My NHL picks are looking fine thus far — Ovechkin stole one from the Rangers, but the pesky Sean Avery returns for game two and, to my mind, that spells power-play chances for the Blueshirts; and the Sabres have taken away the home-ice advantage from the Flyers, but that’s OK by me! — so why not toss out some NBA predictions?
Heat over 76ers in five. We might even have a Chris Bosh sighting. (Zing!)
Bulls sweep Pacers. Rose wears Number 1 for a reason.
Hawks upset Magic in seven.
(Homer alert!) Knicks in six, baby — Shaq or no Shaq (preferably no Shaq). The Knicks can’t defend, but the Celts can’t rebound. Here’s to hoping Rondo’s funk continues.
Spurs over Griz in six. Five if Ginobili’s elbow doesn’t keep him out long.
Mavs over Blazers in six.
Lakers sweep Hornets. Lebron Schmlebron. Kobe may be a creep, but he’s the league’s best one-on-one player on both sides of the court.
Thunder over Nuggets in seven. Kendrick Perkins averages 10 boards a game — and he won’t be wearing Celtics green. (Zing!)
If you missed John Miller’s post below, the Goldwater Institute in Arizona is leading the fight to keep taxpayer money from subsidizing the city of Glendale’s proposed financing of the local hockey team, the Coyotes. A great interview with Goldwater’s Clint Bolick discussing the issue here.
Watch until the end when Bolick asks Senator McCain, who is in favor of the taxpayer-funded deal, to put his own money up rather than rely on taxpayer bucks.
So, will the President meet with Kobe Bryant, as he has in years past, if the Lakers win the NBA championship? If an alleged sexual-assault didn’t stop the smiles, I really don’ see why a little “f***ing f****t” between friends should keep the president from his photo-op.
In the wake of the Barry Bonds verdict — the retired slugger was convicted of a single count of obstruction of justice — Bob Costas unleashed the fury on MLB Network:
Seventy-three is not an authentic number. Seven-sixty-two is not an authentic number. … The authentic single season season home run champion is Roger Maris. The authentic career home run king is Hank Aaron. You would have to think the world is flat to believe anything other than that.
As George Will might say, “Well.”
Bonds almost certainly used performance enhancing drugs, as did many of his peers, but lest we forget about our National Pastime:
Babe Ruth never had to face African-American pitchers.
Roger Maris competed at a time when amphetamines and other dangerous, performance-enabler “greenies” were everywhere.
Cocaine was plentiful in 1970s and 80s clubhouses.
Hundreds of players have cheated, from runners stealing signs to pitchers using emery boards and other foreign substances to batters lying about whether they were hit with a pitch.
Are we really qualified to make judgments as to whose home-run numbers are legit and whose are to be discarded?
By the way, much has been made about how Bonds was 37 when he broke the single-season home run record. As former relief pitcher Bob Tufts has pointed out:
Hank Aaron had his highest HR total (47), highest SLG (.669), highest OPS (1.074) and highest OPS+ (194) [when he was 37 years old]. His best 3 year HR total was from ages 35 to 37, and he hit 40 HR’s at age 39. … Do you really want to go there?
Whadduya say, Mr. Costas? Will you go there for us flat-earth types?
To paraphrase our President, “This is not the Chavez Ravine I thought I knew.”
Growing up in Los Angeles, I’ve been to more Dodgers games than I can count. I still have the felt pennant commemorating their winning of the 1974 NLCS, complete with the stain from a Carnation chocolate ice cream when I used the pennant, much to my father’s chagrin, as a napkin. My last game was in 1988 before I moved to New York City and I ended up catching a foul ball off Kirk Gibson.
In California, you can get your driver’s license at sixteen, which meant the freedom to go to a game whenever you wanted. For the life of me, I can’t remember my parents ever expressing the faintest hint of concern that I was spending the night at a Dodger game with friends. Everything else they worried about, but not a Dodgers game.
Timing and location are everything. Throw in a relentless work ethic, and it is easy to understand why Pompano Beach High’s Stephanie Pellitteri will join two Orlando-area athletes Wednesday in a historic signing with Florida State.
Pellitteri was believed to be the first to commit to a sand volleyball scholarship when she announced in February that she will play for the Seminoles next spring in the NCAA’s inaugural season of the sport better known as beach volleyball.
Former South Lake High (Groveland) standouts Aurora Newgard and Jeassica McGregor followed her lead, and the three will make it official at a signing party 6 p.m. Wednesday at JB’s on the Beach in Deerfield Beach.
It is an appropriate spot. Pellitteri lives within walking distance of Deerfield Beach. It is where she developed a passion for beach volleyball after joining the fledgling Club Beach Dig junior program nearly five years ago.
“I’m making history, which is really exciting,” said Pellitteri, who helped lead Pompano Beach’s indoor team to the Class 3A region semifinals last fall. “My dream was I wanted to play in college. I was looking at playing indoor, but I always loved playing beach volleyball.”
State-level free-market think tanks can struggle for attention–but the Goldwater Institute is basking in it right now, as it fights a government deal to keep the Phoenix Coyotes in Glendale, Ariz.
Last night, during the Versus broadcast of the Red Wings-Coyotes playoff game, the Goldwater Institute and its president Darcy Olsen came up in conversation. How’s that for having an impact?
About a month ago, I blogged on Goldwater and the Coyotes. About a week ago, George F. Will devoted his column to the subject.
The City of Glendale has been negotiating a deal, much of it taking place behind closed doors, to help businessman Matthew Hulsizer purchase the Phoenix Coyotes. The deal would have Glendale give Mr. Hulsizer $100 million to help purchase the Coyotes, money the City would raise through the sale of bonds. Glendale would also pay Mr. Hulsizer $97 million to manage the Jobing.com Arena over a five-year period.
