Watchdog

Mazel tov to the NBA for today passing the 1,000,000 mark in Twitter followers, which it said is a first for a sports league. (The total was 1,000,912 as of the origin of this post.)

Nice. But not as nice as Shaquille O'Neal's 1,684,861 alone.

Me? I'm closing in on 1,000, even though I rarely get around to posting stuff. I'll try to do better in the coming weeks. Glauber passed me a couple of weeks back. Sigh.

Finally got around to watching "The First Basket," released on DVD earlier this month (suggested retail, $24.99), whose subtitle pretty much sums it up:

"The Greatest Jewish Basketball Documentary Ever."

Writer/producer/director David Vyorst and narrator Peter Riegert cover the influence Jews had on the early decades of basketball - including their domination of the first Knicks lineup in 1946-47 and the fact one of them, Ossie Schectman, scored the first basket in the history of what is now known as the NBA.

The subject of Jews in sports often requires a tricky balance of self-deprecating humor and justifiable pride, and this documentary strikes it well.

Bottom line: For the first half of the 20th century, hoops at its highest levels - especially in New York - was the Jewish-American national pastime.

In today's Newsday Sports Blog Post of the Day, Jim Baumbach of The Final Score links to a classic 1992 video featuring Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan at the peak of their powers, in which MJ teaches MJ how to moonwalk.

Should be fun today following Shaq on Twitter as he deals with reports he is headed to Cleveland. This is the first time ever that a future Hall of Famer has had this particular forum for dealing with this kind of story. Weird.

Thank you, Los Angeles for the timely reminder - 15 years to the day since the Rangers won the Stanley Cup - that New York consistently is better behaved in celebrating sports championships than are other, less civilized burgs.

Mark Jackson wondered in the waning moments of the NBA Finals what Shaquille O'Neal must be thinking as he watched. Nice old-school sentiment, Jax.

Heard of a little thing called Twitter that Shaq himself helped make what it is?

The world never again need wonder what he is thinking about anything, including the Lakers winning it all.

Take it away, sir. (Parental discretion advised.)

The results are in for our Super Tuesday ratings challenge, and the winner is . . . no one.

All 14 contestants had Yankees-Red Sox finishing first (as did I), but in fact Game 3 of the NBA Finals won rather handily:

NBA (9.1 of area households), Yankees-Red Sox (6.1), Mets-Phillies (4.5), NHL (2.8).

The Mets and NBA ratings grew toward the end because of the closeness of those games, a bonus the Yankees game obviously lacked.

(On the other hand, the Mets game no doubt suffered from being the only one of the four not on a broadcast station.)

The NBA also benefited from the fact most of its game was played after the baseball games were over, but regardless, it was a resounding victory.

I decided to name a winner anyway by taking the three entries that had the NBA second - the other 11 had the Mets second - and awarding the respect and admiration of WatchDog Nation to the person who came closest on the Yankees rating tiebreaker.

That was Edmund O'Brien, who guessed the Yanks would score a 5.6.

Congratulations, sir, and thanks to all for playing our game.

Only one game into Finals and Shaq has tweetingly ripped Jeff Van Gundy for talking about his brother too much and posted a picture of what a spawn of Dwight Howard and Van Gundy (he didn't specify Jeff or Stan) would look like.

Wow. It evidently has taken his seething dislike of the Van Gundy brothers to push Shaq squarely into the rooting-for-Kobe camp.

Another update on the sports media world: Stranger. By. The. Day.

I spoke to Jeff Van Gundy Sunday here about the awkwardness of analyzing games on TV that his brother, Stan, is coaching on the sideline.

Today, JVG spoke about that on a media conference call and recalled the strains the Heat-Knicks battles of the 1990s put on their relationship.

Jeff called that rivalry "Armageddon" and said after the 1997 fight between P.J. Brown and Charlie Ward the brothers did not speak for two months.

(Jeff still can't bring himself to talk to Brown, even though he thinks highly of him as a person. "I just can’t muster up a hello,'' he said. "I just can’t let that go. I think I should. It's been 10 years.")

Jeff jokingly (I think) said he'd have a little bottle of champagne to dump on Mike Breen and Mark Jackson if the Magic wins it all.

