The Sports Curmudgeon

There’s lots of NBA “stuff” to deal with today. Larry Brown has a new job as the head coach in Charlotte. I’m not so sure he didn’t jump too quickly to take that job. In NY, Larry Brown coached under the “supervision” of a former great NBA player who had demonstrated a huge set of shortcomings as a GM/executive in the NBA. Now, in Charlotte, Larry Brown will coach under the “supervision” of a former great NBA player who has demonstrated a huge set of shortcomings as a GM/executive in the NBA. Is there an echo in here? Oh, and days after he took the Bobcats’ job, there was an opening in Dallas and potentially one in Phoenix. While I will go on to say that both of those teams have significant problems, they are both more talented than the Bobcats.

Let me start with Dallas. I’m not going to try to paint Avery Johnson as the next Red Auerbach; he’s not. But as an NBA coach, Avery Johnson is better than average. If you rank ordered the problems the Mavs had last season, they would be:

1. Players on the court
2. Owner
3. Coaches on the bench.

Dallas was winning two out of three of its games (35-18) when Mark Cuban dug into his hip pocket and paid dearly to acquire Jason Kidd. The Mavs were a “break-even team” after that trade (16-13). Here is the cold, hard breakdown on what Cuban did to the Mavs:

Jason Kidd’s stats are alluring particularly if you are enthralled with triple doubles. But Jason Kidd cannot cover any point guard in the NBA effectively. Therefore, Kidd’s stats have to be seriously devalued because he will give up points and assists and rebounds at the defensive end of the floor all the time he is on the court. Chris Paul averaged 12 assists in the series against the Mavs and less than 2 turnovers.

Jason Kidd has been “unhappy” everywhere he has played. It took almost three seasons of his whining and whispering to reporters and migraine headaches – which miraculously disappeared when his work location changed latitude and longitude – to force his way out of New Jersey.

Dallas now owns the $21M contract of a guy who is old, who cannot play any defense, and who has a history of being a less than happy camper in all his previous stops. BRILLIANT !!

I do not want to leave the impression that the Mavs gave up all that much to get Kidd. Dsagna Diop is a spot player in the middle. He won’t carry a team anywhere, but the Mavs could have used someone large to help out Eric Dampier in the middle. [By the way, Dampier’s defense is less than stellar too.] Losing Devin Harris was not all that huge either since it will probably be another two years until Harris is an average NBA point guard. In two years, Jason Kidd either will be out of the league or will be playing for a hugely reduced salary.

Do you realize that the Knicks are no longer the team in the NBA with the highest payroll? That’s right; the Mavs now own that distinction; the Mavs’ payroll is more than $16M higher than the Knicks. Like the Knicks, the Mavs have the month of May at their leisure…

Back when David Stern invented a new rule limiting owners to seats off the bench and off the floor, Mark Cuban did his pouting and complaining shtick on sports talk outlets. One of the points he made in several places was that because he was on the floor and was in the players’ huddle during timeouts, it allowed him to see just how much respect the players had for Avery Johnson and how good a coach Johnson was. He said that Johnson might not have gotten the Mavs’ job had not Cuban seen him in action. That was less than 24 months ago; now Johnson is gonzo.

There was a report in the Dallas Morning News of a confrontation between Johnson and Cuban in Johnson’s office after a loss to the Lakers. According to that report, witnesses heard Johnson tell Cuban that if he knew so much, then he (Cuban) should coach the team. If true, that proves that Avery Johnson knows what he is doing. There were rumors that Don Nelson got tired of Cuban’s talking X’s and O’s to him and that is why Nelson left in the middle of a season. I have no idea if any of that is true, but it does fit a pattern. And now Mark Cuban – the guy who uses his blog to tell the world how everyone else is running their business stupidly – gets to hire his first head coach. Stand by for the Mark Cuban full court press of sports talk show appearances after the hiring to trumpet what a great decision he made.

Steve Rosenbloom of the Chicago Tribune summed up a lot of this:

“Ownership Hysteria Alert: Mark Cuban is coming to Wrigley for tonight’s game. Anytime you get a rich guy coming to town after his team tanks in the playoffs you’ve got a perfect match. Apparently, Aramis Ramirez is the Spanish playoff term for Dirk Nowitzki.”

Meanwhile in Phoenix, there is a simple bottom line. The trade for Shaq did not work for the reason that I and a boatload of other observers said it would not. Shaq cannot play the kind of game the Suns used to play and the Suns are less effective playing the way they have to play when Shaq is on the court. Shaq was supposedly there to provide defense – particularly against the Spurs’ Tim Duncan. That might have worked three years ago, but Shaq is no longer able to provide that. Duncan just posted 24 points a game and 14 rebounds a game against the Suns. The ghost of Wilt Chamberlain could have done that.

