Basketball

A modest proposal (I really need to stop overusing that particular phrase, this is serious):

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So David Stern wants to make the Olympic basketball tournament an under-23 affair like the soccer tournament, partly to increase the prominence of FIBA’s World Cup of Basketball, formerly the World Championships. That would greatly minimize the number of NBA players who went to the Olympics.

Baseball got kicked out of the Olympics mostly because no MLB players would leave their teams in the middle of the season to go to the Olympics.

So why not expressly make the Olympic baseball tournament an under-23 affair?

Granted, it’s still the middle of the baseball season, and players are even more likely to go to the majors early in baseball – I don’t know if baseball and especially the Angels and Nationals would particularly like Mike Trout and Bryce Harper leaving their teams in the middle of the season to play for Team USA, though it would certainly spike interest in the tournament…

Things are about to get even better for the NBA Champions…

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Apparently Fox can compete for local team rights in a competitive, high-value market as well.

Fox is breaking the bank and is about to at least quadruple the money they pay the Miami Heat – only the reigning and future NBA Champions and the most-talked-about team in the second-most demo-friendly league – closer to the per-viewer average the Lakers are getting from Time Warner Cable. This in a market where Comcast could have conceivably swooped in and snapped up the rights if they wanted to. Certainly there’s room for it – Florida, like Los Angeles, is a market where Fox runs two regional sports networks.

To be fair, though, this is an extention of a deal that still had three years left on it, so this is more of a case of Fox using its incumbent status to lock up a team without giving anyone else a chance in an open market. It doesn’t mean Fox has a massive advantage when it comes to locking up Dodgers rights…

@sportsguy33, the Sonics, and me

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I have a confession to make. When the Sonics were stolen from Seattle? I was kind of apathetic about it.

Part of the reason was that the Sonics were in a lengthy phase ranging from mediocrity to sucking. Part of it may have been that even then, I was developing into more of a national sports fan than a local one, or a fan of any particular team. Part of it was the aura of inevitability surrounding the notion of Oklahoma City getting an NBA team after the Hornets’ post-Katrina exile there, even though, of all the teams it could have been, why did it have to be the Sonics? Why couldn’t the Hornets have just stayed there?

Whatever it was, I couldn’t get myself too worked up about what was happening to the Sonics, even though like everyone else I could see it coming.

These days? These days I simply cannot refer to the Western Conference champions directly. The closest I come is to call them the “Sonics-in-exile”. It’s hard for me even to refer to the city they play in.

What changed? Bill Simmons. While Clay Bennett was still holding the city hostage, Simmons started repeatedly harping on the issue in his columns, pointing out what an asshole Bennett was being and how David Stern was falling asleep on the job. After the team moved, Simmons refused to refer to it by name, coming up with a wide variety of euphemisms to refer to it.

But the funny thing is, as time went on, even as Simmons’ outrage was affecting me, he seemed to be becoming less outraged. He regularly referred to the team as “Oklahoma City” with “Zombie Sonics” becoming the only euphemism used. He praised the team, Kevin Durant, the city. And in yesterday’s column, he basically announces he doesn’t hold a grudge against OKC, while noting at the end he still doesn’t like the situation in Seattle (complete with “Thunder” in the title!). I’ve been ginned full of outrage I never felt in the first place by someone who doesn’t feel as much of it himself anymore.

Honestly, even before that column I wasn’t sure how I felt. I wasn’t sure whether I should root against the Sonics-in-exile, because they stole our team, or for them, because… hey, if they win, it’s really the Sonics winning! The general consensus around here seems to be to root against them, and I do already have reason to root for the Heat, and I’m not sure I’m ready to live in a world where the Sonics-in-exile have a championship after leaving Seattle. But if they do, I hope Seattle throws them a faux “championship parade”, if only to give one last reminder to the rest of the country where they came from.

Why I’m rooting for LeBron James

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I think I might be a pretty weird sports fan. While most people root for the underdog, I root for the favorite.

Now don’t get me wrong. I get as much of a rise out of upsets in the NCAA Tournament as anyone else. But at some point, when the theoretical gap between the two teams gets beyond a certain point, my rooting interest shifts in the other direction. When one team becomes so dominant, so fantastic, I root for them to get their just reward for their effort. Maybe it’s my experience in the trenches of the college football playoff debate (where a lot of people don’t actually want to see March Madness in football) speaking, but I root for history, I root for greatness, and where appropriate, I root for perfection. And I root against history and justice being hijacked in order to film a real-life sports movie.

But even discounting my own neuroses, when you look at it purely objectively… how can you not feel for LeBron James?

Much of it has already been chronicled to death. He’s one of the great talents in the history of the league, but has never been able to take advantage of it when it matters most. He’s been paying his penance for “The Decision” for the past two years. He’s under pressure to live up to his own promise to win more championships than anyone in history, after having already blown one chance. The blame inevitably falls on him whenever the Heat lose, even if Dwyane Wade would get a pass in the same situation. He gets booed every single time he leaves Miami, forced into the role of the villain even against his will.

