The Dope. Game t-shirts have found themselves on a few cool backs lately, but Austin Trout is “No Doubt” one of the dopest. As the defending WBA World Super Welterweight Champion with an undefeated record (25-0 & 14 KOs), Austin ranks #5 in the World and #3 in USA in his division.
Watch Austin “No Doubt” Trout take on contendor Miguel Cotto live on Showtime (ShoSports), Saturday Dec. 1 at 9pm EST.
After two weeks of fantastic playoffs, we have the final 4 of the NFL tournament. The Ravens, 49ers, Patriots, and Giants have all survived and advanced the war of attrition that composes the single elimination rise to the Super Bowl. Before looking to the savory week 19 matchups, let’s glance at how each of these deserving teams ascended to their respective Conference championships.
After a few weeks of this season, I got into another discussion with a friend about the best player in
the NBA. ESPN did their take on it over the summer (http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/7116977/nba-
player-rankings-1). I perused all of their entries, and decided that a review of their top 25 would be in
order. Given the quick way the season came about after months of talk of a complete lockout, the rust
is just now beginning to fall off some teams and players. So most of the analysis will be based on the
work done by the players prior to the season. Certainly it should be re-visited at the end of the regular
season, but to look at the small sample size that is the 2011-2012 NBA season seems like a knee-jerk
reaction.
I hate to use a Wild Wild West cliché, but it’s true. There are no clear favorites. No West coast version of the Heat. Talk to 3 different people, and you’ll get 5 different winners of the conference. The Lakers got older and took away their margin for error in Lamar Odom. The Mavs lost their defensive core with the departures of Tyson Chandler and their best perimeter defender DeShawn Stevenson, in addition to their spark off the bench (J. J. Barea). Oklahoma City has the same core, but the questions at point guard are becoming louder and louder. Indeed, this might be the best opportunity for a team that usually falls in the “also ran” category to sneak in and steal the Western Conference’s bid to the Championship game.
Patience; that is what my new year’s resolution was. Begin to display more patience. The ideal has been lauded as being a virtue by society at large, and my own family. So when the NBA season started, I gorged myself on every game that I could rest my eyes upon. And, as my father, brother, and I recovered from the visual feast, we sat back and picked our teeth with the requisite impending analysis. I even raced to my computer to immediately begin writing on what I had seen; the shots hurried, the defensive assignments missed, the lack of chemistry, etc. But as I looked at what I was seeing, I realized that I was looking at a product of new teams with no training camps, and (some) players that weren’t physically ready to participate in an NBA game due to the lockout and its sudden end (see the play of Dirk Nowitzki). Combine that with my newfound emphasis on patience, and you get this post.
Almost a tenth of a way through the new season (that looks weird to type after about a week) I feel like I’ve waited long enough to see past what I will simply title “lockout rust” and into what I think will be possible trends and who will be contenders come June.
