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Chicago-Based Wilson Now The Official Game Ball Of The NBA

By The NBA

The National Basketball Association and Wilson Sporting Goods Co. announced a multiyear global partnership today that will make Wilson the official game ball of the NBA, Women’s National Basketball Association, NBA G League, NBA 2K League and Basketball Africa League.
The partnership will tip off at different times by league. The NBA Wilson game ball will first be used during the league’s 75th anniversary season in 2021-22. The other debuts will be during the 2022 WNBA season, 2021-22 NBA G League season, 2021 NBA 2K League season and the inaugural BAL season.

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Posted on May 26, 2020

So Long, Jerry

By David Rutter

When I wrote this four years ago, Jerry Sloan was celebrating his 74th birthday with a party to announce that he foresaw the end of his life, and wanted to say goodbye before it was too late. His many neurological illnesses took his life Friday.
He seemed a man among children. Quiet, confident, never self-focused. He acted like you always thought men were supposed to act. He was Lou Gehrig and Atticus Finch.
He wore John Deere caps when no one looked. He was shy.
He never sought to seem what he wasn’t.
If you admire grand souls, you would have liked him.

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Posted on May 22, 2020

The Origin Of MLB Trade Rumors

As a huge Cubs fan, there was always more hope in the offseason than the regular season, site founder (and University of Illinois grad) Tim Dierkes explains, leading to his fascination with the Hot Stove League and transactions.

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Posted on May 21, 2020

They Weren’t Coming Back

By Jim Coffman

You don’t have to go home. But you can’t stay here.
The Last Dance has been danced, and then some. And some prominent backlash began on Tuesday when Horace Grant lashed out at Michael Jordan for misrepresenting Grant’s role in the making of Sam Smith’s The Jordan Rules.
Hell hath no fury like a snitch scorned. And we still haven’t heard from Mr. Scottie Pippen since the The Last Dance began airing last month. That interview should be a doozy.

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Posted on May 20, 2020

When They Broke Up The Bulls

By Steve Rhodes

The two Jerrys fucked it up, plain and simple.
Even if some players were on the decline – a questionable argument – they had only declined to the point where they were still the best team in the league.
And it was up to Jerry Krause to start filtering young players – through the draft or other types of acquisition – onto the roster. A teardown of a championship team (of the ages) is unconscionable. (That doesn’t mean Phil Jackson and Scottie Pippen, in particular, were eager to return for another year, though it was the Jerrys who chased them both off. And who really knows what Michael Jordan would have done at that point; the whole thing had become an incredible grind. But in any case, it shouldn’t have gone down the way it did.)
Let’s take a look at how it happened – in two videos.
1. Tim Floyd On The Bulls’ Post-Jordan Strategy, Jerry Krause’s Goals.

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Posted on May 19, 2020

Michael Jordan’s Regrets(?)

By Jim Coffman

I will readily acknowledge that I was a competitive moron when I was young. And then, when I got into my teens, I was less so. I have some theories as to why things played out that way for me and how it factored into being a fan.
I picked up that moniker at camp and it definitely fit, for a while. It wasn’t just that I was goofily competitive, it was that I got way too upset when my team lost games that simply did not qualify as important in any way, shape or form.
We’ve discussed the sort of “water polo” we played at Camp Echo in Fremont, Michigan, before. There was a goal at either end of the shallowest portion of the swimming area and teams of five or six would compete to score the most in a given time period with pretty much no holds barred.
So when I overdid it at times and my team wasn’t winning and the staff member who was overseeing a given game instructed me to take a break, I would sit there on the beach (the camp trucked in a whole lotta sand to transform what was otherwise a standard freshwater lakeshore) crying my eyes out.

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Posted on May 13, 2020

How Jordan Led

By Roger Wallenstein

Leadership 101.
Step 1. Start with the greatest player in the history of the game.
Step 2. Have that player work harder than anyone else. Not only in games, of which he never takes off more than a few minutes let alone an entire contest due to “load management,” but, possibly more importantly, during spirited, energetic practice time.
Step 3. Surround that individual with a few talented accomplices along with a bench full of guys who most people wouldn’t recognize if they played on other teams.
Step 4. License that star player to cajole, bully, badger, fight, challenge, insult, and intimidate his teammates.
Step 5. Monitor the situation to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand.
These are the ingredients of the style that Michael Jordan portrayed in the seventh hour of director Jason Hehir’s 10-hour marathon The Last Dance. The masterful docuseries reveals so many themes, not only of a team that won six NBA championships in the 1990s, but of human nature, attitudes, marketing, values, and relationships that apply to a world far removed from professional athletics.

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Posted on May 12, 2020

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