Weekly Sporties

-I have to say, for an NBA team which I couldn't care less about, the ongoing saga of Sacramento Kings is really interesting. When last we left them, the Maloof family which owns the Kings were trying to sell the team to a group from Seattle who intended to move the team there to replace the Sonics, who were bought and moved by a group from Oklahoma City. The only problem was that the NBA ownership committee voted against the team being allowed to move. At the time I assumed they were just being greedy and when the Seattle group offered to pay $65 million more as well as an extra $4 to each team just for the hell of it I thought that would be the push which was needed. That is why I was so surprised that when the NBA ownership group continued to vote against allowing the Kings to leave. Instead, they wanted the Maloofs to sell the team to a group from the Sacramento area which was offering about $80 million less than the Seattle group. (We've since learned one of the big factors is that the Sacramento group was so desperate to keep the team they were willing to spend millions on a new stadium while opting out of things like revenue sharing - giving every other team money while never making a profit for themselves.) At first the Maloofs said they had another idea in mind, which was that they just wouldn't sell at all. Or if they did it would be a smaller piece of the team, like 20% of the franchise and they would sell if to the main investors from the Seattle group, allowing them to take control of the team slowly. It had begun to have all the making of a long, drawn-out fight and I was going to enjoy every minute of it. That is why I was so surprised to wake up Friday morning and discover the Kings had been sold to the group from Sacramento and they didn't even raise their offer. Revenue sharing or not, the NA can't force an owner to sell because if they could the Suns and Clippers would have had new owners a long time ago, so I am dying to know what changed the Maloofs' minds. I can only hope that somewhere someone is writing all this down for a book and when it comes out I will be one of the first in line to read about how all this really went down.

-Speaking of books, former Lakers and Bulls coach Phil Jackson has a new one coming out. This is his eighth book, which means he is running out of interesting things to say and if he wants to make the New York Times best seller list he was going to have to start talking about some of the more juicy aspects of his coaching career. Now, for the last 10 years or so everyone has been debating who was better in their prime, Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan. (I've always maintained it was Jordan.) Since he coached both in their prime Jackson is the only one who can adequately answer this, but had refused to up until now. However in his latest book he finally broke down and compared them, ultimately deciding that Michael Jordan is better than Kobe Bryant because he was a better teammate, passer and leader (while conceding that Kobe was never asked to be a leader as long as Shaq was in Los Angeles). For the most part this nothing the general public outside of Los Angeles hadn't decided on its own, but it was nice to get confirmation. However, here is what I really find interesting: after their flame-out in this year's NBA playoffs, there had been a lot of speculation that Lakers coach Mike D'Antoni was going to be tossed overboard and the Lakers would bring back Phil Jackson, something most of their fans (and Kobe Bryant) wanted them to do for this season. I have to imagine this type of slight would pretty much put an end to that because even though Bryant is going to miss most of next season with an Achilles injury, he still has as much influence over that team as any player in the league. The two may have mended fences when Jackson called Bryant immature in a previous book, but I can't see someone as competitive as Kobe Bryant being willing to move on from a comment like that twice. Phil has long maintained he was no longer interested in coaching and if he were to return to the NBA it would be in a front-office capacity. I have to say that for the first time I'm starting to believe him. But even better, I can now definitely tell any who is a Los Angeles resident or under the age of 20 to shut up when they claim that Kobe is better than Jordan.