In Denver, Carmelo Anthony said his team quit. I don’t know if they quit, but watching the Nuggets play basketball is almost like watching those filmed “And 1 Tour” exhibitions. It’s all about running and hogging the ball and playing as little defense as possible so you can get the ball back as quickly as possible so you can run and hog the ball some more. Allen Iverson – acquired by the Nuggets last year – is a transcendent talent who plays full tilt for 48 minutes. But he has never been a winner because he is selfish and does not share the ball. Put him on the same team with Anthony and JR Smith and assists will become an endangered species - - as they are in Denver.

Interestingly, the Nuggets are now 4-20 in playoff games since Carmelo Anthony arrived. In his single year at Syracuse, he led the Orange to the NCAA Championship. To do that, he led his team to six “playoff” wins in a season. So, how many more years might it be until he matches that total in the NBA?

The Mavs, the Suns, and the Nuggets have some striking similarities:

1. All three teams traded for superstars who forced a trade out of their previous venue.

2. All three teams do not play defense.

3. All three teams are out of the playoffs in the first round.

And if that were not bad enough, all three of these teams play in the NBA West where there are a bunch of young teams playing good basketball and getting better such as LA, New Orleans, Portland and Utah.

Finally, now that Dick Vitale has been elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame, let me say unequivocally that is one acceptance speech I do not want to hear - - BAY-BEE!

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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I am really surprised that those mighty protectors of all things noble and good - - and inoffensive to anyone and everyone – in the NCAA have missed out on this one. Those are the folks who forced schools to change their nicknames because they might have been offensive to some – but not all – Native Americans. These are the folks who try to regulate or at least put boundaries on the kinds of signs that might appear at NCAA games or on the themes of halftime shows by some collegiate bands. These are mightily sensitive folks; you would have thought they would have acted by now.

You see, the NCAA gives out an award every year to the best pitcher in college baseball and they call it the Roger Clemens Award. Now if the NCAA will force changes in team mascots and try to limit the expression of students at NCAA events on the possibility that someone might be offended, don’t you think they ought to change the name of that award? Might not someone, somewhere, be offended by the allegations of steroid and HGH use followed by an assertion that Clemens and an underage girl had a relationship of some kind? What about the feelings of those potentially offended folks? Shouldn’t there be some kind of appreciation for their outrage at NCAA headquarters?

As the tawdry part of the Roger Clemens story continues to play out in the media, I am amazed at how the mighty have fallen. Two years ago, Roger Clemens name was being associated with Christy Matthewson and Walter Johnson and Sandy Koufax as one of the great pitchers of all time. Now his name is being associated with Jerry Lee Lewis and Luis Polonia. Sic transit gloria mundi.

There was a column in the LA Times earlier this week by Wallace Matthews. It puts a perspective on Roger Clemens situation without any grand rhetorical flourish. I commend it to your reading.

According to a column by Craig Smith in the Seattle Times, a high school pitcher in Spokane Washington struck out 21 hitters in a 7-inning game. Do the math. He struck out every batter. Two years ago, a columnist might have allowed himself to do a huge extrapolation and refereed to this kid as “the next Roger Clemens”. I don’t think there is any great temptation to do that today…

Staying with baseball pitchers for a moment, here is a quick quiz courtesy of Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:

“Barry Trotz” is:

“A. The coach of the NHL’s Nashville Predators.

“B. A digestive-tract disorder that afflicts Giants fans whenever Zito takes the mound.”

After the Chicago Cubs lost to the Washington Nats by a shutout, Cubbies’ manager Lou Piniella did a post game interview on cable TV for the Chicago area. According to the Chicago Tribune, he said:

“When you don’t score runs, it definitely increases the other teams’ chance of winning.”

I should say so. Since baseball allows no tie games to exist, if you don’t score the chances that the other team will eventually win are 100%.

There are headlines proclaiming that the European Champions League title will be contested between two English soccer teams. Manchester United will play the winner of a Liverpool/Chelsea match in Moscow for the European Cup. Here is another potential “first” for this match up – even though I would not know how to gather the data to prove it:

If the final teams are Manchester United and Liverpool, not only will this be the first time two English teams have played for the championship, but also this has to be the first time that both teams in the finals would be owned by Americans.

