NBA Finals

We could be headed towards an "all-American Airlines" NBA Finals with Dallas playing in the AA Center and Miami at the AA Arena.

iPads at Yankee Stadium

YES Network just showed someone in the front row during the Royals / Yankees game with an iPad 2. But iPads are banned at Yankee Stadium!

Fireman Ed

I love the Jets, and Fireman Ed starting the chant at the games is a ton of fun.

But Fireman Ed has his own iPhone app?
And it's not free?
Which is more surprising?

Jets vs Pats Round 3

After a tight playoff win last night, the Jets go to Foxborough to play the Patriots - site of their 45-3 loss earlier in the year. Now for some observations and predictions:

Jets are 2-1 vs the top 2 seeds in the AFC this year
Tom Brady is 1-2 vs "Ryan brothers" coached defenses this year
Jets are 2-2 vs Patriots last two years
The last time the Patriots scored less than 30 points was in November, vs Cleveland!
In their two losses this year the Patriots only scored 14 points
The Jets have lost only 1 game this year when they score a TD on offense

The Jets will use the 45-3 loss as motivation to show that "nobody shows them any respect" and "nobody thinks they can win." What will be hilarious is how the Patriots will feel the same way! We will also hear a lot of "we haven't done anything yet" and "they have a good football team over there."

The following quotes will be food for the media "I didn't come here to kiss Belichick's rings" and "Peyton Manning studies more than Tom Brady."

And so, here's how it boils down.

When the Jets have the ball: They need to score. They should expect to need to put up 30 points. The Patriots like to take away the things you do well, so they will stuff the box with 8 and dare Sanchez to beat them. Interestingly, the Jets ran against 8 in the box against Indianapolis. In addition, the Pats will probably try to shut down Edwards and make Keller and Holmes do the heavy work. I wouldn't be surprised if the Jets try to do a few misdirection things with formations like they did with Pittsburgh where they get in run heavy formations and try some play action. No drops!

When the Patriots have the ball: They will score. The key is keeping them to FG's but an aggressive Belichick showed that he's willing to go for it on 4th & short in the last meeting (even when up by 30+). The defense did a good job creating 3rd & longs vs Indy, and will have to do the same here. The Jets are built for beating the Colts, but less so for the Pats. NE is going to show a lot of heavy run formations and then pass to their pass happy TE's. In the game vs the Colts, the Jets also used a lot of DB's and again, it wouldn't be surprising if they did the same here. The Jets would probably be content to let NE to run against them because that plays to their strengths and it means they're shutting down the pass.

Special Teams: The Jets have a better chance of breaking a big return but also a better chance of missing a FG or shanking a punt (12 yd punt?)

So who will win? Patriots are big favorites here. Jets have to execute perfectly and fool Brady with formations in order to win this one.

Additional footnote: You know the "home unbeaten streak" of New England, and the "interception-free streak" of Tom Brady? Apparently this doesn't include last year's playoff game where they lost and Brady threw 3 INT's.

Rest of the Jets Season

Barring injury, the Jets have a pretty tough schedule to close out the season. It's a good thing they've started out well, even if some would say they were lucky.

Texans at home
Benglas at home (Thanksgiving)
Patriots on the road
Dolphins at home
Steelers on the road
Bears on the road
Bills at home

Looking ahead, their biggest trouble is going to be the lack of pass rush. The Texans and Bengals home games are games they are supposed to win. The Patriots will be tough. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago people said that the Patriots were throwing in the towel by getting rid of Moss? Let it be known that I wasn't one of those people. It would be hard to think that just one WR could offset an entire offense. The Dolphins are always a tough game, even if they are down to their 3rd string QB. Steelers and Bears on the road could both easily be losses. Bills at home should be a win.

