of places where you buy magazines.
I'll post links to everything that's available without a subscription next few days. And then, as the season ramps up, I'll use this space to post notices about the fantasy articles I'm running on NBA.com, Rotowire or Fox -- and to write general hoops/sports notes.
Here's hoping you'll be along for the ride.
And yet, the most stunning thing I've read on ESPN.com this week came from a puff piece about The Simpsons.
Page 2's Jim Caple did a retrospective on the legendary Homer at the Bat episode. You've seen it, probably more than once... Mr. Burns hires a bunch of major leaguers -- Darryl Strawberry, Wade Boggs, Ozzie Smith, etc., as ringers for the power plant softball team... but all the players except Strawberry are knocked out of action in a series of bizarre mishaps.
Don Mattingly was one of the ringers -- banned from the team because of the unseemly length of his sideburns. For more than fifteen years, I'd assumed that Matt Groenig and company were poking fun at Yankee management, after they famously threatened Mattingly with a benching due to the length of his Indiana farmboy mullet.
Not so, says Donnie Baseball.
"Homer at the Bat" aired in February 1992 after the players had performed their voice-overs in the sound studio when they were in Los Angeles and Anaheim for games the previous season. "The weird thing," Mattingly said, is that he did his scene about Mr. Burns benching him for his long sideburns before the Yankees benched him for not getting a haircut in July 1991. "Everyone thought they wrote it in later but they didn't."That's just shocking. Makes me think that, perhaps, Steinbrenner has been looking to ol' Monty Burns as some sort of role model.
Interesting take on the NBA point-shaving case from The Wages of Wins. Their very well-reasoned point: the Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series (chronicled in the excellent movie and even better book Eight Men Out) didn't actually hurt baseball attendance any.
I'll buy that. But is it really an apt comparison?
After all, the public didn't even learn about the Black Sox until the next year. At the time, baseball didn't have one-one-hundredth the competition for an entertainment dollar that the NBA faces today. And just a year or two after the Black Sox, baseball's popularity exploded due to the emergence of a certain larger-than-life outfielder who played his home games in the Bronx and hit a lot of home runs.
A more apt comparison comes from TrueHoop, which discusses the last time NBA figures were implicated in point shaving. Yikes. Between that and the CCNY scandal, I'm getting the impression that basketball in the '50s was more staged than a Broadway musical.
Tremendous work by "calo2006" over on YouTube, cutting together all of Tim Donaghy's most questionable calls from Game 3 of the Spurs/Suns series.
In case you've been living under a large rock for the last week or so, you've probably heard about Don Imus' less-than-sensitive remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team. On the off-chance you haven't seen or heard the entire exchange, here's the transcript:
(For the record, the Spike Lee movie they're thinking of is School Daze... but that's neither here nor there.)DON IMUS: So, I watched the basketball game last night between -- a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women's final.
SID ROSENBERG: Yeah, Tennessee won last night -- seventh championship for [Tennessee coach] Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.
IMUS: That's some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and --
BERNARD McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.
IMUS: That's some nappy-headed hos there. I'm gonna tell you that now, man, that's some -- woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like -- kinda like -- I don't know.
McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.
IMUS: Yeah.
McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes -- that movie that he had.
IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough --
CHARLES McCORD: Do The Right Thing.
McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
IMUS: I don't know if I'd have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?
ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.
From SI.com's "Truth and Rumors" section today:
Publicist Howard Bragman, from a Los Angeles-based company called Fifteen Minutes, was spreading the word at the Leigh Steinberg Super Bowl party Saturday that a former NBA player he represents will be announcing publicly that he is gay on Valentine's Day. -- Chicago TribunePlease, oh god, please... let it be Doug Christie.
The NBA's marketing department used to be the envy of the sports world. Right now? Not so much. Check out the latest campaign -- featuring the Pussycat Dolls of all people.
Where do I begin? I could point out that the song is "holy monkey, mute the damned TV" bad... but that just scratches the surface. Consider:
