Posted on by
Reply

I walked up to the Garden’s day-of-game window Wednesday night and asked for the cheapest ticket available.  It was 45 minutes before tip.  St. John’s vs. West Virginia.

25 bucks.  That’ll get you a seat up in the 300 level.

I bought a ten dollar cup of Heineken on the fancy new main level and scouted out a way to upgrade my seating location.  An usher working a section behind one of the baskets said he didn’t mind if I crashed his territory as long as I sat near the rear of it.

The Johnnies started five freshmen.  They were seven and a half point underdogs but came out running and gunning.  WVU missed 11 of its first 14 shot attempts.  Twelve minutes into the game, St. John’s was up 21-6.  They coasted the whole way and won 78-62.

Attendance was just 6901.

The guy I was most intrigued to see had a big night.  Johnnies swingman Moe Harkless (pictured above with the ball) scored 23, pulled down 13 boards and had three blocks.  As he’s done four times previously this season, Harkless was on the floor for the entire game.

The way Harkless plays reminds me of the great Mizzou swingman and fellow Queens native Derrick Chievous.  There’s an unusual elasticity in Moe’s frame.  Listed at 6-foot-8, Harkless plays the wing on offense but is the primary force underneath when the other team has the ball.  He skies over guys his size and uses that rubber-band agility to great advantage.  He’s really fun to watch.

Harkless is the highest rated recruit to play for the Johnnies since Ron Artest.  How long he stays is unclear but his tweener-type game may keep him in college for another year to hone his shot.

A majority of the St. John’s scoring (50 points) came from inside the paint.  From an all-frosh lineup, that’s impressive.

At about 6:45 PM, St. John’s coach Steve Lavin elicited excited murmurs from the crowd when he appeared on the Garden hardwood for a pre-game ceremony.  Fifteen minutes later, Lavin had moved up high to a Garden suite as an observer.  Lavin says prostate cancer surgery in early October has left him without the stamina necessary to handle full-time head coaching duties.  He last worked the sideline on 11-18-11 and says it’s possible he may wait until next season to return to the bench.

Assistant Mike Dunlap has assumed the role of head coach in Lavin’s absence.  Dunlap said after the game that it was Lavin who suggested the all-frosh starting lineup but all indications are that in-game decisions are made without intervention from the sky box.

As is his custom, WVU coach Bob Huggins wore all black.  He wasn’t a happy camper for this one.  Huggins seemed especially miffed at the defensive positioning of his bearded Turkish big man Deniz Killici.

I think I figured out the source of discomfort coming from the newly-installed grey-colored seats in MSG’s lower bowl.  Many fans have complained they’re smaller.  I believe the problem is that they’re positioned too low to the ground.  It’s only when you sit in an old green seat immediately prior to switching to a grey seat that one can make this comparison.

One other oddity of the ongoing renovation at MSG is the brand new men’s washroom located between sections 102 and 103.  The entire bathroom is configured with regular toilet basins equipped with stall doors.  No urinals.  When you walk into it, you wonder if you’re in a women’s room by accident.  The rationale of making an entire men’s room of the sit-down variety is a serious waste of space.  While those consuming the Garden‘s $19 steak sandwich might appreciate it, those of us doing nothing more than drinking the $10 beers think otherwise.

-The Times failed to cover the game.  Thursday’s newspaper devoted just two lines of wire copy to an event that occurred just eight short city blocks from its newsroom.

-On the way into the game, I walked by Radioman hanging out on 33rd Street.  I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but when I opened up the Post today, there was a picture of Radioman kissing Katherine Heigl on the cheek before the New York premiere of her new movie.

Posted on by
Reply

Francesa’s annual Super Bowl trivia contest has extra buzz this year with Big Blue in the big game.  For as long as I can remember, Francesa and WFAN have given away five Super Bowl trips for two.  Contestants are asked to answer four Super Bowl-related questions with each one becoming progressively more difficult.

When the Mad Dog was around, he’d take on the “Marquis” alter-ego.  Russo would dress up in a white wig and a royal robe.  The Marquis would ask the questions while Mike acted as the game’s moderator.

Now, it’s all Mike with a stack of papers containing hundreds of questions.  Many are recycled from previous years.

It’s fun radio even if you’re not calling in as a contestant.  The prize is substantial.  You get two game tickets, airfare, four nights at a Fairfield Inn in Indy, a rental car and trinkets.  In all, the value of the trip for two is about ten grand.

What was really interesting this week was that Francesa stumped and frustrated two days worth of contestants with the same audio clip of a mystery player.  Several contestants on Monday and Tuesday were one answer away from winning the trip but failed to identify the taped voice of a prior Super Bowl participant who said the following:

“I try to not get too involved about the past.  I helped them out with some suggestions on how maybe to take the Super Bowl as an event but as far as the ring goes, nobody’s really asked to see it – so I’m not gonna break it out and shove it down their throats.”

