2012, It Was Nice Knowing Ya: Redskins, [Fantasy] Wrap-Up, and Rankings, Oh My!

In all likelihood, this is going to be my last post of 2012, and there’s a lot to cover…so let’s get right to it.

The Redskins have exceeded every one of my expectations this year, and no different was this past Sunday when the rookie backup quarterback to the rookie starting quarterback played, looked great, and led Washington to a decisive victory, which was their 5th straight. With RG3 returning this week against a hapless Eagles team, I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop (lifelong Skins fan as I am). This can’t really be happening, can it? Washington in the driver’s seat for the NFC East going into week 16? Fasten your seatbelts, folks…

At the very least, I have confidence that Cousins can carry the vacated title if RG3 goes down again.

Fantasy football came to an early end for me again this year, as I bowed-out to my brother-in-law Nicky in the 1st round of our league’s playoffs last week. It was a fitting end to my season really. I backed into the playoffs with a 6-8 regular season record, faced the number 1 seed as the number 8 seed, and had James Jones’ 3 touchdown catches and 24 fantasy points on the bench. (I lost by 27, but it was still a sucker punch to the gut for him to blow up like that). At the end of the day, I would say I lost this league in the 1st (my keeper), 2nd, and 10th rounds. DeMarco Murray has missed 6 games this year, Stafford seems to have regressed, and Evan Royster was a wild swing-and-a-miss for a sleeper pick…Alfred Morris is the league’s 8th rated fantasy back, on the other hand. All of that is a recipe for disaster.

Less commercials, more touchdown passes, please (Jerry Rice stole the show in those ads anyway).

Weekly NBA Power Rankings? Sure, why not?!?

1. LA Clippers (19-6, PR=6)…Big leap for Lob City here in week 2, and the other teams didn’t really do anything that warrants getting dropped, but 11 straight is 11 straight. CP3 looks locked in at the moment and hungry for his 1st ring a la LeBron last season.

Showtime is back in LA, and it has nothing to do with the Lakers.

2. New York Knicks (19-6, PR=2)…Melo accumulating some bumps and bruises has to be a concern, but this team is still rolling right now. They might get some reinforcements soon with Amare’s pending return, but I’m wondering if that’s going to mess up their feng shui at all.

3. Oklahoma City Thunder (21-5, PR=4)…Have the league’s best record even with a loss last night in Minnesota thanks to a 12 game streak of their own. Durant looks to be on a mission on par with Chris Paul's above.

4. Miami Heat (17-6, PR=5)…LeBron and Miami looked like the varsity scrimmaging against the JV last night facing a depleted Mavs team. Looks like they can still turn it on when they want to.

5. Memphis Grizzlies (17-6, PR=1)…Damn, all they’ve done is win 3 in a row, and they drop from the top spot to 5th? Such is life this year in a very top-heavy league. Something tells me Team Grindhouse won’t pay outside perception much mind though.

30. Washington Wizards (3-20)…This team is such a mess that they probably deserve their own blog post at some point, and the story that the owner turned down a potential James Harden deal because he didn’t want to commit the money is depressing to say the least. Maybe they will at least split a home-and-home with nearly as dreadful Detroit coming up.

In the Words of Eminem, "Where the F***'s Kanye When You Need 'Em?"

Even though this is a blog, and I can technically post whatever I want without any regard for past posts, I still feel bad when I don’t give updates to certain posts that have become somewhat serial in nature: weekly NBA power rankings, Redskins’ Monday morning quarterbacking sessions, periodical fantasy football updates, my personal injury status, etc…but even when I’m falling behind on those fronts, sometimes something presents itself that I can’t pass up: this time it’s one of my coworker’s inane sports-related babblings.

There’s really only one thing worse than being wrong: being loud-wrong. This dude is a good guy all in all, but to say he’s passionate about sports is putting it mildly. And since I work in an office of mostly dorky engineers (me included) and program managers, most of the athletic opinions he espouses go unchallenged no matter how ridiculous they may seem. (Said coworker has made a B-Court All-Star appearance once before as the coworker who boasted he could bench press 225 lb., close to double his own weight…yea.) Most of the time, I ignore him and go about my business, but he's been in rare form lately. Here’s some of the doozies I couldn’t quite lay off of over the past few weeks.

