When the Madness gets Depressing

  

Day four of March Madness coverage. You know the drill.

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When the Madness Stinks

  

A recap of today's games before we move on to tomorrow's action:

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When the Madness Starts

   

We'll kick off day two of March Madness coverage with recaps of last night's games, followed by previews of the Friday games.

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When the Madness Stops

   

To this point I have neglected to write about the NCAA Tournament, and given that this is the most inclusive and watched sporting event of the year, I feel like the reason bears mentioning. Simply put, I had nothing to say before the first round that you wouldn't have heard about from every imaginable source, and none of them know anything. Kansas lost in the second round. Under no circumstances would I have predicted this. The Big East Crumbled. I thought they were the best conference in the regular season. Saint Mary's won 2 games. I thought centers had to be able to at least graze the rim to play in the tournament.

So what changed?

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Kevin Durant is Not the MVP

   

There is an insufferable habit amongst followers of the NBA to eschew logic in favor of the sexy story. Nowhere is this more prevalent than than the MVP hype machine. Regardless of how painfully obvious it is that one player has run amok in the league and separated himself from his peers, we insist on pretending that the award is being contested.

Which brings us to the present situation, where people are actually defending the notion that Kevin Durant might be the MVP instead of Lebron James.

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The NFL: Who Can Wait?

   

This has to be the worst time of the year for sports. The NFL is months away. The NBA is all sorted out but hasn't moved on to the playoffs yet. Baseball is in its pre-season, March Madness hasn't started, and most stories revolve around whatever scandal is hottest. I don't have anything interesting to say about Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger being drunk and womanizing hardly qualifies as news, and the "revelation" that Allen Iverson drinks and gambles is about as shocking as a sunrise.

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Wizards, Bullets, and Curses, Oh My!, Part 2

   

When we last left off, the Bullets were busy making a mockery of the draft process. The one decent player they had, Jeff Malone, was traded in 1990. The team did not make the playoffs for 8 straight years, from 1989 to 1996. During much of that stretch they had the same propensity to be just good enough to not be able to draft a sure thing, and just dumb enough to make the least of their draft picks.

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Wizards, Bullets, and Curses, Oh My!

  

A friend emailed me recently asking whether or not I thought the Wizards were cursed. The short answer to his question was no, I don't believe that cosmic forces have aligned to collectively screw over an NBA franchise. Excepting the possibility of the supernatural, though, I was forced to admit that he had a point about the eeriness of their futility. This is, after all, the team had a Mexican standoff in their locker room. That standoff involved a player (Arenas) who has played 47 games in the last three seasons combined while under contract for 111 million dollars over 6 years. Arenas then decided that the most mature way to handle these allegations was to make light of it by mock shooting his teammates before a game, which made about as much sense as Tiger mock humping a caddy at a golf tournament. Naturally, at that point the league decided to eschew allowing the legal system to run its course in favor of a year long suspension.

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Meeting the Deadline

 

This is one of the slowest parts of the year for sports stories, unless you like to pretend that you can do a serious breakdown of curling or the biathlon. I suppose I could write the umpteenth article criticizing Tiger Woods for being a robot, but my opinion could be summarized in far too few words for an article: who cares.

You can email Chris with questions or comments at TheSportsKiosK@gmail.com

When the Mighty Fall

  

The Boston Celtics were incredibly fortunate to win the NBA title in 2008. They had a pair of trades that gave them the top end talent they required. Their young players blossomed into excellent role players. They required 26 of a possible 28 games to get through the playoffs, allowing lesser teams to drag out playoff series instead of being able to end them quickly. Essentially, for one year, anything that could go their way did. Considering that they were thought to have a window of 2-4 years to win a title beginning with the 2007-2008 season, the future looked promising.

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Heroes and Villains

  

Roberto Alomar is not a sexy name in baseball. He didn’t have the caché of a big market for the majority of his career. He didn’t hit a prodigious number of home runs, he wasn’t accused of taking steroids, and he never won an MVP. During his seventeen-season career, the words you would use to describe him would have been excellent, workmanlike, and consistent. He rarely found himself the subject of much attention, and he seemed to prefer it that way. Who needs attention when you are quietly the best player at your position since the legendary Joe Morgan?

Unfortunately, all of that nondescript excellence only made his moment of weakness seem all the more glaring.

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Today We Spell Redemption, S-A-I-N-T-S

  

I’ve discussed at length why football brings about the emotions it so effortlessly coaxes from its followers. We don’t only find a reason to attach a ridiculous amount of our happiness to our team of choice, when they aren’t playing we muster up the energy to shift our hatred and exuberance elsewhere. For me, the result was a slightly irrational attachment to the Saints for a great number of reasons (bottom of the article). Their team is a series of cast-offs (Vilma, Brees, Colston), their coach gave up salary to get the defensive coordinator he wanted, and their city could obviously use a distraction, not to mention any financial windfall that winning might bring. As such, I was understandably nervous, given that if you had asked me before the game, I would have given an edge to the Colts, a.k.a. the team that doesn’t lose when it tries.

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Our Newest National Holiday

  

 
The stage has been set for America’s only sports related national holiday. Amazingly, my predictions regarding the games proved to be more or less correct. I guess picking the favorites will lead to that result a good bit of the time. In any case, in preparation for the greatest spectacle of the year, lets look back at the conference championship games and see what useful information we can glean.

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On the Rebound

   

All is right with the NFL. Well, nearly everything, anyways. The teams that were better all season long acquitted themselves, handily dispatching the would-be Davids to their Goliath. The lone exception was San Diego, a team that for reasons elucidated last week probably had the worst match-up of any top seed.

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An Unlikely Hero

  

What a bizarre set of first round games. Three blowouts and a fourth game that felt like one until an improbable comeback followed by an equally improbable finish left us with by far the most competitive game of the weekend. Three underdogs won, 2 road teams won, and I couldn’t help but feel ambivalence towards most of it. Blowouts are rarely exciting, and this weekend was no exception. Nearly every game felt like it was over before it had a chance to get started.

You can email Chris with questions or comments at TheSportsKiosK@gmail.com

A Life or Death Decision

  

The NFL playoffs are upon us. 32 teams have been whittled down to 12, and for four more glorious weeks we will be able to enjoy the pinnacle of America’s national pastime. I, like many of you, do not have a horse in the playoff race. Despite this, those of us who have followed our teams throughout the season will still be watching in spite of their absence. Why is this? What is it about football that captivates us to the point that we create a rooting interest where none previously existed? The answer is clearly not tradition; the Super Bowl may be a national holiday, but so was the World Series once upon a time.

You can email Chris with questions or comments at TheSportsKiosK@gmail.com