I haven’t seen any reference to that in any of the British papers that I scan online but if this happens, I will expect to see a reference to the intrusion of those bloody colonials into “the beautiful game”. After all, those blokes over there don’t know football from a foot stocking…

High definition television has to be the best thing that has happened to the NHL in the last 50 years. Ratings for the NHL on NBC were up 11% this year and ratings on Versus are up more than 25% for the playoff games so far. Be careful about reading too much into ratings increase on Versus; the number was trivially small to begin with so a 25% increase is really a very small increase in viewers. But it beats a decrease by a mile!!

NBC also announced that it will exercise its option to do NHL games next year putting the NHL on Sunday for at least 10 games. This may not be as good as having ESPN pick up the telecast rights – and putting the full ESPN cross-promotional hype machine on the case. But it beats no TV exposure other than Versus by a mile!!

Here’s what I think would really make hockey more exciting on TV – now that Hi-Def allows you to follow the puck easily. If the league were to contract to somewhere between 16 and 20 teams and put another three or four teams in Canadian cities where the fans really care about the game, there would be energy in all of the games. I’ve never been to Winnipeg or Regina so I don’t know if there are sufficient numbers of fans there to garner TV ratings for games involving those teams but I just know that the fans in the building there would be passionate hockey fans and I would be able to sense that as a viewer at home. Watching a game with the local fans in Atlanta or Florida or Columbus? Not so much…

Finally, Greg Cote had this item in the Miami Herald recently:

“Dale Earnhardt Jr. has opened a new bar, Whisky River, in Charlotte, N.C. Cannot confirm the bar aims to be a place where people can come in, relax and feel like they haven’t won a race in 70 consecutive starts.'’

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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There were a lot of rumblings about the story in the NY Daily News that Roger Clemens had a longstanding “relationship with a country music singer. If/when the entirety of this story becomes known, I will be happy to take a position on its importance. For the moment, I have only a couple of simple comments:

1. How this can be used by the defense in Clemens’ suit against Brian McNamee for defamation is not obvious to me. McNamee’s alleged defamation related to Clemens’ alleged use of steroids/HGH not about his marital fidelity.

2. If this relationship were actually sexual in nature, the important part of that would be the age of the young woman when the relationship was “consummated” in the Biblical sense. She would have been 15 when they met; he would have been 28 when they met; a sexual relationship at that time would have been more than inappropriate.

3. If there are specific allegations of a sexual liaison between Clemens and this young woman, might he offer as a defense that all he ever injected her with was Vitamin B-12? [Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one cheap shot…]

Similar numbers of rumblings occurred around the story of Caleb Campbell (S, Army) being drafted by the Detroit Lions meaning that he can indeed play NFL football if he makes the team and can fulfill his Army tour of duty obligations by working in recruiting and community outreach positions. I have heard all the arguments for and against the rule that will allow him to do that. But that is the rule that was extant when he signed on to go to West Point and play football. All he is doing is abiding by that rule which he did not instigate or implement. For those who have a gripe here, your gripe is with the Army/DoD and not with Caleb Campbell.

I have read speculation in several places that the rapidity of the first round of the NFL Draft on Saturday (it took 3 hours and 31 minutes) could lead to holding just the first round of the draft on Friday night next year in prime time from 7:00 to 11:00 PM EDT. I can see that happening for one very simple reason. NFL Network – wholly owned by the NFL – needs programming and during the off-season, they just do not have a whole lot of original programming to offer up. A move like this can help NFL Network so I do not think it will have a lot of trouble being approved.

When the NFL schedule is analyzed and parsed to levels of detail that don’t make all that much sense, you often hear about teams that the league has been unkind to with regard to travel burdens. Well, for the 2008 season, the travel burden fell pretty unkindly on the New England Patriots. In October the Pats play consecutive West Coast games against San Diego and SF; then, in December the Pats go to Seattle and Oakland on consecutive weekends.

When the Raiders drafted Darren McFadden with the fourth overall pick on Saturday, they created a logjam at tailback. Obviously, the Raiders will sign McFadden eventually and he will be in camp and on the team. Already on the roster were – in alphabetical order – Michael Bush, Adimchinobi Eschemandu, Justin Fargas, Lamont Jordan and Dominic Rhodes. That logjam got a little less congested yesterday when the Raiders released Dominic Rhodes.

