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Riding With The Kings

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September 10, 2015
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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It’s almost the middle of September, which means it’s almost October, which means it’s almost time for basketball season. With the NFL stumbling over itself at every turn – which, come to think of it, is how most of its current players will spend their autumn years, in their mid-40s – and baseball casually winding toward the postseason (we see you, Mets), basketball still stakes a claim in some part of the sports conversation, even if you aren’t watching EuroBasket games in the middle of your afternoon (On Wednesday, Italy mounted a comeback to force overtime and beat Germany, 89-82). Tuesday’s announcement that NBA division winners are no longer guaranteed playoff spots kick-started much of the hibernating excitement which will roll us into the upcoming season.

With basketball season breathing down our necks, it’s time to start considering how some of the pieces of Adam Silver’s puzzle will fit, how they will interact with one another and how they can realize their potential. One of the most interesting teams for this basketball season has long been a laughingstock, even with a generational talent who may very well be the best pure center in the NBA. Now, that team has two potential game-changing centers, as well as a hodgepodge of players who either grew out of previous roles or never quite fit into them in the first place. The Sacramento Kings aren’t good, yet, but they could be, and they’re seemingly better; they aren’t stable, yet, but they were for a brief time last year; and they aren’t a favorite, which may end up making them one of the most dangerous teams in the league.

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Cleaning Up The Mess 2015: Week 1

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September 7, 2015
College Football, Sports
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Displaying image2.jpeg

Via USA TODAY

Cleaning Up the Mess is here to make sense of what just happened at your weekend-long television party. Who put Goldfish in the blender? And why is the thermostat on 42?

This week: Award-winning college football analyst James Vasiliou is in Blacksburg to watch his Ohio State Buckeyes dot the “i” against Virginia Tech, so Rory Masterson posted this on his behalf, under his name, knowing full well that nobody would expect him to know this much about college football. Anyway, South Carolina and North Carolina offer you $75 tickets to watch a film on Earth’s lowering water levels. Purdue can’t be bothered to know anything about Marshall football. Also, I thought Sark banned drinking in the locker room.

After a long four days of college football to fill our gullets, there’s a gluttonous need to keep feeding especially after the sample size was so small. Thursday night was a morsel of games that yielded results which left the public licking the plate clean and then eating the plate. This was due to things like the unexpected fist fight between TCU and Minnesota where the Golden Gophers scared the second-best team distinction out of the Horned Frogs. There was also the Utah Utes, beating the brakes off of a Harbaugh-led Michigan team whose offensive problems are resoundingly Hoke in nature. Vegas’ favorites weren’t the talk of the town; the story lines surrounding their opposition became the main course as night faded into day, and Hawaii played Colorado or something.

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College Football Preseason Points of Excitement

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August 17, 2015
College Football, Sports
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(Via Pac-12.com)

In college football, it’s a stretch to try and project how things will shake out by the end of November. This exercise is especially futile in the middle of August, when there’s barely a fall breeze to remind you that snap counts and passes are around the corner. Broken projections and expectations, however, are what makes this sport so fun. So we’re going to stare into the eye of chaos and laugh because insanity is college football’s hallmark. Here are some points to get excited about before madness consumes all of us in the 2015-2016 season.

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Don’t look back, Yankees. Somebody is gaining on you.

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August 5, 2015
Baseball, MLB, Sports
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Credit: Dan Hamilton, USA TODAY Sports

Overreact

[oh-ver-ree-akt]

Verb;  The instinctual response of fans and writers to small changes in a sporting team’s fortunes, especially in regard to those of the New York Yankees.

The New York Yankees will not win the American League East.  This is not an overreaction to the events of the last week.  The team which currently sits five and a half games behind them should be favored, and Yankee fans should be worried about which member of their depleted rotation will start the AL wild card game when Toronto celebrates its first division crown since 1993.

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IF YOU HATE TOM BRADY YOU ARE PROBABLY A COMMUNIST WHO HATES AMERICA

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August 3, 2015
America, NFL, Sports
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tb12

(Disclaimer: I am not an economist.)