The Francesa internet message board is a repository for contest answers and many posters made convincing claims they knew the mystery voice.  But each time a contestant used a suggested answer from the message board, Francesa groaned that they were incorrect.

Two full days went by and Francesa failed to give away the first of five trips up for grabs.  He seemed to enjoy his audience’s inability to decipher the voice on the audio clip.

Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, a caller named Ray from Wall, NJ nailed it.  Here’s what it sounded like:

John Kuhn didn’t touch the ball in last year’s Super Bowl and was on the Steelers practice squad five years earlier when Pittsburgh beat the Seahawks in SB XL.  Kuhn’s not completely obscure, but you could see how his voice would be tough to figure out despite a subtle Pennsylvania accent.

I love listening all week for the reaction of Francesa’s contest winners.  When somebody who roots for a team in the big game wins the big prize, it’s almost as good as the actual football game half the time.

Posted on by
Reply

The process that determines who will run for US President as a Republican this fall is a whole lot more interesting than those covering it are letting on.

I’m not talking about the daily campaign trail travails of the four remaining major GOP candidates fighting for the nomination.

My beef is the same one raised four years ago.  There’s serious failure across the spectrum of those responsible for recording this ritual of democracy to include even basic context on delegate math as the primary calendar is advanced.  Factual framework is left out of the media’s discussion of results in early primary states with small populations and misshaped demographics.

The widely recited takeaway following South Carolina’s primary was that the first three contests (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina) had been “won“ by three different candidates.  This is misleading.  On the first Tuesday of the new year, Iowans scribbled their preferred candidate on slips of paper and had their votes counted quickly in hallways off the caucus rooms.  Piles of handwritten votes were tabulated imprecisely.  Even the now-certified outcome in Iowa lacks a binding obligation when delegates are chosen some six months from now.  The media initially insisted on proclaiming Romney the narrow victor in Iowa, then backtracked when a revised total showed that Santorum had the most caucus votes state-wide.  In reality, there was no “winner.”   The night was more a preliminary state-wide Republican discussion of what the future holds.  The candidates lavished Iowa undue attention because of a thirst for a positive first impression.  A media obsessed with simplifying wanted a winner rather than telling the real story.

A week later, Romney picked up a pretty good percentage of the total votes (39%) cast in New Hampshire but added only seven delegates to his total.  He and the others need 1144 to win the nomination.

Eleven days after that, Newt Gingrich racked up 40-percent of the 601-thousand votes cast in South Carolina’s open GOP primary.  An exit poll using a huge sample size found that six out of ten voters said they were either born again or Evangelical Christians.  The formula used for divvying up delegates in South Carolina is a winner-take-all/congressional district hybrid and Newt walked away with 23 of the 25 total.

None of the papers or major web sites covering politics devoted even a single paragraph in their recaps to delegate scoring following Gingrich’s finish in South Carolina.  The story instead was that Romney’s aura of invincibility had been pierced and Gingrich had become an immediate threat to the front-runner.  Remember, at that point the allegiance of only 37 delegates from a total of 2286 had been settled.

The other ignored twist that must be mentioned is that New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan and Arizona all have been docked half their allocated delegate totals for staging primaries earlier than allowed by the national party.  All five states have decided it’s more important be among the first states to have vote counts than to give their people a representative delegation at the national convention.

The disproportional and misleading coverage of outcomes in the early primary states ignores the long haul math and only encourages more states to position votes at ridiculously early dates on the calendar.

Florida’s GOP primary is a week away and four million registered republicans in that state should produce a whopping 100 convention delegates.   But by moving up its primary six weeks starting in 2008, Florida will now just send 50 delegates to Tampa to pick a nominee this summer.  It’ll get the bright glare of candidate attention and media coverage the next few days but will have done so at a significant cost to the voice of its people.

For both the candidates and the states that vote on them, attention and perception have almost become more important than the tangible thresholds needed to become the national party nominee.

Omission of delegates won, delegates needed to gain the nomination and delegates at stake in a given state (with an explanation of how they’re distributed vis-à-vis the vote tally) has turned media summations of the campaign to date into often baseless interpretations, speculation and blather.

Sportswriters cover a seven-game playoff series by leading their game stories with the score at the end of each contest.  Political writers are leaving out such information.

It’s ok to talk about who has the money, organization and staff to win this thing.  The debates have been great.  But when some of these early states count the votes, the results should be put in proper context.  Nobody right now has more than .02 of the total delegates needed for nomination.  Whoever wins Florida will certainly gain a boost given that state’s size and influence.  The 50 delegates may or may not all go to the winner.  A national party edict bans winner-take-all primaries before April 1 but Florida says it will try to wiggle out of that and allocate all fifty to the top vote-getter.