Two seasons ago, Rhodes played a big part in the Indy Colts’ win in the Super Bowl over the Chicago Bears. He cashed in with a lucrative deal in Oakland despite a DUI incident proximal to that signing. The NFL suspended Rhodes for four games; he then became part of the Raiders’ backfield and now he is gone. It will be interesting to see where/if he signs on next…

There is yet another idea afloat to put an NFL team in Los Angeles. The NFL has made it abundantly clear that this is not going to happen absent a new spiffy stadium in LA and that the city fathers can continue to try to come up with ideas to make the LA Coliseum into something less awful than it currently is but that will be insufficient. Now comes forward billionaire developer, Ed Roski. He has a plan to build a stadium in the City of Industry, which is about 35 miles east of LA and where the funding for the city comes almost entirely from sales tax. The City of Industry is zoned 92% Industrial and 8% commercial; there are only a handful of permanent residents but there is good transportation to the city and it is near LA.

This plan is different from most of the other “plans” that have been proffered in the recent past. The key element here is that Roski already controls the land needed for the stadium and he claims to have in hand all the environmental impact statements needed to move forward with a stadium. There is some tug-of-war ongoing with the State legislature in California over use of a portion of this sales tax revenue for the stadium; I don’t pretend to understand all of that but if that were the single stumbling block to getting a stadium and an NFL team back in LA, I think the votes could be rounded up to make that happen.

Another factor in favor of this new proposal is the longstanding relationship between Ed Roski and Roger Goodell. The commish says that he has known Roski for a long time and that Roski is a “credible man”. That cannot hurt…

The whole story on this – at least the whole story from Mr. Roski’s position – can be found at www.losangelesfootballstadium.com. If you go there be sure to click on the options so you can see the design for the stadium itself. It is a unique design concept…

Finally, Mike Bianchi summed up much of a current sporting situation with this single line in the Orlando Sentinel recently:

“New motto for The Players Championship now that Tiger Woods will skip it while rehabbing after knee surgery: ‘We buried our ratings at wounded knee.’ ”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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The Lakers swept the Nuggets out of the playoffs. That the Lakers advanced is hardly unanticipated; that they swept is not all that stunning. Nevertheless, this does provide a glimpse at the potential for another NBA chronic underachiever. I have talked about how Tracy McGrady has never gotten his team out of the first round of the playoffs and how that indicates that he might be underachieving his “$20M salary”. Consider now Carmelo Anthony. He has been in the NBA for four years now and like McGrady, Anthony has never been on a team that made it out of the first round of the playoffs. I believe that the Nuggets with Anthony have gone 4-19 in playoff games.

In a couple of previous versions of the Nuggets, Carmelo Anthony did not have a whole lot of help on the squad. However, this year the Nuggets have Allen Iverson and Kenyon Martin out there with him. Iverson is a top shelf player; Martin was an overall first pick in the draft at one time. In one of the more interesting ironies, Marcus Camby was just named defensive player of the year on a team that allows almost 107 points per game. So, Carmelo Anthony is not out there alone trying to fend off opponents; he has a bit of help. Nevertheless, the Nuggets are going home at the end of Round 1 yet again.

Lamar Odom and Ron Artest were once on the same AAU basketball team. (I believe that Elton Brand was on that team too.) Odom shares an off-court interest with his former teammate, Artest; Odom is an aspiring music company executive. Odom has a music company called Rich Soil Entertainment and that company will release an album by a rapper known as Ali Vegas in August. [I am informed that Ali Vegas is indeed known to folks who actually listen to rap music; I do not.]

Odom, however, seems to understand a bit of how the world works that might have escaped Ron Artest’s cognitive view. Artest asked for time off during the NBA season to promote an album that he had released under his own record label; Odom is purposely waiting to make the release in August, which is the off-season in the NBA for every player. It would seem as if Odom has indeed made the connection that playing basketball provides him with the resources and the status to do other things in his life and that the resources and status from basketball need to be maintained if he wants to do other things in his life that rely on resources and celebrity status. Maybe Ron Artest should give him a call…

As the horseracing season stumbles toward Kentucky Derby Day – it’s this Saturday if you had not been keeping track – the state of horseracing is moribund. The fact that this year’s crop of three-year olds has excited exactly no one has shone the light on many of horseracing’s significant problems. Some of those problems have to do with changing demographics and changing interests of new sports fans to be sure. Other problems fall into the category of self-inflicted wounds.

The people who run racing and who own the racetracks make their money on the “take-out”. In pari-mutuel wagering, all the money goes into a pool; the track takes a percentage off the top and then distributes the remaining money to all people holding winning tickets. So, large betting pools mean large revenues for the track. That’s not so hard, is it?

