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My college days involved Champions League on those ESPN afternoons. Halcyon days. (Of course then I had to fire up a bizarre P2P app to watch more than one Premier League game come Saturday morning.)

Anyone here subscribing to the Athletic? Is it worth it? Seems like some of their national coverage of soccer might be good but I'm not finding any other compelling reasons to subscribe to it. I guess I am lucky to live in the reach of Boston sports media (...) which is saturated enough that the Athletic doesn't really offer a compelling local-level competitor. That and my Boston Globe subscription is unbelievably expensive so, much as I love to support the local media at this point in time, that's also taking up my media-support budget.

Genuinely curious how much the hardware ecosystem has fractured in the OTT streaming era. I confess I never would've thought having to support X number of gaming systems would be a big deal until this thread! I'm also old-fashioned and stream all my supports on a desktop or laptop computer.

On 8/15/2018 at 10:14 AM, Hat Boy said:

I thought part of the issue is that NBC doesn't get "credit" for the ratings in Canadian TV markets when they sell to advertisers.  Even if 100% of Toronto televisions are tuned into Wings/Leafs, NBC can only charge advertisers based on the stateside audience.

Right, I think this is an issue in all the non-NFL sports, but it's more obvious in the NHL given more Canadian teams. The Blue Jays weren't on Sunday Night Baseball for what, 14 years or whatever it was, and the Raptors have been nonexistent in the States during their good era, except in the playoffs when their good era has evaporated.

I just did the same only to discover that he was just a couple of rows in front of me at a Breeders show in Prospect Park last week. I guess that was my brush with greatness. Or at least my brush with something.

No idea where to put this, but I have to get this out of my system. Today in "You hate to see that": Paul Lukas has to get a new landline number and he may never recover. He's having a terrible time with Verizon customer service but having an absolute meltdown about it on social media. I guess when you get to blog about sports uniforms for a living you might lose perspective on what real problems are. Get a grip buddy.

7 hours ago, RichardWitham said:

ah WEEI home of dennis & callahan, of METCO  gorilla fame.... 

 

 Correct! 

I naively thought that that was vintage Boston, but Minihane has carried the miserable racist torch for a new generation ever since John Dennis got demoted for being an alcoholic.

WEEI really is amazing. So on brand for Kirk Minihane to blame his depression on being called out for mocking a 4-year-old and, apparently, learning nothing.

I had no idea of this Olbermann news if I hadn't checked this thread. My reading list must be drifting away from the media blogs! Or maybe that even sympathetic folks are tired of the zero-value-added chattering pundit class. Then again now that I HAVE seen this thread, I'm immediately seeing Clay Travis having a full-scale meltdown. Anyway, big news for the few dozen people who legitimately believe ESPN is sinking under its liberalism.

Oh you're totally right. Can't believe I forgot about FreeDarko. The leap from "I watch basketball but also watch movies" to "I watch basketball but also got really into Kierkegaard in undergrad".

57 minutes ago, DG_Now said:

I think the reasons NBA gets so much coverage include:

- The NCAA is awful to its players

- The NFL is awful to its players and the world

- The NHL is the NHL

- I don't think people like baseball anymore?

- What else is left?

 

I'm being flippant, but each year it takes a bit more from our souls to follow college sports and professional football. The NBA has filled a lot of that space for people, given that it's become a 12-month league, its players are more visible than other sports, and it's more accessible than alternative sports.

 

I'm not saying it needs to be discussed as a higher moral plane -- and I do get that description and why its annoying -- but I also see why it's become the en vogue league.

I see no fault here! I would also say there are a couple other factors working for the NBA. First is the rise of Warriors-type basketball, which pisses off purists still (maybe?) but is more generally palatable for people who like their sports to be fast and fun and flashy. Jordan and then Kobe, as players, masked how dour the NBA was for a while there. Kobe's Lakers were totally unlikable, the Spurs were boring as hell, the Celtics had individually interesting personalities but were meh as a group, and never quite achieved dynasty status besides. Now I think the trendy styles of play are just generally more fun to watch. (Of course that also happened in the NHL simultaneously.)

I don't discount the element of general hipness, though, in the same way the rock kids started listening to Kanye and Clipse 10 years ago and then suddenly everyone was a rap expert all along. But I don't think white guilt and art-school trendiness fully explain how the NBA has gone global this decade, so there's a lot at play.

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

 

You could just as easily be talking about Deadspin here, too. Maybe that's the true basis of their Simmons animus: they're two brothers fighting over who Daddy loves more.

Well Deadspin trashes all things Boston regularly so at least they're the counter there.

