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Author Topic: WE LIKE SPORTS  (Read 566816 times)

Ptommydski

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1500 on: 04 Dec 2010, 10:03 »

We had a draw in the election and a draw in the footy and we'd damn well prefer another draw to where this looks like it's going.

I think the Ashes have draw written all over them this year, which of course would be a coup for the Tourists.

Here is the forecast for tonight: Kevin Pietersen getting his ton early on and then staying in bat with Cook forever and ever and ever. He'll go into brick wall mode after a few overs, just watch.
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Dazed

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1501 on: 04 Dec 2010, 10:19 »

Man, they aren't having to give up Buchholz, Bard, or Ellsbury for Gonzalez.

That is pretty awesome.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1502 on: 04 Dec 2010, 14:04 »

Man, they aren't having to give up Buchholz, Bard, or Ellsbury for Gonzalez.

That is pretty awesome.

Ellsbury isn't very good, so San Diego probably got more potential without him since there's no major league player in the deal. I'm a little surprised the Padres didn't demand Buchholz, he overperformed his peripherals last year but he's still under club control for 4 years and that's exactly what the Padres need.

Either way the Pads got completely fleeced. They were going to lose Gonzalez next offseason anyway, but I have to think they could have gotten a better deal than this.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1503 on: 04 Dec 2010, 14:19 »

Ellsbury can be very good, and I think at some point he will be very good if he stays healthy. He got hurt early last year and for whatever reason never came back, but in 2009 he did hit .301, steal 70 bases, and scored almost 100 runs while playing very solid defense. He's really quite good when he's on, my only qualms are health and that iirc he hired the Great Satan to represent him at some point.
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Alex C

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1504 on: 04 Dec 2010, 14:35 »

while playing very solid defense for a Red Sox outfielder.

FTFY
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1505 on: 04 Dec 2010, 15:36 »

Hah. Well played, I suppose, but Manny and Jason Bay aside, the Sox outfield is generally pretty decent in the field. For all his faults, J.D. Drew is a solid fielder, Ellsbury catches everything he gets to which is everything, and makes freakishly athletic plays with some regularity, and whichever minor leaguer is replacing our injured left fielder is at least ok.
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Alex C

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1506 on: 04 Dec 2010, 16:05 »

My problem with Ellsbury is that I get the impression sometimes that he wouldn't need to make a circus catch at all if he didn't sit back so deep and had better instincts. You really can't get away with that without having a Vlad type cannon that lets you get away with taking an extra second or two on a catch. I don't watch enough Red Sox games to really say definitively though. He certainly is fast though.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1507 on: 04 Dec 2010, 16:40 »

Australians - Please account for your shoddy fielding thus far in the Ashes. You've all caught balls before, I've seen it many times.

I have no idea what the deal is with the Australian cricket team is behind the scenes but the brilliant fielding they were known for until so recently was obviously a result of endless training, because frankly that's the only way to build up that kind of uniform skill level. So I can only assume that the training regime had changed dramatically, and catastrophically. The fielding's actually been declining for several seasons now.

It's kind of hilarious watching the Australians being so inept, not least because one-eyed Australian cricket fans are so obnoxious and give the rest of the country such a bad name and almost single-handedly allow the English in particular to perpetuate myopic and outdated national stereotypes and so seeing them suffer is a rare delight for those of us with a less jingoistic understanding of what it means to be an Australian.

As far as the decline of the Australian cricket team goes, was it ever really going to be any other way? You had, in quick succession, the retirement of the greatest spin bowler ever to play the game, one of the greatest fast bowlers of the modern era, one of the greatest wicket keeper-batsmen the game's seen, a pair of openers who in their heyday were simply brutal and could by themselves crush an opposition, etc. Basically half a team's worth of players who'll be talked about for generations to come. Those kind of players, and the skill-set they brought to the team, are irreplaceable.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1508 on: 05 Dec 2010, 03:44 »

Ellsbury can be very good, and I think at some point he will be very good if he stays healthy. He got hurt early last year and for whatever reason never came back, but in 2009 he did hit .301, steal 70 bases, and scored almost 100 runs while playing very solid defense. He's really quite good when he's on, my only qualms are health and that iirc he hired the Great Satan to represent him at some point.

Even in 2009 he only OPS'd .770, though. The vast majority of his hits are singles, and he doesn't draw walks well either. He is really fast, I'll grant that. Buchholz would have been more valuable to the Padres, but it doesn't matter because they didn't get either of them. Three prospects for one of the best players in baseball is pretty absurd, I'm not sure if the trade would have been fair even if the Sox had thrown in Buchholz.

Still, he's not going to play the Giants 18 times a year now, so it could be worse.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1509 on: 05 Dec 2010, 07:52 »

Man, they aren't having to give up Buchholz, Bard, or Ellsbury for Gonzalez.

