who do you think

"Here's all our Linkedin bios, somebody rich come fund our pet project please."

And it's the single worst recurring argument against Quebec City in this whole thread (yeah, I've read the whole thing). Worse than the population argument, worse than the "ew French no one will want to play there" argument. Figure it out. Rejecting clearly interested markets that are well within your radius of normal NHL business because you're worried about too many teams being based in the Eastern Time Zone is a level of stupid that could melt grass.

It's too bad Grand Rapids doesn't have a suitable arena. That would otherwise be a cool small market to have around, one of those one-team sized markets that the NHL just doesn't have enough of on this side of the border. (I realize that it would probably have the same issue with the Wings and Hawks that Ottawa does with the Habs and Leafs). RE Panthers, I don't understand the NHL, and MLB for that matter, so doggedly clinging to Miami/SE Florida. It is the worst sports market in the country. Six million people blah blah blah they're not watching or attending. "Well you still need a team there to serve the transplants" - it's 2023, out-of-market streaming has existed for a long time now. Transplanted Habs and Mets fans can just fire up the apps and follow their teams as if they never left the motherland. The Heat only make it work because the NBA is a star driven league and stars are lining up to congregate down there, the Dolphins because football is the least demanding sport fandom-wise and the NFL is bulletproof anyway.

Yuck, CLB isn't much better. I'm too high on my own dumb idea now; CBS to me just looks like it fits way better next to PIT, DET, etc. Paging @Sport for official feedback since it's his team. I have no real preference on Washington (WAS is more convenient to type though) or Montreal. I've never seen WIN for Winnipeg although I kinda like it. I'll offer up another one though - I like PHX a lot more than PHO. It does a better job of leading me to the full word.

Both great sets that got murdered by the material switch. I don't know why the Rockets not only stood pat afterward but even kept the general template through another material change. This crap is the turd in the punch bowl of that 65 win season. Not gonna quote the other post, but that mid-10s Denver set (both iterations) reminds me of that ghost-piping mid-00s Orlando set, I guess you could call it the Steve Francis era. So unremarkable and easy to forget about until someone posts a pic and reminds you it existed. *throws boiling hot water in Nike's face*

This has surely already been posted but damned if I'm going through 500 pages. It's also really petty: Team abbreviations (BOS, CLE, PHI, etc) should be based on the team's official location only, with the only exception being when more than one team claims that city/location and more distinction is definitely needed. So NYY/NYM, LAL/LAC, CHC/CHW and so on are fine. LAK and NYK are not fine, because the competing teams in their market don't claim Los Angeles or New York as their geographic identifier. The Kings and Knicks should just be LA and NY respectively. I hate when nicknames get folded into abbreviations that can be (and historically have been) covered with two letters (NJD, TBR, SAS, GSW) for no other reason than durrrr it has to be three letters. And I really hate the VGK and CBJ abbreviations in the NHL. VGK we can't do much about since the jackasses who own the team were too cool to name it "Las Vegas", so just one more reason to abhor that franchise I guess. But why couldn't Columbus be "CBS"? To me that's a perfectly intuitive abbreviation for the city. Don't even try to tell me that people would confuse it for the network. I know it's 20 years too late now, I'm just spouting off.

At this point, I might become mildly annoyed if the Celtics do somehow pull the championship out of their ass. Because they sure as hell do not deserve it based on their body of work thus far.

That's been Jack Edwards pretty much all year, at least when I've tuned in. Something's up with him. Nights like these made me glad that I'm only a fairweather fan.

Sterling's racism and general repulsiveness was the league's worst-kept secret for decades; the general thought is that he was shielded from any real trouble by being on good terms with David Stern. The 2014 V Stiviano tape and aftermath (don't bring black people to games, Magic Johnson has AIDS, etc) was what opened Pandora's box and prompted everyone to drag out their fainting couches. V Stiviano is apparently also known by about five other names and was notoriously difficult to get a hold of in the wake of all this. Seems very legit. The Chris Paul trade actually happened two and a half years beforehand, during that compressed "offseason" between the end of the lockout and 2011-12 opening night. The Clippers under Sterling had never made that type of move before, and the NBA did reverse backflips to steer him there, even stiffing their signature franchise in the process. The whole thing looks even shadier in retrospect than it did at the time, although for different reasons: back then it was thought to be an owner revolt against the Lakers always buying up all the stars while everyone else fought over scraps, nowadays it looks like the NBA moved the earth to officially start making the Clippers franchise respectable, and attractive to potential buyers. In any case, I don't recall hearing a peep from Sterling during those 3 regular seasons between the trade and the scandal. As for the why and the timing, all I can do is slip on my trench coat and speculate, but: - Stern announced his eventual stepping-down in late 2012, but it's very reasonable to assume that he had told team owners and other people in the loop that he was a short-timer well before then (maybe the lockout was the last straw). Which would put the wheels in motion for Sterling to get booted from the club, with his most important ally gone. - Several teams were changing hands around that 2010-2013 time period, and it's known the NBA had a couple of whales sniffing around in Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer, who wanted to bring teams to San Jose and Seattle respectively. The league evidently wasn't crazy about either of those ideas, but if Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer want into your league, you just don't tell them no then validate their parking; you find out what franchise they would be interested in owning and keeping in place. How about a team in Los Angeles that's not currently performing or operating like a team from Los Angeles should? Who owns them now? Some embarrassing old turd we wish we didn't have to share BoG meetings with. He'll be dealt with.

Clearly you're not a frequent reader. I don't know, I kind of nailed it last year. Find another person here who picked Golden State to win it all. I'm also gonna take credit for being properly skeptical of the Bucks and just being a round late on charting their collapse.

