Welcome Back Smorgasbord - King James, Terrelle Pryor and More!

The blog, much like LeBron James during the fourth quarters of the NBA Finals, has been on hiatus for a few weeks but we are back now to our regularly scheduled program. I will be back with columns every Wednesday and Friday with shorter posts sprinkled in here and there when thoughts and/or events come up. Since I have not commented on anything in a couple weeks here, what better way to jump back in than with an extended smorgasbord! Here we go…

- Where else can we start other than King James? Just when we thought he had fully arrived after the Boston and Chicago series he follows it up with a complete mental breakdown on the biggest stage of his career. (I must say that I had originally planned to do a column after the Chicago series saying how LeBron had finally arrived and was playing the way we all had envisioned him playing for so long…I’m glad that I didn’t have the time to write that post with how silly it would look just two weeks later!) Make no mistake - that was no choke job by LeBron. He wasn’t bricking foul shots or missing layups. He wasn’t throwing terrible passes or missing rebounds. He simply did not show up mentally following the game two loss for reasons that none of us can understand. Why did he stop attacking the basket? Why did his suffocating defense disappear? What in the world was going through his mind? Whatever it was, it was probably the same “thing” that pushed James into teaming up with Dwayne Wade in Miami in the first place. Whether it is a lack of a killer instinct, an unusual level of self-doubt that we typically do not see with players of his magnitude, or something else that none of us can put our fingers on, it is obvious that eight years into the NBA LeBron still does not have that “it” factor. Will he get there? I don’t know. My guess is that his talent alone will lead him to at least 2 or 3 championships and we will forget about many of these indiscretions. (It will be much the same way that we forget how badly Michael Jordan was criticized, called a gunner and how he couldn’t win the big one before he won his first title. That just sounds silly knowing what we know now.) At this point, however, I think we are close to realizing that he will never reach the absolute peak that his physical abilities call for because of something missing inside.

- Can somebody please explain to me what Cam Newton has that Terrelle Pryor doesn’t? Even if you consider Newton the better prospect, it cannot be the difference between the 1st overall pick in the draft and a 4th or 5th rounder as the reports are saying Pryor will go in the supplemental draft. Personally, I think both have a long way to go to be even a reasonably decent starting quarterback in the NFL and there is a good chance that neither amounts to much at that position. Both, however, have the same incredible upside with their tremendous physical abilities. Heck, I would even guess that as an athlete Pryor will grade out better than Newton. Just weird to me that some teams would value Newton’s upside to be that much more than Pryor’s despite the fact that it was Pryor who was a 3-year starter playing in a pro-style offense and not Newton. I will have much more on Pryor in Friday’s post.

- Game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals is tonight and what a crazy series it has been. Vancouver has squeaked out three 1-goal wins at home while losing the three games in Boston by a combined score of 17-3. Roberto Luongo, Vancouver’s goalie, has looked like two different players at home and on the road while Boston has reached this point on the back of its own net minder, Tim Thomas. I like the Canucks to win a close one tonight. You win games like these on the backs of your superstars (hey Penguins fans, Max Talbot is THE SUPERSTAR right?) and the Canucks have more of those players than the Bruins. Either way, I am sure looking forward to the game tonight. Nothing in sports is better than a game seven, and maybe no game sevens match the intensity and excitement of those in hockey.

- Major League baseball is over 40% of the way through its season and the lack of storylines continues to be a trend. Derek Jeter is now on the DL postponing his 3,000 hits bid, which was inevitable anyways. Almost every team in baseball is still alive for the postseason. There are a few players, Jose Bautista and Curtis Granderson come to mind, having fantastic seasons but nobody who is doing something that approaches historical. Scoring continues to be down and there are more pitchers having good years but again, none are doing anything historic. The teams we thought would be good, the Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, Braves, Rangers, etc. are good and outside of the Twins and Indians, the season has gone pretty much as expected. Really, the biggest story in baseball is the hometown Buccos and their quest to end the streak of 18 consecutive losing seasons. As we sit today, the Pirates are 33-33 and only 4 games out of the division lead. If the Pirates can continue to play at or around .500 I suspect the story will continue to pick up steam nationally.

- Speaking of the Pirates, it will be interesting to see what management does as the trade deadline approaches if they continue to hover around .500 and stay somewhat in contention. From a team building prospective, they should still be in “sell” mode but a run at .500 in August and September, especially if there is no football going on, would be a tremendous financial opportunity for the club and that is part of management’s job as well. I will have a lot more on this next week and my thoughts on what I think the Pirates should do if they continue to play good baseball into mid July.

- Pitt and Penn State have agreed to renew their rivalry on the football field starting in 2016. I know this is a big deal for the alumni bases but sorry, I can’t get excited over a football game five years from now. It is ridiculous that this game has not been played in over ten years and even when it resumes, it will lack the tradition and history the rivalry should have.

- College football is covered in scandal. The NFL is in danger of missing a portion or all of its upcoming season due to labor negotiations. The NBA and NHL have never been more popular. Is this the beginning of the end for football as America’s favorite sport? Probably not, and I suspect that the NFL and the Player’s Association will work something out in time because there is too much money to be lost but with a game that violent and that popular I think it is only a matter of time before the popularity decline begins.

- From my standpoint, the labor negotiations have been this year’s version of the Brett Favre comeback story as the most heavily covered story by the media that the general population doesn’t really care about. Most people could care less about how the two sides split up the $10 billion pie (despite the posturing by the player’s association and the owners blaming the other one) and really only care about whether there will be a season or not. I have kept an eye on the negotiations and court rulings from a general business interest but boy do I get annoyed when I have to listen to the daily updates on Sportscenter or on Mike and Mike when they are talking labor negotiations in mid-May. Despite being force-fed coverage of the lockout for the past four months, it will only be in the next couple of months when the pressure to get a deal done really picks up as fans start to become worried about a season actually being missed and players and owners alike realize that there may not be checks coming in the very near future.