The problem comes when betting pools shrink – as they have been doing for some years now. What the racing moguls have done is to raise the percentage of the “take out” thereby reducing the amount of money returned to people who have made winning wagers. Guess what that does. It makes some of the people who used to bet the races take their money and wager it elsewhere – such as on football games or basketball games or in casinos. In some of the exotic wagering pools such as superfectas, the “take out” can be as high as 25% and that is abject nonsense. On a simple sports wager, the biggest “take out” I can recall is 15% and often you can find sports wagers with 10% as the “take out”.

After the moguls have driven away some of the bettors who might provide money for the betting pools, these same geniuses card too many races on too many racing days. It may not seem logical at first, but overdoing the number of races available for betting actually decreases revenue. When the fields are short and uncompetitive or if the quality of horses entered on a day are so miserable that it is obvious that the only reason they are there is to fill out the card for the day, bettors will turn their attention elsewhere. When they turn their attention elsewhere, that is like asking the Grim Reaper to show up and do his thing.

Oftentimes, the arrival of the Triple Crown races rejuvenates an interest in horseracing. If that is the case this year, then that rejuvenated interest is muted far more than in any year that I can remember. A friend of mine who is of British extraction suggested that the reason for horseracing’s decline here is found in American history. He said that racing is indeed the sport of kings and that Americans fought a couple of wars to assure that they would have no kings. He could be right; but I think that horseracing’s decline has more to do with the blockheads who run it.

Speaking of wagers on sports, one of the Internet sportsbooks listed the odds for teams to win the MLS Championship this year. The defending champions – the Houston Dynamo – are not nearly the favorite. The Dynamo are listed at 6-1. Teams with lower odds are:

DC United (5-2)

New England Revolution (7-2)

Chivas USA (5-1)

Interestingly, the LA Galaxy is listed at 7-1 and I wonder how that can be since they have Landon Donovan (US national team star player) and David Beckham (asserted by his acolytes to still be a top-shelf player) on the Galaxy. How can there be two “world class players” on one team in a second-tier or third-tier league and still that team is not one of the top three favorites to win that league championship?

I absolutely could not make this up. Last week, on msnbc.com there was a story about three teenagers who were practicing synchronized swimming in a pool at St. Edwards State Park in Washington. They are members of the Seattle Synchronized Swim Team. All three passed out and went under at the same time. They were taken from the pool and to the hospital. I have never held synchronized swimming in any measure of high regard but synchronized swimming is more than a few steps above synchronized drowning.

Finally, Greg Cote had this item in the Miami Herald recently:

“Marlins players served food Friday at Camillus House of Miami, a homeless shelter. Given the team’s baseball-low payroll, there might or might not have been doggie bags involved.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Let me make something clear at the outset. You cannot evaluate or “assign grades” to a team’s draft for at least the first two years - - and maybe three. I do not believe in giving out draft grades to teams the day after the draft and so I will not do that. I do have a few observations and comments about the draft and since that was the thing that dominated sports radio and TV last weekend, let me get those remarks out now.

This was the Year of the Offensive Lineman. Not only did Jake Long go first in the draft, but also seven other offensive linemen went in Round 1 compared to only five running backs, two quarterbacks one tight end and zero wide receivers. If that ever happened before, I surely do not recall it.

Rumors floated around that the New Orleans Saints were offering to trade Jamaal Brown who made the Pro Bowl not so long ago. With all the teams rushing to get offensive linemen, it is somewhat surprising that a team did not pick up on that offer.

The Arizona Cardinals’ pass defense last year was pretty bad; it was 29th in the league statistically. Yesterday, the Cards seemed to recognize that need and spent picks on cornerbacks and defensive ends/pass rushers. If the players pan out, that should improve the team.

The Carolina Panthers need a running game because they do not have a stud quarterback or a dominant passing game. They took Jeff Otha (OT, Pitt) and Jonathon Stewart (RB, Oregon) in the first round of the draft; that cannot hurt their running attack.

The Chicago Bears need a quarterback; they have for about the last 60 years. They also needed help on the offensive line and at running back and at wide receiver this year and – as usual – the Bears seemed to focus on those other needs and not quarterback. Eventually, even if only by accident, the Bears need to find a quarterback who is well above average every weekend. Maybe next year?

Denver’s defense was miserable last year; it was a major contributor to a losing season for the Broncos. Before the draft, they did acquire DT, Dwayne Robertson, from the Jets; but before anyone falls all over themselves in declaring the defensive line problems solved, please recall Denver’s history with “used defensive linemen”. Do the names Courtney Brown, Darryl Gardner and Gerard Warren ring any bells? [By the way, is Wahoo McDaniel still alive? Can he still play a little?] Anyway, the Broncos emphasized offense in their draft and that seems strange to me.