Stan's and Jeff's parents might have to scramble to catch the final few games of the Finals.

The family arranged a 50th wedding anniversary trip to Alaska for them, figuring the Finals were "a safe time," Jeff said.

"Thankfully, it's not safe," he added. "They'll be watching the last three or four games in Alaska on a satellite dish, or wherever the cruise takes them."

Photo: Getty

Newsday's Kimberley Martin reports here the Liberty is considering joining the Mercury on the list of WNBA franchises to swap their team name for a sponsor's on its jerseys.

Interesting.

LeBron James, whose off-court behavior mostly has been a model for other young superstars to follow since he joined the NBA, pulled a huge, unacceptable no-no Saturday night when he blew off the news media after the Cavaliers lost the Eastern Conference finals to Orlando.

(He also apparently did not stick around to shake the winners' hands, but that's not my department.)

On SportsCenter, host John Buccigross suggested James be given a break, what with the many interviews he did all season.

Jalen Rose, a former player, offered the opposite - and correct - opinion: disappointing.

All I can say is this: Yo, LeBron, don't be pulling that stuff around here whenever you lose a big game for the 2010-11 Knicks.

Photo: AP

Oh, lighten up journalism purists. Cleveland hasn't won a major title since 1964. Let's give these nice people a pass this spring.

(On the other hand, anyone actually watching this newscast in the final second of the Cavs game presumably doesn't know a LeBron from an Ehlo, right?)

What was American's professional jockocracy buzzing about Friday night?

Same thing you were.

Check out the paeans to Mr. James on AthleteTweets.com, including three separate ones from Hofstra's own Speedy Claxton:

"woooooow"

"r u serious:

"thats crazy"

Shaquille O'Neal spent the past few days at Syracuse University studying for a future career in sportscasting, as chronicled here and here.

(Syracuse is known for producing sports broadcasters at a rate almost as impressive as that of Fordham.)

Shaq could be good at it because he is smart and funny - and an excellent Twitterer! - but first he has to learn to speak in something other than a barely intelligible monotone.

In 1989 I had to watch the McDonald's All-America Game because I was on the Kenny Anderson beat at the time. But another kid from the Class of '89 stole the show. Yikes!

Shaq has passed the 1,000,000 mark in Twitter followers.

Bob Knight talks to the Las Vegas Sun about the excitement of watching the NCAA Tournament will all of those wholesome "basketball fans" enjoying the action in Vegas, where he has been appearing on Billy Packer's "Survive and Advance" series.

Take a look at the picture that accompanies the article in the above link. Knight, 68, is the youngest of the four college hoops luminaries pictured on the show's set.

Funny Cide is trailing the field in our Off the Glass blog's inaugural bracket challenge for local sports personalities.

I was rooting for the big guy, what with him going with Cornell over Missouri in the first round.

Not that I'm doing much better than him, even with a brain that unlike Funny Cide's is larger than a walnut. (I think.)

I'm in the 28th percentile in Newsday's March Melee, the 31st in Yahoo's men's contest and the 13th in ESPN's women's contest.

Not that all is lost at WatchDog headquarters. One of the pups was among the 9,423 (4.7 percent) of entrants in ESPN's contest to pick Ball State over Tennessee.

She's one of 49 (0.02 percent) to pick Ball State to win it all.

Only five victories to go!

Photo: Getty

The Cartoon Network and the NBA have established a programming partnership.

If you click below, you can read the news release about this. "Space Jam" was a cute movie, so there is some precedence for hoops/cartoon marriages.

I signed up for Twitter, by the way.

If I play my Facebooking, Twittering, blogging, emailing, texting, cell phoning, commenting, radio listening and TV watching cards correctly, I should be able to get my time available for newspaper columnizing down to five or 10 minutes a couple of times a week.

Maybe my columns should just be a string of random tweets.

This is the end of the world as I knew it, and I'm not sure I feel fine.

Continue reading "NBA, Cartoon Network form programmning alliance" »

Barack Obama took a small shot at Duke on ESPN.

Then Mike Krzyzewski took a small shot at Obama in a news conference.

Then Obama answered back on a radio show I've never heard of hosted by a guy I've never heard of named Ed Schultz.

I'm officially over the novelty of the president filling out a bracket.

Get back to work, sir.

