Playoff push Run to the Madness and NFL crazy The Week That Was. The NBA and NHL are into their playoff push. Unless you are the Lakers then you are shutting it down. Too late though. The NHL playoff push is a bit more exciting then the NBA right now. NCAA Basketball the conference tournaments are about to start. For me a casual basketball fan this is getting in to the best part of the season and when I finally start to pay attention. NASCAR is still out west. MLB is wasting a month pretending they are playing games. No Tiger in Golf this week. Be interesting to see how many people watch.
NFL Trades that are Ready to go
Antonio Brown was finally traded. He will be traded to the Raiders for a 3rd and 5th round draft pick. This is at best a head scratching trade. Head scratching for everyone one involved. The only winner in this trade was Browns bank account. I have seen some stories talking about all the winners in this deal. The Radiers, John Gruden, Las Vegas, The Raiders fans and so on. In the long run that may be true. In the short run it really looks like Brown is the winner here. It is difficult to determine what kind of season the Raiders are going to have this year. They surly will be better than they were last year. They are is a very difficult division. The Chiefs and the Chargers are both pretty good. Are they going to be able to beat both of those teams? Doubtful that they will be able to. At least this year. They really have three years to prove that the Brown deal worked out for them. If Brown can keep things together. I really thought that he would go to a team that was ready to play for a championship. At least ready to win. It appears that no one was willing to give up a lot to get him. They knew that the price to sign him was going to be high so teams did not want to give up a lot to get him. In the end I suppose the Steelers did alright getting a 3rd and a 5th. LOL no they did not. The Steelers did a horrible job in this deal. They got fleeced by a former tv analyst. On who I really did not think much of his opinions when he used to give them. Guess maybe I was wrong there.
With the legal tampering starting today there were a lot of other deals staring to come out. It is pretty clever to call it legal tampering. It gets more fans into what is happening. It looks like several teams are going all in for this year. The Lions are grabbing all kinds of castaways from the Patriots. That is fine. At least they are going to give it a go. If nothing else they are bringing in some people that know how to win. In the NFL for the short term that can’t hurt. It will be interesting to to see how the teams look next week at this time. There is always a huge amount of movement and then things simmer down before a flurry before the end of free agency. I like free agency but I like the draft better. I do love to follow how this period sets teams up for the draft. Which is just over a month away. The NFL just keeps on Rolling.
NBA The Lakers still taking the headlines
The NBA have a Lakers problem. There is all kinds of interesting things going on in the NBA and the first thing I hear when I turn on my radio this morning is about the Lakers and how Jeff Van Gundy puts out there that the Lakers should look into trading LeBron James. I get what he is saying here but really who can you get back in that type of trade? Who would be crazy enough to make that kind of trade? If you did something like that you would just become the Lakers at that point and then you would accomplish nothing. The Lakers really should have started to shut people down sooner. They are now stuck in a tight spot. If they can’t land Davis or Durant in the off season then their whole plan is in the dumps. They will have no choice but to dump some if not most of the players they have now. They are all alienated by what happened at the trade deadline this year. The Lakers are a complete mess. Even though they do not have the worst record in the league they are playing like a last place team.
On the other side of things. The Milwaukee Bucks are doing an amazing job. So far with 15 games still to go. Two teams have clinched playoff spots. Both of those teams are in the East. The Bucks and the Raptors. Both of these teams were expected to be pretty good and to make the playoffs. The Raptors were expected to be on of the teams that could play in the finals with the Departure of LeBron. Milwaukee was expected to make the playoffs but not sure how many people had them playing for the best record in the league. They are two games up on the Raptors at this point. It looks like they have a good chance to keep the lead and get home court through the playoffs. No matter how they finish this year the key to future success for them is to keep Giannis Antetokounmpo. Who knew that when he was drafted in the 2013 draft that he would be this good. Not only is he a top 5 player in the league the city has latched on to him and he is part of the city now. The Bucks would be smart to pay him what ever they can under the CBA to keep him. I think that athletes and owners make too much money but that is the beast we created. So what ever the Bucks have to pay. He is worth it.
AAF Coming on Strong – Still
What the heck is going on out there? LOL Who knew that five games in the AAF would not just be getting viewers. But those viewers would be growing. Really this is just amazing. I really attribute this to changing their path and deciding to work with the NFL. The AAF has put an interesting product on the field. With the amount of viewers that were over loading the bleacher report live servers. The games for this week were moved to TNT. That worked out pretty well as I was able to watch them then. Hopefully they will be able to fix their streaming problem when they resume showing games on Bleacher Report Live.
Every team in the league has a win. Which is nice to see five games in. One team is still undefeated. The Orlando Apollos are 5 – 0 and are clearly at this point the best team in the league. They have scored the most points and have the largest point differential. It will be interesting to see if they can keep it going. The AAF is half way though the regular season. With five games to go and then the playoffs things are looking pretty good. You could say that the AAF is in its Playoff push already. At this point every game will count if you want to get into the playoffs.
