Black Ball Sports

David Stern couldn’t be any happier. The two most storied NBA franchises have risen again to the top and are playing in the Finals once again.

Kobe Bryant is close to being a legitimate threat to Michael Jordan as King of the NBA. Bryant will be gunning for his 4th title. The biggest difference between Jordan and Bryant is that Kobe is missing the signature moments in the playoffs that Jordan had. Jordan had the push off series clincher versus Utah, the shot over Cleveland and the half where he couldn’t miss 3 pointers against Portland amongst numerous others. Jordan had a distinct flair for the creating the moment. Jordan in his prime would likely have dismissed Bryant in a final much like he did Clyde Drexeler.

Bryant has his opportunity now to create his moment. Think a game six last second shot over Paul Pierce in Boston to win the title wouldn’t put Bryant into the same stratosphere as his tongue wagging idol? The momentum for that seems to be building.

No, this isn’t a repeat of Magic verses Bird. However, there is an interesting matchup in this series. Bryant verses Kevin Garnett. They are the poster children for HS to NBA. They made the Lebron James, Amare Stoudemire types popular and gave them a chance to make the move.

Garnett, however has been mired with teams lacking the overall talent to become champions, while Kobe won championships but was overshadowed by the presence of Shaq. Now they face off in the biggest moments of their careers. For Garnett he has his chance to finally cry with the trophy, rather than cry with an empty Gatorade bottle after a playoff defeat. For Bryant he can cement his name in the books with the greatest players of all time.

The critics will say this series is nothing like the old Magic-Bird days. To me, that is just bitter old guy talk. The NBA is clearly a different league, for one there are more teams. This dilutes the opportunity to build teams that have 3 or 4 hall of fame candidates. Second, there are more foreign players than ever. While this brings in new talent, many of these players don’t bring fans to have the affection for them like Boston has for a tall, big, slow white guy from Frenchlick, Indiana. Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili have proven to be great NBA players, but how many kids do you see with their jerseys?

Third, the college game has changed so much, with the exodus of younger players and more mid-major teams breaking through to cause tournament havoc. When Magic and Bird first met it was actually in college for the national championship game. Their meeting led to a building of anticipation for future NBA wars. Previously, it was the norm to have your best college players around for 3 or 4 years to establish themselves as legends, and generally, they’d be surrounded by other quality players.

Nonetheless, classic NBA series are built when superstars meet in the biggest moments, at the height of their primes. All season Garnett has had the Finals on his mind. It was the Celtics goal, anything less was a failure. The moment Ray Allen and Garnett joined Paul Pierce there was no doubt the Celtics were favorites in the East. For Bryant, he’s spent the last off season worrying about where he’d be playing and his future in the NBA, however, his team stepped up and brought him back to the pinnacle.

Garnett v Bryant….the next NBA classic series.

This post is really hard for me to write.  I’ve long been one of the detractors of Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant.

I’ve always been on the side of the Jackson debate, which concluded that he was an overrated coach who built his resume off the backs of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Bryant and Shaq.  Jackson has never taken a really bad team and turned them into a championship.  I always tried to knock him on that fact.

After what I’ve seen over the past season though, I’ve switched sides.  Phil Jackson is the greatest coach in NBA history (or at least during the 30 years or so I’ve been alive).  Some coaches may have been better teachers, or have gotten more out of less.  However, when you really look at the performance of his teams with him as the coach versus either his predecessor or successor, he deserves a lot more credit then he’s been given.

Throughout this post-season, the media coverage has continued to call this collection of Lakers players as supremely talented.  Aside from Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol, where is this talent?  They are all decent to average pros.  For the 6-9 months leading up to the season, the talk was Andrew Bynum stinks (mostly out of the mouth of Bryant) or this roster needs an upgrade.  Jackson and Mitch Kupchek did nothing, and were mostly blasted for such.

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Looking around the sports landscape you see teams in all sports that say that we “are rebuilding.”  Which is a nice way to say we aren’t winning this year, next year and possibly the year after that.  But you can’t be upset your team isn’t good because they have told you “we are rebuilding.”  At its core I have no problem with teams undergoing a so-called rebuilding.  But this means the product is lackluster yet the prices remain the same.  What other company can readily admit that they are now putting out a sub par product but still expect the same price.  When you pay for 93 Octane you are paying for that quality.  So if a team goes from 93 Octane to 87, why don’t their prices drop?  Realistically, if you are telling me that we aren’t winning now and are planning to win a couple of years from now, then I will tell you I will see you when you are trying to win. 

