Is "Baller" Trademarked Yet?

The NBA Trade Deadline has come and gone and while Kyle Lowry remains in Toronto, there were several exciting moves.  Some of the major ones include Nikola Vucevic to Chicago, Victor Oladipo to Miami, Aaron Gordon to Denver, Dwight Powell to Portland, Evan Fournier to Boston, George Hill to Philadelphia, Rajon Rondo to the Clippers, J.J. Redick to Dallas, and Lou Williams to Magic City…I mean Atlanta.  In this post, I analyzed and graded every trade in March for each team.  Trades are ranked based on magnitude of star power in the trade and ones that seemed to be most discussed.  An asterisk (*) indicates that the trade was completed prior to the deadline and includes stats up until the date of the trade.  All deadline day trades will include statistics prior to games played on the date of the deadline (March 25 th ).  All stats are according to Basketball-Reference unless otherwise noted. Nikola Vucevic to Chicago Chicago receives Nikola Vucevic and ...

Every year, I create a bracket for the Men’s and Women’s March Madness.  While I don’t watch enough college to truly be an expert and my Men’s bracket is often horrible (more on that in a bit), I thought it would be good to discuss what I think will happen.   Men’s Bracket Usually, I don’t have any rhyme or reason to my bracket; in fact, I frequently have had teams that are even 4 or 5 seeds winning it; needless to say, my brackets aren’t usually very good.   The best year I ever had was when I had Pittsburgh winning the tournament in 2009 and they were eliminated on a buzzer-beater in the Elite 8 (the only time my winner ever even made it that far).   In 2019, I tried out something a little different in small dosages:   I selected some teams based on which of their players were expected to be drafted and who had talented upperclassmen.   While my predicted winner (Tennessee) still only reached the Sweet 16, I didn’t have Duke winning due to the amoun...

In most seasons, there is a clear sense of which teams are trying to buy and acquire more talent or sell to get a return on their current talent across the league.  This year, there seems to be a few teams that are guaranteed to either try to buy or sell, but most of them are either uncertain while only a few seem likely to be staying put.  In this post, I rank them into 6 groups:  likely buying, possibly buying, likely staying put, possibly selling, likely selling, and unsure.  I also included a rating of how likely I think each team is to make trades.  The ranking is a scale from -2 to +2, where -2 is most likely to sell and +2 is most likely to buy.  There are 3 teams I consider likely buying (~+2), 8 teams possibly buying (~+1), 5 teams likely staying put (~+0), 4 teams likely selling (~-1), 3 teams likely selling (~-2), and 7 teams I am unsure about (too large of a range for me to feel confident).  I first listed the teams in the categories and th...