One thing and one thing only can lift, if not all of it, at least the greater portion of it off his shoulders. An NBA championship.

If it weren’t playing out in real life, it’d be a sports movie in its own right, wouldn’t it? The star quarterback under enormous pressure, taking criticism from all sides, earning redemption by coming through in the big game. We’re the ones getting on his back about his past failings, but if we were looking at it from the outside, we’d be rooting for him to overcome it all. LeBron just won, I believe, his third MVP award. There’s a form of history he’s on the verge of making he doesn’t want: everyone else who won that many MVP trophies also had at least one championship ring by the end of that season. I don’t want that on his record; I don’t want him to be one of the greatest who ever played the game in the regular season who let it all slip away in the playoffs. I don’t want him to confirm his reputation as someone who can’t get it done in the clutch. I want this to work out. I want this to all be worth it.

I don’t want five, not six, not seven. For LeBron’s sake, I’d settle for one. Just one to vindicate himself against all the doubters. I don’t want the history books to look back on everything, on “The Decision”, on the next night in Miami, on all the hatred and drama, and say that it amounted to nothing, that it all ended after two years, that LeBron hadn’t won anything going in and hadn’t won anything going out.

I’m worried that even if they come back, maybe Miami no longer deserves the title, that they can’t just flip a switch and become the best team in the NBA. Then again, maybe no one left deserves the title, if only because I refuse to accept a world in which the Seattle Supersonics have a title, potentially the first of many, when they’re no longer the Sonics or in Seattle anymore. I don’t know if Miami can come back, win Game 6 in Boston, win Game 7 in Miami, and go on to beat the Sonics-in-Exile for the title.

But I have this feeling… I have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind… that LeBron is about to deliver one of the classic performances of all time.

And one day, we may look back on it… and realize we were all playing our roles in his ongoing drama all along.

Cox, the Hornets, and the local sports TV wars

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Fox may be losing its regional sports dominion to Comcast and Time Warner Cable, but that doesn’t mean it’s shrinking elsewhere, and for that it has Cox to thank. Fox was able to set up an FSN network in San Diego largely because then-rightsholders Cox pulled out of the bidding for Padres rights, and history appears to have repeated itself in New Orleans, where Cox, whose regional sports networks have had trouble getting carriage on non-Cox systems, has decided the best way to save itself from rising sports rights fees isn’t to join the party, but to do the opposite, give Fox a monopoly and hope that means Fox can shortchange the team on rights fees and pass the savings on to Cox.

My impression is that Cox can only do this because ESPN and CBS aren’t in the regional sports network business. (NBC is, but their RSNs are tied to Comcast’s cable business.) If there were multiple RSN groups that weren’t tied to cable operators, Fox wouldn’t be able to set the price for local sports rights, and Cox wouldn’t have any other options. If Root Sports were at all interested in expanding outside the three regional sports networks it already has, Fox wouldn’t be able to escape competition anywhere. That they are not could have a number of causes, from DirecTV not wanting to go head-to-head with the organization that spawned it to only holding those three regional sports networks until they can spin them off to someone else like Comcast. But Cox could find itself inside a nightmare if ESPN or CBS decided to take a piece of Fox’s RSN pie.

Comcast SportsNet has become a money-making machine, but I can’t help but wonder whether Time Warner Cable might find itself going the same route as Cox. If its new Southern California networks have trouble getting carriage on non-TWC carriers, they may decide they were better off on the other end of those carriage disputes. On the other hand, the Lakers are a far bigger deal than the Padres or Hornets, and other RSNs for big-name teams like YES managed to survive early carriage disputes, so Cox’s struggles might have more to do with the teams involved than anything else. Certainly Fox isn’t likely to be able to count on other cable operators having Cox’s generosity anytime soon.

The Sports TV Wars Come Back to Life

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There was a dead period of a little over a month in the sports TV wars, but some contracts are starting to get signed again.

CBS Sports Network is starting to become home to all the bottom-of-the-barrel detritus none of the other contenders want – both professional lacrosse leagues, and rumor has it the UFL will be looking to them as their savior. At least they share the PBR with NBC Sports Network. It’s even starting to spread to the college coverage that originally built the network and continues to provide its best programming; the Great Alaska Shootout, floundering since being abandoned by ESPN and putting together a patchwork of regional TV coverage, has gotten back on “national” television with the CBS Sports Network. As the Wars develop, I have a feeling you’ll see people start to say “that league is so far down they’re on the CBS Sports Network!” The challenge posed to CBS is if they can avoid that fate of becoming the network of last resort.

Of more substance, but not much, is the Ivy League expanding its relationship with NBC Sports Network, which already shows several football games, but will now show basketball and lacrosse for the next two years as well, and could sublicence some games to other entities.