That is pretty awesome.

The fact that the Sox keeping Bard makes me so, so very happy.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1510 on: 05 Dec 2010, 11:26 »

OPS is a misleading stat for someone like Ellsbury though, because he's such a prolific base-stealer. All those singles he gets? Half the time those turn into doubles and triples within a few pitches. The dude is a very good baseball player.
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jwhouk

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1511 on: 05 Dec 2010, 13:52 »

Interesting thread - go from discussion of the Ashes in one post to a commentary on the Red Sox lineup in the next.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1512 on: 05 Dec 2010, 14:40 »

OPS is a misleading stat for someone like Ellsbury though, because he's such a prolific base-stealer. All those singles he gets? Half the time those turn into doubles and triples within a few pitches. The dude is a very good baseball player.

Except for the 15% of the time he gets caught stealing and those singles become outs? He's a legitimate big league centerfielder, which has value, but is massively overrated. (And that's even using his 2009 percentage, his career number is lower)

Back on the original subject, the deal has apparently fallen through because A-Gon and the Sox couldn't work out a contract extension, and on top of that Jayson Werth just signed a comically oversized contract with the Nationals. Ouch.
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Dazed

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1513 on: 05 Dec 2010, 14:45 »

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1514 on: 05 Dec 2010, 17:21 »

Aaaaaaaaaaaand now the deal's apparently back on, supposedly it will be announced tomorrow morning. Werth's still off the table for Boston though, and the Angels are going to go all in for Crawford so I don't know if they're going to get anybody else. I suppose they could resign Beltre but then where would they play Youk?
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Dazed

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1515 on: 05 Dec 2010, 17:57 »

Left field! He's totally played left field before. It can still happen! Maybe...
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1516 on: 06 Dec 2010, 08:44 »

Interesting thread - go from discussion of the Ashes in one post to a commentary on the Red Sox lineup in the next.

Tiny little miniscule sports trophies, who cares.

I mean seriously. I've seen highlights of the Ashes. I could put that fucker in my pocket.
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David_Dovey

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1517 on: 06 Dec 2010, 08:48 »

Is it really any better than a trophy which is nearly as tall as me?
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1518 on: 06 Dec 2010, 08:51 »

Dude, it's all about big flashy trophies.

I stood near the Stanley Cup once. Not only is it big, it is EXTREMELY shiny.
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McTaggart

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1519 on: 06 Dec 2010, 09:11 »

Man it's got nothing to do with the trophy at all.

It's all about sticking it to the poms.











 :-(
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David_Dovey

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1520 on: 06 Dec 2010, 09:12 »

Dude, it's all about big flashy trophies.

I stood near the Stanley Cup once. Not only is it big, it is EXTREMELY shiny.

Yo

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valley_parade

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1521 on: 06 Dec 2010, 09:16 »

Pictures do not do the shinyness justice.
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David_Dovey

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1522 on: 06 Dec 2010, 11:23 »

Well there was the other photo we took with the flash, but I'm trying not to blind the entire forum.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1523 on: 06 Dec 2010, 11:24 »

It's like they polished it, and then polished the top layer of polish.
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Dazed

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1524 on: 06 Dec 2010, 22:21 »

Hahaha oh man that was glorious. Suck it, Mark Sanchez. Suck it long, suck it hard.
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jwhouk

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1525 on: 07 Dec 2010, 06:47 »

Pictures do not do the shinyness justice.
No they do not.

When you're in its presence... you get shivers.

Not bad for a 117-year old 42-guinea silver cup.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1526 on: 07 Dec 2010, 09:40 »

Hahaha oh man that was glorious. Suck it, Mark Sanchez. Suck it long, suck it hard.

I actually got tired of trash-talking my friend that likes the Jets in the third. It was getting too embarrassing.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1527 on: 07 Dec 2010, 15:56 »

Manchester United topped their Champions League group with a 1-1 draw against Valencia.

Worth noting because infamous waste of money Anderson scored his second goal for the club. It's only taken him 108 games to score that many.

Also worth noting because United would have been the first team to ever go through the group stages without conceding a goal, but Sir Alex started 20-year-old Ben Amos in net.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1528 on: 09 Dec 2010, 05:45 »

Triple postin' cos did we forget about this thread OR DID THE RED SOX JUST SIGN CARL CRAWFORD?!?!?!?!?!??!??!
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1529 on: 09 Dec 2010, 05:46 »

The main thing is the lakers almost lost to the fuccin clippers last night, which is just not okay.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1530 on: 09 Dec 2010, 06:29 »

Okay, I'm serious about this now: Selig needs to realign the American League into four divisions:

AL East: Baltimore, Toronto, Tampa, Cleveland
AL Central: Detroit, Chicago, Minnesota, Kansas City
AL West: LA-Anaheim, Oakland, Texas, Seattle
AL North: Yankees, Red Sox.

