When Nobody Knows The Champs
Three-Dot Friday 5.30
On New Year’s Eve, the Oklahoma City Thunder and Minnesota Timberwolves played a regular-season game and I said out loud, “Everyone complains that Lebron and Steph are on teevee too much, and yet the NBA won’t put these guys on national teevee every chance they get. This is probably going to be the West Finals, and they won’t put these guys on national teevee until then.”
Well, that’s exactly what happened. And I still don’t understand why it took this long. Why complain that Steph and Lebron are on teevee too much when the NBA itself won’t showcase the two most obvious “next” stars when they play each other four times a year? OKC’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander just won his first MVP and Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards is incredible. Yet only one of their matchups in the regular season got on national teevee, the very last game before the All-Star break when nobody was paying attention. What a joke.
This changes next season, I guarantee it… especially when the Thunder- who won the West Finals easily- crush the Pacers for the NBA title in a “gentleman’s sweep” of five games coming up here pretty quickly. (Yeah, the Pacers and Knicks are still playing in the East Finals. I’m pretty sure the Knicks had their final moment last night in the Game 5 win.)
By the way, get ready for the “lowest rated NBA Finals” jibber-jabber that will inevitably occur if the Knicks don’t make a tremendous comeback. But the underlying issue, as usual, is that viewing habits are so splintered that casuals aren’t going to be even tempted to watch because the NBA refused to showcase both the Thunder and Pacers- whose home cities are separated by less than 800 miles- properly during the regular season. It would be something different if non-NBA types had at least heard of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander before two weeks ago. Now, the Finals are going to get a 10-rating or so- which is still bigger than any network teevee show that isn’t football at this point- and the whiners will complain, which is how it always works. The NBA can say they get all the online views they want. If they aren’t getting them in a place where they can sell ads, it’s a problem.
The West Sacramento Nomads are searching for any way to seem like they care about their history. When they came to San Francisco for the formerly “Bay Bridge Series” and now “I-80 Series,” their press release for the series included the grasping-at-straws “Hey this isn’t the first time the A’s have played in the Bay Area when they weren’t based in Oakland.”
They had to go all the way back to the World War II-era Connie Mack-owned-and-managed Philadelphia Athletics, when they trained for three years in Anaheim from 1940-’42, and then played a few games up-and-down the coast to get in more work. Lots of teams trained on the West Coast in the pre-MLB era- notably, the Cubs on Catalina Island for many years- but the teams themselves rarely bring it to prominence, and almost never during the regular season. It’s generally a thing left to the historians. And that I didn’t know about this (admittedly, every pre-50’s MLB team trained in dozens of random locations, from Maryland to Mexico and beyond) ought to tell you how deep they had to dig to find something remotely relevant.
Those blue-clad American League cellar-dwelling A’s (they finished last in the AL all three years they trained in Anaheim and lost 100, 90, and 99 games respectively) played exhibition games against the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals and Oakland Oaks among others, but according to the A’s themselves their last Bay Area game while based in Philly happened at San Quentin Prison in March of 1942 against the inmates, apparently the first time an MLB team played against the semi-permanent unvoluntary residents of that particular location.
You can make your own joke.
The Sacramento-based Nomads also made me realize that the PCL’s “classic” eight-team configuration from 1938-’57 has now seen “major” league baseball in seven of the eight cities, with Portland being the lone exception. That particular PCL lineup had teams in San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, San Diego, and two in Los Angeles. With the Portland Diamond Project still pushing for a stadium and a team, the PCL may still fully make the majors. And the way things are going, they could quite possibly end up with the A’s…
The Indy 500 debacle continued well past the actual running of the race on Memorial Day. A few days later, the guys who finished second and sixth were found to have illegally modified their cars (yes, this happens a lot) and their official finishes were dropped to the back of the field.
Which means that Scott McLaughlin, a favorite to win his first 500 this year, who crashed during warm-ups and officially didn’t race a lap, finished higher than those two drivers. As one of his fans noted on X, “Scotty Mac so good he can wreck on the pace lap and still gain spots.”
The 500 was already questionable because as explained in this space prior to the race, the owner of the race series and the Indianapolis Speedway itself is Roger Penske, who also owns Penske racing (there are a bunch of shell companies involved to make it all seem fine). And his drivers were forced to start from the back of the field on Sunday because all their cars were modified illegally, including two-time defending champion Josef Newgarden. They fired some high-ranking dudes because this had happened before, but this new issue could really have made things a lot worse.
Because what happens if the second-place guy, Marcus Ericsson, had actually finished first on Sunday? On the day of it’s a great story for him (he won in 2022), he drinks the milk and gets all that goes with the championship… and then he’s knocked to last place two days later. That would have been a bigger black eye to the sport than anything that actually happened to Penske’s team.
Truth is, IndyCar narrowly avoided a major crash at the 500. If they want to stay even remotely relevant in the auto-racing landscape- seeing how fast Formula One is gaining in America at the expense of IndyCar and NASCAR- they better figure something out in a hurry.
Like emphasizing the next generation of stars before they show up in the Finals and everyone says “Where have these guys been?”