Again, not a whole heck of a lot, but the big prizes of MLB and NASCAR are coming up very, very quickly. In fact, the NASCAR contract may be done in less than two weeks.

Sport-Specific Networks
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The 2012 Mid-Major Conference

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Refer to this post if you don’t know what this is about or to catch up on the rules.

This year, six conferences produced multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament: the MWC, A-10, West Coast, C-USA, MAAC, and MVC. These conferences are guaranteed one spot each in the Mid-Major Conference.

Two teams reached the Sweet 16, from different conferences. Ohio did not come from a multi-bid conference, but Xavier did. New Mexico was the only team from the Mountain West to win their first game; ditto for Creighton and the Missouri Valley, and Gonzaga and the WCC, not counting the “First Four”. No team from the MAAC or C-USA won a game in the NCAA Tournament. Memphis and Southern Miss split their regular season games but Memphis won the conference tournament while Southern Miss was upset before reaching the final; Loyola (MD) has a similar advantage over Iona, with the added bonus of not having to play the “First Four”.

This leaves one spot in the MMC to be determined by my discretion, with no conference restrictions.

Without further ado, the eight members of the 2012 Mid-Major Conference:

Xavier (Atlantic 10)
Ohio (Mid-American Conference)
Creighton (Missouri Valley Conference)
New Mexico (Mountain West Conference)
Gonzaga (West Coast Conference)
Memphis (Conference USA)
Loyola (MD) (Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference)
Murray State (Ohio Valley Conference)

A record number of mid-major conferences producing multiple bids (matching the first year I did this in 2007) leaves me with only one discretionary pick, and there was no way I was going to leave Murray State’s two-loss season out. As with Memphis last year, Loyola received an MMC pick solely because Iona received an at-large they might not have deserved, and this one is a bit less defensible. The CAA could have used a spot for VCU or Drexel, and Harvard might have gotten a discretionary spot if Murray State weren’t so strong. Combined with the problem the “First Four” poses for determining tourney distance, I may have to change my rules for how I treat the “First Four” (which didn’t exist in its current form when I made them) in future years. I’ll also need to keep an eye on whether conference realignment affects which conferences are considered “major”. Speaking of which, give an honorable mention to Colorado, who would have qualified for the MMC this year if the Pac-12 were considered what they were this year: a mid-major.

My Sleep-Deprived Bracket

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You can tell, because I became enamored at the prospect at something happening that’s never happened before in the national championship game, something that would doubtless send ratings through the roof. I’m running myself ragged trying to finish up classes. Honestly there aren’t that many teams I’m enamored of in this year’s tournament, and many of the ones I am enamored of I have going down. This bracket basically predicts a repeat of when Duke won the national championship a couple years ago basically by being the last team left standing when the carnage cleared. I’ve actually done something I’ve never done before: submit multiple brackets.

The problem with having the NCAAs and NIT broadcast by two different organizations.

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This is a day late, but I wanted to stretch out The Streak while keeping the Kickstarter feature on Monday:

So as I mentioned Friday, truTV had a “Hardcore Brackets” show that revealed the full 1-68 seed list of the teams in the tournament. Not only that, it also revealed the “first four out” of the NCAA field. Those teams were Oral Roberts, Miami (FL), Nevada, and Drexel.

You would expect the “first four out” to also make up the four seeds in the NIT, right? Wrong. NONE of those four are seeds in the NIT. Miami is a , Drexel is a , and Oral Roberts and Nevada are playing each other in a 4/5 game. ORU, which appeared to be the very first team knocked out of the NCAAs, is a 4 seed, barely getting a first-round home game, and Nevada isn’t even that lucky.

For some reason, ESPN’s “Bracketology” show never mentioned the seed list that was being revealed simultaneously, and the NIT Selection Show seemed to dance around ORU’s bubble status. NIT committee chair C.W. Newton’s interview with George Smith was heavy on vague platitudes and light on actual insight; Newton claimed that there wasn’t much difference between the NCAA and NIT committees, but was never asked why his committee diverged so much from the NCAA committee in their assessment of the first teams out of the NCAA field.

To be fair, it seems the committee never took a vote on the last team in the field before St. Bonaventure’s win in the A-10 final stole that bid, and the teams that would have been included in that vote would have also included Mississippi State and Seton Hall, so it’s entirely possible Seton Hall (which did get a 1 seed in the NIT) would have won that vote, but still, Nevada goes from being potentially the last team in the NCAA field to not even hosting an NIT game?!? What the hell is going on here???

A modest proposal to all bracketologists:

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I don’t know if you’ve heard, but truTV will be airing a special “Hardcore Brackets” show after the selection show on Selection Sunday. And on this show, for the first time ever, we will learn the actual order that the NCAA ranks all 68 teams in the tournament.

I know a lot of you like to measure just how accurate you are each year, so I would hope that you recognize the new opportunity this presents you. As such, I call for as many of you as possible to release your own S-Curve rankings when publishing your final bracket if you do not already do so.