Whatever happens in Florida, though, remember the math.  If you’re a Republican, hopefully you can ignore tired media-advanced themes that so-and-so did such-and-such when he should have done this-and-that.  Realize the math of this process is such that it’s not over ’til it’s over, especially when just a few states want us to think it is.

Posted on by
Reply

The cable TV blackout of Knicks, Rangers, Devils and Islanders games is three weeks old now and hundreds of thousands of affected sports fans have no concrete understanding of why their games are gone.

Neither side in the contractual dispute between MSG and Time Warner is publicly acknowledging or advancing specific details or proposals connected to their disagreement. Rather than state their respective factual cases to the fair-minded sports programming consumer that’s been through these sagas before, both conglomerates are buying up full-page newspaper ads that lob sophomoric trash talk at the other corporate behemoth.

A look at MSG’s “Get The Facts” page on its web site reveals no pertinent information about what MSG wants from Time Warner in exchange for supplying the MSG and MSG Plus channels.

Even the writers who cover sports media in this town have been unable or unwilling to dig up and disseminate much in the way of specifics on what is a substantial concern to many.

So, as a longtime Time Warner Cable subscriber here in Queens , let me supplement the few known numbers at play here with an observation about what’s really an aggravating disruption in service.

Richard Sandomir of the Times obtained data from the research firm SNL Kagan that says MSG charged Time Warner a total of $4.91 per cable subscriber for its two sports channels before turning off the signal on 1-1-12.

In a news release posted at its web site, Time Warner says it thought it had a deal to pay more for MSG and MSG Plus.  It was prepared to pay a 6.5-percent increase (32 cents extra) per month just prior to losing MSG and Plus. Shortly after the NBA lockout ended, Time Warner says MSG upped its demand and asked for a 53-percent increase in the monthly fee (a $2.60 hike).

MSG has denied Time Warner’s latter assertion but won’t disclose what it’s seeking.

The two parties have also bickered about carriage of the MSG-owned FUSE channel but I can’t imagine that’s a central concern in this matter.

My position on this as a sports fan is a bit complicated. I understand Time Warner’s desire to keep content costs in check. My monthly Time Warner cable/internet bill is already $190 a month and each new content cost increase is eventually passed on to the customer.

MSG’s near monopoly on winter pro sports programming in this city makes it must-have. You really gotta have it. The Rangers are playing well right now. Their thrilling OT win in Boston on Saturday was off the screen for big chunks of Manhattan , Queens and Brooklyn and that’s rough on the hockey fan. If one believes Time Warner’s high-end assertion that MSG wants an extra $2.60 monthly per customer, I’m in the camp that would pay it and be done with it to end the blackout.

But if Time Warner conceded to that demand, it would probably bother those who don’t watch MSG much, if at all.

A fair starting point on all of this of course would be transparency on content costs. Tell the customer what each ingredient in the stew costs so they can mull it all over.

The problem with disclosure of cable TV’s individual channel costs is that it leads to talk of a la carte pricing. The consumer would love to pick and choose what it pays for.

The cable industry opposes this because it profits from selling products as take-it-or-leave-it bundles that include channels you don’t want.

Time Warner recorded a $356 million third quarter profit in 2011 and was $1.1 billion on the plus side through the first nine months of the year. The Cablevision (MSG’s parent) numbers over the same periods ($39 mil and $231 mil) are much smaller but still aren’t shabby.

The fight over how much MSG gets for its content comes down to millions on one side or the other but is just a couple of bucks a month here or there to the Knick fan. Or the hockey fan. Whatever it is, it’s a lot cheaper than buying a ticket.

Me? I’m just listening to games on the radio hoping they come back. The Post ran a story Saturday saying the stalemate could last months.

Time Warner probably has greater leverage since MSG owns the teams that now have a new and large bunch of aggrieved fans. Time Warner can say with some legitimacy that it’s attempting to protect its customers.

I just want the channels back on.  Fans are on the short end of a disagreement between two rich corporations who won’t even say exactly what they’re squabbling about.

Posted on by
Reply

My friends Jeff and Deborah of Nashville came to the Big Apple this week for the only two New York-area games on the 2011-12 Predators regular season road schedule.  The pair are loyal Preds fans.  I’ve long lobbied them to come in conjunction with a Preds road trip.

Back in Nashville, Jeff and Deborah can be found in lower level seats opposite the team benches at all Predator home games.  I’ve been out there for a game in their building and was happy when they announced last fall that they’d come here for games at two arenas with strong and contrasting hockey traditions.

Monday’s tilt on Long Island was a special holiday matinee.  We took the Long Island Rail Road to Hempstead and then jumped on the bus (route 71) for the short ride down Hempstead Turnpike.  It should be noted that Nassau County privatized its bus service effective the first of the year.  The buses now are emblazoned with a new logo (NICE) but the balance of the bus experience feels the same.  The fare remains $2.25.