If they win the "should" games - Texans, Bengals, Dolphins and Bills, and lose the others, it would mean an 11-5 finish. Looking at the Patriots, they have a pretty tricky schedule as well - Colts, at Lions (Thanksgiving), Jets, at Bears, Packers, at Bills and Dolphins. They have 3 games they "should" win, and if we use the formula above and they beat the Jets but lose the others, they would also finish 11-5. I do have a feeling they'll beat the Bears on the road. I think the Lions game is tricky for them, but if Stafford is out, then it's less so.

My prediction - the Patriots win the division and the Jets come in as wild card. The remaining games they don't have in common - Jets face Texans, Bengals, Steelers, and the Pats have the Packers, Lions and Colts. Slight edge to the Jets there, but I think the Pats will win the head-to-head match up which will make the biggest difference.

Poor Cubs

The last time the Giants won the World Series was 1954. That was 56 years ago. When they won the World Series, the Cubs had not won for 46 years (1908).

The Texas Rangers have never won the World Series, even when they were the Senators. That team was founded in 1961. That's a 49 year span. But in 1961, the Cubs streak was 53 years.

Poor Cubs.

LeBron's mean tweets

So LeBron retweets some of his "hate tweets" trying to gain some sympathy.

He says in the article:

"I just want you guys to see it also. To see what type of words that are said toward me and towards us as professional athletes. Everybody thinks it is a bed of roses and it's not."

When Hank Aaron or Ken Griffey Jr got hate mail and death threats, that makes me feel bad. When Jason Taylor got death threats, even THAT made me feel bad. But when LeBron complains about it somehow it just seems immature. Is that too much of a double standard?

Let's not get too excited about the Jets...

The Jets are 4-1, they look good and have been executing well. Still let's not get too excited - it's only October and frankly they haven't played that many good teams. NE is pretty decent and Baltimore looks strong but they lost that game. Miami is probably about an average team when all is said and done and Buffalo is poor. I also think the Vikings are very overrated this year. So before we crown the Jets as Super Bowl contenders, let's see how they stack up against the top teams.

Who's David Less?

They obviously meant "David Price" here. I wonder if they're using dictation software or voice recognition because that's a strange typo.

Brett Favre Returns... Again.

I can't wait for October 11, Vikings at Jets. Can't wait for the Jets to pummel Brett Favre.

NBA Saves Knicks From Themselves

Maybe there is an NBA conspiracy to make the Knicks good (as suspected for the 1985 draft lottery) since the league rejected Isiah Thomas' contract with the Knicks. Phew! Dodged a bullet there!!

Week in Sports

Quite a week in sports. Here's a few things I've been thinking about:

1. LeBron - enough has been written on the subject, so I'm not sure what else I can add. Bill Simmons on ESPN had some nice summaries, as did the NY Times. What is most impressive to me is how a athlete / celebrity can go so quickly from being loved to being reviled without having done anything illegal. I'm with the group of people that thing LeBron is a lot less likable than he was before. One would think that a player of LeBron's status could recruit other players to play with him instead of the other way around. Surprisingly some of the other ESPN columnists have been somewhat supportive of James. Sure, it was within his rights to leave Cleveland but the way he did it was pretty tough. The media, fans, and public have to be a little responsible as well for building up egos to this size.

By the way, absolute must watch TV will be the first game of the Heat back in Cleveland.

2. Bob Sheppard - RIP. Amazing that a PA announcer is so linked with a team. Can you even name another PA announcer? Great move by Derek Jeter a few years ago to record Sheppard's voice so that he could announce him forever.

3. Spain wins World Cup - I was hoping for Netherlands but frankly, I don't really watch soccer. Here in Miami a ton of people reacted in the streets for the Spain win. I didn't know there were so many Spaniards here, or that all the Latinos felt such a connection to Spain.

4. The MLB All-Star game is this weekend. There are 83 named all-stars!

5. The Knicks - The team comes out of the off season in a bit of shambles. Amare Stoudamire is being very overpaid and a huge risk for the team, in my opinion. They didn't get LeBron and signed Stoudamire as a reactionary signing so that they had a marquee attraction. David Lee, a fan favorite, is now gone, and they have two new free agents that are in the mid-level range. Now, there's rumors Isiah Thomas is still linked with the team. That would be as if Barack Obama brought in George W Bush to be a part of his administration.