That way, they can slug each other out for their division title.
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valley_parade

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1531 on: 09 Dec 2010, 07:13 »

Your new AL East is the most weak-ass baseball division in history. If only you could put the Pirates in there.
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Dazed

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1532 on: 09 Dec 2010, 07:31 »

Hey now its no NL West. Or Central.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1533 on: 09 Dec 2010, 08:31 »

Your new AL East is the most weak-ass baseball division in history. If only you could put the Pirates in there.

Or switch tampa with kansas city
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1534 on: 09 Dec 2010, 14:24 »

Hey now its no NL West. Or Central.

The NL West was the best division in baseball besides the AL East last season, though. It was the only division where 3 teams were viable playoff contenders at the beginning of September, not to mention being the division of the team that ended up winning the World Series. Even though the Padres have been full-on dismantled over the offseason it's still better than either Central division and probably the AL West as well. Doesn't change the fact that the current divisional setup really fucks over Tampa and especially Toronto. One of them should probably get moved to the West, maybe the Blue Jays?

Also, Carl Crawford is good but definitely not good enough to become the highest paid outfielder ever, and that contract is going to be really bad by the end of it when he's in his mid-30s, or at least it would be if Boston didn't have more money than everyone except the Yankees. The Sox will be really really good this upcoming season though, even if some of their pitchers regress which their peripherals indicate they probably will.
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jwhouk

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1535 on: 09 Dec 2010, 15:15 »

1. It would give the other 12 teams in the AL a better chance at actually making the playoffs.
2. It would mean that, in a three-round playoff (DS, CS, WS) ONE of those two teams would not make the playoffs every year.
3. It would give Fox, ESPN and any other national broadcaster of MLB ratings GOLD by guaranteeing three times the number of Yankees-Red Sox games every year.
4. It would give MLB justification to go to four divisions in the NL as well.

Yes, I've already thought that one out, too:
NL South: Atlanta, Florida, Washington, Houston
NL North: Colorado, Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Louis
NL East: New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati
NL West: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Arizona
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1536 on: 09 Dec 2010, 17:59 »

It doesn't help that the Red Sox now have competent management for a change, though. With the spiraling increase of MLB free agent contracts (after Lee signs this week, there will be 3 120+ million contracts this offseason alone, all on players with substantial risks to their future performance), even the luxury tax isn't really enforcing competitive balance very well. The draft pick compensation system is also really easy to abuse, and some teams (including the Red Sox, coincidentally) have figured that out more quickly than others.

The only real losers in the current alignment are Tampa and Toronto, Baltimore is so bad they'd be bottom feeders in any division. Tampa isn't going to have lightning strike twice like they did from 2008 until last year, they're hemorrhaging players and they don't have the same volume of minor league talent they did to set up this run in the first place. However, that doesn't mean creating a 2-team division is in any way a good idea. I still think the best way to 'fix' the AL East is to swap Texas and Toronto. Texas is big enough under Ryan and Greenberg that they could meaningfully compete and the AL West is weak enough that putting the Blue Jays there could give any team in that division a reasonable chance of reaching the postseason within the next few seasons except for maybe the Mariners. Tampa still gets screwed but I don't see where they could be moved that wouldn't be terrible for them. Maybe if they swapped with the White Sox in the Central but even that's kinda sketchy.
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jwhouk

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1537 on: 10 Dec 2010, 05:43 »

All the money in NY and BOS just mean that if they make a mistake, they don't feel it as much as the other 28 teams would.

For example: say the Rangers sign Cliff Lee to a long five-year, Umpteen Million dollar deal - and then, in year two, he blows his arm out. That's going to hurt them in years three through five, to where they probably won't be able to compete. And THAT is going to hurt them in the long run.

Now, say the Sawx sign Cliffy to that same deal, and the same injury happens. Henry and company shrug, write it off as "operating expenses", and go after the next big FA to compensate.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1538 on: 10 Dec 2010, 05:50 »

Still, Tampa Bay won their division for the second time in three years. There's arguably more of a spread between the teams than any other sport I can immediately think of.

