I bet Mr. Met STILL has nightmares...

I was thinking that since the Magic have decided that they want to take all the Sacramento Kings' castoffs, that the Magic should go out and sign Keon Clark. He would instantly become their most offensively proficient frontcourt player and would give DeShawn Stevenson somebody to hang out with...then I remembered that nobody can find him. Seriously, with all the talking that people did about Ricky Williams and even Bison Dele when they just stopped playing and dissapeared, you'd think that somebody, anybody would've written an an expose on Keon Clark and how he has just willingly given up millions of dollars...It cpuld be because nobody can find him or it oculd be that I'm the only person who cares...but you have to admit that the whole thing is more than a little strange.

I had not seen the replay of Richard Jefferson being undercut by Chauncey Billups until yesterday when ESPNews was talking about Jefferson being out for the year. Wow. How did this play slip under my radar? As someone who played basketball on a competitive level for most of my life, I have to say that it was a very dirty play. Now Jefferson is out for the season. Chauncey can defend it all he wants, but the simple fact is this...you DO NOT take out somebody's legs from underneath them when they are in the air. You just don't, its one of the few unwritten basketball rules. This even applies in pickup games. I have seen fights break out over fouls just like the one Billups committed. Hard fouls are a part of the game but to undercut somebody like that is cheap, plain and simple. Furthermore, it is a joke that Larry Brown, who always talks about his "respect for the game" and "playing the right way", can go out of his way to call out Carmelo Anthony for not being a "good teammate" during the Olympics but will then refuse to comment on whether he thinks Billups' foul was dirty...I guess respect for the game only matters when you can gain something by talking about it. Dean Smith must be beaming with pride.

Peter King brought up a great point in his tuesday edition of Monday Morning Quarterback when he discussed ESPN's refusal to show the Randy Moss celebration replay. How is showing that replay even close to as harmful or tasteless as showing the replay of the Pistons-Pacers fight ad nauseum? I can see where the executives at ESPN were coming from...showing gratuitous violence on a 24 hour loop is definitely alot better than showing a simulated mooning. Personally, I think that having to watch that old ESPN commercial with Mr. Met slathering sun tan lotion on Linda Cohn while she posed in a one piece swimsuit was far more damaging to the youth of America than the two of these combined, no question.

Tonight North Carolina takes on Ga. Tech and I couldn't be more excited. Though I graduated from an SEC school, I have always had a soft spot for ACC basketball. It is consistently the best conference in the country with a load of fantastic rivalries, not to mention NBA ready players. These are two of the better teams in the country and they both play an uptempo, exciting brand of basketball. I am most intrigued by the Jarret Jack-Raymond Felton matchup because I love watching good point guards go head-to-head. Personally, I like Felton's game better, as he is more of a point guard while Jack is a "lead guard" but you can't go wrong with either player as they both are extremely talented as well as top shelf competitors. It should be the first great ACC matchup of the year, but certainly not the last. One final note...you could make a case that this game also features the country's most underrated coach (Paul Hewitt) versus the country's most overrated coach (Roy Williams). They can both recruit and coach but one of them sure seems to come up short an awful lot...and I'm not talking about Hewitt's days at Siena.