-I was very surprised the other day when I got the news that the Patriots had cut defensive tackle Kyle Love. While not a star of the defense, Love had played very well during his time in New England and had started a lot of games for them the last two season. With no clear replacements in line it was a questionable move. It wasn't until a couple days later that I learned why this decision had been made and I have to say the reasoning behind it was another one of those things which makes me squeamish about all the people so blindly loyal to the NFL. You see, the Patriots cut Kyle Love because this offseason he discovered he has Type 2 diabetes. Love will hardly be the first diabetic in the NFL but the difference is that the other players which come to mind are a quarterback and cornerback, two positions which value speed and mobility. Playing defensive tackle is all about girth and power and while trying to get his diabetes under control Love lost a significant amount of weight. While you would think someone who is trying to get a serious medical condition under control would be seen as a good thing, NFL teams are more worried about the short term - specifically their goal-line defense. (Fortunately for Love not all NFL teams are worried about his condition as he was claimed by the Jacksonville Jaguars. Not ideal going from one of the best teams to one of the worst, but at least he stays in the league.) Still, this just speaks to a larger issue. For all the talk about player safety and making sure the long-term impact playing football has on the brain is being studied, people seem to forget that there is just as much damage being done to these guys' bodies simply by trying to carry all that weight. On top of that you would think Love could have brought a legal case against the NFL because he was essentially being fired for having a disease, something which should be illegal. Of course, no one would ever bring this up to the NFL because they love football too much. This is just another example of a league which has a tremendous amount of power at the moment and is more than happy to use it. I would just warn them that those days are going to come to an end eventually, so they shouldn't get too used to being able to do whatever they want.

-While we're on the subject of weight, the NBA combine was this week. Now, if you think the NFL combine is useless, you really don't want to pay attention to the NBA combine because it is even worse. It is just a bunch of guys running drills with no one playing defense and the really good players only half-trying because, unlike the NFL version in which a bad combine can cost you a lot of money, the highest NBA prospects know their draft position is secure and just don't want to get hurt. The only interesting part of the whole thing is seeing how tall some of these guys really are because college programs are notoriously inaccurate. In doing all the weighing and measuring one number stood out from the crowd: Kentucky center Nerlens Noel clocked in at 6'10", which was expected, but only 206 lbs, which is a lot skinnier than people thought he would be. Now, if Noel played shooting guard or small forward like Kevin Durant this wouldn't matter to me because KD has proven you can be skinny and still impose your will on the NBA. However, Noel was a center in college and was projected to play at least power forward in the NBA. If he tries to do that he will be going against guys like Kevin Love, Marc Gasol and Dwight Howard who are all roughly the same height as him but weigh anywhere from 40-60 pounds more. It is going to make holding his spot on the low block a real problem. I know there are guys like Kevin Garnett who are stick figures and still play in the low post, but Garnett is a special kind of player and in his one year of college I did not see Noel have that kind of fire. I'm not saying he should go undrafted, but it does make me think it will take him a couple of years to bulk up before he can be an effective player. On top of that he is coming off a knee injury and probably won't be able to play his first season. It just all adds up to him being taken a few spots lower than projected in what was already supposed to be a pretty weak draft class. You know, they say the best thing for a young player is to go to a team with a lot of veteran leadership, this may be the first time the most important thing a team can have for a player is really good catering services.

-If you follow baseball at all you know the last couple of weeks have not been very good for umpires. First they got a homerun call wrong even after reviewing it and then they didn't know the rules and allowed an illegal substitution when a pitcher was taken out despite not throwing to any batters. Since all this was in addition to the mundane, everyday stuff that umpires seem to get wrong with regularity, Major League Baseball has been considering expanding replay to include pretty much everything short of balls and strikes. I have to say, I couldn't be more in favor of this kind of thing. I know purists say it will slow the game down, but I would counter by saying those people haven't been to a baseball game in a while because it couldn't get much slower. On top of that I think it is far more important that the correct team wins versus a game only taking 4 hours instead of 4.5. (If they really cared about games moving faster they would start enforcing some of the time rules, but they never do.) That being said, rather than going the other way and allowing everything to be reviewed all the time, MLB needs to make sure they have some kind of challenge system in place like the NFL does. I mean, there are way more stoppages of play in baseball and baseball managers are such sneaky bastards they could do something like ask for a review of regular play just to give their pitcher a little more time to warm-up. Thus, like the NFL where all scoring plays are reviewed I think they should continue to automatically review any homeruns which are close, but beyond that I think managers should only be able to request two reviews per game. I know through the course of a 162 game season that sounds like a lot of time spent under the hood, but I really don't think most of those will be used. Despite the bad couple of weeks if you broke down the performance of most umpires you would find that they get most of their calls correct (just when the screw up they really screw up). Thus, many games would pass without needing reviews it is just a matter of being able to use it should it be needed. Trust me, it is more important to have the rules in place and not need them than the other way around, which is how MLB currently operates.

