Aldridge seems to have little love lost for his old employer, but he'd doing all right for himself over at TBS and TNT. (We always forget that he does sideline reporting — or whatever they call it in baseball — for the network's MLB coverage.)

We also enjoyed this Starting Five interview.

So: Do you like the David Aldridge? Do you not like the David Aldridge? Yep.

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Aldridge's take today on the Sean Taylor story is the best we've seen yet.

Sean Taylor, while no saint, was not a "thug." He didn't grow up in the 'hood. He went to private schools before college. And even if he was a thug - whatever that is - or embraced that culture during one part of his life, that doesn't mean he deserved to die in front of his child and fiancée, in his home, bothering no one.

I'm angry that people cry about Sean Taylor's death because he was an outstanding football player, as if his death has extra meaning because he had great closing speed. This is not about sports. We have buried 200 Sean Taylors in this city this year. We don't know what would have come of their dreams and hopes. They deserve our tears, too, for they may have been anonymous to you, but they weren't to their mothers and fathers, their best friends and lovers, their teachers and mentors.

That David Aldridge is a less ubiquitous presence on our airwaves than Stephen A. Smith is as fierce an indictment of our sports media world as we can imagine.

Time To Stop All The Dying [Philadelphia Inquirer]

On Monday, when the Iverson to Denver trade finally went down, we praised ESPN for its scoop on a story everyone had been watching intently. (Even while questioning them, since ESPN has a tendency to get NBA deals wrong, unless Larry Brown is running the Cavs and we just don't know about it.) Well, as it turns out, the scoop might not have been theirs at all. Former ESPN NBA guy David Aldridge — if you don't remember him, he's pictured (the one on the left) — wrote The Big Lead to accuse the network of swiping his scoop.

The Philadelphia Inquirer broke the story about [Tuesday's] trade. I should know, because I wrote it. It was on our site about 10 minutes before ESPN "broke" it. I don't expect everyone to read every website every minute of the day, and the Four-Letter is ubiquitous, so people almost always see it first. But in this case, they weren't first. We were.

While we enjoy the odd notion that a guy at Stephen A. Smith's paper scooped Stephen A. and then had his scoop stolen by someone at ESPN who isn't Stephen A., we're still a little saddened; the network has a long history of confirming someone else's scoops and then claiming "ESPN has learned." We're still not sure that's exactly what happened here, but if it did, we'd like to cordially invite the network to "break" this story, leading to a "ESPN has learned that David Aldridge has learned that ESPN has learned that Allen Iverson has been traded to Denver, which ESPN can now confirm."

Did ESPN Really Scoop The Iverson Story [The Big Lead]