The Indianapolis Colts either plan to move some of their draftees to new positions or they have some inside information on new rule changes coming to the NFL. The Colts drafted three centers over the weekend. They already have one on the roster. The way football is currently played, you do not need more than one on the field on any given snap.

The NY Giants needed to fill the hole in their defense created by Gibril Wilson’s departure for a fat contract in Oakland. With the last pick in the first round, the Giants found the best safety in the draft - - by my evaluation. My mother always used to say it was better to be lucky than smart. The Giants were lucky AND smart; that’s got to be still better.

The Washington Redskins need help at WR and they took two WRs within their first three selections. The problem there is that the two incumbent WRs are in the midst of long-term contracts of the “$30M variety”. The guys getting the big bucks are the ones not getting the job done sufficiently to create the need to draft new players there. Just to clarify, this is not a good situation…

Dallas had the 22nd pick in the draft and took RB, Felix Jones, from Arkansas. Immediately after that, the Pittsburgh Steelers took RB, Rashard Mendenhall from Illinois. Everyone thought Mendenhall was the better pick but Jerry Jones explained the Dallas selection this way. He said that Felix Jones would be a better back-up running back to Marion Barber because Mendenhall had the potential to be an every-down back and they were looking for a back-up. You don’t think that the fact that Jerry Jones played football at Arkansas had anything to do with this selection, do you? Me neither?

The Broncos took a very large defensive tackle from Va Tech in the fourth round. According to data in the scout reports, Carlton Powell majored in “nutrition and exercise” at Va Tech. There was no mention as to whether or not he minored in “sleeping”.

The Eagles departed from their usual “no bad apples policy” taking Jack Ikegwuonu (CB, Wisconsin) in the fourth round. He faces a trial on felony charges for grand theft. In addition, Ikegwuonu – how long before he gets the nickname “Ike” which is so much easier to type? – is rehabbing from an ACL injury. So, he will not be physically able to play in 2008 but in 2009, he might not be able to play because he might be in jail or the NFL might suspend him. Strange pick…

The Bengals are no strangers to players who are “bad apples”. You might think that the Bengals might be on a course to focus sharply on “high character” draftees but if you think that, you might be wrong. The Bengals took a defensive tackle in the fifth round who is facing a trial next month on counts of DWI, driving without a license and hit-and-run. I have no information on the details of the case so I make no judgment about his innocence or guilt, but this is the fifth round of the draft where player rankings tend to collapse one upon the other. If you are the Bengals, is this a critically important player?

The Raiders traded CB, Fabian Washington, to the Ravens over the weekend. Three years ago, Washington was a mid-first round pick in the draft; this weekend, the Raiders got a 4th round pick for him. If Fabian Washington were an Yugo, he could not have depreciated any faster.

Enough with the NFL draft. If there were a Brainiac of the Month Award, this month’s winner would have to be Josh Howard of the Dallas Mavericks. Last week on Michael Irvin’s ESPN Radio show, Howard said that he enjoyed smoking marijuana in the off-season and that lots of NBA players smoked marijuana.

Forget for a moment that he admitted to breaking the law on the radio and forget for a moment that he players in a league so image conscious that it imposed a dress code on its players and forget for a moment that he threw his fellow-players under the bus with his broad and unspecific statement about their smoking habits. In addition to all of that, his comments caused people to focus on how he has been doing in the current playoff series between the Mavs and the Hornets. The answer is not so good; Howard is 15-58 from the floor in four games. One more like that and the Mavs season will be over and Josh Howard can sit back and light up and …

Finally, here is an item from Dwight Perry’s Sideline Chatter column in the Seattle Times:

“Brian’s Song (1971) and Rudy (1993) finished 1-2 in eHarmony.com’s “20 Movies That Make Men Cry,” and four other sports offerings landed in the top 17. But the news wasn’t all good.