Oh, s***!

In sports betting, picking against the spread is a 100% random process.

There are no good short basketball players.

No good basketball players come from small high school programs

An average team from our company adult intramural basketball league could beat the majority of the country’s high school basketball teams.

He’s annoying to argue with partially because he always assumes he’s right no matter what. He also often doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. For example, when I asked what he had based any of these hyperbolic basketball statements off of, it wasn’t from a lot of experience playing or watching basketball…it was based off of the heights of and common high schools where college prospects were listed on recruiting websites.

Arguing with him about this stuff is also obnoxious partially because there is an element of truth to most of his opinions. Yes, there is a degree of randomness to picking against the spread because that’s the way sports work in general, but there’s a reason people with enough resources and brains can actually make a lot of money off of sports betting. Yes, height obviously is a huge factor in basketball, but not every good basketball player is 6’8”. And what exactly qualifies as “good?” Division 1 players only? Yes, there are certain high schools like Dematha and Oak Hill that are basketball factories, churning out pro prospects like an assembly line, but did every high profile baller come out of schools like that? The answer would be “no.” And I have watched a lot of high school basketball over my lifetime, and I know the level of play of a lot of the players in this work league…let’s just say that last statement is not even close to true.

If you stay in a discussion with him long enough, you will usually find that these statements cover up some hidden agenda of his. He stinks at picking games against the spread, or he is short and stinks at basketball; therefore, all short people must stink at basketball, and so on…today was another doozy that, even with my voice so hoarse that it is barely audible, I couldn’t lay off of: Maryland’s drop in men’s basketball ticket prices shows just how crappy their athletic program is.

What…wait…what? Ok, yes…Maryland’s athletic program is in a particular state of suck-titude right now. The football team is awful. They have had to cut certain sports because they aren’t raking in enough money. Their move to the Big 10 was a pure money-grab. And even the men’s basketball team has been successful to a degree, but not to the standards they had made for themselves as of late. But…what?

Exactly.

Even if Maryland’s athletic program was flourishing, why wouldn’t they do that this time of year? Students are home on winter break. The gym is going to be half-full, especially if they’re playing schools like Monmouth and Stony Brook. You might as well get as many people through the gate as you can so you can sell as many sodas and hot dogs as possible. This idea made just as much sense when Maryland wasn't financially in the tank. But if you hang around just long enough, you will find out that the genesis of this statement has to do with said coworker’s comparison to athletic fandom in this part of the country to that of somewhere like the University of Florida, where he grew up near and roots for to this day.

Comparing collegiate sport support between a place like Washington, DC, and just about any SEC school is silly. There are a million things to do and see in and around DC, and its population is absurdly transient. It’s a Redskins’ town and a basketball town, but hometown support for any other team or school fluctuates depending on who’s hot in that moment. SEC-country is a completely different culture, where many schools like Arkansas and Alabama have little competition to hold onto people’s attention. Schools from that pocket of the country produce fanatical (and sometimes radical) supporters that steal each other’s mascots and poison each other’s historic trees. The craziest (and dumbest) thing Terp fans do is burn their own couches in the street. This doesn’t make sports fans from this area better or worse…it just makes them different.

Ok, maybe that's a little bit crazy too...but mostly just dumb.

And that’s the point. Save your over-generalized and mostly unfounded opinions, dude. They’re not going to fly over here! I don’t mean to pick on this guy…but I will continue to do so here because I enjoy it!

Government Friday: Fittingly, The Home Of The Laziest Post Ever

Sometimes I just really want to post something, but I either don't have anything good to write about, or I am too lazy to write...or both. Well, today I'm stooping to the ultimate form of blog laziness, and I'm just posting some funny pics I found when scrolling across the Interwebs a la The Chive. Actually, most (if not all) of these are pilfered straight from The Chive. I could write about RG3-knee-calypse, fantasy football, or any number of other things, but f*** it...super lazy...super-duper...yep.

Have a good weekend, nerds.

