More like Richard "R.I.P." Hamilton amirite!

I love the draft and hate college basketball.

Minny is on a nice run. I think it oppositely mirrors the Celtics' slump. Pretty sick that xorbie has a legit shot at winning his Minny / Golden State best record bet.

I always had faith in my erstwhile boys - basically because they fired whitman before GSW ditches Nellie, they have a shot...

It's mostly because the Celtics have sucked, and theyve had multiple first round picks a few times since 2001, and that there are some teams that are just so consistently bad at it.

It has all the drama- secret guarantees, seedy agents, draft day trades, tremendous upside potential, crying morbidly obese mothers etc. etc.

There are always guys who are guaranteed great players that fall hard for unknown reasons- Caron Butler, Rajon Rondo, Danny Granger. There are players who are known busts that get taken way too high - tyrus thomas, corey brewer, joe alexander. It's also fun to read Chad Ford's projections of the Euros.

I <3 the NBA draft.

Also,

ZOMG RONNY TURIAF

6-7 from the field, 7 assists and 6 boards in under 20 minutes tyvm

the draft has always been required viewing for me, since middle school. I had soured on it a bit during college (and the nba in general), but I'm back on board. The n2 league has helped it, as I have a vested interest in scouting the talent now.

Wow I actually agree with you on Men's tennis being #2. NFL is an easy 3 after that though.

So do I!

i enjoy watching tennis also, but it's below the nfl to me for this reason-- in tennis i will really only watch majors, whereas i will watch any nfl game

Eh, I'll just rank the leagues as a whole:


1. NFL: No other product is even close to this right now. Parity, the excitement of every game meaning so much, rivalry games, a salary cap, non-guaranteed contracts, an exciting and fast paced game.....just nothing even comes remotely close imo. Parity is the big one imo...its just so great to go into each year really having no ****ing clue who is going to be good and who isn't. I'd rather give up every other sport than give up NFL imo.

2. NBA: Played the game, so I love it a ton...definitely my favorite sport to play, and my favorite sport to watch highlights of. But 82 games per season, guaranteed contracts, and nowhere near the NFL's parity make it a distant second imo.

3. NCAA Basketball: March Madness is such a unique sporting event. So awesome. Early regular season kinda sucks though imo. I usually start watching around when conference play begins.

4. NHL: I probably don't watch this enough. It leaving ESPN really ruined it for me, as my TV is auto-tuned to ESPN very often. However, whenever I do watch, I almost always enjoy it and tell myself that I need to start watching more. Close playoff hockey games really are incredible.

5. NCAA Football: Lack of a playoff ruins everything imo. Maryland will lose an early season game and then they're 100% eliminated from title contention and I no longer care about it. Furthermore, I refuse to watch just out of the stupidity of not having a playoff. Otherwise, things are fine imo.

6. MLB: Such a poorly run league imo. Lack of salary cap/floor is probably the biggest problem, but I just hate so much of the rules. The game itself is ok imo...a bit slow paced for my liking and the highlights usually suck since 1/2 of them are homeruns that all look the same.

7. Golf: I pretty much never watch it, but if its on I can get into it on the final day of a tourney. Some really good stories seem to come from golf.

8. Tennis: I like playing it(even though I suck), so I don't mind watching it from time to time even though I have absolutely no rooting interest.

9. Soccer: For the life of me I can't understand how anyone can consider this superior to hockey. Its 10 times slower and has 1/10 of the scoring chances. Just not a fan at all. I will say that some of the Ronahlidno(sp?) highlights I've seen on youtube are awesome though.

10. NASCAR: Worst "sport" ever.

Football fast paced? I went to my first chicago bears game ever over the summer, a pre-season game, and I believe the entire game took something ridiculous like 3 ****ing hours because there's so many goddamn timeouts and whistle blowing every 3 goddamn seconds and the players have to setup their goddamn formations every 9 seconds and no play lasts longer than about 10 f'ing seconds and its the SAME sequence on every goddamn play-- snap the ball back to the QB or whoever the **** controls the ball, every fatass overweight guy smacks into the other, wait a few seconds, either get tackled or make a pass that more than half the time never even gets completed. Repeat. It's ****ing awful.

I love football (coach it for a living)...but I can certainly see why people don't like to watch it. Team A scores, kicks the XP....commercial....kickoff....commercial...one play run, TO to avoid delay of game....commercial....one more play...end of quarter, commercial...and on and on.

any explanation as to why you think this makes the league any better?

NBA>CFB>>>MLB>NFL>CBB>Slamball reruns>hockey/soccer/etc.


Golf isn't a sport, it's a contest. Nascar is the most boring thing I've ever tried to watch.

As you can see, I'm big on parity. Guaranteed contracts penalize teams heavily for signing players to bad contracts and make them suck for quite a long time.

I don't have an opinion on the fairness of guaranteed vs non-guaranteed contracts at all. But I think that the sport is much better when you don't know your team is going to suck before the season even begins. In the NFL, every fan truly has hope going into the year. Teams like Miami and Atlanta proved that this year. The Dolphins were 1-15 last year!! To me thats awesome.

Guaranteed contracts mean that teams must keep a player even if he is no longer good enough to make the roster...surely you would agree that this makes the overall product only worse, right? How could it not be worse to have a better player not making the team because of another player's guaranteed contract?


I meant the play of the game, not the time inbetween plays. You're right though regarding what you said. I was simply unclear.

Teams are forced to pay the player, not play him.

The actual compensation structure of NFL contracts are pretty much like guaranteed deals. Most of the compensation is in the form of a signing bonus that is then paid out over the course of several years. It's an accounting difference, not a real world difference.

I really agree with all of this.. the NFL gets so much right in way of exciting competition for fans.

O RLY? I think you're actually serious, which makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Granted I CAN see how people like football, actually, I am of the opinion that the primary thing necessary to liking a sport is having knowledge of the general game and knowing the majority of the players....having these prerequisites makes it easy to enjoy a lot more sports. I really don't know too much about football (the basic rules I know, but not beyond that) or more than like 1-2% of its players, and I'm sure if I did I would have significantly more interest in watching it, even if I didn't still particularly like the sport.

Also can we please take a break for this clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sarYH0z948

Never watched this show, but it's inarguable that David Caruso is basically amazing. Anybody actually watch CSI Miami?

I will also add that I generally DESPISE parity and I think it's annoying, which is the main reason I despise the MLB and what it stands for. I just don't get how it can be exciting to follow a sport where every single team is basically .500

I don't think this is true. It's just that the way baseball is set up, and paying 162 games, makes the definition of a dominant team a lot different. There's more variance, but that's one of the awesome things about it, IMO.

mlb and parity don't belong in the same sentence.

Can we also take another second to point out that the celtics are 2-7 in last 9?

parity is communism. better dead than red imo

Whatever you know what I meant, I meant that every godforsaken MLB team is basically .500 and I don't see how that can be exciting at all.