Hiatus

Sorry for disappearing, everyone. I quit my job a few weeks back in preparation to head to grad school -- a move which incidentally has afforded me less ability to focus on posting here at 5280'.

I'll be moving to Texas this weekend, ready to start my Masters program in Sport Management at UT-Austin. It will be quite the transition becoming a Longhorn, but I'm sure I'll get used to it -- though, now and forever and above all else, Go Blue.

It's been a fascinating week following the Olympics so far, and I hope that all of you have followed whatever you can. I of course have my opinions about so many things: China, Bela Karolyi, Bob Costas, Jeff Blake's victory over Roger Federer, and so much else. Perhaps by sometime late next week I'll be able to put up a good rant or two and get myself back into the swing of things.

Thank you for the patience, and again my apologies for leaving unannounced. Take care!

Ups and downs

I watched what I could (mostly the first half) of Thursday's Lynx-Fever game. It started off slow, but ended up being an interesting game; hopefully I'll be able to catch the rest on WNBA.com's free webcast service relatively soon. I had several reactions while I watched:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I'm not exactly bashful about how much I love Minnesota's rookie sensation Candice Wiggins. So, imagine my dismay when I watched her, almost immediately upon entering the game for the Lynx in the first quarter, hit the floor hard after getting called for a charge. She was subsequently taken off the court in a wheelchair with a lower back injury and never returned to the game. I'm left here hoping that she'll be alright with a hasty return.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

The Lynx managed a gritty 84-80 win in overtime against Indiana. Minnesota has had trouble managing close games throughout the season, much due to their collective inexperience, and it was refreshing for them to buckle down in the clutch and come out with a victory.

NO!

Minnesota had 17 turnover throughout the course of the game, more than their (best in the league) 13-per-game average thus far. On the bright side, most of these came in bunches when the team hit some particularly ugly offensive slumps.

YES!

Again harping on the growing maturity of the team, it was interesting to see that despite several sloppy turnovers, bad shot selections, and the early exit of Wiggins, Minnesota kept it close. The game announcers for FSN Indiana would have had you believe that the Fever were absolutely dominating their opponents through the first half, but the Lynx hung in and kept the game close (usually no more than 5-point deficits). Sometimes you have to just grit your teeth and play through the slop to come out on top, and they did a good job of keeping the energy up.

YES!

The potential of the Lynx's young talent was on display. Particularly promising was the 12-point performance of Lindsey Harding, who has had a tough time coming back from the injury that scuttled the first half of this season.

Let's look at it this way. If I were to take the talent on that roster and assemble them into the traditional 1-2-3-4-5 positions for a starting roster, it would look like this:

PG Lindsey Harding
SG Candice Wiggins
SF Seimone Augustus
PF Nicky Anosike
C Vanessa Hayden-Johnson

I might even consider rotating in F Charde Houston, as she's been performing extremely well off the bench as of late. Those five starters have a combined 6 previous seasons of experience; half of that is represented by Johnson, while two of those players are rookies. Throw in Houston and you've got... 6 years. Despite all this youth, the Lynx are second in the league in scoring with roughly 80 ppg, second in FT%, and best in the league in turnovers. Just imagine once this team truly gels. The only thing stopping them, aside from their inexperience, is a lack of depth behind all of this talent.

80 ppg is second in the league? Women can't score, can they?

You only adopt that viewpoint if A) You have an irrational hatred of women's athletics and write them off without actually watching, or B) You haven't stopped and put this in proper perspective. I'm hoping for the latter, but if you fall under the former and are still reading this article after this long, there's still hope for you.

Remember that the women's game has only 10-minute quarters, as opposed to the 12-minute quarters used by the NBA. Extrapolate Minnesota's 80 ppg, and a 48-minute game would yield 96 points. That would still net them near the bottom of the NBA, yes, but I don't hear too many NBA fans complaining about 96-90 games. (Consider the Mercury's league-leading 89 ppg; this would be roughly 107 ppg with 12-minute quarters, or fifth in the NBA behind only Golden State, Denver, Phoenix, and the Lakers. Not too shabby).