Miami Dolphins 1-15 Season Highlights (2007), the odds-on favorite, was unexpectedly disqualified from tear-jerker consideration when judges ruled it was more of a comedy.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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The drawings for Olympic soccer competition this summer happened a few days ago and some say that the United States team drew into an advantageous group with regard to being able to advance to the second round. Here are the Groups:

Group A: Argentina, Australia, Ivory Coast, Serbia

Group B: Japan, Netherlands, Nigeria, USA

Group C: Belgium, Brazil, China, New Zealand

Group D: Cameroon, Honduras, Italy, S. Korea

The top two teams from each round of “group play” will advance to the second round from which the medals will be determined. I am not going to pretend to be able to “break down” these pairings because I do not know nearly enough to do so. Having said that, I am shocked by the teams that are absent from the competition. Note the absence of England, France, Spain, Portugal and Germany. In World Cup play, all five of those country teams “make noise”. I realize that in the Olympics they have a shorter field and that they apportion slots geographically, but it is a bit surprising to me to see Europe “represented” by Belgium, Italy, Netherlands and Serbia.

Sometimes I wonder if the New York Yankees – as individuals and as an organization – are addicted to publicity. George Steinbrenner surely never eschewed the spotlight or the back page of the NYC tabloids. As soon as George started to quiet down, his son emerged from total obscurity to become “Yammering Hank” – the sound bite that keeps on giving. Not to miss out on the action, new manager Joe Girardi seems to have decided that in addition to his managerial duties he needs to perform paternal duties with regard to the players on the roster. Girardi has banned candy from the Yankees’ clubhouse and has asked the other teams in the league to keep it out of the visiting locker room when the Yankees are in town.

The idea here is that good nutrition is essential to sustained athletic performance and Girardi prefers to have the team nibble on dried fruit or granola than on gummy bears. While nutritionists and people who are mesmerized by the importance of the food pyramid will surely agree with him, you have to recognize that the Yankees’ roster is made up of adults who ought to be able to make their own dietary decisions when it comes to snacks.

By the way, if the food pyramid is so damned important and so carefully researched to optimize the nutrients for human health, can you explain to me why it gets changed every five years or so? What happens to the health of the people who were religiously following the last version of the food pyramid? Sounds like a class action lawsuit could be brewing there…

When teams play poorly and managers are fired, you often hear that you cannot fire the players so you have to fire the manager. Well, in Cincinnati, they have already gone through a bunch of managers recently and over the winter put Dusty Baker in charge there. The Reds are off to a miserable start; as of this morning, only the Washington Nationals have a worse record in the National League. So, the team can’t fire the players and they really can’t fire Dusty Baker yet – despite the fact that I have never been all that impressed by Baker’s managerial acumen – so the Reds took “Door Number Three”. They fired the GM and replaced him with Walt Jocketty who had been the GM in St. Louis for the last decade or so until the Cards replaced him at the end of last year. The Reds’ owner, Bob Castellini, said:

“We’ve just come to a point where we’re not going to lose anymore.”

Whom does that sound like? Cue Popeye the Sailor Man:

“I’ve had all I can stands; I can stands no more…”

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Barry Zito’s huge contract with the Giants might be a stinking albatross around the team’s neck. He is not pitching well in SF and he has five years and more than $110M to go on that deal. Since arriving in SF, his record is 11-17. However, there are other “albatross contracts” out there in MLB; maybe they are not as big or as long as Zito’s is now, but consider these:

Jason Schmidt signed with the Dodgers for 3 years and $47M. He started six games last year and had a 1-4 record. Then, he had shoulder surgery.

Esteban Loaiza signed with Oakland for 3 years and $22M on 2006. By last August, the A’s had had enough and put Loaiza on waivers and Christmas came in August. The Dodgers claimed Loaiza and thereby became responsible for the final part of last year’s salary and the continuation of his deal at about $7M per year. His ERA with the Dodgers so far is 6.30.

Juan Pierre signed with the Dodgers - - are you picking up a trend here - - for 5 years and $44M. Pierre is now a part-time player for the Dodgers who are upset with the fact that he is an aggressive hitter who rarely walks and who is not a great defensive outfielder. Excuse me, but that was Juan Pierre before he signed on in LA; why are the Dodgers upset that he is exactly the player they signed?

Andruw Jones signed a 2-year contract for $36M with – you guessed it – the Dodgers last winter. Jones is listed on the Dodgers’ roster as weighing 210 lbs. Take a look at him during any televised game and play “Over/Under” 250 lbs; if it’s after lunch and before game time, take OVER. Jones has one full season where he hit .300 or better in his entire career; that’s worth $18M per?

Carl Pavano - proving that the Dodgers do not have a corner on the bad contracts in MLB - signed a 4 year contract with the Yankees for $52M three years ago. It has one year left to go and so far, the Yankees have gotten 111 innings out of him producing a losing record and a 4.77 ERA. Pavano had a career losing record and a history of injury problems at the time the Yankees made their offer.