Special Edition/Season Premiere Of The Weekly NBA Power Rankings

With the NFL season hitting the home stretch, basketball tends to get lost in the shuffle this time of year…as well it should. I’m certainly not the 1st to say it, and it will never happen due to the monetary implications of it all, but wouldn’t the NBA be better served to have a shorter season? Even with the generally bad basketball across the board during the 1st month or so of last season as players went from downing donuts to having to get in midseason shape on the fly, can’t we all agree that the shortened season produced a better overall product? Like I said, it’s not ever going to happen, but I’m just saying…with that in mind, let’s take a break from the world of football, the Redskins, and RG3’s knee to bust out the 1st edition of the B-Court All-Star NBA Power Rankings of the 2012-2013 season. I’ll even throw in a little extra this time.

Aww, f*** it.

1. Memphis Grizzlies…Team Grindhouse has been every talking head’s buzz-team for 3 seasons now, but there’s a reason for that. This team is loaded, has a style a play that’s not for the weak of heart to play against, and they actually have their full compliment of players right now, with Rudy Gay and Zach Randolph healthy at the same time for the 1st time in seemingly forever and Darrell Arthur back to sure-up their front court rotation. Experience and the fact that the West’s other 3 top teams (the Spurs, Thunder, and Clips) all provide interesting foils for the Grizz are their biggest hurdles, but be warned: this team is nasty.

2. New York Knicks…It pains me to put the Knicks this high, but then again it’s hard not to based on what I see on the court. How can a team that looked that bad at times last year make this big of a leap when all they did was get even older and slower? Well, the 1st thing is that they have basically moved Carmelo Anthony to the power forward position full-time, and it looks like he may have actually finally got it (changing from a just a scorer to a playmaker, which in turn has made all of his teammates better). 2nd, they have basically adopted the old Mike D’Antoni offense. You wouldn’t think those old heads would fit into a run-and-gun style, but Jason Kidd knows how to spot up behind the 3-point line, and Rasheed Wallace, Kurt Thomas, and Marcus Camby all know how to run a pick-and-roll when Tyson Chandler needs a blow. 3rd (and most importantly), they are taking and making 3’s at a historic pace right now. If that continues, it could be a special season in New York.

3. San Antonio Spurs…As as good as they look at times I wonder if sometime this year the Spurs will begin to resemble that team that has seen better days. It’s tough to make that argument when they have the league’s best record, beat this ranking’s number 1 team in their only matchup to date, nearly won in Miami with their JV team, and were only a couple games away from playing in the Finals last year with basically the same squad, but something tells me this season is going to end badly for them. I hope I’m wrong.

4. Oklahoma City Thunder…Many (including myself) wondered aloud whether OKC should have let things play out with the James Harden situation instead of being proactive and trading him, but it actually looks like a smart move at this point. Kevin Martin isn’t nearly the player Harden is, but he may actually fit the Thunder’s needs better. He doesn’t need the ball in his hands to be effective, whereas Harden did, and as good as he was putting the ball in his hands would also take it out of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook’s hands as well. Those 2 have also raised other parts of their games (numbers up in assists and rebounds for both) this year, but it’s Serge Ibaka’s leap in offensive production (going from 9.1 points per game last season to 14.3 this season) that has made the Thunder look the smartest of all in the trade’s aftermath. Oh, and they just happen to be on an 8 game streak to the good, best current run in the league.

5. Miami Heat…Miami 5th to start out? After winning the title and adding Jesus Shuttlesworth? I wouldn’t call it a championship hangover because the Heat still have the 2nd best record in the East, and they do seem like they play with some we got this championship swag now, but they also appear to be on cruise control in certain games. Still, if I were them, there wouldn’t be much that would worry me about their start so far…except their 2 games against the Knicks. After 2-plus seasons, I still don’t think they have solved their point guard problems, and in both of those games Raymond Felton was able to get into the paint, draw defenders, and kick the ball out to open shooters at will. While being a different kind of player, Baron Davis had similar success against Miami in the regular season and playoffs before breaking his entire knee. Both guys were able to out-quick or bully their way past Mario Chalmers and or Norris Cole to score or set up other guys…before his injury, the Heat only had a clear advantage when New York sent Davis to the bench to play JR Smith at the point (yuck). Miami’s best solution would be to play their funky, non-point guard, amoeba type lineup, but they can't do that all the time, and either way the Knicks present a real problem for the Heat in the East this year.

He still got game.

