UMFan83

If there was any time to trade Forte, it would probably be now while his value is near his highest (knee injury and contract situation knock him down a bit). The Bears better get at least a 1st out of him.

VDN likely has very little time left as the Clippers coach after losing to NO tonight. The Clippers have won only 7 of their last 19 games, and are inching closer to 9th place in the West (they are up 1.5 games over Utah). How a team with Paul, Griffin, Jordan, Williams, Young and Martin could possibly miss the playoffs is unfathomable to me.

Meh, he's not the only coach who supports his own player's dirty hits but wants extreme action taken when his guy is injured with a dirty hit.

Congrats on turning the public against you Matt! The bridges are starting to become burned. I have no doubt that the Bears could somehow rectify this if they wanted to, but I am leaning towards thinking Forte is going to be traded before the draft. Both sides, especially Forte's are handling this terribly.

Yeah, they clearly would have addressed the O-Line at least a bit in FA if they really thought they needed a lot of help. As for the draft, they might draft someone for the line but I don't think it will be someone we expect or even hope to contribute last year. They've already used their last 2 first rounders on it, and they have already made moves to help the offense in other areas, so in their minds the offense has improved, while the defense is sitting there aging. I keep going back and forth on the O-line. I certainly don't think its good as it stands right now, but I don't think I hate the Bears for not addressing it in FA as much as I did a week ago. I'm sure the Bears consider last season a lost year in terms of evaluating how good the current line can be. One of their 1st rounders played 1 full game, and the other was having a breakout year before getting injured for the season 6-7 weeks in. If both can play to their potential, Garza will do his usual mediocre job, maybe Webb can appove from 'Terrible' to 'Sucks', and the line might not be as much as a weakness as most people believe. Also consider that Marshall (and hopefully another WR) gives the Bears a guy that the other team's D has to respect, and hopefully that will mean less of 7 men in the box or whatever the D does to focus on getting at the QB or stopping the run. I still think the line is the 2nd most position group in football behind QB, but since the Bears seem to not place a lot of emphasis on it, I guess there are other ways to lessen the burden of the line at least somewhat.

Maybe they didn't name Crawford because he only faced 23 shots? I dunno, but it was clear to anyone watching the game that he made some pretty tough saves and certainly deserved to be one of the 3 stars. Oduya's shot was heading wide of the net when Shaw deflected it - and I don't think he was particularly trying to shoot it at Shaw's stick, so it was a bit odd that he got the nod but at the end of the day its meaningless.

This what our 4th attempt in 4 years at finding a reliable backup RB? We had Kevin Jones, and he injured himself in the preseason and didnt give us anything, then we had Chester Taylor who blew chunks before cutting him, last year it was Marion Barber who was ok except he single handedly lost us a game that in hindsight would have likely put us in the playoffs so he's gone. Now it's Michael Bush. On the bright side, the backup RBs keep getting better as they come in.

No ones saying they are, just that they'd prefer to play them over another team. Doesn't mean they can't still lose to the Stars and doesnt mean they can't beat a team like Nashville.

Maybe not tonight but he's been pretty good since he came here from what I've seen. Not great, but certainly good enough for a 2nd or 3rd pairing defenseman. Eddie O was on the Score today and he mentioned that during the losing streak, Q was telling his guys to cheat a little bit on the defensive end to create more odd man rushes/offensive chances, etc. with the idea of ourscoring the opponent, but going onto that West trip we ran into some pretty good defenses who shut us down and really burned us. Since then the Hawks have been doing a lot less of that and have obviously seen better results. I dunno how much of that is the reason why we're playing better. I'm sure it is part of the reason, but to me the main reason might be as simple as good goaltending vs. bad goaltending.

LUONGOWNED I like that new addition! Hawks 9-1-1 in last 11

Alright, got a point....Det lost in OT to the Rangers, so here is the standings if we win or lose If we win... DET 93 PT 74 GP NAS 92 PT 73 GP CHI 92 PT 75 GP If we lose... DET 93 PT 74 GP NAS 92 PT 73 GP CHI 91 PT 75 GP

Always fun to see a Hawks-Nucks game tied late in the 3rd. Of course its even more fun when the score is 5-0 Hawks but then you have to worry about the Vancouver thugs taking out Hawks players. Hawks look like they are content guaranteeing themselves a point and getting this to OT

Good to see that the Bulls can still win over a bad team on the road without their best player and only playing good basketball for about 5 minutes

I could really see this ending the Saints run, or at least seriously hurting it. I know the Saints lost a few guys via FA this offseason and havent made any pickups to my knowledge. I don't know how much that has to do with this scandal or if its just normal NFL business, but it certainly doesn't make the Saints beter. Then you have Brees unhappy about not having a long term deal. There's just a black cloud over the entire organization from the GM, head coach, assistant coaches, and the players.

Updated to included the recently released 351-400 grouping. Only 1 Cub (Travis Wood) and 1 former Cub (LaTroy Hawkins) were in this set of 50.

Do they think that every person on their line is better than the best FA oline player or has the potential to be? They might be ok with it but you can still get a LOT better. We have the money once again and we don't address our many holes. Thrilled with Marshall but it took the Bears 3 years to finally address it. All that said, it's a new GM leading the team so I'm not sure it's fair to use Angelo's last couple of years against Emery. I'll give him at least one full offseason until I bash him mercilessly.

LOL. Bears love to go defense in the 1st round...except that their last 4 1st rounders, and 9 of their last 12, have been offensive players.

Wins against Columbus still count as 2 points right? Of course. It was just a boring game thanks to the effort by Columbus. I wasn't implying that you didn't think the win was a big deal, I was joking about how bad the BJs are.

That's how it felt for us last month. I would turn on the game midway through the first and expect to be down 2-0 only to find out we were down 3-0. I still haven't fully allowed myself to trust the Hawks since then.

If the Hawks can somehow take 2 points at the UC tomorrow against the Canucks, the Wings play at MSG tomorrow...if they lose the Hawks and Wings would be tied with 7 games left. Detroit would have 1 game in hand though.

Wins against Columbus still count as 2 points right?

ESPN is doing another one of their top 500 players lists created by some metric or another. I think it was polling several people and averaging the results. Anyways, here are the Cubs players on the list (51-500 revealed so far): 88. Starlin Castro 98. Matt Garza 147. Carlos Marmol 200. Geovany Soto 227. Ryan Dempster 282. Kerry Wood 296. Alfonso Soriano 297. Marlon Byrd 308. David DeJesus 346. Anthony Rizzo 347. Paul Maholm 375. Travis Wood 402. Chris Volstad 407. Randy Wells 447. Jeff Samardzija 472. Darwin Barney 490. Reed Johnson Too high? Too low? Former Cubs: 133. Aramis Ramirez 160. Sean Marshall 214. Ricky Nolasco 230. Carlos Pena 240. Scott Downs 246. Ted Lilly 259. Carlos Zambrano 280. Kyle Farnsworth 324. Angel Pagan 365. LaTroy Hawkins 409. Derrek Lee 411. Jason Marquis 428. Andrew Cashner 439. Kevin Gregg 455. Casey McGehee 480. Tom Gorzelanny http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/7687515/mlb-ranking-top-500-major-league-baseball-players-2012-nos-401-500

I loved this part:

So does that mean we are going to carry a crapload of salary cap space into our 2nd consecutive season? How much space do we still have?

Yay! He'll be valuable in those 2 games he plays in before his next injury.