Miscellaneous Items …

In case you missed it.  The finals of the NBA Cup will happen tonight in Las Vegas.  The NBA Cup was born as the “In-Season Tournament” as a way for the league to drive interest in the first half of the NBA regular season.  They have gussied up a bunch of regular season encounters with unique floor decorations and flashing lights; there is no way to mistake any games identified as “NBA Cup Games” with any run-of-the-mill NBA regular season game.  But therein lies a fundamental problem:

• The games to determine the winner of this year’s NBA Cup will do so as an adjunct to the NBA regular season – – which most people do not care about – – meaning that it is only a big attraction to diehard NBA fans who would be watching the early season games anyhow.

The stand-apart tournament idea works very well in European soccer where the Champions League and the Europa League are important competitions on their own.  However, there is a major difference between those championships and the NBA Cup:

• In European soccer, the “tournament games” are totally separated from the regular season games scheduled for all the tournament entrants.  A loss or a win in the tournament has no effect on the table of the main league for each club.
• In the NBA, the qualifying games for the NBA Cup Finals count in the standings in exactly the same way that other games do.

Tonight’s final game in Las Vegas is the only NBA action scheduled for today and it will match the San Antonio Spurs against the NY Knicks.  Both teams arrive with a record of 18-7 and according to various sportsbooks the Knicks are 2-point favorites with the Total Line set at 234 points.  Both the Spurs and the Knicks will have tomorrow off and then the Spurs will get back in the regular season groove at home against the Woeful Washington Wizards while the Knicks will stop off in Indy on their way back from Sin City to play the Pacers.  Tonight may indeed be the NBA Cup Finals but there is no real “finality” involved there at all.

Moving on … Georgia Tech was my “sleeper team” for college football this year and they won 9 of their 12 regular season games under the leadership of their senior QB, Haynes King.  Quite frankly, it was the fact that King was returning to Georgia Tech as a senior to play QB there that tipped the balance and led me to pick Tech as my “sleeper team”; Haynes King is a good QB and a good football player.

However, I read a report which said that two Heisman Trophy voters had Haynes King as #1 on their Heisman ballots.  I have not seen the ballots but as much as I admire Haynes King as a QB and as a football player, he is not the best college football player that I saw in 2025 – – and I admit that I did not see all of them.  I can only conclude that those two voters do not take their franchise as Heisman voters as seriously as I would prefer that they would.

Maybe – – I don’t read minds so this is merely conjecture – – those two voters saw the reality of the Heisman voting and decided that putting King’s name at the top of their ballot would not damage the integrity of the election process.

• There are more than 900 voters for the Heisman Trophy.
• Media voters comprise 870 votes spread out across the US
• Previous Heisman winners get a vote so long as they are vertical and taking nourishment
• The fans get one – – as in singular – – composite vote.
• Each voter lists three players in rank order.  A first-place vote counts as 3 points; a second-place vote counts as 2 points; a third-place vote counts as 1 point.
• Obviously, the player with the most “points” from all those ballots is the Heisman Trophy winner.

So, if two voters chose to name Haynes King as their #1 player on their ballots, the odds are that no significant harm would come to identifying the ultimate trophy winner.  Trying to put this in the only positive light I can imagine, Haynes King probably was very helpful to a couple of the voters, and they decided to show their appreciation in their voting.

Finally, here is an interesting perspective from Edgar Allan Poe:

“I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.”

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