-Staying on the subject of expanded replay, after some iffy calls in the playoffs a few NHL stars have come out and suggested the league needs to expand replay to include reviews of penalties. Now, given what I just said about MLB's plan to expand you probably think I would be in favor of more replay in the NHL, but in this case I am not. To me it is a totally separate argument because calling penalties is the hockey equivalent to calling balls and strikes - it's a judgement call which needs to be made in an instant and if you start to undermine that you may as well not even have refs. As long as they continue to review goals in hockey that is really the only thing that matters because while a bad call in hockey may put you at a disadvantage, a bad call in baseball usually costs you the game. For example, this reason this issue came up because the refs called a delay of game penalty against the San Jose Sharks for shooting the puck into the stands when replay made it look as though the puck actually caromed off a Los Angeles Kings player first. While that was bad for the Sharks, it was their sloppy play on the power play which actually cost them the game, not the penalty itself. The other issue is that you would have to ask yourself where would the line be? Could you ask them to check if a guy flopped? What about going back because you think they missed a penalty? Think about it like this - even the NFL, which expands replay almost every offseason, doesn't review penalties with replay because they know you could call holding on just about every play if you went looking for it, just like you could probably call a high stick every couple of seconds. It would ruin the flow of the game. The NHL is actually one of the best league for fixing broken rules on the fly but in this case I think they would be better served to slow down and make sure it is necessary before going off to replay every little thing. Unlike baseball, which needs 8 years and an act of nature to change an obvious problem, the NHL can wait a little bit before seeing if this becomes a real issue in the future. If it does they can address it then, but no need to insert a new rule in the middle of the playoffs because of one bad incident.

-As you may have heard there was a bit of a dust-up at last weekend's Player's Championship. Playing together of Saturday, Tiger Woods was accused by playing partner Sergio Garcia of pulling a club at the wrong time on purpose. You see, Sergio was on one side of the fairway and Tiger was off in the trees. Tiger pulled a fairway wood out, meaning he was going to try and pull off the more risky shot and the crowd murmured its approval. Unfortunately they did this loud enough for Sergio, who had just begun his swing, to hear it. His shot shanked off to the side and he glared in Tiger's direction. After the round Sergio said Woods did it on purpose and began playing the victim. Meanwhile Tiger admitted he and Sergio aren't exactly friends, but he only pulled the club after getting the all-clear from a marshall. (The next day this became a game of he-said, he-said, he-said, he-said as one marshall claimed Tiger was never told Sergio had hit and was showing back character by throwing the volunteers under the bus, while another marshall came out and said Tiger absolutely had been told it was his turn. We may never know the truth.) Either way, I don't care if Tiger was told it was clear or not, to me this is Sergio's problem. Garcia has always been known as a whiny player and this is just another chapter to add to his legacy. I've long said that golfers complaining about noise is one of the worst things for the image of golf and it is especially bad when it comes from people who should know better. Sergio has played with Tiger before and has to know that means playing in front of a larger gallery who will mostly be casual golf fans and may not be as up on the etiquette of the game. But even if that is the case it is not like they were excessively loud. Basically, I think this is Sergio, once again, looking for a way to excuse bad play by accusing someone else of breaking the rules. Normally he blames everyone from the course architect to the golfing gods so, sadly, blaming a playing partner is an improvement. You know, I've obviously never been to Garcia's house, but for some reason I feel strangely confident in saying there probably aren't any mirrors in it.