The Tampa of 2011 will be nowhere as good as the Tampa of the past 4 years.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1539 on: 10 Dec 2010, 06:31 »

Except the point is there are rarely valleys for teams like the sawwwx and the yaaaanks because they are the ones causing the valleys for the teams like Tampa and Oakland, by signing away all of their talent as soon as their contracts are up. Smaller organizations can still draft and develop talent, they just have a limited capacity to keep it because they don't all have a bajillion dollars to spend to keep Carl Crawford or Jason Giambi (once upon a time) or Mark Texeira etc etc.
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jwhouk

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1540 on: 10 Dec 2010, 07:14 »

It would be like Man U and Chelsea signing talent on other EPL squads as soon as they did something good, like win the UEFA Champions League
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1541 on: 10 Dec 2010, 07:45 »

Not to mention everyone United's picked up from Leeds. Cantona, Ferdinand, Alan Smith's hair..
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1542 on: 10 Dec 2010, 08:36 »

Salary caps are a pretty good idea, guys
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1543 on: 10 Dec 2010, 08:53 »

Spare a thought for say, Southampton FC or West Ham United FC, both of whom have brought through an astonishing number of great British footballers over the last twenty years and have won absolutely nothing.

Imagining Gareth Bale wallowing away in the Championship is a frightening thought.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1544 on: 10 Dec 2010, 09:17 »

Even worse!
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1545 on: 10 Dec 2010, 14:34 »

Salary caps are a pretty good idea, guys

...that don't work because of one overriding theme in professional sports:

There's no honor among thieves.
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Inlander

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1546 on: 10 Dec 2010, 23:49 »

If you're going to have a salary cap then you also need to build in allowances for teams that put years into developing star players who they then can't keep because those playes' market worth becomes too high to allow them to be kept under the salary cap. This was the major problem that the Melbourne Storm had this season in the National Rugby League (for those outside Australia, the Storm have been the best team for the last five years or so, but this year it was discovered that for much of that time they'd been massively exceeding the salary cap and cooking the books to disguise the excess player payments; they were stripped of the two premierships they've won in the last three years and were effectively kicked out of the competition for the 2010 season). The Storm's main problem was that were trying to hold onto too many superstar players - but the majority of them, such as Cameron Smith, Billy Slater, and Greg Inglis, were all Storm career-long Storm players who became too expensive for the Storm to keep under the salary cap, because the Storm had made them into such good players. The team I follow, the Canberra Raiders, has a long and proud history of player development and the competition is filled with excellent players who were developed by Canberra. Canberra now has the best young team in the competition (the oldest player in their backline is in his mid-twenties) and it's easy to see them struggling to hold onto the full team in a few years - even though they were all discovered and developed by the Raiders. The salary cap has good intentions but its implementation is rarely fair.
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Alex C

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1547 on: 11 Dec 2010, 00:26 »

If you're going to have a salary cap then you also need to build in allowances for teams that put years into developing star players who they then can't keep because those playes' market worth becomes too high to allow them to be kept under the salary cap.

That's really only important if you consider letting teams amass talent unfettered to be a goal. I don't. I'd rather have a system that occasionally shortchanges a team that has developed plenty of talent-- if you have so much talent, you should be fine after losing a player or two, after all, unless you are egregiously overpaying them due to incompetent scouts-- than set up a system that rewards teams for raiding what little talent small market teams already have. For example, the combination of market forces and a cheapskate owner once led to the Minnesota Twins baseball franchise unceremoniously ditching anyone on the team who made over a million dollars a season.
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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1548 on: 11 Dec 2010, 02:40 »

Could someone please explain the whole College Football Thing to me ... because I don't get it. There's a bowl selection thing going on behind me and they're talking about computers and rankings and provisional places and ... I don't know, don't the teams with the most points at the end of a season play each other in some sort of super sugar bowl thing? Why the difficulties?
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Inlander

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Re: WE LIKE SPORTS
« Reply #1549 on: 11 Dec 2010, 03:54 »

That's really only important if you consider letting teams amass talent unfettered to be a goal. I don't. I'd rather have a system that occasionally shortchanges a team that has developed plenty of talent-- if you have so much talent, you should be fine after losing a player or two, after all, unless you are egregiously overpaying them due to incompetent scouts-- than set up a system that rewards teams for raiding what little talent small market teams already have. For example, the combination of market forces and a cheapskate owner once led to the Minnesota Twins baseball franchise unceremoniously ditching anyone on the team who made over a million dollars a season.

I don't know how it is in the US, but in Australia there's basically zero incentive to develop talent. I don't really follow the Australian Football League so I don't know how the salary cap works in that competition, but the clubs in the National Rugby League that do develop talent do so pretty much purely because of an entrenched culture - certainly not because it's the best way to build a succesful team. Consequently the National Rugby League is divided very starkly between "development" teams, and teams which identify talent in other clubs and poach it. Rugby League is a sport with such specalised positions that having an abundance of talent doesn't really come into it - the loss of a star half-back or five-eighth or prop is going to cripple a team regardless of how many other good players it has in other positions. Furthermore, Australia just doesn't have the population that the US has - so the player base is massively smaller, and there just isn't as much talent around, so it's much more difficult for teams to cover the loss of talented players - and yet that loss is forced on teams because of the salary cap.
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