Random Friday Thoughts

If anyone watched the Orlando-Cleveland game last night, then I think you knew the Cavs were going to blow the 32-10 lead they had at one point. It was going to happen. At halftime it was 56-55, which means Orlando went on a 45-24 run to end the half against the Cavs...at home. That is the third double digit lead the Cavs have blown at home in this series and they are the #1 seed in the East, supposedly the best team in the East. I don't know what to think about them really...

I want to do some random thoughts because there is a lot to comment on and one article won't do for the day. I may not quote from every article but hopefully it will give us enough to discuss.

-Bill Simmons has written an article about the current state of the NBA, it's officiating, and what he thinks needs to be fixed. Overall, though I tend to disagree with many things that Bill writes, it was a well researched article and did not contain many of the annoying references he usually uses. Though he does open it up with a reference from "Speed," I will forgive him for that, because I wish all of his articles were this well written. Did I mention it was well researched? It gives me hope for his book.

Two nights later, Cleveland and Orlando played an unspeakably awful game that featured a whopping 58 fouls. All the momentum from Game 2 was gone. Here was the new NBA in its new age of unadulterated impurity: Teams hoisting bad 3-pointers, referees trying to "manage" the game and failing, players going one-on-five, stoppages again and again and again, free throws and more free throws, more stoppages, more mismanaging by the refs ... by the time it was over, I wanted to commit a flagrant one on myself.

I was so pumped up after Game 2, I made time to watch Game 3 Sunday night, and then ended up flipping channels because the game was so brutal to watch. One of my problems with the officiating is that players drive to the basket looking for a foul call to bail them out and they get it. A bump on the perimeter that doesn't affect an offensive player's momentum or direction is called a foul, but then another referee won't call an obvious foul in the middle when a player gets hacked. There is no consistency in the calls and the fourth quarter of games seem to stop every 2 minutes. I compare it to watching 2 minutes of a movie and then hitting the pause button and taking a break. Dwight Howard caught the ball in the post on an offensive rebound last night and changed his pivot foot three times. I paused my live television and rewound it twice to watch this. Then he did it again on the next possession down court. Needless to say, this was not called either time.

As much as I like disagreeing with Bill Simmons, he is right. Players can't fight for position in the post and they get called for a technical foul for even reacting to a call they don't agree with. They are expected to be wax dummies no matter what they think of a call and still compete out on the court. That's hard. It's like watching a junior high dance where everyone has to have a certain space between each other and there is no touching allowed.

First, the NBA can't seem to replenish its officiating ranks. 1937, 1939, 1943, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1955 ... those are the actual birth years of 13 current referees. In professional sports, athletes slip from the ages of 34 to 39 unless they extend their stay with PEDs. In the NBA, in which officials are required to run or jog for 150 minutes and make split-second decisions on hundreds of plays, we're expected to believe that the aging process doesn't apply.

Well reasoned and researched.

I have no problem with the the 1950's guys being the senior officials, but if you were born immediately after WWII or BEFORE the Baby Boomer Era, you may need to consider retiring.

Here's another thing I don't get. They have rescinded three of Kenyon Martin's technical fouls in the playoffs. Three of five technical fouls have been rescinded! Do the officials even know what a technical foul is? Even with the foul being rescinded, the NBA doesn't rescind the points the team gets from the foul shots when a technical is called.

I love Jeff Van Gundy's idea of a "penalty box" (basically, banishing guys to their bench for a specific period of time). Say Rafer Alston slaps Eddie House again: instead of a one-game suspension, he'd be benched for the first half. Say Amare Stoudemire drifts off the bench because Steve Nash got whipped against the scorer's table and it's human instinct to protect a teammate: maybe he'd miss the first quarter of the next game. Maybe instead of double technicals for jawing, players would get sent off for five minutes to calm down.

I don't know if this would work or not. I don't even know if I like this idea. It seems like the guy would spend most of his time on the bench steaming and trying to get back in the game to whip someone's ass. Maybe I am wrong and he would cool down. I do like the player having to miss the first quarter of a game for leaving the bench or missing part of the game for a violation. That seems more logical than missing an entire game.

the NBA sent out a memo for its Development League Referee Tryout Camp, which is scheduled for June 19-21 in Los Angeles. Participants officiate two games with prospective D-League players and need a minimum of two years experience at the high school level or higher. Not only do the participants have to pay their own way to get there, but the NBA charges them a $550 fee that covers "lodging for two nights at the camp headquarters, transportation to and from the games, and a camp officiating jersey." YOU HAVE TO PAY TO TRY OUT!

