Archive for the 'Just For Fun' Category

From FOX Sports:

"An Ohio woman who paid $5 at a yard sale for a LeBron James pendant she thought was costume jewelry has found out it's worth nearly $10,000.

Vaneisha Robinson, 20, says she used to wear the basketball jersey-shaped pendant to high school when she didn't know its value. Then she had it appraised."

Good to know there's at least one person from Ohio who's still able to derive some benefit from James...

EDIT: ...Or not.

Back in early May, I conducted a poll asking readers t0 vote on who should be inducted into the inaugural Fantasy Basketball Hall of Fame class, and you responded very well, registering almost 1,000 votes. According to the rules of the HoF (based on the Baseball Hall of Fame process), a player had to be named on 75% of ballots to be inducted, which left us with two players (2 point guards, actually): Kevin Johnson, and Tim Hardaway. Tim Bug will get his ceremony later in the summer, but today I think we'll give KJ the love he deserves as a charter member of the FBHoF...

Kevin Maurice "K.J." Johnson
Position: Point Guard
Height: 6-1 Weight: 180 lbs.
Born: March 4, 1966 in Sacramento, California
High School: Sacramento in Sacramento, California
College: University of California
Draft: Selected by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 1st round (7th pick, 7th overall) of the 1987 NBA draft.

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From Slate: "LeBron James is no longer in a relationship"...

(H/T: Ball Don't Lie)

One of my fave features in SLAM Magazine (at least, when I was a teenager -- not sure if they still do it) was the annual "Rookies Most Likely To..." column, where members of the incoming draft class were judged based on what they were the most likely to do. For instance, we would have said last year that Blake Griffin was the RMLT Average 20 Points (sorry, Clips fans!), or that Stephen Curry was the RMLT knock down 40% of his treys (done, with room to spare), or... well, you get the idea. So this year I want to put it to you, the reader: which rookies are the most likely to live up (or down) to each of these expectations?

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As a follow-up to this morning's post about historical 7-game series, here are some notes about the "shape" of this year's Finals...

First, what I mean by "shape" is the pattern of wins and losses by the home team in the series. For instance, the 2010 Finals look like this:

WLLWWW

In other words, the home team won Game 1, lost Games 2 & 3, and then won Games 4, 5, & 6. How often has that happened through the first 6 games of a 7-game series?

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Our friend David Biderman of the Wall Street Journal has a great piece today on the biggest complainers of the Finals so far:

"In the first five games of the Finals—which continue Tuesday with Game 6 in Los Angeles—the Celtics screamed, threw up their arms or spun around in disgust (or all three) after 48% of the fouls they were called for, according to an analysis by The Count. We looked at every foul in the series that wasn't intentional, tracked the observable reactions and gave extra weight to the more blatant complaints. The Lakers expressed displeasure about 36% of the time, even though Kobe Bryant disputed half of his while Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce only bickered about one-third of theirs."

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Somehow, LeBron James isn't on Twitter yet (seriously, how did that happen?), but his initiation into the Twitterverse has to be coming any day now. That's why SBR Forum has posted odds on King James' Twittering future:

"Currently, the top Twitter athlete is Shaq with over 2.9 million followers. The moment James actively decides to tweet, we anticipate his follower list to grow at unprecedented levels. The long wait of him finally becoming seemingly accessible will make his Twitter debut impressive. "

SBR guesses that James not only will get on Twitter in 2010,  but that he’ll become the top athlete on Twitter by Sept 1, 2010. Or at least they give him a 67% chance (1 to 2 odds). Would you take that bet?

As an announcer, Mark Jackson sure loves to repeat himself. Whether it's "Mama there goes that man," "Hand down, man down," or my personal favorite, "Grown man move" (clip unavailable), Jackson's canned go-to phrases are a staple of any ESPN broadcast -- especially when cutting to a commercial break, serving to punctuate an important replay with, well, words that have lost all meaning.

Recently, though, Jackson's been repeating another comment he began to make during Rajon Rondo's triple-double vs. Cleveland two weeks ago. Here's a variation from Saturday night:

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That's right, it's time once again to pay tribute to the fine journeymen of the Basketball League of Amazing Benchwarmers, one of the finest fictional basketball institutions founded in late April of 2010. For those who have no clue what this is, it's a fantasy league I put together that's named after the legendary Uwe Blab... In a nutshell, BLAB takes some choice scrubs from the past and gives them their own 6-team league, headlined by team captains Greg Kite, Larry Krystkowiak, Kevin Duckworth, Kurt Rambis, Joe Wolf, and Paul Mokeski. The season is 30 games per team, and outcomes are determined by the career Win Shares per 48 min. of the players on each roster (randomized using the players' seasonal standard deviations of offensive and defensive WS/48). The top 3 teams in the league table make the playoffs, with the eventual winner taking home the prestigious Uwe Blab Championship Trophy.

The last time we checked in with BLAB, the Joe Wolf-led Lone Wolfs were 8-2, sparked by the outstanding play of Mario Elie, as well as Chris Gatling off the bench. However, the Krystkowiak Special Ks were hot on their trail, just a game back at 7-3, and Team Mokeski was 2 games behind at 6-2. That was 10 games ago; here are the results since then:

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A select few in the annals of the game will be elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, but those who don't make the cut shouldn't despair. If you compiled great conventional stats on losing teams, or powered many a fantasy league championship despite never quite getting over the hump in the real NBA playoffs, this idea is for you...

The premise: create a Hall of Fame for the best fantasy basketball players of all time. The requirements:

1. Only stats compiled from 1990 to the present are considered, because fantasy hoops was not really a mainstream activity until the nineties.
2. Players must have played at least 5 years as a fantasy starter in a 12-team league (or similar) from 1990-present.
3. The player must be retired and/or out of basketball in 2010 (no current players allowed).
4. Only consider fantasy value in standard league setups -- i.e., 12 teams, 8 categories, roto, head-to-head, or basic points. In other words, no super-shallow or deep leagues, and no exotic scoring systems.
5. Players are ineligible if they have more than a remote chance of making the real Basketball Hall of Fame.

To be enshrined, players must receive at least 75% of the vote; those with 5% or fewer will be dropped from future elections. Here's the inaugural ballot (voting will close in 1 week):

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