6. LA Clippers…I had questions about chemistry and playing time when the Clips signed or traded for every available player in the universe this offseason, but this team is going to be a problem for opponents all season long. Jamal Crawford, (fat) Lamar Odom, Eric Bledsoe, and Matt Barnes give them the deepest bench in the league, and you still have Chris Paul and Blake Griffin to deal with on a nightly basis. If Griffin continues to at least take (making them is a bonus, but he at least has to take them to keep the defense honest) open 18-footers off the pick-and-roll, it’s going to open the offense up for the whole team. Did I mention they are right behind OKC with a 7 game winning streak of their own? No? Ok, well there you go.

23. LA Lakers…No bottom 5 this week, but I will give you a team that has definitely been among the dregs of the league up to this point. The Lakers have lost 3 straight, 7 of their last 10, and are 4-8 since D’Antoni took over as head coach. I had some doubts about their overall team speed and health as an older unit as well as their lack of a bench, but I didn’t expect them to struggle like this at all. After firing Mike Brown, using the current roster in D’Antoni’s previously mentioned system has been nothing short of trying to smash a bunch of round pegs into the squarest holes ever. Pau Gasol has been hurt, but D’Antoni doesn’t want him on the court anyway. Steve Nash was the engine that made D’Antoni’s offense go in Phoenix, but Nash is a few years older, hurt now as well, and doesn’t have the Suns’ miracle training staff to fix him up anymore. If LA thinks Nash’s return is going to be a magic cure-all for everything that ails them, they better hope they kept the receipt for that purchase. Dwight Howard continues to be a liability (as he has his whole career) at the end of the game from the free throw line, but D’Antoni refuses to sit him because he doesn’t want to scare Howard off from resigning with the Lakers in the offseason. Even besides all that, the Lakers have basically none of the spot-up shooting necessary to make his offense work, and that along with Nash’s injury has caused Kobe Bryant to bring the ball up the court, somehow pass to himself a few times without travelling, and shoot possession after possession. Kobe’s individual stats are great this year considering the point he’s at in his career, but the Lakers are also something ridiculous like 1-10 in games where he scores 30-plus points. So then what exactly is the solution? Is there a solution at all? They are a complete mess. Their best hope for this year is to trade an unhappy Gasol away for like 3 quality role players (preferably 2 shooters and a point guard)…wait, hold that thought. Of course that’s what will happen…they are the Lakers after all. The rest of the league always lines up to be taken to the cleaners in trades by LA.

On A Monday Night In December, RG3 Finally Gets Some Help

There are a couple of reasons I dread primetime Redskins’ games. There’s the fact that they usually stink, and I feel embarrassed that the rest of the country has to watch my lousy team…I imagine it would be something like if your kid was bad at sports. F***, I am about to have a kid in a couple of months, let me take that back! Don’t want karma to bite me in the ass already. There’s also the fact that Washington has been consistently lousy for 2 decades, but that lousiness has been amplified at home Monday night games for some reason…how’s 10 straight home MNF losses taste? And lastly, it means yours truly has to stay up way past his bedtime, rendering me useless for most of the following day.

But the Redskins made that all worth it last night, holding on to beat the Giants 17-16. For all the shame they usually provide their fans, it’s nice to have “Mike & Mike” gush about them once in a while on the drive into work. RG3 is almost at the point where his individual exploits aren’t worth mentioning. He delivers pretty much every week, so it’s hardly even worth bringing up a ho-hum game (for him) where he went 13/21 for 163, a touchdown throw, 0 picks, and added in 72 yards on the ground. He’s been consistently good to the point where it’s a bigger story if he has an off day.

No, this week let’s give some dap to some of Griffin’s helpers. How about a little bit of luck, with Griffin’s fumble popping right into the waiting hands of Josh Morgan for the game’s 1st touchdown? How about Pierre Garcon’s 106 yards and 4th quarter go-ahead touchdown catch? How about big Trent Williams, who might be the best left tackle in the league at the moment, playing through pain to do some road-grading in the running game and keeping RG3 mostly clean against a vaunted New York d-line? How about Alfred Morris’ 124 tough rushing yards, including consecutive gains of 4, 3, and 6 yards to effectively end the game with the Giants trying to get the ball back for some late game magic? We know all too well that Eli Manning only needs a couple plays to take his team down the field (against this D in particular).