In return Glendale would get parking rights—rights that documents show Glendale already owns. The City has given the impression that it would use revenues from parking to repay the bonds. However, if the parking revenues do not reach $100 million, Glendale has promised taxpayer money to close the gap—a blatant violation of the Arizona Constitution’s Gift Clause.
To show that the blame-the-victim mentality is not confined to rape cases, here’s a sportswriter who thinks that if that Giants fan at Dodger Stadium didn’t want to get beaten up, he shouldn’t have dressed so provocatively:
Maybe someone can ask Stow, if he ever comes out of his coma, why he thought it was a good idea to wear Giants’ gear to a Dodgers’ home opener when there was a history of out-of-control drunkenness and arrests at that event going back several years. . . .
Obviously, not every fan who wears his team’s jersey to a game is looking for someone from “the enemy” to beat up. But maybe somebody should do a psychological study to find out if all those game jerseys have contributed to the new mob mentality that seems to exist in the stands these days.
For those readers who might not know some of the “finer points” of that sport from up north, here’s a short explanation of the rules from Denis Lemieux, goalie for the Charleston Chiefs:
For those of who horrified to find Right Field talking about soccer, take comfort: the NHL playoffs start tomorrow night. Old-time hawkey! Eddie Shore!
Well, maybe not old-time hockey. There are a lotta hot-weather teams in the NHL’s second season this year. The NHL is fast becoming global-warming public enemy Number One. Anyway . . .
My eighth-seeded Rangers make the trip down to the capital to take on top-seeded Alex Ovechkin and a buncha other guys. [I'll take the Blueshirts in six.]
The (most likely) Sidney Crosby–less Penguins host the Tampa Bay Lightning (bless them). [Lightning round!]
The champion Chicago Blackhawks travel to Vancouver to face the powerful Canucks. [I'll take the Sedins in a sweep.]
Detroit’s Flying Hubcaps host the Phoenix Coyotes. [The Red Wings' balanced offense will be too much for the desert dogs.]
The Predators of Nashville (a.k.a., Hockey Town, USA) travel to Anaheim to take on the Disney Ducks. [Quack -- but Nashville's defense and penalty-killing stretch this series to seven games.]
The three remaining series kick off Thursday. We’ve got a great Original Six matchup in Beantown, Canadiens at Bruins [Habs in six!]; Sabres at Flyers [Blech: Flyers in six]; and the all-Cali matchup, Kings at Sharks [Marleau and Thornton make L.A. afraid to go in the water -- San Jose in five].
I agree with pretty much everything that Brian Anderson had to say about the Celtics — that as Rondo goes so goes the team, that the Perk-Robinson trade was a mistake — but my jaw dropped when he wrote that “basketball is the most team-oriented of sports.” Basketball, of all the major sports, may be the least team-oriented. Look no further than the Cleveland Cavaliers, who in one season went from playoff material (some said championship material) with King James to basement dwellers without him.
With only five players on the court at a time, and with most of the key starters playing 75 percent of the game, the impact that an individual player has on the outcome of an individual basketball game is huge — more than in any other sport.
Which sport is the most team-oriented? Football, by a long shot. An individual player, even the quarterback, is only on the field half the game (if both teams’ time of possession were the same), and even then he’s only one of eleven players. (Tom Brady, the Lebron James of football, was replaced by Matt Cassel for the majority of the 2008 season, and the Patriots didn’t skip a beat.)
Being (at best) a casual fan of the English Premier League, I had last paid any heed to West Ham United two Saturdays ago in a home match against first-place Manchester United. I had woken up in time to watch the second half on ESPN2. Before doing so, though, I flipped through the most recent soccer thread on Baseball Think Factory and took note ofpost no. 10:
I have a feeling the second half of this game is going to be like the German attack at the end of Saving Private Ryan, with West Ham as Tom Hanks and company.
Sure enough, after perhaps 20 minutes of the second half had elapsed . . . blitzkrieg! Man U scored four unanswered goals in quick succession, three off the leg of Wayne Rooney.
Anyway, Right Field commenter “Otis Nixon” yesterday wondered about the Hammers’ immediate future. (If the season ended tonight, West Ham, along with the Wolverhampton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic would be relegated. With six clubs bunched up at the bottom of the EPL table (i.e., standings) and several matches remaining, I asked a EPL-phile friend who works in the Senate for predictions.
Here is his reply:
In my view, it will come down to strength of schedule and form, which are key in the final stretch of the season. Based on those undoubtedly subjective factors, my prediction is that West Ham, which lost the last two games and will play Manchester City and Chelsea away in consecutive weeks, Wigan, which has four out the six remaining games away from home, and new boys Blackpool, which lost four out of the last five and will finish off the season away at Tottenham and Manchester United, will be the clubs relegated. Look for more experienced Blackburn and this year’s Carling Cup winner Birmingham to move away from danger over the next few fixtures and the feisty Wolves to take part in last-minute heroics to stay put for another year.
West Ham hosts Aston Villa at Upton Park on Saturday morning at 10:00 EDT.
Over at Bleacher Report, there’s a blistering takedown of John Thompson, the former Georgetown basketball coach, by Harold Bell, a veteran DC sports broadcaster. He and Thompson clearly have a history of animosity, but he doesn’t appear to be making things up, and there’s plenty of lurid stuff there. This is actually one of Bell’s milder stories:
Early in his second season at Georgetown, when his job was on the line, in the wee hours of the morning someone hung a banner in the Georgetown Gym that read “John Thompson the nigger coach must go!”
Back then I was his first line of defense in the media.
When he called my home at 3 a.m. explaining what had happened, I was pissed off.
I must admit, he played me like a beaten drum. I later discovered he’d hung the banner himself.
All that mattered to him was the end result: It helped him keep his job.
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