Hot Topic Sports

The State Class B basketball tournament is one of the marque events in the state and congrats to The Forum for recognizing that.

I’ve been very impressed with their coverage of the tournament so far. The Forum had excellent preview stories in Thursday’s paper, good game recaps in today’s paper, a live scoreboard on in-forum.com along with live game blogs. They’ve also put together some very good feature stories capturing the essence of what Class B basketball means to various communities.  I don’t think a fan could ask for much more in terms of coverage.

Some links to pass along:

Interesting article by Helmut Schmidt about how the State Class B can bring a small community like Lamoure to a standstill on game day.

A very entertaining piece by Amy Nelson of espn.com regarding North Dakota native Travis Hafner.  Highlight of the piece comes towards the end regarding Hafner’s likeness to a character from "No Country for Old Men"

For Twins fans like me who find themselves overly optimistic about the new season, here’s an article to dampen our spirits. Patrick Reusee of the Star Tribune predicts the Twins win less than 75 games this season…ouch.

If you’re in the F-M area today head on out to the Fargodome for some exciting Class B basketball.  The winner’s bracket starts at 6:30 p.m. with Lamoure vs. Turtle Lake-Mercer with Grafton vs. Watford City to follow. All four teams were ranked in the top 7 of the final Class B basketball poll.  The games will also be broadcast on KVLY TV.

Oral Roberts took down IUPUI for the Summit League title last night, 71-64. Moses Ehambe made seven 3-pointers for the Golden Eagles. It’s Oral Roberts’ third straight championship and appearance in the NCAA Tournament.

Joe Lunardi over at Espn.com currently projects the Golden Eagles as a #13 seed for the tournament. Let’s hope they make some noise in the tourney and gain respect for the Summit League. A win or two would go a long ways towards the conference champion (maybe NDSU) receiving a higher seed next year.

March Madness is officially here! Championship Week is upon us and Selection Sunday is less than a week away. It doesn’t get any better for basketball fans.

Check out Espn tonight at 6 p.m. for the Summit League title game. NDSU conference foes IUPUI and Oral Roberts will battle for an NCAA Tournament birth. The game promises to be a classic as the two teams split very close regular season games. I’ll pick IUPUI in a close one. Expect George Hill to take over the game and make the difference down the stretch.

The championship game will be a good indication of what’s ahead for the Bison when they become tourney eligible next year. There’s a distinctly different atmosphere between playing a regular season game and playing for a shot at the Big Dance. IUPUI graduates only one key player and will return George Hill, the best player in the Summit League. So NDSU will most likely have to go through Hill and Jaguars if they wish to make the field of 65 next season.

Jordan‘s shot and fist pump. The Cal-Stanford Band Play. Six Grafton Park-River skaters on the ice. All these plays will live on thanks to YouTube. In sports, if it’s legendary or controversial, you can probably find it on YouTube.

YouTube has become a worldwide phenomenon for many reasons. For sports fans it has become a place to relive memories, prove the officials actually were wrong and view sports clips from around the world.

Some of my first sports memories are from the late great Kirby Puckett in the 1991 World Series. I’ve watched this slideshow tribute to him at least 20 times since he died. Without YouTube I wouldn’t have the pleasure of reliving some of my first memories on a daily basis.

Is there a historic play you’ve never seen and always wondered what the fuss was about? That used to be me with the famous "Shot Heard Round the World." Thanks to YouTube, I’ve lived that play. I was there (at least it felt like I was.)

Over on Bisonville.com, and other college sports message boards, highlight packages on YouTube of potential recruits make the rounds. It’s extremely exciting for fans to preview athletes coming to their school. It wets the appetite until they arrive on campus.

Not only is it great for college fans, but it’s also a great marketing tool for the athletes. Under-the-radar athletes can make themselves known to the right people by their YouTube highlights. The grandfather of a nine-year-old soccer player made a highlight package and put it on YouTube. Now the kid has been signed into the Manchester United soccer academy, one of the best soccer programs in the world.

We live today in an Internet world where endless information is at your fingertips. YouTube is just the tip of the iceberg for sports fans. Baseball-reference.com, basketball-reference.com and pro-football-reference.com are sites I use constantly. They’re great tools for settling that sports trivia bet you and your buddies made.

With the convergence of media and some ambitious people, the possibilities are endless. Who knows, maybe down the road there will be a database on the Web with every recap ever written for every professional game ever played. Just imagine, you can already view the video, but now you could also read first-hand accounts of the "Shot Heard Round the World" just by a click of your mouse.

Fantasy football was a little known phenomenon 15 years ago. But thanks to the Internet millions of people now play fantasy football worldwide. Not just football though, fantasy baseball, basketball, golf, hockey and even auto racing are now available to anyone looking to waste a few hours of free time.

