By Roger Wallenstein

I couldn’t care less whether there’s a 2020 baseball season.
There, I’ve said it.
This despite the fact that I love going to a ballgame. I accept the sappy descriptions about the smell of cut grass of the rich verdant greensward, the awakening of my taste buds from a sizzling red hot smothered in mustard and onions, the beauty of a shortstop going into the hole and throwing a perfect strike to nab the runner by a half-step, and the late-inning home run that puts the home team ahead.
However, with all the other truly horrible and unthinkable events that currently grip our existence, the idea that the baseball lords and their employees can’t come together, support one another, and make arrangements to play a simple baseball game if and when it is safe to do so, is beyond my patience.

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Posted on May 30, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Billionaire owners cry poor, as usual. Plus: Our Hearts Ache For Minneapolis; Illinois Provides Week’s Top Sports Story; Last Dance Remnants; The Blackhawks Just Undeservedly Made The Playoffs; Kaner & The Breadman; Reopening Sports; Remembering Biff Pocaroba!; Thibs Lives!; Biggs’s Bag; and Chicago-Based Wilson Gets Back The NBA’s Official Game Ball.

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Posted on May 29, 2020

By TheLines.com

The NHL betting lines changed after NFL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced Tuesday the league’s return plan for the 2019-20 season, but the Boston Bruins and Tampa Bay Lightning remain the betting favorites to win the Stanley Cup. The updated betting lines reflect a modified playoff format, according to TheLines.com, which tracks odds in the U.S. regulated sports betting markets.

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Posted on May 28, 2020

By Jim Coffman

On the day after the generally acknowledged toughest guys in sports, hockey players, announced a plan for ending their season with a tournament (the near-the-bottom Blackhawks somehow qualify to play), I find my thoughts turning to Jerry Sloan one more time. The Southern Illinois native who became the first Bull to have his number retired at the end of his stellar, 10-year playing career that included 10 years on the West Side, died last week at age 78.
Sloan went on to put together a Hall of Fame coaching career mostly at the helm of the Utah Jazz. And in so doing he became the best example in all of sports of how a coach should comport himself – displaying class and dignity every day but also flashing an ultra-deadpan sense of humor.

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Posted on May 27, 2020

By The NBA

The National Basketball Association and Wilson Sporting Goods Co. announced a multiyear global partnership today that will make Wilson the official game ball of the NBA, Women’s National Basketball Association, NBA G League, NBA 2K League and Basketball Africa League.
The partnership will tip off at different times by league. The NBA Wilson game ball will first be used during the league’s 75th anniversary season in 2021-22. The other debuts will be during the 2022 WNBA season, 2021-22 NBA G League season, 2021 NBA 2K League season and the inaugural BAL season.

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Posted on May 26, 2020

By David Rutter

When I wrote this four years ago, Jerry Sloan was celebrating his 74th birthday with a party to announce that he foresaw the end of his life, and wanted to say goodbye before it was too late. His many neurological illnesses took his life Friday.
He seemed a man among children. Quiet, confident, never self-focused. He acted like you always thought men were supposed to act. He was Lou Gehrig and Atticus Finch.
He wore John Deere caps when no one looked. He was shy.
He never sought to seem what he wasn’t.
If you admire grand souls, you would have liked him.

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Posted on May 22, 2020

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Bad pizza, Cheap Trick and Luc Longley. Plus: Remembering Jerry Sloan & Michael McCaskey; Matt Nagy Admits What Media Toadies Won’t; The Bundesliga, NASCAR, Golf And The Pseudo-Triple Crown Are (Sorta) Back; and Steve’s New iPhone And The Saga Surrounding It.

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Posted on May 22, 2020

As a huge Cubs fan, there was always more hope in the offseason than the regular season, site founder (and University of Illinois grad) Tim Dierkes explains, leading to his fascination with the Hot Stove League and transactions.

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Posted on May 21, 2020

By Jim Coffman

You don’t have to go home. But you can’t stay here.
The Last Dance has been danced, and then some. And some prominent backlash began on Tuesday when Horace Grant lashed out at Michael Jordan for misrepresenting Grant’s role in the making of Sam Smith’s The Jordan Rules.
Hell hath no fury like a snitch scorned. And we still haven’t heard from Mr. Scottie Pippen since the The Last Dance began airing last month. That interview should be a doozy.

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Posted on May 20, 2020

By Steve Rhodes

The two Jerrys fucked it up, plain and simple.
Even if some players were on the decline – a questionable argument – they had only declined to the point where they were still the best team in the league.
And it was up to Jerry Krause to start filtering young players – through the draft or other types of acquisition – onto the roster. A teardown of a championship team (of the ages) is unconscionable. (That doesn’t mean Phil Jackson and Scottie Pippen, in particular, were eager to return for another year, though it was the Jerrys who chased them both off. And who really knows what Michael Jordan would have done at that point; the whole thing had become an incredible grind. But in any case, it shouldn’t have gone down the way it did.)
Let’s take a look at how it happened – in two videos.
1. Tim Floyd On The Bulls’ Post-Jordan Strategy, Jerry Krause’s Goals.

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Posted on May 19, 2020