No part of what’s been a mostly predictable NBA postseason has been more entertaining than Stephen Curry’s emergence as a bona fide superstar. Even on the playoff stage, where opposing coaches knew exactly what Curry wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it, defenders were still resigned to simply crossing their fingers and hoping he would go cold.
It’s treatment typically reserved for scoring machines like Kobe Bryant and Carmelo Anthony, two potent scorers who have frustrated defenses for years with their incredible shot-making. Curry has joined that rarefied company, and in terms of his ability to pile up points, the comparisons are apt. What sets Curry apart, though, is that he has the potential to be much more than a brilliant individual scorer. He can be the maestro of great offenses for years. It’s not Kobe or Carmelo to whom Curry should be compared. It’s Steve Nash.
There will be a lot to say about Vinny Del Negro's time with the Clippers, and his exit from the Clippers. But for now, let's celebrate the man. Here we have the greatest moment in Italian basketball history, Vinny Del Negro subcategory. It's footage of Del Negro, back in his Lega Basket Serie A days. He was playing for Benetton Treviso, and he apparently had the ability to manipulate reality the way one might adjust the difficulty settings on an NBA 2K game. Actually, you know what this all reminds me of?
From time to time, the writers of Grantland will use this space to unpack a new sports book. Most of these books will be bad.
Relentless is a sports self-help/inspirational book by famed athletic trainer Tim Grover that reads like it was written by the love child of Gordon Gekko, Ayn Rand, and Sonny Vaccaro. Imagine The Onion doing a parody of an ultra-sociopathic Michael Jordan with the constant roar of the author swinging his dick like a helicopter rotor in the background and you have Relentless.
The moment I knew that Relentless would be a special read was when I got to Grover’s list of 13 traits that define a “Cleaner,” Grover’s term for the ultimate, take-no-prisoners type of winner exemplified by Michael Jordan. Why 13? “To remind you that there is no such thing as luck,” writes Grover, who is mostly known for training athletes in a sport where hitting the same percentage of your shots as a coin flip means you’re really good.
The Brooklyn Italians coaching staff looks worried. Less than an hour to go before the kickoff of their U.S. Open Cup first-round game at the Aviator Sports and Events Center in Brooklyn, and they’ve just discovered they’re not supposed to be wearing their usual blue jerseys for the game, and that apparently they’d been told this two weeks ago. (“Why’d they e-mail him? He was on vacation and he’s not even the right person.”) Nobody has brought the team’s spare white shirts, and after some internal debate, one of the younger members of the Brooklyn Italians entourage, Mario Frasca, is dispatched to take coach Lucio Russo’s car to get the shirts from Bensonhurst. As Frasca dutifully sprints across the field toward the parking lot, there’s a loud blast of music from the speakers on the side of the official scorer’s room/referee’s locker room/press box. It stops abruptly and a head appears around the door. “You guys playing the national anthem?” The assembled Brooklyn Italians turn to glare up at him for a beat, then one breaks off to deal with the ceremonial issues while the rest drift back to the locker room to wait for the non-blue kit to arrive. Welcome to the magic of the cup.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
A couple of weeks ago, just before the Colts started their rookie minicamp, Andrew Luck was a guest on NFL Network’s NFL Total Access. Asked by host Scott Hanson how much more comfortable he felt going into this season compared to his first, Luck gave a platitude consistent with someone who owns this cell phone. “One hundred percent more comfortable,” Luck said. “On this day last year I was probably sitting in class.”
Like most things Luck has ever said, that doesn’t seem much worth reading into, but there’s still probably some truth to it. It’s important to remember that the era of the just-add-water rookie quarterback is still fairly new. When Matt Ryan threw for more than 3,000 yards in 2008, he was just the second rookie to ever do so. Last year, every rookie quarterback that started from Week 1 had at least 3,100. Luck’s 4,374 yards were enough to break Cam Newton’s rookie record set the year before, and everything about the Colts offseason points to Luck being even better in Year 2.
