Absurd Anschutz Demands Put LA Football Stadium Deal in Jeopardy

Posted on March 30, 2012 by theHoundDawg

We’ve frequently commented on various actions of that scumwad Phil Anschutz and his AEG company that want to control LA sports and entertainment, as they have in cities around the world, to the detriment of all LA residents, not just football fans.

We’ve described how the proposed football stadium deal, appealing to the weakness of deprived football fans, will screw the City of LA and its taxpayers. Now, the NFL has stepped up and roared its power, in effect telling Anschutz that they will not be similarly coerced.

Anschutz’ proposal includes the requirement that any NFL team that wants to play in his stadium must sell to him AT A DISCOUNT PRICE a minority stock interest, and turn over team control. Well, Commissioner Roger Goodell has told him in no uncertain terms that he and the NFL will not accept any such deal, and if he wants to control a team, his one option is to buy a team.

Goodell and the power of the NFL has stood up to this egomaniacal jerk were mayors, councilpersons, governors, and a certain ex-president (whose initials are g w b) who accepted massive campaign contributions and corresponding demands, would not.

It is unlikely that any current NFL owner will sell out to Anschutz, in particular any owner of a team currently considering moving to Los Angeles. Thus, finally, the stadium plan could be dead. The City of LA has put on hold massive projects, to its detriment, and to the detriment of more honest and ethical developers, all to placate the miserable jerk Anschutz. Its time to plan a realistic Convention Center update, that DOES NOT involve Anschutz’ ridiculous concept of tearing down the existing structure in order to move it over one block.

We have been sans NFL since 1994. We have managed to survive. We can continue to get by without an NFL team.

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Holly Crap – McCourt Gets $2 Billion for Dodgers

Posted on March 27, 2012 by theHoundDawg

Breaking News tonight: Frank McCourt has agreed to sell the Dodgers to the Magic Johnson-Stan Kasten-Mark Walter group, for $2,000,000,000!

Walter is the money guy, long time baseball executive Kasten will run the baseball operation, and hopefully Magic can restore the Dodgers name and image.

The BAD news: McCourt reportedly will buy back Dodger Stadium land for 150,000,000 and still be the Parking Lot Guy.

Peter O’Malley sold the team to Fox in 1998 for just over $300 M, and Fox sold to McCourt for $430 in 2004. Fox was the real culprit in destroying the franchise, though McCourt made things worse, and made the headlines.

A $1.5 B profit just isn’t right.

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MLB Opener in Japan a Bad, Bad Idea

Posted on March 27, 2012 by theHoundDawg

So it seems that the Oakland A’s and the Seattle Mariners Japanese soil this week. The games will be played at prime Japanese evening time, which means for anyone interested in watching or listening to the action back in the USA, game time will be something like 3 a.m. PDT, tomorrow. Well, actually in about seven hours.

Ichiro to Play Regular Season Game in Japan

Ichiro to Play Regular Season Game in Japan

After these games, the A’s and the Mariners will return home for the rest of spring training, playing four and five more, respectively, exhibition games, prior to next weeks season openers. Well, season openers for the other 28 major league teams. You see, these two games between Oakland and Seattle this week, in Japan, are real games, that count in the standings and everything; games that are part of that 162 game schedule.

ESPN.com’s Tim Keown wants to know if anyone will notice:

“This is how your 2012 big league season begins: In the middle of the night on a Wednesday in March, thousands of miles away, in a game between two bad teams playing in a dome, on fake grass, before a crowd that couldn’t care less. It’s a far cry from the traditional day game in Cincinnati, a tradition that went away so long ago it’s almost embarrassing to admit to remembering it.”

Just which inmate in the MLB asylum decided on this plan? Or abandon that opening day event in Cincinnati, as well?

Forget that part about going to Japan. How do players get ready for regular season games, actually play a couple of them, then go BACK to spring training for a almost a half dozen more end-of-spring meaningless exhibitions? That’s asking a lot, and for our perspective, an insult to professional ballplayers.

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LA Basketball Coaches Treated Very Differently, Conclusion, For Now

Posted on March 27, 2012 by theHoundDawg

In the 27 year history of the Los Angeles Clippers, they have posted winning seasons exactly twice.

In 1991, the team was below .500 when Mike Schuler was fired as head coach, and replaced by Larry Brown, who led them to wins in 2/3 of the remaining games, an overall 45-37 record, and the playoffs. The Clippers were in the playoffs again the following season under Brown, with a 41-41 record. Brown left after that season, and 20 years later he is still the only Clippers head coach to record a winning lifetime won lost record while coaching the LA Clippers (or their predecessors, the Buffalo Braves and San Diego Clippers).



