With Juwan Howard officially joining the Miami Heat - 14 years after the team first tried to get him - the word “irony” is getting thrown around a lot. But here’s a small one:
When Howard signed with Miami in 1996, he almost broke the NBA. As Howard signs with Miami in 2010, the NBA is almost broke.
Howard’s annulled deal of ‘96 was essentially the pinnacle of his career; he’d been an All-Star in his second season, carried a woefully under-talented and oft-injured Bullets team to the brink of the playoffs and now had teams fighting to offer him a $100 million contract. Read more…
Textcerpts, The sporting life
I’ve been a fan since his freshman year.
Lin could become the first Harvard player in the NBA since Ed Smith in 1953. As a senior, Lin nearly guided the non-scholarship Crimson to its first NCAA Tournament berth since 1946. He averaged 16.4 points and 4.4 rebounds. He went undrafted and was widely considered a nice story but not an NBA player.
Much like his 8.0 scoring average with 2.0 assists and 2.3 rebounds in 15.7 minutes in four summer league games, Lin’s stat line doesn’t tell the whole story of his production and value. The Mavs came to Las Vegas seeking to train the electrifying guard Rodrigue Beaubois to run the point but will leave knowing that Lin — while not the complete athlete or pure shooter as Beaubois — is the superior point guard.
–Kaplan, ESPNDallas.com, 7/17
Textcerpts, The sporting life
On Thursday—day seven for some parents with a three-day weekend ahead and more snow in the offing—nerves were beginning to fray.
“I am about ready to eat my children,” said one mom, who declined to be named.
-Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 2/11
Textcerpts
The iTampon jokes are flying. This is to be expected, but it does not mean that iPad is a bad name. Not for Apple, it isn’t. Apple can make this work just fine.
Marketing 201: if you’re a small company, your product name will be defined by language. But if you’re a huge company (or a government,) language can be redefined by your product name.
-Howard Tayler, Blógünder Schlock, 1/27
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By the end of this year, tablets of all types will have a less than 1% market share, with 3 million to 4 million units shipping, Endpoint Technologies analyst Roger Kay predicts. “But Apple could blow that forecast out of the water,” he says.
-Baig, USA Today, 1/27
Biz of the biz, Textcerpts
Something has caused Ron Artest to develop plantar fasciitis in both feet, and Lakers CoachPhil Jackson believes that something might be the shoes his small forward wears…
“I’ve called his shoes concrete boots for about the last month,” Jackson said. “Those shoes look like they are made for the Hudson River. But he stays with them and he gets his feet worked on. But he does not move really quickly. He looks like he’s clogging around out there.”
Artest endorses a shoe by a Chinese company called Peak Shoes, as do Dallas’ Jason Kidd and Houston’s Shane Battier.
Turner, Los Angeles Times, 1/25
Textcerpts, The sporting life
O’Brien’s last night as host of “The Tonight Show” drew a preliminary rating of 7.0, which translates to about 8 million households. But more impressive, he scored a 4.8 rating in the key demographic of viewers 18 to 49, one of the highest scores for any show at any time of night on network TV this year.
By comparison, Jay Leno’s so-called last show as host of the “The Tonight Show” earned a final household rating of 8.8, topping O’Brien by about 2 million households. But O’Brien did better with young viewers, as Leno’s “finale” scored only a 3.4 rating in that group.
-Zurawik, Baltimore Sun, 1/23
Cultural catch-all, Textcerpts
Watts devised a clever way to simulate the effect. He and his collaborator, Matthew Salganik, created a music-downloading Web site. They uploaded 48 songs by unknown bands and got people to log in to the site, listen to the songs, then rate and download them. Users could see one another’s rankings, and they were influenced in roughly the same way self-fulfilling prophecies are supposed to work.
That meant some tunes could become hits — and others duds — partly because of social pressure.
-Clive Thompson, Wired, December 2009
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The show hasn’t changed, we have. I’m not a big fan of Mr. Leno’s comedy, but he did a remarkable job of hanging onto Johnny Carson’s audience, losing just a little over 10 percent of the show’s viewers in his first 10 years, according to Nielsen. But as broadband Internet and DVRs became ubiquitous in recent years, “The Tonight Show” and much of network television disappeared into a thicket.
Ratings for “The Tonight Show” fell off a cliff the year before Mr. O’Brien took over in 2009, dropping to about 4.7 million viewers a night, from about 5.5 million, or 15 percent, in a single year, according to Nielsen.
-David Carr, New York Times, 1/18
Biz of the biz, Textcerpts
