Posts from Sports

My friend Patrick told me yesterday that I should check out Team Handball. He said its a lot of fun to watch. I immediately thought “I should find out when they are streaming a Team Handball match.”

My daughter posted on social media that she can’t deal with the non stop advertising that NBC is running on their main channel. I can’t either.

The combination of being able to watch when you want and how you want with the incredibly annoying experience of the main NBC broadcast tells me that this may be the Olympics that streaming starts to beat TV.

So when I saw this Variety headline this morning, NBC Universal’s Olympic Upset: Streaming Trumps TV, I clicked on it and read it.

There isn’t enough data in that article to conclude that streaming has, in fact, passed TV as the dominant way we watch the Olympics.

But I can tell you that the streaming experience definitively has.

It’s fun friday. Time for more talking and less reading.

The opening ceremony is tonight. We have a fortnight (ish) of sport to watch. This is one of the very few gatherings of the entire world in one place. It’s a celebration of what brings us together. The opening ceremony is such a beautiful thing. The flags, the garb, the pomp and ceremony. The torch. I have to say that I love the Olympics, warts and all.

So for fun today, let’s discuss what our favorite sports are to watch at the summer olympics.

For me, it is swimming. I particularly love the relays.

How about you?

I watched the second half of the Warriors Cavs game with my son Josh last night.

I woke up thinking about this play:

pic.twitter.com/NtTTVdvQMl

— naveen (@naveen) June 9, 2016

The Cavs have an uphill battle. The Warriors sure feel like a dynasty right now. But LeBron and his teammates, notably Kyrie and JR, showed up last night and put up a fight. That was missing in the first two games in Oakland.

There is something about this photo and that play. It shows that LeBron is not going to take this sitting down. He’s is fighting the fight. I said I thought the Cavs would defend home court throughout this series. They sure did that last night.

It’s easy to say this series is going to be a blowout after watching last night’s game.

But I’m not ready to do that.

I think the Cavs will defend their home court and this will go seven games.

What do all of you think?

Right now the OKC Thunder look unbeatable. They made the Spurs look old and they are now making the Warriors look slow. That’s quite something to accomplish. Let’s see if they can keep this up. It isn’t easy.

I am reminded of the Mets last fall. They went on a hot streak that quickly took out the Dodgers and the Cubs. Then they came back to earth for the series and got beat soundly by the Royals.

How does a team get hot? And how do they stay hot? And is there anything to learn from this phenomenon for teams that operate in the real world?

For the Mets, I think it went all the way back to the walkoff home that Wilmer Flores hit on the last night of July. That combined with the arrival of Cespedes lit that team up and they stayed lit for three solid months.

For the Thunder, something has changed in the playoffs. I’m not entirely sure what changed but I watched a lot of Thunder games this regular season and they were not the same team. Something has changed and very much for the better if you are a Thunder fan like me.

But one thing is for sure. When teams get hot, when they have confidence running through their veins, when they trust each other and know where the other person is going to be great things happen. It’s something to behold.

Steph Curry is the future of the NBA, but Kobe Bryant was the best player in the league for most of the past twenty years and the way he went out this past Wednesday was pretty special.

If you are an NBA fan and haven’t seen it, take five minutes out of your weekend and watch this highlight reel.

The most amazing part is he had to hit two free throws at the end to make 60 and I am sure he was feeling the pressure of needing to make them. He did.

Enjoy.

I read the other day that Patrick Ewing would like to be considered for the currently vacant NY Knick head coach role.

I think that’s a terrific idea. Companies like Apple and Twitter have gone back to their early leaders to rejuvenate the company.

The Knicks have started down that path by bringing Phil Jackson back as GM. They should complete the effort by bringing back Patrick Ewing as head coach.

I arrived in NYC a couple years before Patrick showed up in 1985. And for the next fifteen years there was an energy and a winning attitude at the Garden that honestly hasn’t existed since then.

While Patrick doesn’t have a ring, he has about almost everything else on his resume that a basketball player can accomplish. And he has been one of the most respected assistant coaches in the league for years.

Patrick has the heart of a lion. The Knicks need that, badly.

I’m going to the Garden tonight to close out the season, yet another losing one. I am thinking about bringing a Bring Back Pat sign with me.

This evening, twenty four of the thirty NBA teams will be in action. If you are an NBA fan, keeping track of all that action is not easy. My colleague Jonathan Libov wanted a quick mobile dashboard to keep track of NBA action and so he and some friends built it.

The app is called Twenty Four and has been in the app store for a few days now.

Last night was fairly light but here’s what it looked like on Twenty Four:

If you click on the Thunder Cavs card in that feed you get this:

So Twenty Four makes a nice Twitter client for watching live NBA basketball.

You also get notifications when a game is close in the fourth quarter.

This is tonight’s lineup:

I’m going to a holiday party but will pull out my phone and check out the action quickly. You might want to try that too. You can get Twenty Four here.

Last night I got home to watch the World Series and turned on the TV and fired up Twitter. In addition to the Mets Royals, you had the GOP Debate, and fourteen NBA basketball games. Twitter was on fire. I didn’t change the channel once on the TV, choosing to continue my pain from the night before and watch the Mets lose back to back games to the ferocious Kansas City Royals. But my Twitter feed kept me apprised of everything else going on. The Knicks beat the Bucks, the Bulls beat the Nets, KD is back and the Thunder beat the Spurs, and, apparently, Rubio had his coming out party last night in the GOP debate. I’ve always thought the GOP race was eventually going to come Rubio’s way. He’s the best of the bunch even though I prefer Kasich.

This weekend will have the World Series at Citifield, NBA games galore, and the NFL in mid-season form. It’s that time of year when all the major sports are in action. It’s a wonderful time for sports fans and a wonderful time for Twitter too.

I will leave you with this. Twitter does SportsCenter.

Highlights from a wild night in the NBA