What happens in dreamleague happens in the NBA

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[From Stephen B. Snyde for Friday tidbits...]

Any given dreamleague AAA game, any given night: guy dribbles down the court with about 10 seconds left, down by 1. He's already taken most of the team's shots and, quite frankly, the team is better off with him shooting this last one, and they want him to shoot it. Only one problem: the other team knows this too.

So anyways, the guy's defender is doing a pretty good job, especially as the guy dribbles some more to the sideline, further choking his options, as the clock ticks down 10, 9, 8. Another defender from the other end of the court comes over to try and pick it while his teammate has the guy preoccupied. Guy heaves it with two hands in his face at the buzzer, ball comes nowhere near hoop. Game over. Yuck. Guy and his teammates all go home depressed a little, but not that bad. Gotta get up for work in the morning. Hey, it's AAA. We're here for fun anyways. No need to go yelling at each other and strive for perfection.

Well, this same thing happened to Lebron James and the Cavs last week. Same exact thing (sadly, even the post-mortem). The 2-guard was nowhere to be found. The 3 and the 5 decided to watch from the baseline. The 4 failed to cut to the wide open middle. No one on the bench really knew what to say. Coach forgot to draw up a play. Total, utter lack of basketball IQ exhibited.

It's just a good thing we dreamleaguers don't end up in the newspaper later in the week with sentence after sentence of ridiculously obvious observations and comments.

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Wonder-trail of MJ DKYs Part III of IV

He could have owned TWO dynasties!

Continued from Part II...

Then if you Google "jonathan kovler bulls", you'll find courtesy of the NY Times that George Steinbrenner (of all people) once owned 10% of the Bulls, but his share was bought out by Jerry Reinsdorf in '85, prior to the Bulls' championship runs. Based on 2003 estimates in Rovell's article, Reinsdorf parlayed his $9.2 million investment twenty-fold into $184 million! When Steinbrenner sold, the Bulls were only worth a little over $16 million. Ten percent of that is only $1.6 million, so my guess is, Georgie's original investment was probably around $500,000 (maybe less). Had he held onto his share, theoretically he could have turned $500k into about $33 million!

Btw, according to 60 Minutes, MJ was worth $4 million (annually?), mostly in endorsements. He was worth a quarter of the Bulls value! Assuming that's a per-year basis, not even LeBron comes close to that (Nike: $90 mil over 7 years, Cavs: $80 mil over 5 years).

More to follow in Part IV someday in the near future.

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LeBron's global strategy now hinges on playing 1-on-1 with Chinese kid (from Chicago?!)

Our beloved beacon of basketball brouhaha, TrueHoop.com, reported earlier on Tuesday in a line item that LeBron James just "announced" a promotional deal with Microsoft, so I had no choice but to drop everything and embark on a writeup which I was hoping could wait until the holidays.

I put "announced" in quotation marks because this is actually pretty old news. Microsoft has sponsored LBJ's Bike-A-Thon in the past and there's even an insightful transcription (scroll to the middle of the page) of LeBron's budding relationship with Microsoft, through a dialogue between Maverick Carter and a Microsoft executive at an advertising conference not too long ago in late September.

In fact, as you might remember from our dreamleague-wide posts (before we had this blog) on Nov. 27 entitled Chinese Youth with Skillz for LeBron Commercial (scroll almost all the way down), LeBron has been scouring the country for a male Chinese kid age 10-14 with good basketball skills to go one-on-one in his forthcoming commercial with Microsoft...

Read the rest of the story (UPDATED 1/15/2007)

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