The NBA Needed the Warriors Broken Up, and New York to be made relevant...

News on the free agency front (sources telling ESPN) appears to indicate the league may be getting both.

The Nets are getting Kevin Durant, as well as Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan.

So does this (like the news that Anthony Davis is going to LA) move the meter for, in Durant's case, the 2021 NBA Finals odds...  Durant ruptured his Achilles coming back for Golden State, and is probably out most, if not all, of the 2019-20 NBA season.

(EDIT TO ADD:  4:45 PM PDT:  Caesars, however, has told ESPN that the Nets victories in free agency will still reduce their odds for 2019-20's title from 25-1 to 18-1.  Some of the futures I get on my trip to Las Vegas in August will be most interesting.)

But what is clear is that the NBA has had enough (and rightly so) of Golden State and the imbalance they created in the league.  You now have superteams at least building in both major coastal media markets, plus New Orleans winning the Zion Sweepstakes...

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....

Nah, the balls aren't juiced. What could I POSSIBLY be talking about...

17-13 and 12-8.

At least they didn't give London the Marlins and Orioles or something...

But 50 runs in two games in London for the Yankees and Red Sox.

And the balls aren't juiced, you lying sack of shit Commissioner.

(If anything, you just gave us a preview of October.)

And speaking of the self-same Orioles:  Wins #23 and #24 this weekend -- by identical scores.

THIRTEEN TO NOTHING each time!!

Suspension Blotter: Could be bigger than one might think...

• New Orleans Saints:  David Onyemata:  1 game, marijuana possession.
• Los Angeles Rams:  Aaron Neary:  4 games, substance abuse policy.

This is the first suspension reported for each team.  Both, however, are forecast to be major players in this season.

I didn't think it would happen THIS quickly, but it might move mountains in sports as time goes on...

ESPN crawl note, subject of sports wagering...

More money was wagered last full month (May 2019) in the state of New Jersey than in the state of Nevada.

Keep an eye on all that...

MLB admits the ball is juiced. They just don't tell you such.

A number of outlets (this one from Larry Brown Sports) have reported that Commissioner Blinded By The Light (yeah, Rob Manfred himself!) all but admit the 2019 balls are juiced for home runs.

He just says the center cork "pill" of the ball is creating less drag.

And if you believe that, I'm in drag as the Queen of England!!!

Your majesty...

Shut up.  :)

When my friend used to follow baseball (MAGA and the Dodgers getting screwed half a decade running now have basically ended all that!), she would make reference to idiocies like Game 5 of the 2017 World Series, that debacle in Houston where balls were as if they were shot out of a cannon!!

And now, do we go one day anyone without at least three 11-7ish run-fests anymore?

All you'd have to do, if you wanted to absolutely ensure a result, is to know which balls have the easier "pill" and make sure one team gets those and the other doesn't.

Provided TS does not HTF in the next six weeks, my annual Vegas trip should be a very interesting look at how this is going in baseball!

Another (Attempted) Murder By Coaching Staff: Eat The Football Team's Food? Send half your team to the hospital...

Not a recent one, but my anonymous friend was correct...  This should have more attention brought to it.

The coaching staff of the women's soccer team at the University of Houston tried to kill the team (at least in my own opinion) for the "crime" of at least two of the players eating food which was pre-destined for their almighty football gods.

For this, they were subjected to a brutal regimen of workouts designed to cause damage -- and damage it did.  Twelve of the players on the team came down with a massive kidney disease which is evident to the death of muscle tissue due to overworking (Rhabdomyolysis).

One was hospitalized for five days.

The coaching staff, who berated players who slowed down in the brutal (and, apparently in the bounds of the handbook for the team) "physical punishment", should be in jail for attempted murder.

But that's three things:

• Misogyny
• Football Over Everything
• And Fuck Your Safe Space

In short, I think I know who the coaching staff voted for three years ago.

All parties on the side of the attempted murder refused all comment to a KPRC investigation.

MLB (!) Suspension Blotter: We beginning to see a couple of 2019 season storylines develop?

First, another notch in the Rob Manfred "I Hate Pitching!!" Department:

• Oakland A's:  Have lost their ace for the rest of the season.  Frankie Montas does not understand that GNC is not the place you want to be getting nutritional supplements.

Banned 80 games -- basically the rest of the season, for something he got over the counter.

Two things to say to this:  First, if you are a professional athlete under a drug testing policy, DO NOT EVEN THINK OF ENTERING GNC or basically any similar national chain.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that GNC and other store chains sell products illegal under sports policies over the counter.

I need to get the numbers on this second part, though:  It's gotta be a record year for scoring in MLB this year.  Every day, I'm seeing 10-3, 12-5, 15-14, all this madness where the scoring is just through the damn roof.

Why?  Rob Manfred has made it clear.  He hates pitching.  He wants games like Game 5 of the 2017 World Series, where runs left Minute Maid Park at a sickening rate.

