Drinking the Nets Kool-Aid

A nice icy cold glass of Kool-Aid from Nets management to their fans...

We hate to skewer the Nets just as they hit the high point of their season. All right, that's a line, as Knicks supporters, the Nets are the archenemy, and we don't hate it at all. Why is it the high point of the Nets season? Well, short of opening night, this is as good as it has gotten for the Nets. Yesterday they beat the number three team in the Eastern Conference to get to 6 up and 52 down.

We at the Clarion Content, as Knicks fans, have always viewed the Nets as provincial upstarts. They are not as threatening as the Devils, mind you, but they are gnats irritating the NY area's NBA king. Jay-Z might be a part-owner, but nobody raps about the Nets. They were doomed when they lost Dr. J. We knew this season was destined to be a joke for the Nets when they offered in a ticket promotion to send Brook Lopez to your kid's Bar Mitzvah, and/or send Yi Jianlian to your company picnic. Anyone this side of Bill Veeck would be cringing painfully at the idea of renting out major league players for free appearances.

Despite that, even we did not expect the Nets to be this bad. They are historically awful! Even with the win yesterday against the Celtics, they are still on pace to break the record for the worst NBA season ever. What is so galling to the Knicks fans on our staff, is the Nets absolute refusal to come to terms with it, to accept just how bad they are and how bad things are going to be. Nope, Nets management just keeps passing around the Kool-Aid Jim Jones style and Nets fans keep swigging it down. The examples are legion.

The Brooklyn arena nonsense predates this season. But despite wild claims by an owner now nearly broken by the real-estate market, Bruce Ratner, the Nets are still playing in the Meadowlands parking lot, in the glorious Brendon Byrne arena. Wait, what about next year? Oh, yes, next year they will become the number two tenant in a downtown Newark arena built for hockey's Devils. Ask any NJ/NY metro area denizen about the ease of getting from Newark to Brooklyn... Despite the distance factor, the reality is Chicago to Des Moines is simpler and quicker. At the Clarion Content, we have yet to see developments that convince us that the Nets will ever play in Brooklyn. The billionaire Russian nickel magnet helps, but unless eminent domain is used Kremlin style he is not going to be enough to get the Atlantic Yards stadium done.

Nor is the tall billionaire going to be enough to bring the Nets fans their wildest fantasy, LeBron. Seriously, LeBron is going to come to Newark? Maybe if the Fugees were still together, but money break groups up like the Five Heartbeats. LeBron is destined for a bigger time franchise, sorry Nets fans. No matter how much salary cap room you have, no LeBron, and oh by the way, no D-Wade either. He is not leaving South Beach for Newark. Maybe you get Chris Bosh, Nets fans, if you are lucky. It is cash and cache that bring big free agents to town. Jay-Z prolly gettin ready to sell his piece a your hoopty and buy into a better team.

Then last week, as if all that craziness weren't enough, in the midst of the worst NBA season ever, the Nets started floating ludicrous and perhaps certifiably insane coaching rumors. They fired Lawrence Frank earlier this year and replaced him with clueless and seemingly unmotivated Kiki Vandeweghe. They started with Rick Pitno, currently at Louisville. Pul-leeze! He might be itching to get back into the NBA some day after his previous unsuccessful dalliances with the Knicks and the Celts, but again, not with your franchise, no matter how bad the tabletop publicity he has been getting has been. He shot the story down publicly almost immediately.

So the Nets people, believing if they won't buy the small lie, perhaps the really big one will sell, launched a Mike Krzyzewski coaching rumor. Ha! He is leaving Duke for the Nets, really? You have a better chance of Red Aurebach coaching the Nets some day. Krzyzewski barely bothered to address the rumor since no one outside of East Rutherford bought it anyway.

There were no big moves for the Nets at the trade deadline. They are stuck with what they have. So put the Kool-Aid chalice down, Nets fans, even the Knicks are better than that, and in fact, at their worst the Knicks did not bottom out this badly.