AJ Burnett signed a 5-year $55M deal with the Blue Jays in 2006. In the first two years of that deal, he won 10 games each season. If that does not seem worth $11M per year to you, consider that Burnett had a career losing record when the Jays signed him and that he has never won more than 12 games in a season in his career.

Finally, whenever you feel tempted to curse the fates for some minor tribulation in your life, think about going through life with the name Ugly Johnny Dickshot. No, he was not a reject from a Playgirl centerfold photo shoot; he was a baseball player in the 1940s. Google is your friend…

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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They say that life sometimes imitates art. Well, I think I have discerned another “situation of imitation”. We are now 90% of the way through the Presidential primaries here in the US; and for at least the last six months, I have heard the cadre of TV political analysts huff and puff and repeat the same thing over and over again. Last night, I realized that the “Road to the Final Four” and the arguments for and against teams being included in the NCAA basketball tournament are nothing more than the same kind of “political coverage” and prognostication - - except the subject is basketball and not votes. I doubt that realization will make next year’s bloviating about the tournament and/or the “bubble teams” and/or what Northwest/Southwest A&M needs to do to advance any more palatable. However, it will explain the presence of that hot air mass settling in over the country…

By the way, there is another way that the basketball pontificating and the political predictions and analyses are very similar. In addition to the common element of endless bleatings about the obvious, all of the predictions are eventually rendered moot because of objective results. Only one team can win a basketball game; only one candidate can win a primary election. Who wins and who loses is determined outside the venue and the purview of the TV pontificators.

Enough philosophy. There was a point earlier in the NBA season where the Houston Rockets were winning 22 games in a row and it sure looked as if – even with Yao Ming injured – the Rockets had a good shot to advance in the NBA playoffs. Tracy McGrady has been on the NBA All-Star team seven times but his team has never advanced to the second round of any playoff series – in those years when his teams made the playoffs. Based on the first two games of this year’s series against the Utah Jazz, it sure looks as if that trend will continue. In addition, Tracy McGrady needs to shoulder a big part of the blame if that indeed happens this year.

In the fourth quarters of the first two games of the playoff series, McGrady has scored a total of two points and has not made a single field goal. He just missed a triple-double in Game 2, but was 0-4 from the field in the fourth quarter of what was a close game. That is not what is expected from a player making $19M this season and whose salary escalates to $23.2M in 2009/10.

In another NBA playoff series, the Cavaliers have a comfortable 2-0 lead over the Wizards. Much has been made of Brendan Haywood’s hard foul against LeBron James in that series but if anyone is buying into the idea that the Wizards are a tough/physical team, then they have not been watching the Wizards for the last decade. Some folks would like to believe that the referees are protecting LeBron James so much that the Wizards have no chance. Balderdash! Of course the referees give “star preference” to LeBron; that is NBA basketball. However, for the Wizards’ fans to think that this is the reason for the 2-0 deficit in the series is purely delusional thinking. Consider:

In Game 1, the Wizards missed eleven consecutive shots from the field in the fourth quarter.

In Game 2, they played terribly from the opening tap until the final whistle and got blown out. The way they played in Game 2 might have gotten them beaten by 10 points against the Grizzlies or the Heat.

The Dallas Mavericks have now lost 10 consecutive playoff games. After leading the Heat 2-0 in the Final series two years ago, they lost four in a row. Last year, they were the #1 seed in the NBA West and they lost four in a row to Golden State. This year they are down 0-2 to the Hornets. And unless someone on that team figures out a way to stay in the same zip code with Chris Paul, the Mavericks will continue to lose. I watched a little more than half of the second game between the Hornets and the Mavericks and the best thing the Mavs did on defense against Paul was that two players faithfully kept their eyes on Paul at all times as he dominated the game with a jillion points and a half a jillion assists.

For the record, if you actually believe that Jason Kidd has the ability to put the defensive clamps on Chris Paul in this series, I would suggest that you are living proof of reincarnation - - because no one could be that ignorant with only a single lifetime to work on it.

In baseball, the Chicago Cubs are off to a torrid start. They share the best record in MLB after 21 games. What I find hugely interesting in their record is that they have accomplished most of their success with Alfonso Soriano out of the lineup. When a team has a player on the DL who they signed to a “nine figure contract”, you would think they would be a whole lot better once he recovered and started playing again, no?

A lot has been made of the ESPN “gotcha moment” with Miguel Tejada where they presented him with his birth certificate showing that he is actually two years older than he has claimed to be. Danny Almonte jokes have abounded. If you stop and think for a moment, Miguel