Paying to try out doesn't make sense in this situation at all. This is not a recreation league in your local hometown where the league needs enough money to pay for uniforms and other necessities to put the league together, this is the NBA where you would think they would be dedicated to finding the best officials and that means not making people pay to try out.

If you want a blog that gets traffic, start tracking bad playoff calls. Read the rulebook, familiarize yourself with it, watch each game with a fine-tooth comb and jot down every missed call and incorrect call. Chart how the fouls go up and down depending on the quarter. Chart the inconsistencies. Chart the number of calls, as well as the types of calls, that each referee makes and see if there's some sort of common theme. If you do a good job, I will send you traffic and so will everyone else. It's that easy.

This is a move that is part brilliant and part annoying to me. He gives his SimmonsClones a task to perform and undoubtedly we are going to be seeing blogs that chart all of these referee mistakes and everything else Bill wants appearing on the Internet. How will we have a clue whether the information contained is correct? People are idiots and I am going to assume the 18-25 year old range Bill speaks to is not going to be the absolute best at gathering information and deciphering it together into an accurate picture of the officiating situation in the NBA. We won't have an idea if the information is reliable and that is the annoying part, but it is brilliant because if someone does have good information that is reliable and well collected, then maybe Bill can get his point proven.

A reader e-mailed after the 86-FT Game that he would rather watch a playoffs in which players called their own fouls. At first glance, ridiculous. Within a few seconds, I started talking myself into it. By the three-minute mark, I was genuinely excited. No referees. The players policing themselves. Pickup rules for the playoffs. Hmmmmmm.

That's how bad things have gotten. An idea THAT dumb got my wheels spinning.

I am glad he realizes this idea is dumb...because it is. Overall, a very well written column by Bill. It's this type of column that he writes that almost makes up for some of the useless dreck he has put out (in my opinion) in the past. I am not ashamed to admit I liked this column. Ok, a little ashamed...

-Norman Chad wrote this Boston hating column a few weeks ago. He hates the Celtics. I don't think he actually hates the Celtics, I think he hates that they win all the time. That's the reasoning for a lot of the current Boston hatred, well that and the fans of the Boston teams have been stereotyped like Tommy from Quinzee from KSK, which some may actually be that way. Unfortunately behind every stereotype there is a little bit of truth. I learned this lesson from something a guy who came into my work on Tuesday showed me when he found out I was a Panthers fan. He rolled up his sleeve and showed me a tattoo of the Carolina Panthers logo eating a Cowboy's hat. I cringed a little. I hate the Dallas Cowboys but that's too much redneck for me.

-J.S. did a good post about Jeff MacGregor a few weeks/months ago and I saw a column by MacGregor the other day that made me wonder, as I usually do, what the hell he is talking about. It is called "Do Sports Teach Lessons or Provide Distractions?"

The question I really want answered is "What Purpose Does Jeff MacGregor Serve At Page 2?"

What are sports for?

Entertainment. It's plain and simple, we want to be entertained with athletic events and we have sports to serve that purpose. Other people (pointing at Jeff MacGregor) may want to make them more than they are, but you can't. They may serve as a microcosm of life, but at their very heart they are a billion dollar entertainment industry. The original reality television.

All of which got me thinking about the ideas of sportsmanship and character, and the antique notion that sports have to teach a moral or ethical lesson to be of real value.

This guy is just a real drag. He insists on trying to suck the fun out of everything.

(MacGregor's son) "Dad, I want to play video games at the arcade today."

(Jeff MacGregor) "But son, why do you want to play games? Are you revealing your true childhood ambitions that your alter-self refused to allow you to achieve because you wanted to meet what you thought were our expectations of you as our son?"

(MacGregor's son) "Because they are fun and you are really boring."

(Jeff MacGregor) "Just continue playing coy, insolent child, I will get the true reasoning out of you one day."

And while I understand and empathize with the moral exhaustion that besets us all, somebody somewhere in Major League Baseball thought Manny Ramirez had to be suspended for 50 games for breaking a rule it considered important. Is that rule wrong? Or is Manny Ramirez?