There are only two words needed to explain this boom in fantasy sports: the Internet. The Internet coupled with the evolution of 24-hour sports channels created endless space for sports media to fill. Sometime around the year 2000 it became commonplace to fill this space with the slowly growing market of fantasy sports. Once fantasy made mainstream, there was no stopping the growth.

I joined my first fantasy football league about 10 years ago, before the fantasy explosion. My uncle ran the league himself. We would phone in or email lineups to him and he would manually keep track of our rosters and calculate scores when the games were over. I don’t know how he ever put up with it.

Today, I run that same league, but I maybe put in one-quarter of the effort he did. Our league is now run primarily by Yahoo.com. Once we hold our draft and input the lineups into the program, I don’t have to worry about a thing for the rest of the season.  Participants can log in and manage their team over the Internet. No more manually calculating scores either. Once I input our league scoring chart a program automatically calculates the scores. Instead of worrying about running the league I’m free to spend 10 hours a week tweaking my lineup or scanning the waiver-wire for the next hot pickup.

There is endless information out on the Internet for people in fantasy leagues. A basic search for "fantasy football" on google.com turns up an astonishing 24.7 million results. Most sites are free to play and give free advice, but like everything else fantasy football has become a moneymaker for many people.

Most sites with free leagues also have pay leagues. A typical entry is around $40-$50. A payout or prize is awarded to top finishers but mainly you’re paying for extra features. Real-time stats, draft kits and insider information are all perks of a pay league. Some even include Sunday morning video podcasts where they give you the latest information on who you should start and who you should sit.

This boom in fantasy sports and the subsequent money to be made are all possible thanks to the convergence of technology and media on the Internet. Having everything at the tap of your keyboard has made fantasy football an easy obsession. There’s no work involved, just surfing the Internet. Watch all your players with the nfl.com season package. Read updates on how your players are doing from newspapers halfway across the country. Throw questions out in fantasy football message boards and receive hundreds of answers from guys just like you. Email potential trades to other owners. Listen to podcasts for advice from so-called experts. Anything you want or need related to the NFL is now at your fingertips.

The Internet has made fantasy football an "easy" hobby and thus the reason for the recent explosion of fantasy leagues.

No one can really pinpoint when and where it took place, but sometime in the last ten years the world of sports was revolutionized by the Internet.

No longer were fans waiting for the morning paper to check scores. No longer were we grasping for news outside the region. The convergence of media on the Internet has changed it all. For a small fee we can listen or watch any game we please. For no fee we can get live play-by-play and box score updates. Instant analysis and endless information is at our fingertips.

Over the next few months I’ll be analyzing this convergence of sports media on the Internet and how it has revolutionized the life of a sports fan. First up let’s tackle the worldwide leader in sports: ESPN.

I grew up watching ESPN. I’d sit through an hour of Sportscenter hoping to see Minnesota Twins, Timberwolves or Vikings highlights. I would only leave the room during commercial breaks for fear I’d miss my highlights. Of course sometimes I wouldn’t make it back in time, and I’d have to sit through another hour. In today’s world I get my highlights online. At espn.com they have highlights built into almost every game summary. I can watch highlights when I want, where I want. The game recap and highlights complement each other and give fans a sense of being at the game.

Thanks to media convergence ESPN has turned their journalists into more than just a name. With countless video and radio appearances by journalists we now have a face and a personality to go with that name. Ten years ago I had no idea what Peter Gammons looked like. Now, I could probably draw his portrait in my sleep. Some will say they’re overexposed but that fact is ESPN has turned their journalists into household sports names.

Some journalists at ESPN have even started hosting their own podcasts, a radio show uploaded online. Print journalists are becoming radio hosts. It’s becoming almost impossible to know what media these ESPN personalities call their specialty. The lines between print, radio and television have become blurred. Future sports journalists will need to be experienced in all media because of the bar ESPN has set.

ESPN prints a magazine. They have affiliations with multiple radio stations. There are at least five ESPN television stations. Last of all they run a top-notch sports website. The website pulls content from all media outlets and has become a virtual one-stop shop for sports fans. It’s this convergence of media that has made ESPN the worldwide leader in sports and left other sports media following in its wake.

Just wanted to pass along a few articles I read over the weekend. 

For those still interested in the Kevin Garnett Saga, Marc Stein breaks down six possible destinations for the current Wolves superstar.  I’m still undecided on whether the Wolves should continue to shop Garnett or if they should try and make some moves to give him more help.  Two weeks ago I wanted him out the door for draft picks and young guys.  Now with the draft behind us… I’m not sure if the Wolves could even get 50 cents on the dollar for KG.  Anyways, here’s the story.

Interesting article from the Associated Press about the aspirations of North Dakota State’s new conference The Summit League (formerly known as the Mid-Continent Conference).  Among the high points: The Summit League is looking to be in the top half of all conferences in attendance and RPI, and the league also plans to stream coverage of all the conference’s basketball games online this year.  A big thumbs up for online coverage.  Check it out.

