Category Archives: basketball
Bracket Buster
It’s March Madness week. The president has a pen, he’s filling out his bracket, and he doesn’t need Congressional approval. Here’s a cool bracket from FiveThirtyEight. You can roll over any team and it will give that teams chance of winning any game right up to the championship.
Burning Love for LeBron
Sterling / Silver
How can somebody so rich be such a fool? LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s bigoted habits were well known around the NBA, yet they never seemed to be a problem for him. He has more NAACP life-time achievement awards than Barack Obama has Nobel Peace prizes.
Well, it’s a problem now.
Sterling / Silver
Word got out that Sterling told his girlfriend not to bring black people to his basketball games. This embarrassed the NBA. New commissioner Adam Silver came down hard. Sterling was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from his own team, and told to find a buyer.
Sterling deserved what he got if you look at it as a life-time boorish behavior award. But he’s being punished for something he said in private, not for anything he actually did.
As the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass says, “if you’re an American, you know the back story. It’s race in America. And it’s showtime.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar anticipated all this in a piece he wrote condemning Sterling before his penalty came down:
Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.
What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really?…
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way?
Northwestern Wildcat Strike
If the Northwestern University football team goes on strike would it be a Wildcat strike? The NLRB ruled last week that the players could form a union. The university is appealing the decision.
Personally I think the players ought to be cut in on the booty they produce for huge money making athletic programs. According to ESPN the AD at The Ohio State University gets an $18,000 bonus for Logan Stieber winning an NCAA wrestling championship.
Dayton Flyers Strike Again
Most schools like the Elite Eight Dayton Flyers don’t have that kind of money to throw around. Actually this was just an excuse for me to work my Flyers into a cartoon.
Update: The Flyers played hard but so did Florida and they were a little bigger and better.
Dennis Rodman Birthday Song
Dennis Rodman apologized for his drunken rant to CNN and sang happy birthday to Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Rodman is 52 and young Kim is thirty-something. Hope Kim doesn’t think of Rodman as a crazy uncle.