Game, set, match...

And I guess a little credit does go to that much-maligned defense referenced above. They were the definition of “bend but don’t break,” but it’s hard to whine too much about them when they only gave up 16 points for the game, 3 in the 2nd half, and held that 1 point lead for most of the 4th quarter.

And yet, you couldn’t help but think the Giants gave the Redskins the game at least a little bit too. Washington’s D was so bad through 3 quarters that it seemed like the only way they could get off the field on 3rd down was for the Giants to commit a penalty. In the 1st half, New York had 3 drives with double digit plays, and they held on to the ball for nearly 34 minutes in the game. Those 16 points seemed like they could have easily been 24 or 27. And while Manning seemed to be able to throw the ball at will, the Giants curiously were very run-heavy in the 2nd half. Ahmad Bradshaw finished with good numbers – over 100 yards and averaging nearly 4.5 yards a carry – but I would much rather throw the ball against the Redskins than run it, and the run D was much better in the 2nd half. I’m not sure if the Giants were trying to run some clock in the 2nd half or they saw something they thought they could exploit in the running game, but it seemed interesting considering Giants’ receivers were running through Washington’s secondary wide open all night long.

The Giants probably regret not letting Eli keep chucking it in the 4th quarter last night.

Regardless, a win is a win. The Redskins are now at 0.500 and have creeped within a game of both the Giants for the division lead and a wild card spot. Even though Washington holds tiebreakers over the Giants for the division and some of their wild card competition like the Vikings, Bucs, and Saints, they still have an uphill climb, and it’s easy to play the what-if game now. What if they found a way to eke out even 1 win in close losses against the Rams, Bengals, Falcons, the lowly Panthers, and the Giants the 1st time around…but maybe that’s just the eternally pessimistic Redskins’ fan coming out again. Today is a good day. Let’s focus on that.

Good Ending Not Guaranteed

And for my 1st post of December, how about the glorious return of “terrible movie and TV show reviews?” Yea, get hyped, people. This week’s honor goes to Safety Not Guaranteed, which stars the younger funny girl from “Parks and Rec” and Nick from “New Girl”…I know what you’re thinking because it’s the same thing my wife and I were thinking when we rented it off iTunes: that’s not a bad start. And for the 1st hour or so, it didn’t disappoint. Yes, it gets a tad unrealistic at times. No interns for a b-list local magazine are going to risk life and limb for some goofy story idea, and there’s no way an even emotionally damaged Aubrey Plaza is going to fall for a late-30’s lunatic with a sweet side (a different guy than "New Girl"-Nick, by the way). But you can suspend your disbelief for a little while at least because the story pretty much breezes along, and Plaza and Nick-from-“New Girl” actually make you LOL (yes, I just typed that) from time to time.

Not a bad comedic duo at all.

But no one is going to buy Plaza sticking around past the next bus out of town when she finds out this time-travelling yahoo concocted some alternate reality in his own head about his past fictitious relationship or her being so bummed-out by the present and yearning for the past that she climbs on said wackjob’s death-contraption fashioned out of stolen government lasers, gyroscopes, transmogrofiers, and who knows what.

But even that is fine I guess as long as the movie didn’t have the ending it had. Have Plaza b****-slap the dude and let the FBI throw him in the back of a squad car as she looks all sad and mopey, have them climb on the time machine and it bursts into a raging inferno as soon as bizarro-Marty McFly hits the switch, but don’t have the stupid time machine seemingly work and blast the 2 into some alternate dimension! Don’t make the next screen the credits!

F***...

I guess this isn’t really a “terrible movie review” per se. It’s more a “pretty good movie review that went horribly wrong in the last 5 minutes.” And maybe I’m completely alone on this, and people universally loved the ending. It’s possible. It scored a 7.1/10 on Metacritic after all. I’m just not sure what they were going for with that ending other than maybe they thought other endings were far too obvious and they were trying to be hip and smart and edgy or something. All I know is I hadn’t WTF-ed (yes, I typed that too) that hard at a movie ending since The Departed, where everyone but Marky Mark bites the big one…just…no more of that, movie people. When the other movie I watch this weekend is Step Up Revolution, and that 1 ends up being the 1 I was less angered by, that’s not a great sign. For the love of…