Categories
NBA General

Around the Rim: David’s Dilemma


1. Save Face or Send a Message?
In an ironic twist of fate, commissioner David Stern now holds Carmelo Anthony’s All-Star future in his hands. Earlier in the season, Stern dished out a 15 game suspension to Melo for his involvement in the New York brawl. Now, the commish is responsible for assigning two players to the west’s team to replace the injured Yao Ming and Carlos Boozer. Anthony got snubbed by the coaches and the fans this year despite leading the league in scoring. Stern backed off the synthetic ball issue after player complaints continued to mount; will he be able to forgive and forget when it comes to Melo? If Anthony doesn’t make the squad, he would become the first player ever to miss the All-Star game while leading the league in scoring.

2. Wade’s Way
Dwyane Wade carried the weight of his entire team during the fourth quarter of last night’s game against the Cavs as he single-handedly outscored the entire Cleveland team. In the final 12 minutes, Wade went off for 24 points while LeBron’s boys could only muster 23. Making matters worse for Cleveland is that they held a 12 point lead with less than eight minutes remaining. The 24 points were also a Heat record for points scored in the final quarter. Wade finished with a fat 41 point game to go along with five assists, three steals and two blocks.

3. Low Blow
After writhing around on the floor because of an allegedly inadvertent pop to the face by Kobe Bryant on Sunday, Manu Ginobili decided to dish out a little “unintentional” punishment of his own last night. With about nine minutes remaining in the game, Ginobili drove to the hoop and delivered a running knee shot right to Amare Stoudemire’s unborn children. As most men would do, Stoudemire crumpled to the ground before jumping up and looking to throw down. After the game, Stoudemire said that he thought the knee was on purpose and called Ginobili a flopper; he was right on both counts. (We also want to point you to this hilarious video of Avery Johnson getting too excited and hitting Josh Howard in the nuts by accident.)

Thursday’s Player of the Day: Amare Stoudemire vs. San Antonio 43 min, 24 pts (FG: 9-18, FT: 6-7), 23 reb, 1 stl

Friday’s Game to Watch: Los Angeles Lakers (28-18) @ Indiana (24-21) The Kobe Show has hit the road, and it’s going to be a while before the performance returns to Hollywood. Tonight’s game is the third in an eight game road trip for the Lakers; so far they’re 1-1. The Pacers have only lost seven games at home this year behind the great play from Jermaine O’Neal, who was named an All-Star last night. Indiana has also won four of their last five with the last win coming at the expense of the pathetic Celtics. The same Celtics that Kobe scored 43 against on Wednesday.

Buzzer Beater: How did the fans get the West so wrong? Steve Nash has won the last two MVP’s and his biggest competition for this year’s award seems to be Dirk Nowitzki, yet both players were forced to make the team via a coach’s vote. The fan vote has become a pathetic popularity contest where performance is apparently irrelevant. Heck, health doesn’t even matter to the fans; Shaq got voted in despite playing in only four games by the time the votes were due. To borrow a phrase from Bill Walton; “How sad.”

Categories
High School Sports

There will be no more brawls at Bradley Tech

Actually, there will be no more fans at Bradley Tech either. Following a brawl Tuesday night after the Bradley Tech vs Bay View High School game, school district officials have banned Bradley Tech and Bay View from attending any varsity or junior varsity boys and girls basketball games. Their opponents’ fans will be allowed to attend games however.

On Tuesday, the brawl lead to six injuries and ten arrests including a girl who suffered a seizure during the brawl. Somewhere someone is trying to figure out a way to blame Ron Artest for this.

Here’s video of the brawl.

Links:
[WFRV]: Basketball Game In Milwaukee Ends In Brawl

Categories
General Sports

Feb 2 2007 episode of Poor Man’s PTI

This is a combination Poor Man’s PTI/ Weekly NFL Picks podcast. We spend half the time talking about the Super Bowl and the rest talking about various topics.

You can download this week’s podcast directly (running time 34 mins) or subscribe to the feed.  

If you use iTunes, just click here and then click subscribe and iTunes will take care of the rest.

This week’s topics include:

  • Celebrity Super Bowl Picks
  • Are you sick of the black coaches angle yet?
  • Ryan meets Terry Francona
  • Colts Bears Preview: is Rex Grossman vs Peyton Manning the biggest QB mismatch in Super Bowl history?
  • Sarah Spain
  • The 50 types of annoying people at your Super Bowl party
  • Nick Saban’s coon-ass story
Categories
Washington Redskins

Top 10 Dumbest in-game Injuries: #2 Gus Frerotte


[Sportscolumn is running down the ten dumbest in-game injuries in sports.  Here’s #2.]

