SpongeWorthy

How about the 93 Bulls won the championship and the 94 Bulls didn't? Regular season doesn't really mean all that much to a veteran championship team. I mean they already proved they could win a bunch of regular season games. You've got to throttle it back in the regular season after a 3 year stretch on top. The Lakers did the same thing with Shaq and Kobe. They ran roughshod over the league in the first year Phil was there and then basically cruised in the regular seasons after that. Scottie was obviously possessed to step out of MJ's shadow and lead the Bulls to as good a record as possible.

I wouldn't put much stock in Mosley/Mayweather doing more buys than Pac/Clottey. Mayweather is a slightly bigger draw than Pacquaio but Mosley is a pretty big star in his own right. Clottey's just a guy.

I thought we were still entertaining Lebron pipedreams. This Boozer and Frye talk is ruining it. I don't want any part of Boozer and no part of Johnson at a max deal. In fact I don't really want to give any kind of deal to Johnson at any realistic price because that means we're settling on a guy that's not going to get us over the hump.

I still have no idea why the NBA put the age limit in place. The track record of kids jumping straight from high school to the NBA exceeded anyone's wildest expectations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prep-to-pro_players There's a handful of outright busts there, some guys who made way too much money relative to their ability level, and many more solid players to all time greats.

Are you ok with no limit on how often a coach can call a 15 year old kid? Should there be restrictions on when he can place calls? How bout visits? Can he wait outside his school every day for a week? The NCAA is FUBAR, but it doesn't mean there's no basis for their restrictions. We don't really have a problem sending young tennis/gymnastics/music prodigies that are much younger than that to go to a school almost entirely devoted to getting better at tennis/gymnastics/music. But those kids aren't young and black and from poor neighborhoods so we don't see the need to save them from themselves. Any person that you see in Olympics, and many, many levels of competition below that has had a far more regimented lifestyle for longer than the typical big time college hoops or football player.

In what other walk of life would a potential suitor calling you and encouraging you to come work for them be considered a bad thing? I think it illustrates how nutty things have gotten. I don't really think a college is entitled to have a level playing field, really. It's not like Harvard and MIT have to leave a few extra bullets in the chamber when trying to get a Nobel laureate to join the faculty. Genuine amateurism is nice but it's kind of hard to enforce with your left hand while your right hand is signing multi billion dollar television contracts.

Derrick Rose is a good Calipari related example of what I'm talking about. Absolutely no one cares about his SAT thing now that he's in the pros. They only cared then because he was on a college team that happened to not be the team that most people rooted for not because of what it meant about "ethics" in college sports. It didn't stop him from being drafted #1, and if it did you'd be labeled, rightly so, as a totally incompetent front office guy. But in the bizarro NCAA world it was an egregious violation...even though the NCAA got a lot more out of Rose than Rose did out of the NCAA. He should've never been in college in the first place.

Equating skirting the rules with paying people off is sort of what I'm getting at. They're pretty different but you conflate them all the time. Even Tim seems to think that USC was ever accused of paying Reggie Bush off. That's not even remotely accurate, btw. Sorry. Please correct me on the story as I didn't really pay all that much attention. I know it wasn't a direct cash receipt by reggie. And it was likely a booster or set of boosters and not the school, right? the post I quoted had nothing to do with cash dispersals from the university funds, though. It talked about schools skirting the rules. If you think USC is completely innocent of that, I've got some lovely real estate to sell you. It was an agent that wanted to sign Bush that put his family up in a fairly expensive house in San Diego. An agent that had everything to gain by getting him to leave school a year early. The school is accused of not knowing/monitoring it like it should have been. I'd say that's quite different than a booster or someone in the university paying a guy to attend/stay at your school. But yeah, it's bad and USC is going to get some punishment for it this summer, finally. And no I know USC is guilty of skirting more than it's fair share of rules. I probably care less than most though. I just can't get that worked up about whether institutions, in league with the NCAA, that profit from the exploitation of college athletes under the guise of sham amateurism are following the letter of the law. Big time college athletics is a huge farce that way. Every day standards of fairness that we take for granted in every segment of the economy somehow get people into a lather because certain colors are involved.

Equating skirting the rules with paying people off is sort of what I'm getting at. They're pretty different but you conflate them all the time. Even Tim seems to think that USC was ever accused of paying Reggie Bush off. That's not even remotely accurate, btw.

I think it's that you guys say that Calipari, among others, are paying off everyone in sight as if it's incontrovertible fact that comes off as whiny and presumptuous.

Carlos Boozer is a huge loser.

The starters were gassed by then. This team is peaking.

btw, goran dragic officially stripped himself of being derrick rose's biatch by TORCHING the spurs for 26 in the second half. he was amazing.

This whole "PHX learned how to guard and no one noticed" makes things VERY interesting.

So is all that hyperventilating about how the Hawks played in the 2nd half of the season pretty much history? As a total hockey newb, it's pretty easy for me to tell that the Hawks are just way better than their competition thus far. They can't even generate chances or control the puck. They almost look unbeatable playing this way.

Beautiful.

http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=26791 I don't know enough about hockey to know how impressive those stats are. I'll just assume he's a choker who happened to be lucky enough to play on Team Canada in 2010. It's more fun that way.

My experience of watching Luongo is this series, last years series, and the Olympics. Why is this guy considered one of the best goaltenders around again?

Is Luongo drunk? I am and I think I can spot other drunk people.

WOOP

That was pretty sick by Toews.

Hawks are the first team to get back to back hat tricks in the playoffs since 94. lol @ lu

Hollinger would put up whatever his statistical rankings say he should put up. And there's not anything wrong with that necessarily. He's the sort of guy that could be transported back to 1997 and would claim that Terrell Brandon is a better basketball player than Allen Iverson. What I'm saying is if you think Rajon Rondo can carry a team like Derrick Rose can then you're not watching the same sport I am.

If we hire Calipari if/when Lebron is eliminated from the playoffs I'm going to get irrationally excited.

How good is Sharp considered league wide? Every time I watch him he's doing awesome things.