May 13th, 2010 | Published in Sports
Last night, Mikhail became the majority owner for the New Jersey Nets. Coming into an off-season where Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and many other superstars are heading into free agency, the richest man in Russia couldn’t have stepped into the league at a better time.
Find out more about the newest NBA team owner after the jump.
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May 12th, 2010 | Published in Sports
Truth is, you gotta BELIEVE it to do it!
May 11th, 2010 | Published in Sports
Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times went to the trouble of crunching JaMarcus’s financial numbers alongside his actual on-field production. So, just as one final recap of the mercifully dead JaMarcus Russell era in Oakland, I’ll pass these along. Here’s how JaMarcus was compensated for his production with the Oakland Raiders:
Roughly $100,000 per completion and $5.6 million per win.
April 21st, 2010 | Published in Sports | 1 Comment
This is the proper way to get past the catcher…
March 1st, 2010 | Published in Sports
Forgot his Airness, the King is after Bill Russell…
LeBron James could reportedly have a new number next season, but Cleveland Cavaliers fans hope the words remain the same.
James filed paperwork to switch from No. 23 to No. 6, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on Monday. He beat a Wednesday deadline to make the request.
The All-Star said in November that he was thinking of giving up 23 out of respect for his hero Michael Jordan, but at that time he was “50-50,” according to the newspaper.
“I’ve done it,” James told the Plain Dealer. “I already sent it in. I’m going to be No. 6.”
March 1st, 2010 | Published in Sports | 1 Comment
In case you missed it, here are some of the highs and lows of the 2010 Winter Olympics…
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA — It was shortly before 3 p.m. on Sunday in Vancouver, and the Closing Ceremony set to begin later in the afternoon was suddenly irrelevant.
Sidney Crosby had just given Canada all the closure it required by slamming home the goal. And in the downtown sports bar where hundreds of us watched this gold-medal game, hundreds of arms were suddenly high in the air accompanied by a group howl that was still loud and clear 15 minutes later, even as the tequila started disappearing from the shot glasses.
What red-blooded, red-mittened Canadian could possibly ask for more after a somber start to their Winter Olympics?
Time for our own traditional closing ceremony (tequila optional):
BEST PERFORMANCE ON SNOW
You could go for a medal magnet like Marit Bjoergen of Norway, who won three golds, a silver and a bronze in women’s cross country: something her coach equated to a runner winning medals from 800 meters to the marathon in the Summer Games. You could go for Bode Miller’s storming slalom run that brought him his first Olympic gold. But I’m going for Anja Paerson making it to the starting gate less than 24 hours after she launched herself much higher and farther than planned off the last jump of the women’s downhill. How Paerson avoided major injury after her brutal crash landing remains a mystery, but the even bigger surprise was seeing her — terribly sore but only slightly shaken — win a bronze medal in the super combined the next day.
February 17th, 2010 | Published in Sports
Round two of the 2010 Lakers-Celtics war is tomorrow. The Lakers will have to pull out all the stops to go up 2-0. Currently on a four-game win streak without superstar Kobe Bryant, the Lakeshow is not worried. ESPN covers the story…
Lakers guard Kobe Bryant told reporters Wednesday that he is doubtful for the Lakers’ Thursday game against the Boston Celtics and expects to miss his fifth straight game, (sixth if you include the All-Star Game), because of a lack of strength and lingering pain in his left leg and ankle.
“Right now, it’s a no,” Bryant said. “If I wake up tomorrow and I feel drastically different then I’ll play. But, I doubt it.”
February 10th, 2010 | Published in Sports
Tracy McGrady has been splitting his time recently shuttling between Chicago and Houston, alternating between working out with famed athletic trainer Tim Grover and spending time with his family.
His only constant has been the waiting.
McGrady expects to play again this season, one way or another. If the Rockets trade him, he’ll report to his new team and try to show he has something left. If the Rockets don’t trade him, he’ll seek a buyout prior to March 1, allowing him to sign as a free agent with a playoff team.
A seven-time All-Star, McGrady is the crème de la crème of this season’s version of our annual list of the Top Non-Playing Trade Assets as we barrel toward the Feb. 18 NBA trade deadline. Technically, McGrady is probably ineligible since he’s in playing shape, he played this season, and he’s been playing ball on the side to try to stay in shape while continuing to strengthen his knee following microfracture surgery. But with the Rockets having sent him into exile, what else can you call him except a Non-Playing Trade Asset?
So with that clarification, let’s get right down to the meat of things with information gleaned from various team executives, agents and other heavy hitters from around the NBA.
February 10th, 2010 | Published in Sports
True fans of the Winter Olympics will need more than a television broadcast schedule to stay current, especially if NBC’s Olympics coverage (across local and cable channels) doesn’t show your favorite sports or shows them on a tape-delayed broadcast that leaves you 3 hours behind your Twitter feed. Fortunately, we have some tips to help you use your PC and smartphone to get the coverage you need–regardless of where in the world the right coverage may air.
