Posts from New York Knicks

Fun Friday: Can The Knicks Beat The Heat?

A crazy wild regular season has come to an end and the NY Knicks are the seventh seed in the eastern conference with a record of 36-30 and a record of 18-6 under Mike Woodson, who should shed the interim before his title asap.

The prize for this late season surge is a first round series against the Miami Heat who ended the season with a 46-20 record. The first game is saturday at 3:30pm eastern in Miami. We will be watching.

So the question for everyone who cares today on Fun Friday is can Melo, Stat, and Tyson handle Dwyane, LeBron, and Chris Bosh? My take is they have a better shot than most people think. But Stat has to step up big and take some of the load off of Melo, who has been carrying the team the past month.

What do you all think?

#Sports

Fun Friday: NBA Basketball

I watched the President talk to Bill Simmons about the Chicago Bulls (and Jeremy Lin) just now. I hope Obama gets his wish to welcome the Bulls to the White House as NBA Champions.

But I don't root for the Bulls. They killed the Knicks too many times in the 90s for me to ever be able to do that.

I'm a Knicks fan. And it's been fun to go to The Garden the past couple years. It's not just Jeremy Lin. The Knicks have a lot of weapons this year. They can run their entire bench without giving up much against most teams.

But I'm also a Oklahoma City Thunder fan. I've been into Kevin Durant since his brief college career. His game is so lovely to watch. His jump shot is pure and so good, and he can explode off the dribble as well as anyone. Last year in the playoffs, particularly against the Grizzlies and the Mavs, my son and I watched every game and became hard core Thunder fans. Westbrook has a ton of talent and James Harden is one of the smartest young players in the game.

I don't root for the Heat. I don't enjoy watching LeBron. He plays basketball like a linebacker. It's not beatiful but is effective. I do enjoy watching Dwyane Wade. But as the President says in that Bill Simmons interview, it will be hard to beat the Heat this year. They are playing much better than last year.

This shortened season is fun for the fans. There are a ton of games to watch every night. The lockout sucked but I feel like NBA Basketball is having a great season post lockout. I'm expecting the Thunder to get to the finals this year and hopefully they'll be playing the Bulls instead of the Heat.

Do you like NBA Basketball? Who do you root for? And who do you think will be visiting the President at the White House this year?

#Sports

#screwcable

Our family spends hundreds of dollars a month with Time Warner Cable. And plenty more with the NBA league pass. And plenty more with tickets to Knicks games. It's not that we don't want to pay for our sports entertainment. And it's not that we are unwilling to pay more.

But last night we were turned into "pirates" as the entertainment industry likes to call us. As 2011 turned into 2012, the executives at Time Warner Cable and MSG Network were unable to make a deal to keep MSG on Time Warner Cable. My son was fuming and so was I.

So I did what many did last night. I opened Twitter on the family room iPad and tweeted out a question.

 

 

Within seconds the suggestions came pouring in. NBA.com's League Pass for broadband was widely suggested but they were blacking out the Knicks Raptors game in the NYC area. Note to NBA.com – take all Time Warner Broadband IP addresses out of your blackout code table. If you do, you'll sign up a bunch of new subsribers during this TWC/MSG spat.

So we went on to the pirate sites. That worked great. No blackout problems there. Here's the tweet I sent out when we got the game on the big screen in the family room (via our family room mac mini).

 

 

I added the #screwcable hashtag to that one. I hope others start using it. The industry sure deserves it for turning really good paying customers into pirates.

I've long believed that piracy is largely a business model problem not a human behavior problem. If you give people a legal way to consume the content they want, they will pay for it. But when you make it impossible to legally consume the content they want, they will pirate it. That's what happened last night and that is what will happen every night there is a Knicks game on TV for as long as MSG and Time Warner Cable continue to figure out how to screw their customers.

#Web/Tech