You know the story. Jeffrey Loria bought the Montreal Expos, ran them into the ground, then swapped them for the Florida Marlins. For the next 10 years, he ran, essentially, a skeleton operation, at one point so brazenly failing to compete that Major League Baseball started leaning on him to spend more on player salaries. He argued that, as a multimillionaire, he couldn’t make enough of a profit unless the taxpayers of Miami-Dade County (who have a median household income of $43,957, and 17.9 percent of whom live below the poverty line, according to the latest census figures) bought him a new stadium.
And when they did, at the eventual cost of more than a billion dollars to taxpayers, Loria and his front office made a good-faith effort to compete for one season, before shipping off Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, and Mark Buehrle and replacing them with players who make the major league minimum. All told, it’s a tale of class warfare that would make Karl Marx’s hair stand on end even more than it did before.
But despite the overall ickiness of their ownership group, one that seems to view actually having to field a baseball team as an annoyance (and wouldn’t you, if said baseball team was in the habit of hitting Greg Dobbs cleanup?), the Marlins are in an interesting position. They know they aren’t going to win, and so with all the depressing, .600 OPS-toting retreads and career replacement-level non-prospects they’re marching out there, they’ve taken the opportunity to blood a couple more exciting young players.
This seems to be how the Marlins work — they assemble oodles of talent, develop it slowly, make the playoffs and win the World Series, then sell that championship roster for parts. No owner, perhaps in all of North American sports, is trying less hard to build a champion than Jeffrey Loria. But if these players grow up together, in a couple years he might get one anyway.
By Sean McIndoe at
AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Nathan Denette
By now, hockey fans have probably seen the video of a group of Toronto Maple Leafs fans watching last week’s Game 7 loss to the Bruins. If you haven’t, it’s below. Fair warning: It’s downright painful to watch.
You don’t have to be a Leaf fan or even follow hockey to understand what you’re witnessing. If you’ve been a die-hard fan of a team in any sport for long enough, chances are you’ve suffered through watching a game like that. Depending on which teams you follow, you may have been there far more often than you’d care to remember.
There’s no right or wrong way to react to the sight of your favorite team self-destructing on national television. But through the years, fans seemed to have developed a variety of methods for handling it. The next time you have to sit through a sports disaster for the ages, here are 20 different types of unhappy sports fans you might find yourself in the room with.
The Premier League season ended on Sunday. On the last day of the 2011-12 season, I needed oxygen, a Sergio Aguero mask, and a vacation. It was all last-second drama, intra-city power shifts, and brave new worlds. This season? Not so much. United had the league wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, Wigan went down the trapdoor to the championship (joining the already relegated QPR and Reading) when it lost to Arsenal last week, and the only real unanswered question going into the final day of league play was which North London club would nab the final Champions League position. That "prize" went to Arsenal, just like it always does.
Honestly, I feel like Watford's promotion playoff semifinal match against Leicester from mid-May soaked up all the drama in the known universe. So maybe it's just as well. I don't know if the tectonic plates could have handled any more scenes.
In case you were busy not making up with Sergio Garcia, here's what you missed in sports on Monday:
Detroit overcame a Patrick Kane third-period goal, as the Red Wings topped the Chicago Blackhawks, 3-1, to take a 2-1 series lead in their Western Conference semifinal matchup. Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville held himself responsible for the loss, explaining, "I motivated our team before Game 1 by having them all watch Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Worked like a charm. Then I'm like, boom, stick with Scott, but emphasize teamwork: Black Hawk Down. But they all got hung up on the title. Mixed message on my part. OK, Game 3, Prometheus. Huge mistake. Movie makes no sense. Totally lost control of the team." When asked if there were any actual tactical or line adjustments he would implement, Quenneville said, "I'm this close to going with Thelma & Louise before Game 4 just to mix things up."