Me? It's time to paint my face red and white for the big game this afternoon.

This was the first NCAA championship game I watched.

What was yours? Discuss among yourselves.

Time to make some new college hoops memories. Enjoy the Binghamton-Duke game.

The highest-rated basketball game ever - college or pro - was played 30 years ago next Thursday. The Michigan State-Indiana State NCAA final on NBC attracted 24.1 percent of U.S. households, almost double what last year's Kansas-Memphis game averaged. (The classic trio of Dick Enberg, Billy Packer and Al McGuire on the call!)

I watched in a bar at JFK after returning from a trip to Las Vegas. The drinking age was 18 then, which was convenient, because that's how old I was.

Second-highest rated game: Villanova-Georgetown, April 1, 1985, at 23.3 percent of homes. With all due respect to Duke-Kentucky and others . . . that '85 game was the best ever in the NCAAs, especially impressive since it lacked final-play dramatics.

An interesting story about the first NCAA Tournament games, in Philly, 70 years ago Tuesday.

My grandfather would have had Villanova in his bracket, if he were still not brushing up on his English and thus not well versed in bracketology.

How did the mighty Orangemen survive Thursday night's classic?

Behind-the-scenes insights from our friends at ReelSportsFan.com.

Nothing particularly juicy here. Just a gift to sleep-deprived SU diehards from your trusty WatchDog.

Here are parts one and two of the Sports Media Journal's recent survey of sports bloggers. It would appear I have relatively little in common with my blogging brothers and sisters, as I am the minority on all of these questions:

QUESTION: How old are you?

26-35 49%
18-25 31%
36-45 15%
46-55 5%
Over 55 0%

QUESTION: Marital Status

Single 77%
Married 23%

QUESTION: Do you consider yourself a journalist?

No 65%
Yes 35%

QUESTION: Should blog writers always identify themselves?

No 70%
Yes 30%

This is extremely weird for a conference built on TV as much as any in college sports history, but . . . Tuesday's first round of the Big East men's basketball tournament at the Garden will not be televised.

ESPN's contract did not obligate the Worldwide Leader to televise the extra games when the conference voted to expand its tournament from 12 teams to 16, so ESPN understandably passed.

You can watch on www.bigeast.org, though.

(The Garden and Newsday both are owned by Cablevision, which has no conceivably relevance to this post.)

Has the luck of the people who made what is widely regarded as the best deal in the history of sports finally run out?

Great find here by Rovell from the list of Bernie Madoff victims.

Also, a take on the Citi Field thing in which Rovell differs somewhat from the Matthews / Rieber view.

MSG, MSG Plus, SNY, YES, ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, CBS, CBS College Sports and Versus will combine to show 29 men's and women's college basketball games Saturday.

I guess I have a lot of work to do.

See ya Sunday.

Unless New York City approves more bonds for the Yankees and Mets between now and then.

Here is Mark Cuban's thought-provoking essay on the idea of newspapers and pro teams partnering to bolster coverage of local sports.

It is a notion that will make journalism purists blanch, but as he indicates, at worst it's a starting point for an interesting discussion.

The best part is his passionate defense of the continuing importance of newspapers to the business of local sports teams as well as the fan experience.

Thank you, Mr. Cuban.

Usually I wait until after the first day of spring to watch my first non-Knicks NBA action, but Thursday I did catch the ends of both the Spurs-Suns and Celtics-Lakers tilts.

Good stuff.

The Finals rematch was the highest-rated NBA regular-season game in four years, averaging 5.3 percent of homes. That's 51 percent higher than last year's equivalent Christmas game on ABC between the Suns and Lakers (3.5).

The game attracted 9.96 million viewers, way better than last year (5.98 million).

I briefly referenced the NBA's unprecedented, Christmas quintupleheader in my newspaper column, but here's the full schedule:

Orlando vs. New Orleans, ESPN, 12 p.m.
Phoenix vs. San Antonio, ABC, 2:30 p.m.
Los Angeles Lakers vs. Boston, ABC, 5 p.m.
Cleveland vs. Washington, TNT, 8 p.m.
Portland vs. Dallas, TNT, 10:30 p.m.

I'm no expert on Christmas, but this seems to be a bit much, no? I mean, aren't people supposed to be eating goose or drinking mulled wine or something?

