Is "Baller" Trademarked Yet?

Before discussing the two topics involved in this post, I would like to congratulate UConn for winning their second straight championship!  It is an unbelievable feat that very few teams do, and their dominance all season paid off. Going into the Men’s tournament each year, I have one metric that I utilize the most when projecting the winners, which effectively determines which team has the most potential NBA Draft selections out of their older players.   This has proven to be the best metric I have found; while I have only been correct with one of the past 4 winners (I had Gonzaga, Kansas, Houston, and Arizona from 2021-2024 respectively), each of the actual winners (Baylor, Kansas, and UConn twice from 2021-2024 respectively) looked amazing in this metric in particular.   Out of the teams that lost in the semifinals, Alabama was solid in this metric (I wouldn’t have predicted them since UNC and Arizona were in this region and were better in this metric) and NC State h...

Before discussing the two topics involved in this post, I would like to congratulate South Carolina for winning the championship and completing an undefeated season!  They had an incredible year and completed what seemed impossible after their entire starting lineup was gone. While it’s been the hottest talking point of the season, I honestly find it to be a dumb thing to debate.   My general mindset is that it doesn’t make sense to compare two different eras when the talent is naturally better (in that regard, I often joke that the NBA 75 should realistically be the 75 best players in the NBA that season, and the NBA 100 should be the 100 best players in the league that season).   While I think it makes sense to speculate how players would fare in different eras, I think it gets ridiculous since many people ignore that talent improves after their favorite era of basketball, which makes a lot of older fans convinced that the basketball talent now is not better than that...

For years, there has been a perception that one team in the Women’s March Madness tournament will dominate.  For many years, there was some truth to this, as dynasties formed, with teams like Louisiana Tech, USC, Tennessee, Stanford, UConn, Baylor, and South Carolina all won multiple championships within a short window of their primes.  South Carolina appeared to be the newest, but fell to Iowa in the Final Four.  This opened the opportunity for LSU to win and continue a unique era in Women’s college basketball, resulting in the 5 th unique winner in 5 tournaments. While there are several talented teams that could go far in the tournament, I cannot stray from predicting an undefeated South Carolina team.   Dawn Staley is one of the best coaches in college basketball, the team is again amazing, and they appear to have addressed their concerns from last seasons.   I have them beating Iowa 81-75.   Still, it won’t be an easy team for either team to go all t...

Every year, there is so much analysis regarding who is going to win the championship, with so many “experts” and talking heads claiming there are a few teams who are going to win; that said, they’re almost never right.  Even in my case, I have 4 metrics which have provided a good indicator of success over the past several years, and I’m often more wrong than right.  This is the nature of the Men’s tournament normally, and I think it is going to be worse this year. This season, there are 3 teams that were the Men’s side of college basketball that were considered better than any other team, in UConn, Houston, and Purdue.   The catch is that there are serious concerns with each of them, especially the latter two.   I don’t believe there is a single team that is a clear favorite, but there is one team that fares the best in most of the metrics:   Arizona.   I am predicting them beating Creighton 75-68.   That said, I would not be surprised if I get none ...

I have heard and read several sports talking heads going insane talking about how the NBA All-Star Game is broken and needs to be fixed.  Most of these messengers are middle-aged to old men whose talking points involve that the players don’t care, it used to mean something, and nobody has ever gotten injured during an All-Star Game (my counter to that is that Kemba Walker was never the same after the 2020 All-Star Game).  That said, younger voices have not been loud with their criticism, and I agree with them.  I think these dissenting voices are missing the point of the game, and I would argue that the game itself isn’t broken, meaning it doesn’t need to be fixed. Historically, All-Star games were created for the best players to play against each other for a variety of reasons, though often these sorts of exhibitions are often financial based.   As they evolved, many games became the only time other stars played against each other was in the All-Star Game.   ...