NBC
NBC has the U.S. broadcast rights to the 2010 Winter Olympics, so the best place for U.S. viewers to start looking for coverage is at the NBCOlympics.com Web site. (We previously covered the network’s streaming options for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.) Prepare your PC by ensuring that it has the most recent versions of the Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight plug-ins; you’ll need them to view the slideshows and to stream video. If you don’t mind following NBC’s online streaming schedule, it offers a fairly good way to watch the Olympics. NBC even provides a BOSS button that brings up a generic Windows desktop–complete with empty spreadsheet–in case you want to view the events discreetly while at work.
The NBCOlympics Website has plenty of other gizmos besides streaming video to keep you coming back. For example, you can choose among many Olympics RSS feeds organized by topic, sport, country, or nation, opt for alerts via SMS or e-mail, and get local Olympic TV listings sorted by provider. If you have a smartphone, you can supplement your PC coverage with upcoming apps for the iPhone or BlackBerry. A mobile-optimized version of the NBCOlympics site will be available, as will live streaming video via Olympics 2Go.
February 9th, 2010 | Published in Sports
The NFL Champions celebrated their Super Bowl win in their hometown of New Orleans today.
Pictures of the biggest party of the year are after the jump
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February 4th, 2010 | Published in Sports
The 24th annual Tough Guy Challenge took place last weekend, on Sunday, January 31st, on South Perton Farm, near Wolverhampton, England. Despite being billed as “the safest most dangerous taste of physical and mental endurance pain in the world”, this year’s race still attracted over 5,000 men and women – all of them signing a disclaimer saying “It’s my own bloody fault for being here”. About 600 racers did not complete the course this year – the winner being Paul Jones of Oswestry, England, completing the course in one hour 18 minutes.
January 29th, 2010 | Published in Sports
Jim Fassel waited patiently as the cavernous auditorium filled, just to make sure everybody was present. He was the New York Giants‘ coach at the time — a man whose team had won the 2001 NFC Championship Game over the Minnesota Vikings just two days earlier — and he wanted to establish his strategy for Super Bowl week.
But it wasn’t only players and assistants who had arrived for this meeting at team headquarters. Wives, girlfriends and even a couple of mothers had been asked to attend, as well.
What Fassel understood was that the days leading up to Super Bowl XXXV would be rife with the kind of distractions that can cripple a team’s focus. And the last thing he needed was to face the Baltimore Ravens with even one player not having had a great week of practice.
“I told everybody in that room that I didn’t care what happened that week,” Fassel said in a recent interview. “If it was tickets or travel plans or parties, whatever. I told them all to keep the players out of it. The only thing they needed to be worried about was the game.”
Fassel ultimately wound up losing that game, but his message is one many coaches have uttered over the years. In fact, you can bet the Indianapolis Colts‘ Jim Caldwell and the New Orleans Saints‘ Sean Payton have delivered similar speeches as their teams prepare for Super Bowl XLIV in Miami. As everyone knows, this game is the dream that occupies the mind of every player in the NFL. What those same players sometimes don’t realize is how easily the opportunity of a lifetime could be ruined by poor decisions.
January 29th, 2010 | Published in Sports
This Sunday, catch the Los Angeles Lakers take on the Boston Celtics (ABC 3:30 EST)
Sunday’s game will be the first time these two teams face each other this season. The Lakers are coming in during the longest road trip of their season while the Celtics come home from a quick two game skid.
Rivalry highlights are after the jump…
January 27th, 2010 | Published in Sports
During the next week and a half, statisticians, analysts and even astrologists will pick through the Super Bowl with a fine-tooth comb, trying to divine a winner based on everything from quarterback passer rating to phases of the moon.
With that in mind, Carlton Chin, a financial analyst and MIT graduate, and Jay Granat, a psychotherapist, constructed a model for The Wall Street Journal consisting of 10 football data points to figure out whether the New Orleans Saints or Indianapolis Colts will win the title Feb. 7.
Messrs. Chin and Granat crunched numbers from the previous 43 Super Bowls and found that teams with more takeaways than giveaways in the game have a 61% chance to win (good for the Saints, who have a better turnover ratio than the Colts this season), while teams that allow fewer offensive yards have a 60% chance to win (plus-one for the Colts, based on what they have done this season).
In this study, a few metrics wound up with surprisingly negative connotations. A high passer rating actually has a negative correlation with winning the Super Bowl, as the team with the lower overall passer rating has won 53% of the games. That could be bad for the Saints, as quarterback Drew Brees had a league-best 109.6 rating this season, besting Peyton Manning’s 99.9.
So what’s the verdict? Six of the 10 factors say the Saints will win, but big-game experience, which looks at whether a team played in the Super Bowl in the previous three seasons (the Colts were in the 2007 game) had the strongest correlation. Teams that did this beat teams that didn’t—the Saints have never been to the Super Bowl—64% of the time.
January 25th, 2010 | Published in Sports
They are not coming in undefeated, but the two best teams in the league will square off in South Florida.
Indianapolis is on a mission for its second Lombardi in four years while the Saints are savoring their first trip to the big game.
If you’re a gambling man, the line is after the jump. For everyone else, get your flat-screens ready and your grill fired-up Superbowl XLIV looks to be one for the ages.