Perspective

The best perspective we have heard yet on the Tiger Woods saga came out this afternoon. Asked for a comment on the Tiger Woods press conference today by the Associated Press, his holiness, the Dalai Lama said, "I'm sorry, who?" And then the silly-ass A.P. reporter had to explain just who the hell Tiger Woods was to the Dalai Lama.

Now there's a perspective!

After having the situation explained, the Dalai Lama dished a little wisdom. "All religions have the same idea [about adultery] ...Self-discipline with awareness of consequences."

Baseball is coming

“People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for Spring.”
—Rogers Hornsby

Link to Spring Training start dates here.

Ouch

The Clarion Content has been hearing for sometime about the likelihood of an NFL lockout for the 2011 season. It is only recently that we heard about the threat of the same from the NBA. We have been saying the American sports industry was going to get its comeuppance for some time. A double lockout in two of America's three biggest sports, that sounds about like the sports armageddon that we have been forecasting.

Bill Simmons, our favorite sports columnist, has been warning for a while that many NBA franchises are bleeding cash. The Clarion Content's own analysis and research supports Simmons conclusions. There are just not enough fannies in the seats. America's biggest professional sports, especially the NBA and NFL, made this problem for themselves by raising outrageously the prices of their individual game tickets. (Note: of late baseball teams, led by the Yankees and Red Sox, have been following suit.) These ticket prices are ostensibly a sustainable model in the NFL, fans after getting soaked for their personal seat licenses, only have to pay for 11 or so home games, including the preseason. In basketball, fans are expected to pay for 41 homes games. The NBA knew that they were pricing out the average fan, and they did not care. They thought that they would be able sustain sales though corporate ticket purchases.

They did not anticipate the economic reckoning that has come to America. Corporations are no longer dishing out big bucks for sporting events, whether we are talking about sponsorships or season tickets. The NBA is paying an enormous price. They are willing to admit publicly that ticket revenues are down 8-9% year-to-date. This means they are likely much worse off in some cities. As Simmons says, you can see the Monet paintings in the crowd shots behind the basket. (Empty seats create an impressionistic hue.)

The NBA must have started to come to terms with this reality. Commissioner David Stern, interviewed yesterday on the BS Report, didn't blanch at the subject of contraction. He said he hoped to avoid it, but hardly ruled it out. That was a huge shock to the Clarion Content, even if it was negotiation related posturing. Although the collective bargaining agreement is good through the end of next season rather than this one, the NBA submitted an initial proposal to the Players Union this week, just in time for their annual player representative meeting at the NBA All-Star Game in Dallas.

The proposal is jaw-dropping. It offers up draconian measures: minimum salary would be reduced by as much as 20 per cent, the total value of a maximum contract for a veteran would drop below $60 million (less than half of its current level), contracts would only be 50% guaranteed as opposed to the 100% guarantee they have now, there would also be a hard salary cap that teams could not violate (no more Bird rule, no more mid-level exemption), and first-round draft picks would have their salaries cut by about one-third. Those are across the board cuts exempting no one.

Three years ago we would never have seen the players accepting anywhere near close to that offer. Now? Will there be a lockout? Contraction? A settlement? Neither side can go long without income. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires July 1, 2011.

Break-up the Kings?

Kings leading scorer Anze Kopitar

The Clarion Content has never seen the Los Angeles Times put the L.A. Kings hockey team at the top of the sports page. Yesterday, they did. Even as the Lakers won in Portland for the first time in half an decade. The Kings won their ninth in a row. They came back on the perennial powerhouse Detroit Red Wings from a 3-0 deficit. The Kings are 17 games over .500 and tied for 3rd in the Western Conference.

Is L.A. starting to notice?

Lane Kiffin skewered

One of our loyal Ohio readers forwarded along this video clip which roasts former Tennessee Volunteers coach Lane Kiffin to the tune of Runaway Train by Soul Asylum.

Two quick links

Two quick interesting sports links that crossed the Clarion Content's desk this week. One came from a local Durham painter who loves his sports. It is to a Jason Whitlock article about why the threatened NFL lockout will not or should not happen. The Clarion Content has been operating under the assumption that the lockout is faiti accompli. It is what we have read and heard elsewhere. Whitlock takes the common sense approach and analyzes the NFL's presence, as well as its cultural centrality.