New Stats vs Old Stats

This past off-season, the Yankees acquired CF Curtis Granderson from Detroit and sent one of their promising prospects, Austin Jackson, to Detroit. Now Jackson is playing in the majors and had a great April, or perhaps, a lucky April.

By conventional stats, he has done very well. A summary can be found in this ESPN article, where he is hitting with a BA of .356 and has 37 hits (leads the AL).

But we look at things another way, and maybe this is nothing to get too excited about. Of all sports, baseball is one where people always warn about sample size. The Pinstriped Bible pointed this out a few weeks ago with Jackson. Jackson is striking out at a rate of 29%, which is not good, and he's on pace for roughly 200 K's over the year. His BABIP (batting average for balls in play) is .514. The BABIP is the % of balls that are hit that end up as hits and not outs. Jackson's .514 is extremely high (Ichiro has a BABIP of .357 for his career). So we're saying here that Jackson had a very lucky April but not necessarily one that will predict his future.

I like what the new statistical approach is suggesting here. We already know that BA and hits are stats with some limitations. The newer stats also have limitations but I think it will be interesting to see what happens with Jackson the rest of the year in these terms. I'm a little surprised that ESPN.com, which usually posts more in-depth insight, ran the Jackson has a BA of .356, therefore the trade is a bust story.

Observations

Inglourious Basterds - A pretty good Tarantino film without being too complicated or mysterious but still with his style of dark humor. I don't know why it took Netflix 4 months to get it to me, but it was great.

24 - Considering how hard it is to fire someone from the government, people get fired from CTU a lot!

Hubble 3D - Where is this movie playing??

The Jets - shopping Alan Faneca now? Mike Tannenbaum is the type of GM who gets a lot done but this seems ridiculous. We're trying to win next year, right?

Taylor

Even if Jason Taylor helps lead the Jets to a Super Bowl, he'll still always seem like a selfish pretty boy who puts himself before his team to me. He'll really have to have an amazing season - at least 10 sacks in meaningful spots - for me to think that he's actually worth this signing.

The NY Times had a headline, "Taylor Ready to Let Bygones be Bygones with Jets Fans." Oh how gracious of him. He had better be good. Sure, Johnny Damon and Roger Clemens came to the Yankees after success with the Red Sox - but neither of them made ridiculous statements about Jets fans. Taylor says that saying those things just was to help add heat to the rivalry. No, that's not necessary to add passion to the rivalry - to insult the fans. Frankly, I don't remember Taylor ever coming up big for the Dolphins when it mattered, and so that concerns me just as much as the fact that he skipped out on Dolphins' mini camp in order to be on "Dancing with the Stars."

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Jason Taylor is a Jet.

He had better not suck.

Butler

I'm secretly rooting for Butler to win so that sports pages everywhere can have the headline "The Butler Did It." Unless someone can come up with an equally entertaining and silly Duke headline, I'll continue to root for the underdog.

Baseball starting

Woo hoo, it's the 2010 baseball season! Pretty exciting start with the Yankees / Red Sox.

The Good: Bill Simmons wrote his best column since 2001 that does a great job of recapping some sabermetric stuff that's pretty interesting.

The Bad: No Yankees / Red Sox games between May and August.

The Ugly: Curt Schilling has a regular TV job.

Best Infield Ever?

No posts in February but since spring training is starting, I have to wonder - do the Yankees of 2009 / 2010 have the best infield ever? A-Rod, Jeter, Cano, Texiera... In the past, one might have argued that Jeter or Cano was the weak link defensively but last year it seems like it's come together. It seems like there's been some discussion of this last year but I think we have to think this is a possibility.

Weather Update????

NFL.com has a weather update for Jets vs Colts? Is there one for Saints vs Vikings? Why yes, there is!

Aren't both games indoors?