I think he may be overanalyzing this a bit. Major League Baseball set up the rule because they want to make sure there is an even playing field in baseball and the Union and the Commissioner believe restricting the use of PED's is the way to go about helping to even the playing field. You know, so a guy doesn't hit 73 home runs and get walked 200 times. That sucks the fun out of the game a little bit.

So to answer the question, Manny Ramirez broke the rule so he is wrong.

Or are sports just a performance, a vacation from the real? Is a game merely three hours of happy distraction from the killing grind of the everyday?

It's fucking entertainment. That's it. Like everything else in the world with a set of rules and any type of authority figure, it can also be seen as a microcosm of life. Quit writing such pretentious shit.

Which brings us back to the trillion-dollar question, the one we have to answer before any of the others:

What are sports for?

Entertainment.

A simple, impossible question. But maybe if we all put our heads together we can puzzle it out. Ask your friends, neighbors, parents, children, coaches, players, teachers.

Is this question really worth getting a commission together for? He is so pretentious. I hope he chokes on the organic bagel he is eating in his Smart car, which will undoubtedly be playing classical music.

-Rick Reilly gets paid millions of dollars to write columns that whine about his favorite NBA team. As always, there is more to the story as well. The column is full of shit like this:

Moses wandered the desert for 40 years? Pah. That's Club Med compared to us. For 41 years, we've eaten sand and washed it down with tall glasses of bile. At least Moses had manna. All we ever got was crayon jerseys.

It annoys the hell out of me that every team is fighting and clawing to be a "cursed" team lately. Every team, has a SOB story about how beaten down they are and how long their fans have been waiting for a championship or any type of hope from their sports teams. Shut up. 41 years is not really that long. Denver had the Broncos win 2 Super Bowls in the 90's and the Rockies made the World Series two years ago, and that doesn't include any success the Colorado Avalanche had recently.

Since then, we've run a substitution pattern of famine, plague and pestilence, the last of which was a man named Nikoloz Tskitishvili, on whom we wasted the fifth overall pick in 2002, while passing on stiffs like Amare Stoudemire, Caron Butler and Carlos Boozer. Tskitishvili was really tskitty. One time, he took a wide-open jumper and hit the shot clock.

Maybe you are not really cursed, you just have incredibly shitty decision makers in the organization. It sounds to me like that could be the case.

You sent us Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. He wouldn't stand for the national anthem.

If I recall correctly, he was a pretty good basketball player. Yes, I remember the ex-Chris Jackson was a pretty good player who helped the Nuggets win basketball games. Standing for the national anthem doesn't win games for the Nuggets and players that did not help the Nuggets win games is what you are whining about. Try to stay on point.

So when you click on Reilly's article, you see a Registered trademark next to "Life of Reilly." He trademarked his article title. He is very impressed with himself.

He officially wants himself to be a brand. Apparently the brand he wants to be is the type of brand that recycles old products and tries to pass them off as new. Deadspin said he was a little shy of being a Hallmark card anyway...but don't you think he is actually going to try and spread the brand name around a little? I have a feeling he is going to try and do this. There will be "Life of Reilly" cards, mugs, and toilet paper. Peter King would even use the toilet paper as he was preparing for his next colonoscopy!

-It's wrong how coaches like John Calipari are able to stay one step ahead of NCAA officials and never actually have to suffer any of the sanctions the school has to suffer. I will never doubt this guy can recruit, but he also bends the rules past the point where it is an NCAA rules violation.

Just like at UMass, his name doesn't appear on anything, but just like at UMass he is in the middle of it, but has found a way to not get himself dirty. He has made 2 Final Fours in his career, the first with UMass in 1996 has been erased because Marcus Camby had improper dealings with an agent. What did Calipari do for his UMass team after this was found out to make them feel better for all their hard work being erased or what did he tell his team to ease the pain? Well, he was actually running the New Jersey Nets into the ground when the sanctions came down, so he wasn't around anymore. He stayed one step ahead of the NCAA.

Now Derrick Rose is accused of cheating on the SAT, which Calipari had to have some knowledge of, unless he is able to keep up with everything about the student-athlete's lives on his basketball teams except for their wrongdoings. If found guilty, Memphis would have to vacate their Final Four appearance and the wins they got for the 2007-2008 year. As usual, Calipari doesn't have to really worry about the lowering of another Final Four banner because he is at Kentucky now with a sparkling recruiting record but zero Final Fours to his record.