Considering all of this left me curious. Why does the women's game limit itself to 40 minutes of play? It seems to me that it would help the marketability of the WNBA by at least helping to eliminate the perception that women can't score. It's not as if these athletes aren't conditioned well enough for a longer game; there has been some great overtime play throughout the season. I really can't think of an answer to this question. Do any of you have any thoughts regarding the issue? Let me know what you think either way. 10-minute quarters or 12, and why?

Carson Palmer is my new favorite football player

He totally is.

Makes me wonder how he feels, though, about being stuck in Cincy through 2014.

Detroit ruck city

I was at the Sparks-Shock game last night for the 84-81 Los Angeles victory.

It started off as a fairly uncompelling contest, actually. Los Angeles came sprinting out of the gates from go. Their play was phenomenal, with a high-tempo half court kind of game with great play in the paint and excellent ball movement everywhere that had me absolutely amazed. Their half-court defense completely shut down the Shock, who had absolutely no ability to select good shots for the entire first half. Deanna Nolan of all people was held to five points in the first half. Maybe they were all taken aback by the fact that a visiting player, Candace Parker, received a greater ovation than anyone during the pre-game announcement of both teams' starting lineups. The Sparks looked unstoppable, and were looking down a 42-21 lead at one point in the second quarter.

Said a friend in attendance with me, "That's a Globetrotters score. They're playing one of the best teams in the league and you can't even tell."

The Sparks let up just a bit late in the second, but carried a 48-34 lead into halftime. For those of you who keep this in the back of your mind while watching a game as I do, you're thinking that they were on pace to win 96-68.

My perspective of the game changed significantly as it progressed. Early on, I was considering writing a simple recap and analysis of the game here. Then, I was going to consider turning this into a scathing critique of Sparks coach Michael Cooper, who, in one of this season's great coaching gaffes, turned a game in which his team should have put up 90 and won by at least 20 and made it a last second fight to the finish. He let his front court get out of position and give up space under the basket. He couldn't seem to figure out that he needed to tell Shannon Bobbitt not to hold on to the ball for the first 16 seconds of each possession. During a downright miserable third quarter, after Parker stopped the LA scoring lull with a great hustle play off a rebound, Cooper decided to immediately give her a break on the bench. Detroit never gained the lead, but shame on Cooper for letting them shave a 21 point lead to 1. If one more shot falls for the Shock, LA loses that game. Don't let your team go into cruise control.

Oh, did I say, "fight to the finish," just a moment ago? With 4.5 seconds left in the game, I gained an entirely new perspective on last night's action. Play had gotten progressively grittier and more physical as the game progressed, and Detroit especially began playing rough. Watching it all develop was like seeing a NHL playoff game where one team knows it's out of contention for the night and decides to try to hurt the members of the other team with a few questionable hits and some minor scuffling.

Except Detroit wasn't out of it in the least. But the team reminded us that it is coached by former bruising Pistons greats Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn as they started giving unnecessarily hard fouls. LA was getting mugged.

That's when it happened. With 4.5 seconds left, Detroit's Plenette Pierson collided with the Sparks' Candace Parker, tempers flared, and the scuffle turned into a brawl on the court (Not a great video of the fight, but all I could come up with quickly). When (literally) push came to shove, at the end of the melee Parker and Delisha Milton-Jones were ejected from the Sparks, as were Detroit's Pierson and Mahorn, and the Shock suffered a casually as Cheryl Ford went down early with a nasty knee sprain and had to be taken off the court on a wheelchair.

Don't interpret my comments about Detroit's play above to mean that I think they were the only party in the wrong. Far from it. It's easy to love Candace Parker, and I admittedly can get caught up thinking that something going wrong must have been someone else's fault. She's a charismatic, phenomenal player who can seem to click at any position, and it's easy to get sucked in. That being said, the one thing I don't like about her is that she's a bit of a hothead. I could pretty much see the fight coming midway into the fourth quarter as she got into brief shoving matches after several plays, and Cooper needed to do a better job of cooling her down. In the collision that set off the brawl, she seemed to do her best to drag Pierson to the floor with her.