Another thing I think Simmons deserves credit for, though, is that while he was definitely the proto-basketblogger, I think his passion and his knowledge of the NBA is tough to dispute, and traditionally his basketball writing keeps the sport in perspective and appreciates it for what it is, instead of falling down the rabbit holes of NBA as social criticism and high art that the rest of them do. (I get the feeling that Burnenko knows his :censored:, too, but he's all the way down that rabbit hole.) And it's even more impressive that Simmons did that while also being the Boston guy, too, because his entire come-up happened when no one in Boston gave a :censored: about the Celtics. That's one reason that the Ringer disappoints in just being kinda generic modern NBA blogging mixed with a Celtics fan's facebook feed.

1 hour ago, McCarthy said:

 

I like The Ringer too, but they have this way of getting so insular and what becomes important in their office is often not representative of what's happening on the large scale and they'll drive things into the ground that people didn't care about in the first place. They're going to be paying for "Patriots Week" for a long time. That was ill-advised. 

 

Also the way they cover the NBA like it's on a plane above all other sports, like the happenings on the court are more important than other sports is slightly off-putting. I think that comes from Simmons. It's a basketball league whose players sometimes speak up when it comes to social commentary, but it's mostly just a league that plays basketball. 

I get the sense that Grantland built on the Simmons strengths — or those of his idea/genre, not always him personally — but the ESPN structure kept it restrained. Without that, The Ringer lets that get too self-indulgent and the worst impulses end up driving.

agree on the podcasts though. Those have to be subsidizing the operation. It’s wild how Simmons’ instincts in audio/video content are so drifted from his writing M.O.

40 minutes ago, the admiral said:

 

What began as a necessary check on the excesses of ESPN has spread into flailing at everyone who has the temerity to not be them: last I checked, they're feuding with Barstool, Reddit, The Ringer, Vice, and now even their own parent company. I wouldn't handle my own death well either.

That list is mostly garbage and I enjoy a petty feud, so I have less of a problem with that, even when it does come across as hypocritical.

What drives me nuts about Deadspin is their guys who ostensibly write about basketball but are really more masturbatory and off-topic than Simmons at his worst was. And all of the Arbitrary Sarcastic Proper Nouning of things, like yes thank you, I also read David Foster Wallace. What's his name, Albert Burneko? Worst offender, which is sad because sometimes he gets some proper basketball tactics talk in there. Classic example of online media's misguided belief that anyone should post anything without an editor.

4 hours ago, DG_Now said:

 

I read that whole thing and am glad I have nothing to do with Barstool Sports. The closest I've got was the Tank stuff (is that still a thing?) and watching those guys be terrible (like, the boring kind of terrible) on ESPN.

 

Am I supposed to subscribe to the Athletic now? I don't know where all of the sports is supposed to be anymore. And I'm generally in line in Deadspin's particular brand of liberal-tinged sports reporting. Their soccer coverage stinks though.

I think it depends on whether you need news or takes. I get the sense the Athletic wants you to subscribe for the news. But they haven’t cornered the market on news enough yet.

i generally like Deadspin but I can’t believe they still have the soccer guy after the Mix Diskerud bicycle kick incident. 

An obstacle to OTT services is that your average sketchy Reddit stream is still higher quality than the official ones, I thought as NBCSports.com repeatedly froze, glitched and randomly threw to "coverage returning shortly" screens in the middle of NHL playoff action.

Oh I had missed the 30 For 30 news. Does it have the whole series? That would make perfect sense -- it's driven me nuts how it's not available on any other streamer or even the previous ESPN on-demand.

The supposed value of Woj is crazy to me. He breaks nothing that won't eventually come out anyway, unless it's a rumor that doesn't work out. 

I loved their old colours, honestly.

Not a fan of red white and blue for them, especially since now Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse all have red. And rwb for the Bisons and Chiefs.

Well at least the PawSox have moved toward.... light blue...

They've got pieces of every era. Which is fine for fashion hats to sell at the merch stand, but not so much on-field.

A thought I've always had about minor league alt-mania, but particularly when looking at the very minute differences between elements of the Yard Goats set: how do little minor league clubs sell enough of five marginally-different hats for it to be profitable?

Anything but the PawSox just isn't right, even if they're only moving a few miles away. RIP McCoy, home of the 33-inning game.

Yeah, a (mostly) traditional Red Sox looking jersey with a light blue hat looks all kinds of strange. Even if it fits the polar aesthetic.

Woof.

http://www.overthemonster.com/2014/12/5/7342151/pawtucket-red-sox-pawsox-new-logo-uniforms-2014-2015