Most players get excited when they play in NFL’s spotlight game, but Gus Frerotte probably went a wee bit overboard in 1997. After a touchdown in the second quarter, Washington quarterback Frerotte, for some unknown reason, celebrated by ramming his head into a thinly padded cement wall during a game against the New York Giants on Monday Night Football that ended in a 7-7 tie. The Redskins numbskull was rushed via ambulance to the nearest hospital where doctors diagnosed him with a concussion. He fought bouts of wooziness for the rest of the season.

There is no truth to the rumor that upon finding out the final score, Frerotte asked who won.

Back to #3 | Forward to #1

Categories
NFL General

Odds and Ends: The NFL is serious about those copyright laws


Fall Creek Baptist Church in Indianapolis wants to throw a Super Bowl The Big Game Party for members and guests but the NFL has put the kibosh on the event because it would violate copyright laws. The church planned on showing the game on a 12 foot screen but the law says it can only show it on one TV no bigger than 55 inches. While it clearly states in the U.S. constitution the separation of Church and NFL, this is insane. You can watch NFL broadcasts online via a bunch of TV over IP applications (if you know where to look) but a group of churchgoers can’t gather to watch the Super Bowl? NFL lawyers will have a special express line for hell. (Thanks to Can’t Stop the Bleeding for the photo and their excellent headline: “NFL to Christ: Fuck off”.)

In other news…

[Newsday]: Dolphins lose a home game, Giants benefit again

[MSNBC]: Super Bowl Myths

[KETV Omaha]: The wrestler who started the herpes outbreak in Minnesota is from Nebraska

[Sports By Brooks]: Which Super Bowl Champion t-shirt will some third world country get?

[ESPN]: What’s this? A feel good story from ESPN?

[Sportsline]: 50 types of annoying people at your Super Bowl party

Categories
High School Sports

Cheerleaders. Soldiers. Booze. Sex.


That’s the headline from Newsweek. They are either running out of good headline writers or they simply realized that there really isn’t anything more you need to add. Why waste words when that will get everyone’s attention. Hell, if they could have added lesbian to it, I’m sure they would have. Titillating headlines aside, this story has got everything that tabloids love… except it’s Newsweek.

According to the article, two cheerleaders from Ware Shoals High School in South Carolina ditched a school function and instead headed to a hotel room with their coach Jill Moore to meet two National Guardsmen on a recruiting trip to their high school. Moore allegedly gave the girls vodka and then went to another hotel room with one of the guardsmen and left the other one with the two girls. One of the girls admitted to having sex with him.

Oh but wait… there’s more. The principal of the school is being charged with obstruction of justice for trying to cover up what the cheerleading coach did. Oh but wait… there’s even Moore… (sorry)… Jill Moore also is accused of having sex with a male high school student and separately would bring along a cheerleader to the National Armory to distract other employees while she had sex with a Guardsman. Did we mention she is married with two kids. (Jill, you dirty slut.)

Moore is the only one to be charged. The guardsman are off the hook because everyone involved were at least 16, the age of consent in South Carolina. The Newsweek subheader was “A National Guard recruiting mission gone awry shakes a small South Carolina town to its core.” Did it really go awry? This might be the single best thing to happen to the National Guard. What high school student isn’t going to want to join the Guard now? Look at the perks!

Links:
[Newsweek ]:Cheerleaders. Soldiers. Booze. Sex.

Categories
NBA General

Around the Rim: Is There a Doctor in the House?


1. Injuries Love Company
The injury bug is biting the big stars, and it’s biting hard. The latest victims are Carlos Boozer and Antawn Jamison. Jamison is out for anywhere from two to eight weeks with a sprained left knee, while a hairline fracture in Boozer’s left leg will keep him sidelined for four to five weeks. But the Jazz and Wizards aren’t going to be receiving much sympathy from the rest of the league. All-Stars are dropping like flies around the Association. Paul Pierce, Ben Wallace, LeBron James, Allen Iverson, Yao Ming, Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Redd and Richard Jefferson (whew!) are all currently out of action with a variety of injuries.

2. Cold Blooded

Kobe Bryant returned to action against the lowly Celtics after being suspended for a game because of an elbow to Manu Ginobili’s melon. And when he got back on the court, he let out his frustrations by dropping 43 points on the leprechauns. Bryant showed again why he is the best scorer on the planet, despite his tendency to take a cheap shot from time to time. Kobe hit 13 of 25 overall and was dead on from behind the arc, going seven of nine. This is the Mamba’s fourth career game with at least 40 against Boston. There are some great players who don’t even have four games of 40 in their entire career. His scoring ability is almost underappreciated because he has been so explosive, so consistently since joining the league.

3. XXXXXXL

If you thought Yao Ming and Shaq were a couple of big boys, just get a load of the newest member of the ABA’s Maryland Nighthawks. Sun Ming Ming is a 7-9, 370 pound center from China and he’s only 23 years old. When being signed by the team, Sun had a difficult time squeezing into a XXXXXXL sweatshirt. The youngster’s career has been on hold for the past year while he underwent a pair of surgeries on a pituitary tumor that was the cause of his enormous size. But he’s gradually getting back into playing shape and it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that this giant will make his way into the NBA at some point because, if you haven’t noticed, most teams are willing to gamble on a seven footer.