Magic Johnson said last week that he didn't mind Christmas games: “I loved it, and it didn’t matter if we were on the road or not. Just give me the basketball in my hand, and everybody watching me? Oh, man. We were the featured game. I loved it. It’s the best time because there’s only a couple of teams playing. It’s fantastic.”

(Of course, now there are more than "a couple of teams playing." There are 10, to be exact.)

Lakers coach Phil Jackson, meanwhile, complained about the schedule leading up to the big Christmas showdown, calling it a "gimmick game."

Click below for a compilation from the NBA comparing 2008 to the last time the Celts and Lakers met on Dec. 25, which was in 1970.

Continue reading "Five NBA games to be played on Christmas Day/Night" »

Hey, Berger's first column for CBSSports.com is up!

I miss him already.

But not enough to take up CBSSports.com's p.r. people on their offer to have me interview Mr. Berger: "Please feel free to reach out with interview requests for Ken."

Yuck. That would be almost as weird as interviewing Glauber.

Greg Oden finally has broken out of his tie with me on the NBA career points list.

Good luck from here on out, sir. Sharing a place in history with you was fun while it lasted.

My last year on the St. John's basketball beat was Felipe Lopez' freshman season.

I don't even want to think about how hold Felipe is now, because he's roughly the age I was then.

Jim Baumbach caught up with him.

Seems as if he is OK with how life has turned out.

Bob Cousy - a nice little point guard out of Andrew Jackson High in Queens - is out as a Celtics broadcaster, and he isn't happy about it.

Here's the story.

This just ain't right.

Yo, MSG, stick it to Comcast and the Celtics by bringing Bob home as a guest analyst!

Media Matters, the folks who brought down Don Imus last year, this week uncovered some disturbing radio banter in Minnesota, of all places.

Turns out a couple of clowns (jokingly?) wondered whether Earvin Johnson had faked getting the virus that causes AIDS, prompting Magic to respond angrily. Click below for all that.

One of the strangest assignments of my career was writing the news story about Johnson's announcement in 1991. Of course no one would have believed you at the time if you had said Johnson would be alive and relatively well in 2008.

The next morning I read The New York Times' account and its lead paragraph and mine differed by a single word, as I recall. That was weird. You could look it up, if you had no life and nothing better to do.

Continue reading "Minneapolis yakkers claim Magic faked HIV/AIDS" »

If Kenny Anderson is in the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame, and if I covered him when he was a high school freshman, that makes me . . . old.

Anyway, congrats, Kenny.

The Chinese apparently got caught up in the Celtics' championship run last season, lifting two members of the Boston Three Party into the top 10 in jersey sales.

Here are the top selling NBA jerseys in China last season compared to the year before. (I do not have a list of the top selling Chinese players' jerseys in the U.S.)

2007-08
1. Kobe Bryant (Lakers)
2. Kevin Garnett (Celtics)
3. Tracy McGrady (Rockets)
4. Paul Pierce (Celtics)
5. Allen Iverson (Nuggets)
6. Gilbert Arenas (Wizards)
7. LeBron James (Cavaliers)
8. Dwyane Wade (Heat)
9. Dwight Howard (Magic)
10. Yao Ming (Rockets)

2006-07
1. Kobe Bryant (Lakers)
2. Allen Iverson (Nuggets)
3. Tracy McGrady (Rockets)
4. Dwyane Wade (Heat)
5. LeBron James (Cavaliers)
6. Yao Ming (Rockets)
7. Kevin Garnett (Timberwolves)
8. Tim Duncan (Spurs)
9. Carmelo Anthony (Nuggets)
10. Gilbert Arenas (Wizards)

I'm pretty sure there is a clause in the contract of every Newsday sportswriter requiring us to refer to anything local-girl-made-good Sue Bird does.

Hence, you should know that our Ms. Bird will be appearing on "NBA Access with Ahmad Rashad" at 1 p.m. Saturday on Ch. 7 as part of an all-access look at the Seattle Storm of the WNBA.

I once covered a UConn game during Ms. Bird's era in which it beat LIU, 101-29, in a first-round NCAA Tournament game.

Oh, heck, I might as well be the last blog in North America to post Shaq's rap from Sunday night.

