Trash Talk: NBA Finals Games and More
There’s so much sportsing this week that more Trash Talk posts are needed to prevent other threads from being trashed.
Please confine your sports chatter to these sports-dedicated posts, thanks. You may treat this as an open thread; House J6 Committee hearing discussion should go in those dedicated posts.
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NBA FINALS
The 2022 finals between the Boston Celtics and the Golden State Warriors continues.
Sunday’s game tied up the series at 1-1 with Warriors win over Boston 107-88.
Last night the Warriors met the Celtics at TD Gardens, Boston MA only to lose to the home team, 116-100.
With the Celtics now leading the series 2-1, they’ll meet again in Boston tomorrow Friday, June 10, 9:00 pm ET; the game will be on ABC.
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NFL FOOTBALL
Yuck. By the time this post is published, Walmart scion Rob Walton may have bought the Denver Broncos for a record-breaking $4.65 billion. Denver may now have Walmart marketing plastered all over it to which a local news outlet refers euphemistically as “shaping central Denver.”
Denver would do better buying all Denverites some Spanx shapewear.
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PRO GOLF (PGA and not PGA)
Phil Mickelson did an interview with Sports Illustrated in which he discussed his gambling “habit.” He’s still got a problem if he can’t call it what it is — an addiction.
One might wonder if the addiction is why he’s up to his ears in the Saudi-backed LIV Golf in spite of acknowledging openly the Saudis’ human rights problems.
Knowing about his addiction this mea culpa sounds flat:
— Phil Mickelson (@PhilMickelson) June 6, 2022
Whatev.
Tiger Woods isn’t ready to return to golf just yet; he’s skipping the U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, MA this week. He’s planning to be at the JP McManus Pro-Am in Ireland for July 4-5, and at the 150th British Open at St. Andrew’s, Scotland for July 14-17.
Unlike Mickelson, Woods turned down a massive 9-figure offer to join LIV Golf. I guess Woods doesn’t feel he needs to worry about shaping PGA Golf the way Mickelson does — at least that’s Mickelson’s excuse for being persuaded to participate in LIV.
Speaking of LIV, I went looking for more details about golfers participating in the inaugural LIV Golf Invitational Series. The USA Today article I found did them no favors; they all sound like they could really care less if they were rubbing shoulders with acknowledged killers because golf.
But what really took the cake is the spokesperson for LIV…
wait for it…
guess who it is…
no, really…
I have to ask why any journalists, particularly American journalists, will cover this and what editors will assign LIV to any journalists’ beat because they also know this entire golf venture is whitewashing the murderers of an American journalist who was chopped up with a bone saw while still alive because the murderer who put out this hit didn’t like the coverage he was getting in American media.
What the hell; is American journalism as soft in the spine as these compromised golfers? Do they think they’re immune if they provide less than happy coverage of this whitewashing effort?
And are they going to be sucked in once again because there’s a familiar face at the podium offering the same smarm circa the Bush administration?
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MISC. SPORTS
Belmont Stakes will be run this Saturday, June 11. Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike is scheduled to appear after skipping the Preakness; odds, however, favor We the People at 2-to-1 to win the Belmont.
90 U.S. Olympic women gymnasts including Simone Biles have filed a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the FBI for its failure to appropriately investigate and prosecute mass sexual abuser Larry Nassar though the FBI had known about his serial assaults.
I haven’t seen any further details about this suit which is the second filed this year against the FBI with regard to Nassar. On the face of it this looks like a gross violation of women’s civil rights; why were they not afforded equal protection under the law?
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Got some other sports issue you need to air out? Do it in this thread along with any non-hearing related topics, thanks.
The PGA sent out a letter saying that if you’re going to play with LIV, you’re not going to be playing at any PGA tournament. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/09/sport/pga-tour-liv-golf-series-spt-intl/index.html
Hadn’t seen that yet. All week there’ve been questions put to the LIV players about their PGA status and they’ve been all over the map. If I were PGA I’d boot them, too, because they’ve clearly set their priorities elsewhere.
Good luck shaping PGA Tour being cut off like that, Mickelson.
2 of the 5 U.S. courses for LIV are Trump properties. can only imagine how many figures HIS cut is.
Far as I can tell, at least two of the 3 others are owned by just as big of a prick.
Probably a cut of the gouging going on at the pump now, laundered through those courses.
What’s the odds he flees Mar-A-Lago for one of those LIV sites?
Lots of background on LIV here if anyone’s interested: https://the athletic.com/live-blogs/liv-golf-tour/w2otzU9Us4lG/ (link broken; hope I did that right). The USGA will let LIV players enter the US Open if they qualify. The PGA will not let them play in the PGA Championship. The Masters is still undecided; apparently the Augusta National Golf Club makes that decision.
Sigh. The Warriors were definitely over-matched in Boston last night. Each team has done a great job of adjusting after a loss, however, so we’ll see what tomorrow night brings.
I would love to know how much the home team advantage affected the outcome last night.
Alot. Refs are human. The crowds affect them except maybe in games seven. Warriors have to figure out Williams.
Even if Steph plays, he won’t be at full speed. Green must step up bigly, and Poole too.