But Detroit were heavy instigators here, and I put a lot of blame on the coaching staff. Laimbeer and Mahorn need to realize that this isn't the '80s anymore, and the game has changed. You can't throw elbows, you can't punch a player when things get heated, and you definitely have no business clearing the bench with 4.5 seconds left. You can't have your players tackle their opponents when trying to foul to keep the game going. Give a quick swat at their arms when they've got the ball, head to the line, and continue with the game. Instead, the Shock were out to make their case physically.

Mahorn certainly deserved to be ejected. From my position in the stands, he was facing me, and it seemed to me like he did shove Lisa Leslie down during the fight. That aside, even assuming it was an accidental bump as he was trying to break everything up, he was in the wrong. It's one thing as a coach to step out onto the court to grab your players and try to pull them out of the mix. Your players. That's where the line is drawn. As a coach, you have no business touching the other team's players. That's the place of the LA staff and the refs, and Mahorn knows better.

Suspensions and fines will surely be handed out. While many of the Detroit fans seemed all too electrified hoping for another '04 Pacers-Pistons style brawl, this was a travesty. While the game may not have been great, the ending was shaping up to be very exciting. The Shock erased a 21-point lead to come back with every opportunity to steal the victory in the closing seconds. Instead, however, this took the momentum completely out of the game. Play was stopped for more than ten minutes, and the remaining 4.5 seconds (in which Detroit was then facing a 4-point deficit, though they kept things interesting with a late shot that again kept LA on their toes) went by in a kind of uninspired daze for those in attendance. It was all anticlimactic.

While it does occur to me that this might be the exact sort of thing to find its way to internet video and spark the curiosity of those who previously condemned women's basketball for being "soft" (which is nonsense to begin with), and while it could ignite an intense rivalry from here on out, it's still pretty sickening to think of last night's events as a positive in any light.

Fish out of water

In a league where mimicry is king, who is Redskins owner Dan Snyder to buck trends?

The New York Giants' three-headed defensive end rotation of Michael Strahan, Justin Tuck and Osi Umenyiora won the G-men the Superbowl back in January, and has since sent the league into a pass-rush frenzy. Their NFC East rival, the Washington Redskins, has seized the opportunity to follow the leader.

Upon the season-ending injury of end Phillip Daniels during 7-on-7 drills recently, the Redskins traded for Pro Bowl end Jason Taylor of the Miami Dolphins. Miami's trade of the former Defensive Player of the Year is perhaps the least surprising bit of news in the NFL since Brett Favre's announcement that he's considering coming out of retirement. The Redskins sent their 2009 second-round pick along with a sixth rounder in 2010 in exchange for Taylor.

So who came out on top in this trade? For once, I'd say that Snyder made a rational decision, balancing both a need for caution and a pressing sense of urgency. The Redskins clearly got the better end of the deal. Moreso, I might say that Taylor came out a winner as well, getting away from a 1-15 team in an offseason boiling over with controversy onto a generally competetive team.

The Redskins ended up with an upgrade at the position (whether the trade talks were in place before or after Daniels' injury), replacing an injured player who only had 2 sacks last year to a 6-time Pro Bowler with 11 sacks to his credit in 2007. With Taylor agreeing to continue the rest of his two-year contract without alteration, he's the perfect way to bolster the Skins' defense, which ranked near the middle of the league in almost every category, in the short term.

What does this trade further highlight? Miami lord emperor vice president of football operations Bill Parcells is becoming less of a brilliant strategist and more of a stubborn mule with each passing season. Parcells has had a wonderful time finding a whipping post with which to assert his dominance upon arriving at any of his new locations. I could understand the release of veteran MLB Zach Thomas. But apparently that wasn't enough for the Tuna, who felt the need to alienate and ultimately drive out the only great player on a downright miserable defense. He may be pushing for youth with the newly acquired future draft picks and Matt Roth and rookie Phillip Merling filling the starting roles at ends in the 4-3, but he surely won't stay with the Dolphins long enough to see the fruits of that labor -- as unlikely as they are to materialize as a positive force.

Miami is plagued with a secondary with little talent and no depth. Take away a Jason Taylor-caliber pass rusher and you're left with a defense standing ready to make even whoever starts for the Jets or Bills look like a superstar. It's painful to even think of what Tom Brady and the Pats will do to that squad. Miami might as well start planning their #1 pick in the 2009 draft now.