Locker Page 45 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
It’s the ‘research’ dance again
While NFL teams, and all professional sports teams for the most part (at least those that have the faintest clue what they’re doing), spend millions on having PR firms and people at their disposal, it seems that most everything they do comes from the same template. No matter the situation, we know t...
Steve Cohen Tax? It’s Mets’ rivals flashing cash
One of the headline parts of the new Major League Baseball collective bargaining agreement was the “Steve Cohen Tax,” a new level of the not-a-salary-cap salary cap system designed to rein in the Mets’ billionaire owner....
Claude Giroux will be leaving Philly soon unadorned, as their best tend to do
Rarely do you get the symmetry of a player playing his 1,000th game in the NHL, all with the same team, at home, while it also serves as their last game in that uniform before he’s traded to a contender. It’s hard to not see the diverging stories. A player giving his entire career to an organization...
The Rockies don’t make any sense
As infuriating, or disappointing, or occasionally exciting as baseball teams can be these days, you can generally figure out their direction and aims pretty quickly. As well as where they are on said arc. You don’t need a Watson to figure out what the Reds and A’s are doing. Nor do you for the Mets ...
Now that’s a win for players
While MLB players were doing their best to put a shiny face on the new CBA as progress, before watching baseball act like baseball again unless you play for the Mets, their minor league counterparts did actually change the landscape a bit last night....
Baseball is back to not caring what you think
You know, just for a second there, I thought baseball might give everyone a little time to enjoy the lockout being over, to soak in the excitement of the anticipation of spring training games and the season that will start right on its heels. To feel the reflected heat of the Arizona and Florida sun...
Everyone wants to attend their own funeral
In a sense, we’ve done this to ourselves. The amount of attention, emotion, and time we spend not just dissecting the NFL, but the specific position of quarterback in the NFL, would warp any person who plays the position and is on the receiving end of all that. It’s probably one of the big reasons t...
Kyrie brings loser energy to Brooklyn
Thanks to a change in arena policy last week removing the vaccine requirement for entry, Kyrie Irving was allowed in the building in Brooklyn on Saturday night for the first time all season – as a spectator, for Duke-Virginia Tech in the ACC championship game....
Stream shows consciousness
When I told my mom about the reports of NBC’s impending $30 million deal to stream a dozen and a half Major League Baseball games on Peacock, she groaned. More streaming, more annoyance when all you want to do is just turn on the TV and see the ballgame....
Maybe Jack Eichel should shut up
Jack Eichel returned to Buffalo last night, his first game in America’s basement refrigerator since his trade to Vegas. It did not go well, much like pretty much anything in Eichel’s career hasn’t. The Knights lost 3-1 to the Sabres, and losing is something they’ve been doing a fair bit of since Eic...
Poll shows fans’ changing feelings on the paying of college athletes and sports gambling
You can’t turn on a firehose of cash and expect it won’t change anything. And in the last 40 years, that’s just what has happened in college sports. Although it took far too long, the revenue has finally disrupted the system and who sports fans believe should benefit from it....
MLB rejects proposal it proposed
At this point, trying to parse out the details of the continued screaming-at-their-shoes negotiations between the MLB owners and players is akin to huffing the aura of those around you at the DMV at 4 p.m. You’re beyond caring what the minutiae is, you’re infuriated about what’s around you and whate...
MLB owners sure seem afraid of Steve Cohen
At the time of writing, there were actual negotiations going on between MLB owners and players ahead of yet another fake deadline the owners set up that they can’t actually enforce. By the time you read this there could be actual hope. Or yet another dive straight into the dirt. Just be warned....
Integrity is a funny word
The first rule for any professional sports athlete is that you can’t bet on the games. Technically it’s called Rule 21 and you can find it hanging in every Big League clubhouse. Pete Rose would walk past it every day for decades as a player and manager, paying it no mind, so his lifetime ban is the ...
Coach K goes out with a whimper
Mike Krzyzewski coached his final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Saturday night, and North Carolina spoiled the party, knocking off fourth-ranked Duke, 94-81, and disappointing everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to Terrell Owens, who took the weird step of publicly admitting to rooting for Duke....
Suns rise, and Knicks set in their ways
The Suns are the best team in the NBA, and the Knicks are the Knicks, so of course Cam Johnson’s buzzer beater went in, lifting Phoenix to a 115-114 victory. ...
What of Alex Ovechkin now?
I haven’t made any attempt to hide my enjoyment of Alex Ovechkin when writing about him in the past. I find his pursuit of Wayne Gretzky’s goal record to be one of the more fascinating aspects of the NHL right now. His metronomic yet stratospheric production over 17 years now is really astonishing, ...
Did Lovie Smith ever have a moral compass?
Somewhere at the beginning of his head coaching career, Lovie Smith got the label of being a pretty good guy. Maybe it’s because he went to church. Maybe it’s because he has a soft delivery when he speaks. He certainly commanded respect from his players, though that’s not indicative of much. Lovie c...
I want baseball to die
Not that Rob Manfred would care, but his smirking and laughing visage as he announced the first cancellations of the 2022 regular season, which caused just about every baseball fan to have an urge to reach through their screens and thrust their fist through to the back of his skull, is the image tha...
No matter what, baseball is screwed
At the time of writing on Monday night, there still isn’t an agreement between the MLB owners and the MLBPA. When I finally gave up waiting, things were moving toward beating the arbitrary deadline the owners had set up to start the regular season on time (extended to 5 p.m. EST today). Not that the...