And GP2. He was terrible, and he’s been one of the best stories of the year. Expect a bounce back and going back home all tied up. Gawd I hate Boston and their fans.
I used to have season tix to the Suns. And there was one year when the people who sat behind us sold their tix to a couple of obnoxious Celtics fans when the Celts were in town. I darned near turned around and punched one of them. I would have probably gotten clobbered and thrown out. It was really close though.
You should try a couple Knick fans behind you some time.
Loved the Warriors since Cohn sold the team (remember when the new owner traded Monte Ellis for Steph right after purchase).
However, Steph is, against the Celtics, a defensive liability.
They use a pick to put Steph on a guy taller and quicker; easy “2”
Still hopeful……..
The Azerbaijan Formula One race will be on Sunday. This will be the race closest to Russia, which had the race cancelled, and nationals barred from the sport due to the invasion of Ukraine. So I’m hoping it will be an immense success.
I am aware!
I have no love for the Warriors OR the Celtics, but super, SUPER proud of what Portland native Ime Udoka has been able to accomplish in his 1st year as a Head Coach. Between him and having Damon Stoudamire as one of his assistants, we’re eeking out as much vicarious pride as we can over here.
Now if we can just get penguin-skull-fetishizing, security-detail harassing Jody Allen to finally sell the Blazers, things will be looking up.
The Texas Tribune gets an interview with Pete Arredondo, Uvalde ISD police chief.
https://twitter.com/texastribune/status/1535074160824696842
He comes across as way over his head in anything out of the ordinary.
This was my thought, too.
Which is not unusual for a small town cop.
In this case it was disastrous, but how many similar situations are out there?
Badly in over his head, for sure. But he should shut up and talk to a lawyer, because his latest admissions are not showing him in a better light. They indicate, to me, gross incompetence and reckless disregard for his job and the lives of those dependent on him. They also challenge the received narrative.
Arredondo claims he didn’t think he was in charge: “[H]e never considered himself the scene’s incident commander and did not give any instruction that police should not attempt to breach the building….“I didn’t issue any orders.” This is despite a) being the chief of the school district police force – only in Texas – b) earlier reports that he was in charge throughout the incident, and c) reports that he consistently ordered breaching teams to wait, a standing order that the CBP team reportedly ignored when it breached the classroom.
Arredondo also says he intentionally did not carry his “police and campus radios.” He believed that some of them didn’t work inside school buildings and that they would slow his movements. The admission seems so damaging, I can’t take it in.
For starters, and with all the money thrown toward local leos, why would you have essential comms equipment that did not work in the circumstances they were most needed? Why would a school police chief not carry essential equipment in the midst of an “active” shooter incident that had already demonstrably claimed lives? How would Arredondo know who was in charge or issuing orders – and who others thought was in charge and issuing orders – if he purposely kept himself ignorant of events and outside the loop. The action is reckless beyond words.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/10/texas-school-shooting-police-chief-pete-arredondo
Yeah, but between this week’s demise of Bivens, and the overlaying brick wall of qualified immunity, the parent victims likely have no viable remedy. Maybe more people (not you!) should have paid attention when people in this field were complaining over the last 35 years about the infamous “slippery slope”.
A police commander choosing not to have essential communications equipment on him throughout a deadly emergency is probably not in keeping with police and emergency training – or any aspect of this guy’s job.
He should be suspended or unemployed already – are there no rails, have they no tar and feathers? – but Texas being Texas, he’ll probably retire as Uvalde schools police chief.
None of it is newfangled stuff for response to such a situation. If this mope thought he was the incident lead, why? He says he did not know, but how is that possible if his decisions are controlling it?
The simple answer is, it is not.
Regarding Bivens, I can see where this Court’s radical right majority would be happy to overturn-in-fact every decision written by William Brennan Jr.
The hits just keep on coming. It appears that Arredondo did make his statements after talking with defense counsel. That means his badly self-incriminating story is the best they have. Imagine how bad the truth is.
Arredondo’s story pokes other holes in the received narrative. It’s not clear, for example, that that classroom door was ever locked! The NYT Houston office apparently tested doors in the school after the fact: they did not reliably or consistently lock. If true, that would mock Arredondo’s claim that he frantically tried “thirty” different keys, instead of testing the fucking doorknob. (The CBP solved the problem by asking the janitor for the key.)
The key kerfluffle masks that Arredondo’s dedicated school district police force did not have master keys. That’s after his team – and presumably the Uvalde PD and its SWAT team – trained to respond to a school shooting some two months earlier. One would think an after-action report would have covered the key and door locking problems, along with the problem with the radios – one that should have been exposed before they were ordered.
It’s clear that Texas, from Gov. Abbott to the Uvalde schools, their top cop, and their insurers – along with the NRA, the GOP, and their biggest patrons – hope to stall and distract long enough for this story to go away. I’d like to think it’s a doomed strategy.
Shepherd Smith had something to say about LIV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tTj72EhtrI
I swear, the Warriors are going to kill me.
So the Warriors have evened the series and have momentary home court advantage. Why then does 538 have the Celts as 63% faves to win the championship? What sort of simulations give them this result?