But what he might also get is another round with the Major League Baseball Umpires Association, who already publicly commented on the first of these two suspensions, and I would bet money has a word about the second, at least privately...

• San Diego Padres:  Manny Machado suspended one game for apparently bumping an umpire, and the MLBUA went public that it wanted far more.
• Texas Rangers:  Asdrubal Cabrera banned four games for throwing his batting gloves at an umpire and hitting him.

Look, MLB...  We know you're stoking for another major player-umpire showdown.

Obviously, this would take dealing with the CBA and the like, but there's a way you ensure the lines which are not crossed.

• Get tossed, that's one game.
• Get tossed multiple times in a season, each one adds a game to the first.
• Any action which basically is a screaming altercation gets reviewed as if it were a bump now.
• And if you hit an umpire with a thrown object, start the bidding at about a month!

I'm the first to understand umps who escalate and the like (and that needed to end yesterday anyway), but I do begin to wonder, especially with these massive scorelines, if we are seeing players begin to act as if they, as offensive players, have the right to do whatever they want because it is basically their game...

And the balls aren't juiced.  Nah...  /s

I hate the guy, but I do read my enemies' work... This one sprung up as a cardinal rule of life without Rule of Law...

I'm not linking to his site because I hate him, he hates everything I am all about.

He's a glowing bigot, racist, probably misogynist as well...

But Karl Denninger may have slipped on one here in picking up a story about a former Auburn and Cleveland Browns football player.

CBS News had the story in 1999.  James Brooks hadn't been paying child support, and chose to go to jail instead of fulfilling his requirements as a father.

Brooks was functionally illiterate, and Denninger, as the money quote for his post, seized this from the CBS News article...

"Didn't have to go to class," Brooks said. "In this country, it was all about how good you are, and I was one of the best in the country."

People don't get it.  There is no rule of law...  Probably never has been.

Brooks probably has done many things (in the name of being Football Man) which would get ordinary people imprisoned for life.

But there is one important thing people don't get.  The law confuses this as a person's actions having what is referred to as "legitimate purpose".

What is really being adjudicated or charged is not the action having "legitimate purpose", but the actor of said action.

Brooks didn't have to do anything as a student because his Football Man status gave him legitimate purpose and free reign, as such.

And, once that legitimate purpose ends, it can all come crashing down, as it has for Brooks.

I would suggest that Denninger look into Vince McMahon's league and damn well hope my fear for it comes true -- that it is a league of, by, and for White players.

NHL: AND HERE WE GO AGAIN!!

You'd think media companies would learn by now if they don't want us to think sports are rigged.

I'm not sure when it flipped from San Jose to St. Louis, but a report this early afternoon (Game 6, with the Blues up 3-2, is 5 PM Pacific) indicates that St. Louis Blues owner Tom Stillman has had published his letter congratulating the Blues fans for their first Stanley Cup.

The only question now is whether it's six or seven....

Good God!! Series should be 3-1 -- at the VERY MINIMUM.

Well, it sounds as if at least some of the fandom in Oakland are getting a little bit tired of Golden State lolly-gagging it's way through the 2019 NBA Finals, to which they now trail two games to one.

And it goddamn good and well should be THREE to one, with no game Friday.

Why?  FORFEIT!!

It turns out that, in the fourth quarter of the game, Kyle Lowry was grabbed by a fan in the stands.

Yep, here we go again with Sports Fan Syndrome.

Here's the real problem:  Piece of shit was a (small) part owner of the team, billionaire venture capitalist Mark Stevens, according to VSiN, the Vegas Sports and Information channel on Sirius XM Radio.

You know my policy from when I had to scream down the very Commissioner of the Arena Football League (by the by, we down to about 4-6 teams now in what's left or successored to the league???).  That is a no-bullshit forfeiture offense.

And since it's an owner, the only question now is giving Toronto the championship outright or tossing another game into the mix.  What POSSIBLY (and yes, I speak this knowing my background!!!) could be any even remote justification of a part-owner of the team (and not in the style of, say, The Green Bay Packers) doing this?

So, basically, they win Game Three and get Game Four for free.

Stevens is banned from the NBA for one year, fined half a million dollars.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

If that's not sufficient grounds to hand the championship to the Toronto Raptors right now, at minimum:  the next game played is Game Five in Toronto, Toronto up 3-1.

Non-Sports: AUGH! We got it again!!!

(Wrote the most of this at about 3:45 - 4 PM Pacific today.  Held it until West Coast airings.)

I would really like to know what the Hell has gotten into all of us.

It seems that, this time, not only was there the open-faced "FIRST!" desire, evident when every news source under the sun notified us the morning after Ken Jennings' loss was taped, but it seems that it has propagated like wildfire to a truckload of trolls and Nelson Muntz-jobs to make sure it got propagated everywhere!