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
This morning, Calvin Johnson reportedly confirmed something that we’ve sorta known, but not really known, for a few months. Then he didn’t. Right now, we know this much: For a significant portion of a season in which he broke the single-season record for receiving yards, Megatron played with at least one messed-up finger.
Now, as others have noted, broken fingers for wide receivers are not uncommon. Torry Holt looks like this. Antonio Freeman can’t wear his Super Bowl ring because notorious asshole/finger-breaker Brett Favre ruined his hands.
After the high drama of Sergio vs. Tiger last weekend, producing the best Players Championship ratings in more than a decade, we were probably due for something a bit less energetic. But as a fisherman would say, a calm surface can disguise a roiling storm below,* and despite a tranquil veneer, the golf world was alive and stirring this weekend.
*It's not clear that fishermen actually say this or that the phenomenon of subsurface storms is a real thing.
Here are five things that happened this weekend that might interest YOU, the Grantland reader:
Before this week the only thing I knew about the NBA draft combine was that Kevin Durant couldn’t bench 185 pounds at the event in 2007. Then, during Game 6 of the Spurs-Warriors series, Jeff Van Gundy mentioned that “you have to be a basketball junkie” to watch NBA TV’s coverage of the combine. I took Van Gundy’s remark as a personal challenge and decided to hang out in my basement all weekend to soak in all six hours of televised combine action. Spoiler alert: This proved to be a terrible decision.
I’m guessing you didn’t subject yourselves to the same torture, so I took it upon myself to provide a running diary. Here’s what you missed:
Stopping the San Antonio Spurs offense, one of the league’s three best over the last three seasons combined, is always going to be a chore. Smart defenses can construct wonderful theoretical game plans centered on limiting the Spurs to midrange jumpers off Tony Parker pick-and-rolls by cutting off Parker around the foul line and staying home on San Antonio’s unfair army of deadly shooters. And some of those smart defenses are good enough to actually execute that kind of game plan over long stretches, or even entire games.
But the Spurs have top midrange shooters at key positions, and they are so good that over time they're going to find cracks in even the most well-meaning team defenses. Parker and Manu Ginobili, even this aging and limited version, are brilliant ball handlers who can slice through the gut of a defense with wily crossover dribbles, tiny bits of misdirection, and pinpoint passing. The constant whirring of the Spurs system often gives them a head start by putting their defenders through all sorts of off-ball movement before Parker or Ginobili finally catch the ball in position to attack — and with their defenders off-balance and/or fatigued. And no group of NBA big men is better versed in the art of setting screens in tricky little ways that disguise which direction the Spurs’ ball handlers might jet around those picks.
There’s an understanding among baseball fans who can read and do math that relief pitchers are pretty much interchangeable. Certainly not all relievers — some are consistently good, like Mariano Rivera, while others are consistently awful, like Josh Lindblom. But in general, one relief pitcher is going to pitch so few innings over the course of a given year that a great bullpen isn’t a foundation to build on, but rather the last piece of a championship puzzle. And even then, relief pitcher performance varies wildly from year to year. Consider the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies, who won the World Series thanks, in part, to one of the best bullpens in the game. Then consider what Brad Lidge, J.C. Romero, and Chad Durbin were doing even one year later.
One exception to this rule is the 2011-12 Atlanta Braves, whose bullpen performed wonders. The poster boys for Atlanta’s late-inning run prevention were closer Craig Kimbrel and lefties Eric O’Flaherty and Jonny Venters. In 2011, O’Flaherty, Venters, and Kimbrel were first, third, and fifth, respectively, among Braves pitchers in WAR. In 2012, Kimbrel and O’Flaherty were second and fifth. Put another way, in the past two years the Braves had three different relievers post three-win seasons. That’s ridiculous.
Since the start of the 2011 season, O’Flaherty has appeared in 161 regular-season games, 55 of them on less than a day’s worth of rest. Venters appeared in 151 games, 49 of them after having pitched the day before. And last week, we found out that both of them would be headed for Tommy John surgery — in Venters’s case, for a second time.