I am a creature of habit and tend to stick with getting my information from the same places even when the quality of that information gets worse over time. In this case ESPN is helping me move on. Since they are pretending that the AAF does not exist. There is little to no coverage on their site. Since I am interested in it I am forced to get my information from other sites. I am finding that the stuff I used to get from ESPN I can get from other sites. It also seems that most of the sites I am starting to get my information from are not doing the ESPN+ thing. It is always a huge disappointment when I see a headline that looks interesting and click on it only to find out that I have to have an ESPN+ subscription to read it. I don’t know how many -people pay for it. I am sure it is quite a few. I already give ESPN enough of my money through my cable bill and the ads they already show when I go to their site. So for ESPN it is a huge PASS for me. So thank you ESPN for pretending that the AAF does not exist.
NCAA Playoff Push to the conference tournaments
Teams are making the tournament already. With many of the smaller conferences having their conference tournaments this week. It seems like almost every day there is another team making the tournament. It is smart of them to do their tournaments the week before the bigger conferences. At least this way they can get some attention.
Some people think that the teams from the smaller conferences should not be able to get into the tournament. From my point of view that is part of what makes it such an interesting tournament. Also by winning their conference they earned their way in. So it is all good for me. After last year where a 16 seed beat a 1 seed for the first time. It is difficult to tell if the tournament will be as interesting as last year. Who am I kidding. Of course it will.
MLB Spring Training is NUTS
I only say this because I am getting notifications on spring training games as if they were a regular season game. This is fine and I am just complaining for the sake of complaining. But it does drive me nuts when I get split squad scores for spring training. That is just an odd thing to me but I get why they do it. We are only half way or maybe a little over half way through spring training and most teams have played 15 – 17 games. That is a whole season for football. How many games can you play. LOL It is jus too long for me. I am sure that in the cities that teams have their spring training in. There is a huge amount of money spent there so it really helps the local economy. So in that case I would say it is a good thing. But wow. It is just way too long for me.
Now that all the major free agents have signed and are ready to get to work. The rest of them can stop complaining about how unfair it is that those players are only going to make $300 million or more. If you make it to the Major league just like in any other sport you make it to the top level you are going to make a decent living. The Minimum wage this year for a full time player in the MLB is going to be $555,000. I don’t know how much of that they will actually get but you have to believe that it is at least $250,000 after taxes and maybe even expenses. As long as you don’t go out and buy a million dollar home you will live alright and be able to save some of it for later. Guess I got a bit off the track here. Maybe time for another post about how much pro players get paid. The point is that the MLB season is way too long. LOL
In the world of Other Entertainment
Captain Marvel came out this past weekend and blew the box office away. I don’t get a chance to go to many movies in the theater anymore and not sure I wil be able to get to this one. There are some out there that were complaining that there was too much of a feminist theme in it. To those people get over it. If you have not noticed Captain Marvel is a woman. We need more great women roll models in all sectors of society. The real question here is was it a good movie? It seems that the answer to that is yes it is. So if you are threatened by that. Get over it.
On the small screen. Even though I am a fan of the Walking Dead. Yes we have stuck with it through the crappy stories of the last few years. It is getting much better this year so that is nice. The thing that is starting to annoy me the most about the success of shows like The Walking Dead is the short seasons. There is the 8 episode first half of the season and then the 8 episode second half of the season. By the old standard that would be close to the total of the first half of the season. What is happening it that other shows that I like are moving to the 16 – 20 episode seasons. So I have a lot of shows that are ending already. This may just be an annoyance of mine. Not sure if other people feel the same way. I did like the other format better. But as long as they have good shows to pick up when those end it will be alright. I guess.
We are huge American Idol fans. Have been since the beginning. Glad that it is back on. It is good entertainment with a lot of different talent levels. For some reason we have not watched the other singing competitions. Just not the same I guess. The only thing that is getting to me a bit is how they have a touching story in every show this year. I guess they have done that every year and it usually is pretty interesting. It is amazing that there are that many talented singers that have such a touching story.
I am trying to figure out if people like the long post like this or if they would rather have each section broken out into individual posts. If you have any ideas on that though let me know in the comments. On that note. When you are posting a comment there are two check boxes under the comment section. One of them is to notify you when a new post is made. If you check that box a notification will be sent to the email address you put in every time a new post is made on biglakesports.
I am also looking for people that are interested in writing posts on biglakesports.net If you are interested you can send me an email at jbigalke at biglakespots.net and we can go over what I am looking for and see if you are a fit. There would be no pay at this time but you would be able to put your writing out there and could post it on other sites if you wanted to.
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