Johan Santana, Justin Morneau and Torii Hunter have been named to the AL All-Star team, but that’s not all.  Rubber-armed reliever Pat Neshek is up for the Monster All-Star Final Vote.  He’s up against some stiff competition so click on over and vote for Neshek.  

I absolutely love the choice of Corey Brewer for the Wolves at #7.  He’ll be an upgrade over Trenton Hassell or Ricky Davis depending on where coach Randy Wittman wants to play Brewer.  Brewer brings athleticism and top-notch defense to the team immediately and down the road he should become an offensive threat as well.  The choice of Brewer will allow the Wolves to trade guys like Davis and Hassell en route to freeing up salary cap space for the future.  Within a few years we could be talking of Brewer and Randy Foye as the top guard combo in the league.  (Note: It’s the NBA Draft, hope springs eternal, so I’m allowed to be optimistic and make potentially outrageous statements.)

I’m a little disappointed Minnesota was unable to move Kevin Garnett before the draft and acquire some high picks but life goes on.  Let’s just pray McHale doesn’t panic and make the worst move of his career: Lamar Odom, Andrew Bynum and the No. 19 for Garnett.  No way he’d accept that deal.  Not a chance.  Never.  Not gonna happen.  Then again… I can just see the wheels turning in McHale’s head.  "Bynum could be the next Gheorghe Muresan, I gotta grab him, and at number nineteen we could select Ndudi Ebi, a sure-fire hall-of-fame legend.  All that for only Garnett…sweet!"

Realistically, it’s going to be tough for the Wolves to get fair value for Garnett and they might just be better off playing the first half of the year with him.  If Foye, McCants and Brewer can make large strides, Garnett may want to come back for his last year.  If not, then the Wolves can move him at the trade deadline for probably the same value as today.       

The Twins took two blows to the gut last night, one literal and one figurative.  Justin Morneau spent the night in the hospital after colliding with Marlins catcher Miguel Olivo on a crucial play late in the game.  Morneau scored, but was diagnosed with a bruised lung.  Now I don’t know anything about a bruised lung, but it sounds about as painful as being one of Mike Vick’s dogs.  Luckily, Morneau is expected to only miss a few games.   

The figurative blow to the gut?  That came in the bottom of the eighth inning off the bat of Hanley Ramirez.  He launched a deep gopher ball off Juan Rincon to take the lead and seal the deal, 5-4 Marlins.  While Morneau’s injury was a freak accident, Ramirez’s game-winner was preventable.  This loss goes squarely on the shoulders of manager Ron Gardenhire.  Why is Juan Rincon pitching in the eighth inning of a tie game?

You are Ron Gardenhire.  Your team has just rallied to tie the game in the top of the inning and you decide to throw a struggling Juan Rincon out there for the eighth inning.  The same Juan Rincon who was knocked around like a little leaguer in his past two outings.  His psyche has to be fragile.  Then he throws a perfect 1-2-3 seventh inning.  Get him out!  He pitched great, he did what he was supposed to.  He restored some of his confidence.  Take him out before he eventually regresses.  The game is tied in the eighth inning.  Your team has the momentum.  It’s time to hand the game over to the core guys and give your offense a chance to win it.  Hand the ball to Pat Neshek for the eighth,  Joe Nathan for the ninth, and if extra innings are needed turn to Matt Guerrier.  Fair or not, this loss is on Gardenhire.

After publicly saying he had no plans to trade Kevin Garnett, it now seems Kevin McHale may be listening to offers. This according to Chad Ford at espn.com. The "hot rumor", as Ford calls it, has Garnett heading to Boston for a package of Al Jefferson, Gerald Green, Sebastian Telfair, Theo Ratliff, the #5 draft pick and possibly one other player.

Also, Ford says in his blog that the buzz around the league has the Wolves selecting Spencer Hawes with the 7th pick in the draft. Now it’s very unlikely that both these scenarios will happen, if even one, but let’s have a little fun and take a peak at the Wolves future.

With Jefferson filling the power forward position and Hawes playing center the Wolves could then spend the #5 pick on small forward Corey Brewer. This leaves the Wolves with a rotation of Jefferson, Hawes, Mark Blount, Craig Smith and Juwan Howard in the posts. At small forward they can run Brewer, Davis and Jaric. Randy Foye, Rashad McCants, Sebastian Telfair, Trenton Hassell, Gerald Green and Troy Hudson would be candidates for the guard positions.

Now obviously the 6-for-1 deal with Boston will make the roster a little crowded so the Wolves could look to move Hassell, Davis, Hudson or Jaric to make room for the young guys. When it’s all said and done the Wolves will be left with a young nucleus of Hawes, Jefferson, Smith, Brewer, Green, McCants, and Foye. The Wolves would have a fairly decent rotation to begin the rebuilding process and the additions of Jefferson, Green and Brewer would inject some much needed excitement into the future of this team.