There were lots of kids in the crowd announced at 10,755.  The Preds scored three first period goals and made its quick pounce hold up with strong goaltending from star netminder Pekka Rinne.  The Islanders put 37 shots on net.  The only home team score came on a John Tavares tip-in with four minutes left in the game.  3-1 was the final.  Rinne is 10-0-1 this season when he faces 35 more shots in a game.  The 29-year-old Rinne is 6-foot-five head to toe and has great quickness.  His frame alone blocks much of the goal.  Rinne signed a seven-year, $49 million dollar extension two months ago.  The long-term deal for Rinne may be viewed as a bit risky given its length but the Nashville organization has a consistent track record of loyalty to its bedrock components.  Predators GM David Poile and Head Coach Barry Trotz both have held their jobs since the franchise’s inception in 1998.

Cultivation of talent acquired through the draft has been so successful in Nashville, retention of two valuable homegrown players may be impossible.  Defensemen Shea Weber and Ryan Suter both on the verge of free agency and it’s likely they’ll command salaries that gobble up too much cap space given what’s already been doled out to Rinne.

Two bars at Nassau Coliseum specialize in the sale of independent craft brews.  Jeff is a beer-hound with fondness for IPA and so Blue Point Brewery’s Hoptical Illusion (made in Patchogue, NY) was his choice of cheer as he rooted on the Preds from section 102.

The next night we hit Madison Square Garden.  The Rangers have the NHL’s best record and the Preds had won five in a row (8 of last 9) going in.  It was a big buzz matchup.  Unfortunately, Trotz decided to start backup goalie Anders Lindback.  That decision took some starch out of the game.  It was for sentimental reasons that Trotz handed the assignment to his backup.  The 23-year-old Lindback is from Sweden.  So is his “idol” Henrik Lundqvist of the Rangers.  Trotz sat his hot, high-paid keeper so his backup could get a kick out of facing his countryman.

The Rangers won 3-nothing and Lundqvist (pictured above) took a bow for the sellout crowd after the game.  Our view from section 119 was excellent.  Craft brews (unless you count Brooklyn Lager) were nowhere to be found.  Jeff and Deborah wore Preds jerseys to both games.  The only verbal punishment either one faced at the two venues came from a hostile Rangers fan in the MSG men’s room after Tuesday night’s game.  A guy standing behind Jeff in the bathroom line unleashed an ugly and intimidating statement that unfortunately is not completely uncommon at a pro sporting event in the current era.  I won’t recite here what was said but it was aggressive, profane and disturbing especially when you consider the hospitality Jeff extends to visiting fans at his home arena.

The addition of Brad Richards to a team loaded with talent makes the Rangers my current pick to win the Stanley Cup.  I never pick the Rangers.  They never seem to mesh.  But this team has lots of toughness.  Lots of young, emerging talent.  Rookie winger Carl Hagelin is fresh out of the University of Michigan hockey program and gives the team’s PK unit a big spark.  Lundqvist is playing great.  There’s a legit captain in Ryan Callahan and pretty consistent hard work coming from all corners of this team.  Let’s see what happens when the Rangers get into it with Boston, but I think the Blueshirts are going all the way this year.

It was rainy and cold during our sightseeing window Tuesday afternoon.  Among our stops was the new 9-11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site.  Huge waterfalls pour into the twin tower footprints.  The names of 9-11 victims are inscribed on bronze panels along the outer edges of the pools.  In all, it’s a beautiful eight-acre space in the middle of what’s currently a massive construction zone.  One World Trade is already 90 floors in the air.  On Tuesday, fog shrouded upper portions of newly-erected steel.  When it’s done early next year, it’ll be the tallest building in the US (if you count the antennae that takes it up to 1776 feet).

A free pass obtained in advance is the only ticket into the memorial site.  This was my first time there.  It would be my hope that full and open access to the site occurs once construction in the vicinity is completed.  That’ll take a long time, but I’d hope the current security screening procedures and ticketing process goes away and that the space becomes more open.

The old World Trade Center plaza was a place you could roam freely.  Certain constraints should be expected, sure, but the beauty of the memorial and all it is surrounded by should be open to public inspection on a whim when feasible.

Electronic machines arranged on the memorial’s perimeter help visitors determine where an inscription of a victim’s name is located.  Those who designed the site should be given major credit for the emphasis on trees.  About 400 White Swamp Oaks dot the site.  They’re beautiful, even in wintertime.  When those trees reach higher levels of maturity, they’re gonna be spectacular.

The Nashvillians’ visit ended here in my neighborhood with bowls of sopa de pollo at La Abundancia.  When I saw them off at LaGuardia, people in the long, slow-moving check-in line for JetBlue were shaking their heads in frustration.  There was no such wait for those flying Southwest back to Nashville via Chicago-Midway.