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Well, here we are. The dead zone. All the football is done, save for the NFL draft, but that particular circus doesn't pull into town for a while yet. Winter meetings are over, and spring training hasn't started yet, so the only real baseball-based entertainment is pointing and laughing at Alex Rodriguez when he says his 40-year-old ass can still play third base, then laughing at the Yankees because they're still saddled with A-Rod's terrible, terrible contract. Basketball is stuck in the regular season, where you have a choice between the NBA's Western Conference meat grinder/Eastern Conference meat dynamic, or else you have college basketball, but since there's no brackets involved yet, odds are you probably aren't doing that. We have hockey, but I know very little about hockey and therefore cannot make jokes about it. My apologies to those hockey fans that read my column. Although I expect it's odd for Canadians when someone apologizes to them.
Gregg Popovich Wins 1,000th Game
Popovich's San Antonio Spurs beat the Indiana Pacers 95-93 on Tuesday, making Popovich only the ninth head coach to reach the milestone. He is also one of the two coaches to win 1,000 with one team (the other being Jerry Sloan with the Utah Jazz). Popovich celebrated the occasion by nodding slightly more deeply than usual on the sideline and nut-shotting five journalists when they asked him "how the win really felt."
George Karl To Coach Sacramento Kings
Karl, another one of the 1,000-win coaches, will begin his coaching duties in Sacramento after the All-Star break. His last stint as a head man was in Denver, where he took the Nuggets to the Western Conference finals with Carmelo Anthony, and then overachieved in the playoffs without a true superstar. Karl is by all measures an excellent coach, and he should help Sacramento pull itself out of the rut they've been in ever since the Lakers beat them that one year in Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals in what was a completely legitimate victory.
Karl inherits a team with a legitimate superstar candidate in All-Star DeMarcus Cousins, henceforth known as "Boogie," because that is his nickname and it's way more fun to say. The Kings have been floundering, however, since Mike Malone's December firing. The team is 7-21 under interim coach Tyrone Corbin, after a promising start to the season was derailed by Boogie's case of viral meningitis. Karl's experience working with both Carmelo- and post-Carmelo-Nuggets teams would suggest that he can be successful in Sacramento, and the big-name coaching candidate certainly fits new owner Vivek Ranadivé's desire to "make a splash" with his new team. Karl's Kings teams will be worth keeping an eye on in the near future.
Carmelo Anthony "Very Likely" To Stop Playing This Season After All-Star Game
As opposed to the rest of the Knicks, who appeared to shut it down around Thanksgiving.
Anthony, in the first year of his shiny new megadeal, has been dealing with knee issues all season, and with the Knicks at a woeful 10-43 this season, shutting down is probably preferable to exposing the star to more serious injury in what is a wasted season in the Big Apple.
Just in case you were wondering, the 10-43 mark is the worst in the league. Yes, that is worse than the Philadelphia Sixers, and if you've been paying attention to the sport over the last couple of years, you know that the Sixers aren't actually interested in playing NBA basketball with their current roster and have adopted a "Screw it, let's play the lottery" approach, similar to what the Thunder did when they landed Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. The Knicks are worse than a team that is actively trying to lose games, which is sad on a monumental level. Like, on a one-to-ten scale, that win-loss record is "four-hour loop of those five-minute long ASPCA commercials" sad. Or "one Nationwide Super Bowl ad spot" sad.
Until next time!