McHale's enough of a doofus that this seems plausible on the surface, but I don't think that's what decided it. Not on a trade/player of that magnitude. If I wanted to go even deeper on conspiracy theories about the league rigging things, I'd say that, in addition to small market owners throwing a fit and (since the Hornets were league-owned) actually having the power to spike the trade instead of just crying about it, Basketball Reasons unfolded because the NBA was already sniffing around on ways to oust Donald Sterling from the Clippers by that point, and with a seemingly good young core in place for the first time, the time seemed right for the Clippers to finally get turned around and made into a second legitimate LA franchise to be sold for big big money once they got Sterling to walk into the wood chipper. As for the Lakers, how good would they really have been, and for how long? Kobe was old, Gasol and Odom were included in the proposed trade, Artest was well over the hill, and they would have been counting on a hell of a lot from a high-maintenance, often-injured Bynum. Weren't you saying a few pages ago that D'Angelo Russell was the missing piece that turned this season around? As for the other guys they picked up... well, they're getting depth minutes with apparently some success, considering they just beat the 2-seeded Grizzlies by 40 to clinch the series. Six months ago I'm pretty sure the Lakers' bench was the fried helicopter parts from the Kobe crash, so anything probably helps.

The league itself probably had something to do with it. Those teams weren't going to get much more than the Lakers' couch change package for those guys anyway. Enter Silver or some other shadowy guy from the league office getting in touch and saying "y'know, you could send those guys to LA and boost their roster; if they can shed Westbrook, get back in the playoff picture and make a run, that's more TV revenue for the league, which will find its way back to you, I'm just saying." > nooooo conspiracy theory from biased Celtics fan! I also think the NBA steered KG to Boston back in the day instead of Chicago or Phoenix or whoever else was reportedly in on that.

Too bad for the Kings, they shouldn't have blown game five, they're young and there's always next y- oh.

Celtics close it out in Atlanta and avoid the heart attack game 7. Now for the Boston "it's only April, godddddd" Celtics vs. Philadelphia "Embiid is hobbled and Doc Rivers is our coach" 76ers. Somebody has to win this.

Yeah this combined with the lower seeds in the west looking likely to advance definitely isn't going to help the load management epidemic. I wonder which of these will happen first: A) Somebody wins 70 games again, maybe even sets a new wins record, due to actually trying in a league where no one else tries until April. No team reaches 50 wins for the season, because the good teams are Managing Loads and giving the finger to the idiots who still buy tickets for mid-winter NBA games, while the bad teams actually try because it's either a bad draft year with nothing to tank for, or because nobody owns their own first rounder anymore due to trading five of them for other teams' fringe stars so they can pay them $60M a year and load manage them for half of the schedule.

Grizzlies > Spurs in 2011 and Warriors > 67-win Mavs in 2007. Both in six games. A 4-1 series victory for the 8 seed might be a first.

Mike Budenholzer is probably done. Deserved or not, somebody's gonna get scapegoated after that. Meanwhile the Kings are screwed.

Don't worry, they are and they do. (The point of course being that clinging to CSA population numbers as your lone guide to whether or not a given market is right for you is dumb.) And the Nubobcathornets have been such a smashing success, haven't they. They're a useless footprint franchise in a transplant haven. Road games there for the Celtics might as well be home games, and I'm sure there are several other franchises that can say the same. NBA teams are far more insulated from any real trouble than NHL teams due to greater central revenues and the league generally not being run by mental midgets, but I wouldn't be shocked if the Hornets are the team most likely to relocate (again) someday. That whole corner of the country is college, college, college, and more college everything. The pros are an afterthought. Citation needed. I went over this in the NBA thread - why hasn't the NBA even started the expansion process to back there, despite everything supposedly being all set up for them? Meaningless PR statement. Vancouver was a bloodbath. But I'm sure if Gary Bettman and Jeremy Jacobs were in charge they would have clung to that failed market like fruit flies to rotten produce, even it meant the league itself subsidizing the operation (or better yet, trying to bully local government into doing it for them) and eventually moving the team into some Canadian Applebee's after they got booted out of the arena so can people can continue never watching their games. All because "Bleep Bleep Bloop Bloop There Are Over Three Million People In The Greater Vancouver Area Bleep Bleep Bloop Bloop". "According to a list that some guy writing for Business Cosmo pulled out of his colon, these franchises in these markets are actually bad. Battery low."

Jeez, Cavs. Guess I'm buying into the Knicks now! If Miami actually finishes off the Bucks this whole half of the bracket is officially on the fly. The Celtics are still refusing to finish games and may not even win their current series, Embiid is hurt and allegedly so is Harden, the Knicks are a 5 seed with no established stars (on the Tatum/Embiid/Harden/Butler level anyway) that was league average on both ends, the Heat are an 8 seed on a down year.

Deal reached for new Calgary Flames arena, for real this time?

Did the Celtics forget to take care of business again? DidtheCelticsforgettotakecareofbusinessagain? Whosagoodboywhosagoodboywhosagoodboy

Butler is Grant Hill if he never got seriously injured.

Arenas was a ball hog and a gunner who led a handful of 42-40 Wizards teams to literally nothing. Butler is most definitely not that. EDIT: Just remembered, he also missed almost the entire 07-08 season and the team performed exactly the same without him. Allow that sink to enter the premises.

That, plus Miami is arguably the #1 free agent destination in the whole league so they can just reload instead, plus they would average about 30% paid attendance if they ever did commit to a proper rebuild/tank. Looks like I'll be taking a bath on my predictions upthread. Good thing I don't gamble!

Less than ideal? Sure. A Glendale/Sunrise situation? Not even close. Went poorly last time and nobody important/with money wants to own or build anything MLB-related there. Bunch of guys with no money drawing on napkins and making websites.