 Take for example the Washington Nationals who moved from Montreal in 2005.  When the Nationals first came into existence they moved to an old outdated stadium.  So they told the fans enjoy the fact that you have baseball back and if we get a new stadium the team will get better.  Basically they announced that until they got a new stadium the money spent on the field wouldn’t allow the team to be competitive.  Ok, understanding it was a franchise move and things might take a little while to take off.  So the fans are asked to not expect a quality product, but pay similar prices as people who are going to see the Red Sox and Yankees.  Now take us to today the Nationals new stadium has opened and yet the payroll for the Nationals hasn’t drastically increased.  So a lie was told to the fans who supported the team with the promise of a better product and more spending on the team when the new stadium opened.  So this year the payroll increases slightly but the product on the field has remained the same.  It’s probably because the owners realize they can wait another couple of years to spend money on the team, because the fans are going to come to the new stadium.  So once again the fans are being taken advantage of.

I’m not calling for an outright boycott of bad teams.  Because teams will got through their cycles of being bad and good.  But if the team is not making an effort to spend money to improve why are we taking money out of our pockets.  How long are baseball franchises like Pittsburgh and Kansas City going to hold their fans hostage.  At some point fans have to say we as a group aren’t going to continue to support losing franchises that aren’t making a legitimate effort.

While watching the Celtics/Pistons game two, I saw a commercial where they played the famous highlight of Tayshaun Prince blocking Reggie Miller on a clear path layup in the 2004 playoffs. Reminded me how underrated Prince is and how every team looking to win a championship, needs to have this guy playing for them.

He does all the little things, hustles, plays defense, passes and hits his jumpers. He never calls undue attention to himself, doesn’t taunt, and has never had off the court troubles. He has humbly accepted a role on the Pistons which will likely never lead him to being an all-star.

Put him next to Lebron in Cleveland, with Carmello and Iverson in Denver or with Nowitski in Dallas, and watch how much he’d change those teams.

Maybe more importantly, make sure he has a critical, important role on the Olympic team. One of the key reasons, the US team has failed is it’s inability to guard on the outside against these foreign teams which often play taller players in outside shooting and passing roles. Prince has uniquely long arms and is athletic enough to run with anyone through screens and the like. Yes, he’s a risk of being backed down in the post, but most foreign teams don’t play that way. Because of his good shooting, he’s certainly not a liability on offense.

The Olympic team is constantly looking for players to do the little things, and I’d pick him in a heart beat over Shane Battier, Carlos Boozer or Bruce Bowen.

I’ve never particularly cared much for Penn State or Joe Paterno.  No solid reasoning, just not a team I cared for and I almost always thought they were overrated.  However, Joe Pa is off speaking the truth about college football.

Here is a true veteran of college football speaking about the lack of a playoff:

“To be frank with you, I don’t know what the reasons are not to have a playoff,” Paterno said during a speaking appearance in Pittsburgh. “You can talk about missing class and all that kind of stuff, [yet] you see basketball go on forever. You have a lot of bogus excuses, but obviously the majority of people who have the say don’t want it.”

How true is that?  The official college football season typically runs September - January for most programs, with December basically a month off.  Most teams schedule about 12 games.  Which if they play every weekend from September, their season ends in November.  If they are invited to a bowl game, they play a single game in late December, or early January.   So that is at most 13 games over more than 4 months.

College basketball?  Teams schedule about 30 games from mid-November to mid-March or 5 months.  They will schedule as many as 3 games a week and if they perform well in post season tournaments (conference and NCAA), they might tack on as many as 8-10 additional games.  National final participants, Memphis and Kansas played 40 games and finished the 2nd week of April.

How exactly would one or two more games in a playoff extend the season such that the football teams would be missing an unreasonable more time in comparison to the basketball teams?

Joe Paterno, an 81 year old man, who wears glasses thicker than Shamu’s aquarium glass can see the system is bogus.

Typically coaches, writers and fans use the cliche, “There is no I in team” when speaking about stars or talented players who tend to dominate their team’s play. But it does work both ways, sometimes the team doesn’t interject themselves into the I. In game 7 of the Boston/Cleveland series, both teams had success as teams, when their role players were effective, in addition to their stars.

Boston wins games when in addition to a solid game from Kevin Garnett or Paul Pierce, guys like Rajon Rondo, James Posey, Eddie House etc play their roles and make big plays in the form of nailing open shots, grabbing rebounds or loose balls. Conversely, Lebron benefits mightily from similar play out of Big Z, Delonte West, Wally Sczerbiak et. al.

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As more and more information starts to come out about the OJ Mayo saga at USC and while in high school, one thing becomes more and more clear: ESPN, CBS, Sports Illustrated, the NBA and the NCAA are all to blame. How can all of these entities stand around and blame OJ Mayo for this situation. All he and athletes like him see is these companies use his name and likeness to make million of dollars.