The naughty words are beeped out, but parental guidance suggested anyway.

Look, Kevin Garnett from all accounts is a good guy, a great player and an emotional fellow. Mazel tov and props to him for his big victory Tuesday.

But as I watched Michele Tafoya's scary/fascinating post-game interview with Garnett, during which he seemed to be speaking in tongues, I was thinking this:

It is impossible to imagine Bob Cousy or Bill Russell or Larry Bird or Dennis Johnson acting this way on national TV after winning a title. And why is that?

Because the cultural expectations for publicly displayed emotion and celebration have changed, whether it's because of SportsCenter or reality TV or . . . oh, never mind.

I'm just old. Whatever.

Congrats, KG.

I went to a screening of "Love Guru" Thursday. I'm not clear how much I'm supposed to say about it a week before its release.

It was silly, coarse and at times quite amusing. Is that OK?

I can say that if Jessica Alba was pregnant during shooting, it did not show. Her character owns the Toronto Maple Leafs, looks like Jessica Alba and has trouble meeting men.

Did I mention this is a fictional story?

I "watched" the third quarter of Celts-Lakers on a train via auto-refresh on my Blackberry and thought perhaps there was a glitch that only allowed the Celtics' score to change.

The strangest part of my journey to the big city was that Penn Station appeared to be under invasion by middle-aged men wearing Hawaiian shirts. It was scary, and confusing.

Turned out, yup, it was a Jimmy Buffett concert.

I was home in time for the fourth quarter. The referees apparently didn't get the memo about how helpful a 2-2 series would be to the league and failed to foul out Garnett, Pierce and Allen.

Today's lesson in 21st century media:

I did not watch the NBA Finals Tuesday, causing me to miss Jeff Van Gundy discussing his like of Alyssa Milano.

Wednesday, I read Awful Announcing, which discussed this matter.

Then I read The Big Lead, which noted that Van Gundy mentioned the wrong attractive actress who has dated athletes and whose last name starts with M and ends with O.

Then I wrote a post on this subject, as a cheap excuse to post a picture of Derek Jeter and Vanessa Minnillo.

Then Hot Clicks actually CALLED Van Gundy to resolve the confusion, which he did here.

And now I'm doing a post wrapping up the entire saga, and taking advantage of the excuse to post a picture of Kaz Matsui.

It's a good thing I didn't go to journalism school, because if I had, I'd be wondering why.

In honor of a certain weaselly former referee who is in the news this week, we present a clip from when NBA refs were men's men, including fighting fans during the Finals!

Here is Richie Powers in action in Game 5 in 1976, still the wildest game ever played in the NBA Finals.

Bill Plaschke, my Tribune teammate (for now), did something dangerous when he questioned the severity of Paul Pierce's Game 1 injury.

Then he did something more dangerous when he responded to the Celtics fans who ripped him for it.

Thank goodness such melodrama is not encroaching on our quiet, New York-area lives this spring.

We are too busy robotically, numbingly alternating between worrying about what is wrong with Our Mets and Our Yankees, who might just be what they appear to be: a pair of .500 teams!

Whatever. Like Big Brown Saturday, I'm not in the mood today. So I will stop blogging and write a column for the Tuesday newspaper in which I make no observations about the NBA Finals, seeing as how I missed most of Game 2 because I was watching the 1972 and '74 Rangers on "MSG Vault."

No need to bother staying up late watching the NBA Finals.

A computer with time to kill played the series 10,000 times and has decided the most likely result is that the Celtics will win in six games, specifically by a 107-103 score in Game 6.

You're welcome. Sleep tight.

Regardless of its reputation, the New York media always has been a bastion of reserve and sanity compared to our bratty cousins to the northeast.

Today's development: a venerable Boston newspaper columnist who moonlights on TV took on a famous Boston fan/Internet columnist who moonlights in a magazine on the subject of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry.

Here is the column by Bill Simmons that inspired this by Bob Ryan . . . apparently in his blog.

I officially have lost control of the sports media world.

Next thing you know the Globe will be writing an entire story on the departure of Hazel Mae from NESN. Oh, wait . . . here it is.

Uh, oh. It requires registration. Here's a more detailed story from the Herald on Ms. Mae.