Wednesday’s Player of the Day: Kobe Bryant @ Boston 41 min, 43 pts (FG: 13-25, 3FG: 7-9, FT: 10-13), 8 reb, 8 ast, 2 blk

Thursday’s Game to Watch: San Antonio (32-15) @ Phoenix (36-9) Nobody likes playing in back to back games, especially when the second game is against the run ‘n gun Suns. But the Spurs are going to have to quickly forget about their four point loss in Salt Lake City last night and prepare themselves mentally to take on the hottest team in the league. Sure the Suns are coming off a loss to the T-Wolves on Monday, but 17 of 18 and 35 of their last 39 is still considered scorching where I come from. If that’s not impressive enough, Phoenix has only lost three games at home this season, but they are winless in five games against the Spurs, Mavs and Jazz.

Buzzer Beater: Talk about offensive productivity! In the third quarter of last night’s game between Washington and Toronto, the two teams put up an incredible 77 points. In a 12 minute shootout, Toronto scored 43 points while the Wizards responded with 34. Chris Bosh put in serious work during the quarter as he scored 16 of his game-high 34, including a 56 foot three pointer that hit nothing but the bottom of the net. After missing his first four shots of the game, Bosh went 15 of 15 during the remainder of the contest.

Categories
NFL General

Sarah Spain picks her lucky date


By now you’ve probably heard about Sarah Spain, the girl who tried to sell herself on eBay for Super Bowl tickets because she’s a huge Bears fan. (We never got around to blogging this story because, well, we couldn’t get past the picture part of it, but for you dear readers, we fought through…) Anyway, instead of having to actually do anything for Super Bowl tickets, she wound up with 4 tickets to the game courtesy of Axe Body Spray (what tons of high school guys will look back on as their generation’s version of Drakkar Noir) and had an extra ticket so she decided to run a contest to take one lucky guy. Well that lucky guy is some medical student named Alan Shahtaji.

You can check out Sarah’s posting on her myspace page about why she picked the guy but we think it was probably the photo of him as a kid pretending to be a Bear. Chicks love that stuff. Anyway, we think the guy over at With Leather should have won even if he isn’t a Bears fan — mainly because of his application essay. We suspect that if Matt from With Leather had his way, any googling of “Alan Shahtaji” would come up with “has herpes”.

By the way, we could have posted a photo of this Alan guy but… why?

Links:
[With Leather]: SARAH SPAIN IS A GIGANTIC TEASE, PART 1
[LAist]: Interview with Sarah Spain

Categories
College Football

Nick Saban defends "coon-ass" story



I’ve got coon-ass friends!

Yesterday, Nick Saban got in trouble when he told an anecdote by one of the members of the LSU board of trustees. You can listen to the audio here but here’s the transcript:


He was walking down the street yesterday before the Sugar Bowl. He calls me. There was a guy working in the ditch, one of those coon-ass guys that talk funny. I can’t talk like them, but he can. Most people in Louisiana can. He says, ‘Hey you see where coach Saban signed up with Alabama – you know however they talk and the board of trustees guy says, ‘yeah I saw that’ and he says, ‘that son of a bitch, I feel like he’s f’ing my wife.’

And then Nick Saban has a nice chuckle. But now that he’s catching some heat about it, he released this statement:

Those comments need to be placed in the proper context so as to understand the meaning of what was said. The words were used in paraphrasing a story told to me by a friend. I was simply using the same wording used by the person who told me the story.

The term in question is not language that I use or condone, and I can understand how some would take offense. However, I think it must be noted that those comments were made off the record and the words merely reflected an anecdote that was told to me using that language.

For the record, “coon-ass” is a derogatory term for cajuns and Saban’s defense that he was merely relaying a story is weak at best. It is unclear whether Saban then went on to tell a joke, “Say, did you hear the one about the Jew, the Catholic, and the Colored Boy who went to heaven?”

Links:
[Sun Sentinel]: Slur puts Saban in midst of uproar

[Wikipedia]: Coonass

Categories
Boston Celtics

Top 10 Dumbest in-game Injuries: #3 Tony Allen

[Sportscolumn is running down the ten dumbest in-game injuries in sports.  Here’s #3.]

With three minutes remaining in the third quarter of a game versus Indiana, Boston’s Tony Allen decided to woo the crowd with a high-flying dunk after a foul had stopped play on the floor. After missing the wide open jam, Allen landed awkwardly on his left knee and crumpled on the famous parquet hardwood. Allen tore two ligaments in his knee which led to ACL reconstructive surgery, along with having cartilage repaired. The luck of the Irish was definitely not on Allen’s side during that game as the stupid slam will keep him out of the lineup for the rest of the season.

Back to #4 | Forward to #2