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$69.95 $59.95		 Despite a .397 lifetime Clippers won-lost record, Mike Dunleavy did lead them to another 45-37 record in the 2005-6 season, but never approached that success again.

In Vinny Del Negro’s second season, they are currently 28-21, in second place behind only the Lakers’, and currently possess the highest winning percentage the team has EVER recorded since landing in LA. They could eclipse the franchise record .598 set in the 1974-5 season played in Buffalo, when the team was lead by the likes of Bob McAdoo, Randy

Smith, Ernie DiGregorio, and Jack Marin.

The optimism heading into this season was as an all-time high for Clippers fans. Blake Griffin was now to be joined on the court by Chris Paul, Caron Butler, and Chauncey Billups. The sky was the limit. Then a measure of reality set in. Despite still playing in the NBA West, inhabited by the likes of the Thunder, the Spurs, and oh, yea, those Lakers, Clippers fans expected to see the team run away with the Conference. As the end of the regular season draws closer, fans and pundits see disappointment all around. Well, they should take a better look.

Despite the devastating loss of Billups, the team has compiled the Western Conference’s fourth best record, trails only the Lakers’ in the Pacific Division, and only by two games, and is in the process of compiling one of the best, if not the best, seasons in Clippers history. Pundits see problems where none exist. The very fact that some have said that Del Negro has “lost” the team is absurd. They criticize his experimental of player combinations and match-ups.

Still relatively new coach + new players + no training camp = Need to experiment and find what works best. Mike Brown gets a pass, but Vinny gets crucified. Brown could take a lesson from Vinny and use some of his benchwarmers and see if they can contribute.

The New York Knicks entered the season with the same kind of anticipation and expectations as did the Clippers. Look at the disaster there. You cannot just buy a championship team in the NBA; look at last year and the magnitude of pundits who had handed the title to Miami. The Clippers and Vinny are progressing. This is no time for a coaching change.

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LA Basketball Coaches Update

Posted on March 26, 2012 by theHoundDawg

Hours after I posted yesterday’s missive, the Lakers lost what should have been a very winnable game to Memphis. The fourth quarter saw the second coming of Del Harris, otherwise known as Mike Brown, do something seldom seen in the past 16 NBA seasons: For a few key mid-fourth-quarter minutes, as the Lakers were struggling to overcome a six-to-eight-point deficit, he benched Kobe Bean Bryant.

Harris, uh, Brown, thinks he can win games this way?

Brown’s legitimacy as an NBA coach grows sketchier as each day goes by.

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LA Basketball Coaches Treated Very Differently, Part One

Posted on March 25, 2012 by theHoundDawg

What in the world is with all of these LA basketball pundits who think Vinny Del Negro is, or should be, on the way out as Clippers head coach. And why are they giving an almost total free pass to the real underachiever, the second coming of Del Harris, the Lakers’ excuse for a leader, Mike Brown?

You listen to these guys, like KSPN’s fill-in-chief and super trojan brain surgeon wonk, Mark Willard, and they make it sound like, on one hand, the Lakers’ team is composed of a roster of junior high school jvs and are being masterfully led to undeserved heights by Brown, while on the other hand, the Clippers are talent-wise the reincarnation of the 1985-6 Boston Celtics, but being led into a giant downward spiral by the incompetent Del Negro.



adidas Andrew Bynum Los Angeles Lakers Revolution 30 Swingman Performance Jersey
$99.95 $89.95		 Well, let me give you my opinion, first on the Lakers. Their roster from the start of the season has been significantly better than these know-it-alls say. Lakers talent is being totally misused by Brown. Players like Troy Murphy and Josh McRoberts are excellent back-ups, whose games have been destroyed by the way they have been handled by Brown. Even more so is the case of two talented guys the Lakers just gave up, Jason Kapono and Luke Walton. Kapono can shoot but when he infrequently played, he NEVER saw the ball anytime he was ever open. People forget that Walton was an integral part of Lakers championship teams, but he never got a

chance to show Brown that he can play in this league. Brown’s love affair with the lunatic ron world be peace metta tag free is absurd. Meanwhile, other young talent wastes away on the bench. Yes, I mean Devin Ebanks and Darius Morris. Early in the season these two guys showed two things: They have NBA talent, and they need playing time to mature. Morris should have gotten time especially when Steve Blake was hurt, and Ebanks should be in much of that wasted time the peace meta tag thing gets.