As your resident Patriots apologist here on Tuesdays with Horry, I’m here to tell you that a lot has been said about consummate gentleman, best quarterback to ever play the game and general American Hero Tom Brady throughout his career, but especially since last season’s AFC Championship Game (You know, the one where the Indianapolis Colts lost by a billion and then whined to the league about it AGAIN, initiating the saga now known across the world as ‘Deflategate’). Lots of people have called him a cheater, a liar and various other mean things despite the total and utter lack of proof provided by the NFL that the footballs used in that game were deflated by anything other than natural causes.

My question to you, fellow Americans, is this: why?

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The Perfect Space: Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon

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July 13, 2015
Sports, Tennis
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Serbia's Novak Djokovic celebrates beating Switzerland's Roger Federer by eating a blade

AFP

In the parlance of modern tennis, Roger Federer has become the default, that against which any and all challengers fill in a blank as some kind of placeholder until the younger, better next generation arrives. For many players over the last decade, most notably Spanish clay court foil Rafael Nadal, it is a frustrating truth which is, nevertheless, true, because playing in the shadow of a man who has won seventeen Grand Slam titles since 2003 leaves you in a begrudging negative space, an elephant graveyard where hyenas battle for Federer’s scraps.

Unlike Nadal, Andy Murray and other would-be mutineers, however, Novak Djokovic has always looked like he feels comfortable in that negative space. His rocketing serves, his maddening return game, his consumption of grass: this is the one they colloquially call “the Joker,” and he is the best tennis player alive.

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Won’t You Celebrate With Me?

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July 8, 2015
America, Soccer, Sports
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WWCup Japan US Soccer

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Sixteen years of disappointment, heartbreak and anticlimax led to this moment. For every commercial featuring Brandi Chastain, the weight of the world pushing her to the ground at the very moment it lifted, there was a rumble about Abby Wambach’s training regimen, Carli Lloyd’s inconsistency or Hope Solo’s extracurricular activities. Not having won a World Cup since 1999, despite a trio of Olympic gold medals, wore on this team. They grew tired of heeding to the Germanys and Japans of the world in its most important tournament, and a shaky start did not bode well for the Americans.

When they needed to get it together in a time of dire need, however, where they so often had misstepped on the biggest stage, the U.S. women delivered a barrage of cannonading blows, exorcising demons and returning their country to a once and present glory.

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How To Spend A Day With The Stanley Cup

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June 18, 2015
Hockey
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The Stanley Cup is the greatest trophy in all of sports, and if you disagree, you’re wrong. It’s just a fact, you’re not allowed to have an opinion on this.

Part of what creates this aura around the Cup is that when you win it, you don’t keep it. You borrow it for awhile, and if you want to hang on to it, you have to win it again. As a player, you only get one day to hang out on your own with the Cup, so you better make it worth it.

One day doesn’t seem like a ton of time, because it isn’t. But I started thinking about this after the Blackhawks won the other night (third Cup in six years, dynasty, etc. etc. etc.). There are like, seven guys on that roster who have been around for all three. How do they keep coming up with things to do with the Cup? There is only so much you can do with a 35-pound trophy, only so many things you can eat out of the bowl on top, does it ever get boring? (The answer is obviously no, winning the Stanley Cup is never boring, it is always the most awesome thing to ever happen, STUPID question).

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The Celebration of Life on Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s “Surf”

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June 5, 2015
Hip-Hop, Music
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There’s been a lot of print dedicated to telling people that Chance the Rapper will be a featured player on Surf rather than the star. That hasn’t stopped some critics of the surprise, free release (!) from griping about how the whole product isn’t a definitive showcase for Chance’s singular Bugs Bunny-as-Edward G. Robinson style. To be sure, Chance is on the record, but his rapping is as it was advertised in the press: a featured player.

His rapping serves more as an additional instrument to the lush jazz production that defines Surf. If anything, he’s just a necessary link to the relative unknowns in the Social Experiment as well as the “We are the World” ensemble of guest stars. The true star is the horn of Donnie Trumpet which pierces, zips and buoys its way through 52 minutes of a long, strange, wonderful trip.

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