I don't hate John Calipari but I do find it odd he stays at schools long enough to get out when sanctions start to come down and leaves the school and the athletic department to take the fall for what violations may or may not have happened. Recruits don't remember his Final Fours had to be vacated, they remember he coached Marcus Camby and Derrick Rose in a Final Four and almost won a National Championship in 2008. That's all they remember.

And though Kentucky fans will dismiss it, it should be pointed out that that's exactly what Memphis fans spent nine years doing. They explained to opposing fans that Calipari had nothing to do with the Camby mess, that it wasn't indicative of anything. But now here they are dealing with similarly damaging allegations of rules violations that happened on Calipari's watch, and it would be naive for UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart to not be concerned, at least a little, because 2-for-2 is 100 percent.

In other words, if Calipari someday leaves Kentucky without In other words, if Calipari someday leaves Kentucky without the NCAA subsequently accusing the school of operating outside the framework of the rulebook, understand, it'll be the first time he's ever exited a program that way.

Fortunately, Kentucky won't really care at that point because he will have brought them a couple of Final Fours, maybe a National Championship, and some respect back, and Calipari won't care because by the time the new NCAA sanctions come down, he will be at a different school.

This is one reason I hate college basketball recruiting and don't ever want to know what goes on behind the scenes.

-Here is an interesting article about the real trade value of Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez. I had to read it twice to get the gist of the article, but I don't know if I completely agree with it.

By the same math, though, a random minor leaguer of the sort who might be part of a deal for two such players is far more valuable than you might think. An average player is worth two wins in a year. A prospect who struggles in his first two years, giving the team just one win in each, and then settles in at dead average for the next four before leaving the team as a free agent, will have been worth about $45 million -- and he'll likely have been paid somewhere between $15 and $20 million, given baseball's idiosyncratic pay scale.

I just find it hard to believe this is accurate, though it is based on Fangraphs information, so it very well may be. There are so many assumptions that go into this, for one that the prospect(s) traded make it to the major leagues and that the great player traded continues to perform at the same level he performed prior and not perform at a higher level.

I think this may all be over my head a little bit but this was an intriguing article.

He talks a little bit about the Jake Peavy trade that almost happened with the White Sox and what surprises me is that the Padres seemed to lower their demands. Nothing against he package the White Sox offered, but the Padres originally wanted five players in a trade for Peavy, including two major league ready players and two top prospects. I think they should have taken the Cubs trade earlier in the winter, but they did not. Peavy is too chicken shit to play for the White Sox in that ballpark. I guess the American League is too scary for him.

-I think the Padres early season success has a lot to do with Adrian Gonzalez, but guess who is getting some credit?

The two things that Towers pointed to on behalf of the Padres, whose payroll is a puny $46 million (and may still go lower if Towers can find a place Peavy would like to play, beyond the Padres, that is): 1) There is no quit in them; and 2) David Eckstein is on their roster.

"A lot of it has to do with David Eckstein," Towers said.

"When you have a player like that, it becomes contagious," Towers said. "He sets the standard. He's so fricking intense. And he has the best in-game instincts I've ever seen."

What is it about David Eckstein that makes general managers and announcers talk about him like they are teenage girls and he is one of the Jonas Brothers?

-Jay Mariotti seems to think if the Cavs lose the series he is going to be gone from Cleveland in 2010.

Everyone has him going to New York to play for the Knicks or to play for the Nets in New Jersey, but does he really have a better chance at winning a championship and succeeding there? I think the higher profile he has playing for one of those teams will also cause increased scrutiny on him, which is not always good. Just ask Randy Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Alex Rodriguez, and Plaxico Burress. I am just saying it is not always a good thing to be in the spotlight all the time, and LeBron James may be smart enough to realize this.

-Gene Wojciechowski thinks the Cubs still have time to play well and blames many of the problems on injuries. Even though the Cardinals have had a ton of injuries this well to key players and have a lower payroll. Whatever, I don't want to disturb Gene with logic.

How long before we have an ESPN Boston web site? Another month? It's going to happen and it may not be a bad thing. Gene usually writes about Chicago anyway, so it is nice we can stick his articles on a site where I don't have to read them...in theory. Unfortunately ESPN still insists on putting the columns on the front page, so when they get other "ESPN cities" it is going to seem like they only care about those cities from a standpoint of coverage and may make their coverage seem more biased. Not that ESPN really cares, because as long as the ratings come in positive, nothing will change.