As to the roster moves the team recently made, they gave away Derek Fisher for nothing. Jordan Hill is a non-entity, who will only take up roster space for the next month. They made a brilliant deal, however, for Ramon Sessions, and the way he has played, he could be the Lakers point guard for the next five years or longer. But, what happened to talented power forward Derrick Caracter? He showed last season that he has the talent to be a great backup at that spot, and potential starter.

So, this team talent-wise stinks, but the second coming is working miracles. Bull. The declining 2010-1 Lakers ended their season 32 games over five hundred, and played .695 ball. Harris’s, uh, Brown’s 2012 team is staggering along at .625, which their current 7-2 streak got them up to. Yea, Brown’s a real magician.

Tomorrow, the Clippers.

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Saints’ Bounty Punishment Not Nearly Severe Enough

Posted on March 23, 2012 by theHoundDawg

Commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL came down on the New Orleans Saints with some tough penalties for their long-running bounty program. For the institutionalized, intentional injuring of opposing players, the team was fined $500,000, lost some draft picks, head coach Sean Payton was suspended for a year, and the architect of the program, former defensive coordinator Greg Williams, was suspended indefinitely.

This constitutes a slap on the wrist.

Understand what this was: This was the coaching staff of a professional football team offering cash rewards to speedy, 300 pound professional athletes, for causing injuries to the players on opposing teams. The bounty system was in effect for three full years, from 2009 through 2011. It involved as few as 22 Saints’ players, and possibly as many as 27. It was reported that there was maintained a “bounty pool” of $50,000, and players received $1,000 for causing an opposing player to be carted off the field, and $1,500 for causing an opposing player to be knocked out of a game.

In recent years, the NFL and other sports associations have re-examined issues of the physical well-being of players. The thrust of strict rules against steroid use in football, baseball, and other sports, has been primarily due to the horrendous physical effects of such drugs. The NFL should have gotten this message years earlier, when effects of steroid use began making headlines, such as when steroid-related cancer took the life of 43-year-old Lyly Alzado almost 20 years ago. The NFL engineers headlines with their half-hearted bandaid solutions to the epidemic of concussions and other serious injuries. The NFL is sitting on a powder keg of brain injuries that will begin affecting the lives of vast numbers of retired players over the next couple of decades.

With this background, the NFL should have shown coaches, players, and the public, that the intentional injuring of players would not, under any circumstances, be tolerated. Both Greg Williams and Sean Payton should have been banned from the league for life. Players who received bounties should be named, fined, and suspended. Players who did in fact cause serious injuries should also be banned for life, and players who caused less severe injuries should receive year-long suspensions.

Anything less, as the league has in fact done, demonstrates a mere pretense of protecting players from injury.

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The NFLPA Should Have Boycotted the Super Bowl

Posted on February 4, 2012 by theHoundDawg

Not that many years ago, professional athletes, including the biggest stars in the NFL, were worker bees, not unlike auto workers, masons, teamsters, and school teachers. They received low salaries, needed second jobs in the off seasons to support their families, endured poor working conditions, and had few, if any, benefits.

What changed?

The development of players’ unions, that’s what. Unions are responsible for unimaginable salary levels, in all major sports, in particular the NFL. Unions are responsible for safer equipment, for health and pension benefits, for free agency rights, and for shared endorsement fees.

Without unions, and without collective bargaining rights, NFL players would still be poorly paid employees, tied to the teams that drafted them for many years, with equipment far inferior to what is used today that is designed to prevent serious injury, with no pensions, no lifetime health care, no ongoing endorsement monies (except for the very few greatest names) no first class travel, no grievance procedures, no bargaining power.

The Super Bowl will be played in a few hours in Indiana, home of a miserable right-wing zealot governor who as part of the republican wave of busting union rights in state after state across the country, just orchestrated his passage through the gop controlled Indiana state legislature of the end to union rights and collective bargaining in Indiana.

Citizens of Indiana no longer have the rights to fight for the types of benefits that NFL players enjoy – the rights to bargain for livable wages, health benefits, pensions, safe working conditions – that NFL players now enjoy BECAUSE of unions and collective bargaining.

Collective bargaining and union rights averted an NFL lockout a scant few months ago. How quickly the players forget.

Where is the NFL Players’ Association. Silent. Mute. Apparently castrated.

The Players’ UNION should have organized a boycott and REFUSED to play the super bowl in Indiana.

