Weekly Sporties

-Like every Celtic fan across the globe, I was very disappointed by the news that point guard Rajon Rondo tore his ACL last Friday (which wasn't revealed until Sunday at halftime of the game against the Miami Heat). However, unlike a lot of analysts I do not see this as the death knell for the team this season. First off, they play in a very weak conference with no great teams behind them in the standings, so I fully expect them to still make the playoffs. Admittedly, I am not anticipating they will be able to do much in the playoffs if they can't get out of the #8 seed and have to face the Heat in a 7-game series, but if they could get to the #7 seed it is not like any of the other teams frighten me, with or without Rondo. Also, they have the rest of this season to figure out how to play without him, which may not be as hard as you think. Not that I am trying to devalue his play, but Rondo was starting to be a bad fit with Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. Rondo wanted to run and push the tempo, something Pierce and KG simply couldn't do anymore. A slower, more deliberate pace may be actually better for the roster as it is currently constructed (Doc is already talking about playing a more simple style). But beyond this year you can only hope Rondo is able to come back at close to full strength. They say it typically takes a year to recover from this type of injury, but obviously medicine has come a long way as guys are coming back faster and faster. (Everyone points at Adrian Peterson as the new benchmark, but knees are especially important in a sport like basketball so I'll be happy if Rondo is closer to Derrick Rose's recovery time.) You can only hope that since he was walking around on that knee for two days and thought he had only hyper-extended it is a sign that the tear isn't as bad as it could have been. Clearly, this is not going to make the next couple of months easier, but if you are expecting me to stop watching now than you obviously don't know me very well.

-One guy who I am sure the Celtics will not be looking at to fill Rondo's sneakers is former 76er star Allen Iverson. Iverson has been out of the NBA for several years, but reports were that he is determined to make his way back. However, he can't be too determined because this week he turned down an offer to play for the Dallas Legends, the Mavericks' D-League affiliate. On the one hand I can totally understand why Iverson, undoubtedly a Hall of Fame player, would not want to play in the D-League in what is nothing more than that team's effort to attract attention and pimp him out for publicity. Plus, if Iverson agreed to play for them and wasn't able to dominate the competition like people are accustomed to it would be seen as a sad end to a great career. So, he has a lot to lose. The thing is, if Iverson really wants to come back to the NBA, the Legends are as good an option as any. You see, the Mavericks aren't exactly having a great season and signing Iverson makes as much sense as any other move they could make. But, the Mavericks aren't just going to sign him on faith, because his last few NBA stop didn't exactly end well as he was plagued by off-the-court problems and his decade of playing basketball by throwing his body around finally catching up to him. Playing for the Legends would give Iverson the chance to show the Mavericks' front office what he could do up close and give him a chance to make a good impression on them, like an extended try-out. It may be the only chance he has left. I know playing in front of a couple thousand people and then hopping on a bus to the next game isn't the comeback a guy like Allen Iverson had in mind, but someone should remind him that he isn't going to make it back to the league on reputation alone.

-Just when you thought the apathetic response to the Lance Armstrong confession would have shown the sports media that the American public is sick of hearing about steroids, they were back in the news twice this week. First came the accusations that Ray Lewis may have taken deer antler velvet spray, which is a banned substance. You see, deer antler grows very fast and thus extract from the antlers seen as a way to speed up healing. Since it is a close equivalent to Human Growth Hormone, it has been banned by most pro leagues out of association. (This is where it should be pointed out that even if Lewis took the spray there is no way to prove it, because the NFL doesn't currently test for either HGH or any other substance like it because they don't do blood testing. In other words, this is another one of those Super Bowl media week story which does nothing but create a controversy which can then not be corroborated or disproved, like SpyGate all those years ago.) Still, the case Ray may have been on something like this not a hard one to make - Lewis tore his tricep muscle in September, an injury which normally ends a player's season and yet Ray was back in time for the playoffs and playing better than before he got hurt. The fact that Lewis played so well and so soon after suffering what would normally be a career-threatening injury and no one questioned how he pulled that off just shows how sports media is still as quick as fans are to buy into the mythology of these guys. Some of it could be attributed to the fact people pretty much expect football players to be on some kind of steroid, but mostly this just feels like lazy journalism. I'm always saying sportswriters are slow learners, but this should be yet another reminder to everyone involved in the sports media - when a story sounds too good to be true, that is because it is. Seriously, when will you people start remembering this?

-A couple days after that came the news that yet another PED clinic - excuse me, "anti-aging center" - this one in Miami, had a detail client ledger which contained the name of several baseball players. Among them are the recently suspended Melky Cabrera, but the most famous was that of Yankees' third baseman Alex Rodriguez. This is obviously not the first time Alex has been linked with steroids, which is going to make his innocence harder to prove. Even though Rodriguez admitted to taking steroids in the past, he has maintained he has been clean for years. Still, people have had their doubts and if it turns out he never stopped juicing and just tried to find a different supplier, that may be the final straw - you could officially kiss his already-slim Hall of Fame chances good-bye. Now, he won't have to deal with that for a while, but that doesn't mean he is in the clear because in the short term he has bigger things to worry about. Reportedly, the Yankees are investigating these claims themselves and if they find evidence he was still juicing they will look for a way to get out of their deal with Rodriguez, which still has 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars left on it. Personally, if I were the Commissioner I wouldn't allow it. Seriously, the Yankees knew what they were getting into when they sign Rodriguez. I have no more sympathy than I would any other team which signed a player who had admitted to taking steroids in the past (like Cabrera and the Blue Jays) - once a cheater, always a cheater and if you are stupid enough to take a chance on that guy you have to deal with the consequences. You know, last week there was a report which said Rodriguez's hip injury may not have been as bad as first feared and that there was a chance he would make it back before the season ended. If I were him I wouldn't be in too great of a hurry.