By about 2:45 PM, I had found this spoiled on:

• My most recent post on the status of this streak and how close the person involved was to the two remaining sacred records in game shows.
• Yahoo! had made it a news item about how many fans are pissed off that the result was leaked, as early as 11 AM Pacific, if not before!
• Deadspin too...
• A leaker got into one of my YouTube comments and propagated the spoiling that way...

And, according to my anonymous friend, the two New York tabloid newspapers actually spoiled this SUNDAY FUCKING NIGHT!!!  And no less than about 5-6 PM Pacific too!!!

Surprisingly, as of writing, ESPN (who has done more coverage on this guy than basically anyone outside the show) has NOT spoiled it.

What is it?

Well, unless you're under a rock today, you already know (but I will still withhold the blog post until most of the scheduled airings have taken place):

Flamboyant professional sports gambler James Holzhauer was defeated today on Jeopardy!.

Holzhauer had made mincemeat of the record books for the show over a six and a half week reign of terror (which the show had no problems openly exploiting for ratings) which gave comparisons to the last super-champion on the show, 74-game winner Ken Jennings...

Today represented two ironies:

• Over the weekend, we had just passed the 15th anniversary of the beginning of Jennings' regular-season run.
• If Holzhauer had won today with anything approaching his nearly $77,000 average, he would've become the greatest winner in the history of the show for regular play -- he would have eclipsed Jennings' $2,522,700 regular-season total on the show.

That number is one of only three superlative Jeopardy! records Holzhauer leaves the show not having taken:

• The second is not being able to eclipse a neutralizing metric invented by Jeopardy! contestants to gauge game-to-game skill.  The Coryat Score is a metric created to take answers at their stated value only and score that way.  Holzhauer's best was $38,200, $1,000 short of Jennings' best.
• The third is the amount of money won on Jeopardy!, first place held by all-time all-shows grand champion Brad Rutter, who, of his $4,888,440 (plus two mid-2000s Chevrolet Camaros, given to him as a five-time retiring champion while that was in force), won all but about $100,000 on Jeopardy!.

To give you an idea of how ridiculous Holzhauer's run was...

• The pre-Holzhauer record for the highest one-game winning total was $77,000.  Holzhauer bested it SIXTEEN TIMES, including six six-figure victories and two over $130,000.
• He leaves the show with, of the 25 top one-day totals, 21 of them.
• Holzhauer was the first player in history to break the $18,000 raw limit on the Jeopardy round -- and he did it SIX TIMES.
• He had the top Daily Double wager ($25,000, twice),
• the top Final Jeopardy wager (somewhere between eight and twelve times over)
• the highest score at the end of Double Jeopardy (between ten and sixteen times over)
• the most answers given to the contestants without that contestant missing (the record is now over 250 (over four full shows), and he had another run of 187 answers heard without him missing as well!)
• the most correct answers given in a game without a miss (44, and he had five other shows in which he had also beaten the pre-Holzhauer highest record for a perfect game)
• a winning way that meant, over the course of his run, according to how much host Alex Trebek is stated to make, outearned the host of the show by over or just about one million dollars.
• and a SIGNIFICANT ratings bump for the show, as the show made no secret of advertising the presence of the next great Jeopardy! super-champion.

So why this post?

BECAUSE WE SEEM TO HAVE A FUCKING NATIONAL OBSESSION WITH SPOILING PEOPLE AND THEN POINTING AND LAUGHING AT OUR REACTIONS.

That's why.  :)

I still recall how pissed I was when no less than the Associated Press spoiled Jennings' loss at 3 AM the morning after it was taped.  On the sports-talk radio stations in San Francisco, that was the only true newsbreak they took on their schedule.

I seem to recall an incident involving someone spoiling Avengers: Endgame, and getting violently beaten over it.

Though I have to hand it, on a lighter and final note, to one professor:

I forget precisely where, but the professor told the students he'd read all of the relevant books of the Game of Thrones series just completed.

If the class acts out, he tells them the next character(s) to die.  :)  :)  :)

Swiss Court tells IAAF to GFY, Caster Semenya can compete as a woman

(ESPN reports on the story.)

For about a month now, Caster Semenya was banned from competing in the 800 meter race she is the defending Olympic champion in.

Switzerland's Supreme Court, earlier today, has ordered the IAAF, track and field's governing body, to either show cause for the exclusion of athletes with Differences in Sexual Development (DSD) from the 400, 800 and 1500 meter women's competitions (as well as the few mile competitions still run), or allow them to compete as women.  The decision allows Semenya to compete as a woman, effective immediately, with the IAAF needing to show cause by June 25.

Two other Olympic medalists are also affected, at minimum:  Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi (silver to Semenya in Rio) and Margaret Wambui of Kenya (bronze -- meaning the impact is to all three of the Rio medalists) also have reported being affected by this rule, indicating the entire Rio podium at 800 meters for the women were DSD athletes.

The IAAF believes there are dozens of elite track and field athletes with DSD.