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First Skirmish Goes to Clippers

Posted on January 15, 2012 by theHoundDawg

The first skirmish in the 2012 Battle of LA is over, and the clear winner is…….. da Clippers.

The Lakers out-shot the Clippers overall, thanks primarily to Clippers’ bench players Randy Foye, Ryan Gomes, and ex-Laker Brain Cook shooting a combined 2 for 16. The Clippers, however, out rebounded the Lakers, shot better from behind the arc, generally played a more tenacious defense, and out-hustled the Lakers for the entire game, save for part of the third-quarter, when the Kobe-Bryant-led Lakers went on an eight minute rampage and briefly narrowed what was a double digit lead for almost the entire game.



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$46.95 $36.95		 And in the end, Kobe’s fourth consecutive 40-point game was not nearly enough, as Chris Paul showed the Lakers why they were correct in being his primary pursuer, putting in 33, but more importantly, being the team leader that the Clippers have not had since, well, … ever. Not Blake Griffin last year, not Baron Davis, not Elton Brand, Ken Norman, Ron Harper, Gary Grant, or Randy Smith. But it is more than Paul, as the Clippers are now a team full of talented, experienced players, whose aim it is to win Los Angeles, win the Pacific Division, and make a mark in the playoffs. The additions of Chauncey Billups, Caron Butler, and Reggie Evans give the Clippers a nine-deep group that can complete with anyone in the NBA. The return of Eric Bledsoe will make them even deeper.

Great drafting gave them Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan, and the excellent talent that they sent to New Orleans in order to acquire Paul. The future is now.

As to the Lakers, besides the grit and disdain for pain continually displayed by Kobe, the best thing that came out of last night’s game was the play of Darius Morris, in his new role backing up Derek Fisher while Steve Blake is out. Morris made some mistakes, but showed he has NBA point guard talent, and that he should be a competent bridge until Blake’s return.

Something else to consider regarding the Lakers’ second half play. It’s no secret that the Lakers are, as a group, far from being spring chickens. Add to that the effects of the lockout and lack of training time, and the further fact that no NBA team has already played more games than the Lakers. When they made their third quarter run to get within a couple of points, that was it. There was nothing there there, thereafter, and the lead quickly reverted to double digits. Are the Lakers already fatigued, as LA Times blogger Mark Medina has speculated?

Or, is it coaching? Remember, that’s Mike Brown, not Phil Jackson on the bench. Brown seems to still be using different combinations each game, and some of his personnel moves, and the manner in which he is using his personnel, are questionable (Remember our earlier posts on the second coming of Del Harris. Or of Randy Pfund).

For example, in the fourth quarter, announcers Bill McDonald and Stu Lantz were talking about getting scoring from someone besides Kobe, and then Jason Kapono entered the game, just for that purpose. For the four and a half minutes that Kapono played in the fourth quarter, he was never once set up for a single shot, and almost never even touched the ball.

Tomorrow, Lamar Odom returns to Staples, as the Lakers play Dallas, and then they go to visit the reeling Miami Heat. Think they’re tired now?

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I Knew I’d Seen That Tim Tebow Throwing Motion Before

Posted on January 14, 2012 by theHoundDawg

Bobby Knoop 1965 Topps Baseball Card

Bobby Knoop 1965 Topps Baseball Card

After watching Tim Tebow for most of this season, it finally dawned on me who it is that his throwing motion reminds me of. It is none other than the guy I consider to be the greatest fielding second baseman I ever saw play, 1960s Angel, White Sox and Royals defensive star Bobby Knoop.

The .230-hitting Knoop was a magician with the glove. His range both up the middle and into the hole were remarkable, but his true gift was his ability to snatch a batted ball while off balance or diving, and make one amazing accurate throw after another, as he was falling to the ground. He did this routinely through his five-plus seasons with the Angels. When Tebow rolls to his left, as defenders

are pursuing him, and as he fires accurate passes while running for his life, sometimes while falling to the ground, I see the exact image of Bobby Knoop from 50 years ago.

For Knoop the throws were actually more difficult, as he so often made them diving into the hole to his left, and throwing right handed. Tebow makes this play running the natural way for a lefty, to his left. He may have done it but I have yet to see him do it running to his right.



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One final note: It is interesting that if you polled most baseball fans as to their pick of the best defensive second baseman in recent memory, most would likely choose Roberto Alomar. Knoop was traded by the Angels to Chicago for Roberto’s father, second baseman Sandy Alomar, Sr.

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