Whatever discomfort billionaire NFL owners might have with sharing more than half of their total revenue with millionaire players, the owners will get over it when Goodell explains what their partnership with players has wrought.

The popularity, TV-ratings-driving and cultural-influence distances between the NFL and Major League Baseball and the NFL and the NBA have never been wider.

The Pro Bowl -- the most worthless sporting event known to man, a game ditched by 40 percent of the roster this year -- garnered massive ratings on ESPN. The NFL is a force of nature right now.

Read the whole piece here.

The other link is to an article that is a less sober analysis of the evening the Indians decided to hold "Dime Beer Night" at Municipal Stadium. Needless to say, shenanigans ensued, on a scale that makes Disco Destruction Night at Old Comiskey Park look like a family picnic outing in comparison. This link came from Bill Simmons.

Early on, the demand for beer surpassed the Indians' capacity to ferry it to concession stands, and a luminary, perhaps the same person who suggested the promotion in the first place, decided to allow fans to line up behind the outfield fences and have their cups filled directly from Stroh's company trucks. The promotion achieved critical mass at that moment, as weaving, hooting queues of people refilled via industrial spigot.

It is a crazy tale. Read it here.

Encouraging

The Clarion Content probably spends far more time writing about the negatives than the positives that come out of the world of sports. And we love sports! This week we saw a delightful and encouraging article about the nature of sports in the New York Times. It verified something we heard out of radio row at the Super Bowl on the Jim Rome show. We can't quite recall which it was of the many NFL players whom Rome had on his show that said it, but of the many NFL vets, Rome got one of them discussing his favorite times playing football, and he ranked them from best to least favorite; high school best, college next, NFL last. He said in high school, one knew all the cheerleaders and had grown up with his teammates. At each level after that it got more impersonal and more professional. It became more of a job. The New York Times article made a similar point.

A high school sophomore in Darien, Connecticut, Peter Barston, has surveyed hundreds of young, local athletes about why they play sports. The New York Times reports the project was born of curiosity when last summer, Bartson's father, Mike, attended a workshop by the Positive Coaching Alliance, a national organization advocating a kinder youth sports culture. There he saw a presentation that referred to a 20-year-old study by scientists at Michigan State’s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports. They had polled young athletes about their reasons for participating in sports. Barston, inspired, attempted to emulate the survey locally.

In a reminder that kids rule until adults cynically co-opt them, Barston found something very similar to what Michigan State's much more formal survey discovered. His survey a single page list of 11 reasons children might have for playing sports, included lifestyle (to have fun, to make friends) and the competitive achievement (to win, to earn a college scholarship). Just like the Michigan State researchers, Barston instructed the local Darien athletes to assign points based on the importance of the reasons for a total of 100.

Barston found a striking pattern. No matter how he categorized the responses, the most important reason youngsters gave for playing sports was the same: to have fun! This was the number one response from football and basketball players, from boys and from girls, and from players in each grade from fourth to eighth. In the basketball survey, 95 percent of boys and 98 percent of girls cited fun as a reason for playing, nearly twice the number who mentioned winning.

Michigan State's professional researchers found the same thing. According to the Times, "Their study of 28,000 boys and girls around the country asked, Why do you play sports? The top answer then was “fun,” followed by “to do something I’m good at” and “to improve my skills.” “Winning” did not crack the top 10."

Barston's work has resonated in his home town of Darien, the Times quotes a member of the local junior football league’s board, saying the survey was a “touch of reality” for adults.

“It reminds us why kids play sports in the first place,” he said. “It’s not about winning a championship in the fourth grade and having that be a life achievement.”

Can we get a hooray?

Ron Artest is flaky

The Clarion Content knows that this is not news. However, we did see new bemusing notice of Artest's flakiness this week. Artest ditched the Lakers' team visit to the White House this past Monday. Coach Phil Jackson told the LA Times that Artest had the 2 and 1/2 hour flu. Artest reportedly discussed with teammates before the event that he was worried he would feel like a third wheel. He is the only player on this season's Laker team not on last season's championship squad.