-With Jonathan Vilma's defamation suit against NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell dismissed and Saints head coach Sean Payton back at work, the only person still affected by the New Orleans Saints BountyGate scandal is former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams. Williams, who has the most damning evidence against him in the form of an audio tape where he is heard telling his players to go after another player's head, is indefinitely suspended and some have speculated that suspension will never be lifted. The Commissioner had already said he didn't plan to address the suspension until another team tried to hire Williams, meaning any team that wants Williams will have to basically talk the Commissioner into letting him back into the league (in college they call this a show-cause penalty). Considering the number of defensive coaches on the market and the number of new minds which are coming along every day, that sounds like more trouble than it is worth. However, early this week came a report which said Williams is close to getting hired by the Tennessee Titans as a position coach. Williams used to work for the Titans and is reportedly still close to the owner, which is why Tennessee is willing to take a chance on him. Normally going from a coordinator to a position coach would be seen as insulting, but I can only assume after thinking he would never coach again Williams is only too happy to be so insulted. At this point I would find it strangely fitting if Williams, the person everyone said was hit the hardest by all this, only ended up missing one season. It would encapsulate how over-blown the whole thing was. Seriously, the players never missed any time and half the coaches got their suspensions reduced, so why should Williams be any different? Plus, it finally ends the entire embarrassing affair for the league and it has a strange symmetry to happen when most of the league is in New Orleans for the Super Bowl. I'm sure Goodell is holding out because he feels Williams's suspension is the last thing holding back the criticism that he screwed this entire affair up from the very beginning, but someone needs to tell the Commissioner that he can let it go, because everyone thinks that already.

-When the NHL was in the middle locking out its players for half the season, you may have assumed all the time they spent not working on a deal was being put to good use to hammer out all the internal issues the owners had. Like, for example, making sure the Phoenix Coyotes actually had an owner. Apparently not. The league has been in control of the team for a few years now and finally thought they had a buyer in former sports executive Greg Jamison. However, it turns out that deal wasn't quite as done as people hoped, as this week Jamison missed his payment deadline to take ownership of the franchise. (Making the owners look even more foolish were subsequent reports which have surfaced showing the chances he would ever find the money in time were slim at best.) What this means is the team continues to be in a state of permanent limbo. They don't have an owner, despite the fact you can buy an NHL team for about a third of what an NBA team will cost you and the city has shown in the past they would be willing to give a very favorable lease to any buyer who would agree to keep the team in the area. You would think some millionaire would want them as a vanity possession but instead the only people showing interest are groups who would move the team as soon as they took control, possibly to Seattle or Quebec. Seriously, why didn't they just contract this team when they had the chance and get it over with? I know the players union would have had serious problems with 25 fewer jobs available, but when you remember the desperation on both sides to get a deal it is not like they would have raised too much of a stink and submarined the entire deal over the Coyotes, a team no star players want to end up on anyway. Instead the NHL is still in control of a team no one wants to buy, with players who don't want to be there, in a city which doesn't care about hockey. And to think - there are some people who still can't understand why owners needed to lock out their own players because they couldn't trust themselves to stop handing out terrible contracts. Personally, I go the other way - I seriously wonder how any of these people were smart enough to make enough money to buy these teams in the first place.

-Mercifully, the Super Bowl is finally upon us, which means it is time for my prediction (everyone else gets one, why shouldn't I?). There are two things which would worry me if I were a Ravens fan. First, Joe Flacco makes me nervous. I don't care that he beat Peyton Manning and Tom Brady in consecutive weeks, I watch 16 underwhelming regular season games before that and would be afraid the two weeks off killed his mojo. Also, their defense has looked really good against drop-back passers, except Colin Kaepernick is rarely where you expect him to be. I don't anticipate him rushing for much yardage (I'm saying around 60 yards), but the constant threat Kaepernick may take off would be enough to make me uneasy against a Ravens defense built to move north/south versus east/west. However, it is not like the 49ers should be brimming with confidence either. They may have put up a lot of points in the last two games, but the Packers and Falcons weren't exactly fielding stellar defensive teams. This will be their toughest test in weeks. On top of that they have a nasty habit of getting into close games against teams they should be much better than. And as dynamic as Kaepernick is, the fact remains that the Super Bowl will be his 10th career start. That is a huge stage for a guy who is essentially still a rookie, I don't care how poised he has looked in his short career. I would be fearful of him making a mistake if the game stays close all the way through. Fortunately for the 49ers, while I see this as a close game for a half, I do think San Francisco will be able to move the ball on the Ravens and eventually put some distance between the two teams. Plus, I expect the Flacco of the regular season to rear his ugly head one more time.
My pick: San Francisco 35, Baltimore 24.