This conversation is about OJ Mayo receiving an estimated $30,000 while in high school and at USC. When you compare that to the way USC basically rebuilt its basketball program on the back of OJ Mayo does $30,000 sound like he made enough money. USC’s basketball program has been dormant for the last number of years. OJ Mayo signs with USC and season ticket sales increase. In the preseason the competition is hyped between he and Kevin Love for the battle of LA. So USC will say, “he can get a college degree.” That is one of the most disingenuous comments that the NCAA and these programs make. Players such as Mayo or Michael Beasley who wanted to go pro right out of high school are forced to go to college for one year by the rules of the NBA. But in order to qualify to play basketball for the entire season they only have to get qualifying grades in the first semester. So the NCAA which calls them “student athletes” basically says a player who is planning on leaving school after one year doesn’t really have to even go to class after Christmas and can play all the way through March Madness. How does this teach the “student athletes” that their education is also important? If the institution isn’t even making these athletes pretend to go to class how can they even pretend that payment for playing for the school is the scholarship?

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Like I said, SpyGate isn’t over. Yet most of the media is kissing up to the NFL like lap dogs. Most writers are pronouncing the case over. The Boston Herald begged the Patriots for forgiveness for running a story insinuating that there was a tape of the Rams walkthrough.

The NFL put on a show on Tuesday, a “look we have nothing to hide” show. Commissioner Roger Goodell did as little questioning as possible. If you really want to know what Matt Walsh knew and was willing to say, read the report from Senator Arlen Specter.

Here’s is an interesting quote from his comments:

(1) The filming enabled the Patriots coaching staff to anticipate the defensive plays called by the opposing team. According to Walsh, he first filmed an opponents’ signals during the August 20, 2000 pre-season game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. After Walsh filmed a game, he would provide the tape for Ernie Adams, a coaching assistant for the Patriots, who would match the signals with the plays.

Walsh was told by a former offensive player that a few days before the September 11, 2000 regular season game against Tampa Bay, he (the offensive player) was called into a meeting with Adams, Bill Belichick and Charlie Weis, then the offensive coordinator for the Patriots, during which it was explained how the Patriots would make use of the tapes. The offensive player would memorize the signals and then watch for Tampa Bay’s defensive calls during the game. He would then pass the plays along to Weis, who would give instructions to the quarterback on the field. This process enabled the Patriots to go to a “no-huddle” offensive, which would lock in the defense the opposing team had called from the sideline, preventing the defense from making any adjustments. When Walsh asked whether the tape he had filmed was helpful, the offensive player said it had enabled the team to anticipate 75 percent of the plays being called by the opposing team.

Wait, take a minute and re-read that. Basically Walsh recorded the tapes, which were then evaluated by the coaching staff. A player memorized the signals, watched for the calls and passed the plays on to Weis, who passed the information along to the QB on the field. The Patriots would then go no-huddle and prevent the defense from making changes.

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Kobe Bryant is MVP of the National Basketball Association. Looks to be a lifetime achievement award for a great player. Don’t get me wrong Kobe is the best player in the NBA hands down, and probably has been that way the last 3 years, but Most Valuable Player not this year.

Before we even look at the other players around the league who should’ve beaten him, let’s take a closer look at his team. As I seem to be the only one who recalls that Kobe demanded to be traded from the Los Angeles Lakers this past off-season and even as the season began. Not only that he called out teammates for not getting better such as Andrew Bynum. Now before Bynum got injured he had improved drastically this past season. Now was that before Kobe blasted him right before the start of the season. Probably not, because there is no way he could’ve gotten that much better in the 2 weeks before the season that Kobe blasted him. No Bynum was already working to improve his game in the off-season. Which means that Kobe “MVP” Bryant wasn’t being a good teammate and working with Bynum in the summer or he would’ve known how much he had improved. So do we give Kobe credit then for Bynum improving when he realistically played no part?

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So Matt Walsh finally turns over the video tapes he has of the New England Patriots recording opponents signals. The spin thus far has been there is no smoking gun, hence the whole thing will be rendered finished come May 13th when the NFL and Senator Arlen Specter interview Walsh.

Ummm, no it ain’t over.

Due to the fact that Bill Belichek apparently admitted to regularly recording opponents signals since 2000, and all Walsh turned over were sideline signals and not walkthroughs (such as the 2001 Superbowl versus the Rams), many think the league will be able to quickly end this story. While that may be true, the truth is the story will live on. Especially, if the Patriots begin to erode and win no additional championships. Continue Reading »