Scattered Brilliance
From my brain to paper (or pixels as the case may be)Archive for sports
Red Sox podcast Episode #3 at MVN
Paul and I recorded episode 3 of our Fireside Chats Red Sox podcast at MVN last night. If you want to check it out here’s the link and the audio is embedded below.
I also completed my Wisdom of Crowds Red Sox 2008 player projections. The results and my thoughts can be found on MVN as well.
New post up at MVN.com’s UConn beat
I’ve been writing about UConn over at MVN.com’s UConn blog, Husky Connection. Here’s a teaser for the March Madness preview that I wrote that will appear in the upcoming March issue of Roster Magazine as well as on MVN.
Editor’s Note: The following article will appear in the March Issue of Roster Magazine as well as MVN’s Basketball U column.
Connecticut Huskies
21-5 (10-3 Big East)
RPI: #11
Projected Seed: #2-4Seed Explanation
Sitting at 11-5 and 2-3 in the Big East on January 17th after a home loss to Providence, UConn fans were more often left with thoughts of how they stacked up against other potential bubble teams than how they stacked up against the nation’s best. But a ten game winning streak including wins against four top twenty-five ranked teams (Marquette, @Indiana, Pittsburgh, Notre Dame) change all that.Now sitting a only ½ game back of Georgetown and Louisville in the conference, the Huskies look to take advantage of a stretch run of five conference opponents with a combined Big East record of 27-40 as the make a serious bid at the regular season Big East crown and the #1 seed in Madison Square Garden where past national champion UConn teams have begun their run.
With a strong overall schedule (SOS: #11), a Husky regular season and Big East tournament championship could easily mean a #2 seed (from where Ben Gordon and Emeka Okafor led the Huskies to their last national title.
Looking at the upcoming schedule and the possibility of returning Jerome Dyson to the lineup for the stretch run, it is hard to foresee the Huskies slipping below a #4 seed in the dance without a meltdown of catastrophic proportions.
You can read the rest here: Husky Connection at MVN
New post up at MVN.com’s Red Sox beat
You can check it here: http://mvn.com/mlb-redsox/2008/02/19/2008-red-sox-for-better-or-worse/
Here’s a little teaser:
So with a better lineup and a less dominant pitching staff, where does that leave the Red Sox next season? In the chart above, I turned to Pythagorean Win Expectancy and plugged in my runs scored and runs against ballparks to settle in with 98 wins. You can also see Baseball Prospectus’ slightly more scientific run +/- predictions and outcome using PECOTA numbers.
Realistically, I think Pythagoras does us a bit wrong here and overestimates wins based on this input, but I do think that PECOTA short changes the team by a few wins. So for my final answer, “for better or worse”, I think the 2008 team is every bit as good as the 2007 version.
My gut: About the same. While Pythagoras has me at 98 wins, that feels aggressive, but I think back to back 96 win seasons and A.L. East banners sound pretty good to me. So mark it down. 96-66, 1st place in the American League East, 2nd best record in baseball behind the New York Mets.
On the radio (blog talk radio that is)…
Having been a sports radio junkie my entire life, growing up on WFAN in Connecticut and then living with WEEI in Boston as a daily ritual for the past 10 years, I was extremely excited to be invited to preview the Red Sox 2008 season with Colin and Durden on Blog Talk Radio.
I called into their show last night and spoke for about 20 minutes about topics ranging from the rotation to the Yankees. All in all, it was an excellent experience. I did better than expected and didn’t cringe at all listening to myself this morning.
Here’s a link to the show archive and I’ve embedded the MP3 into this post below as well. If you want to skip to my interview, hit up the 24:30 mark of the show.
This experience has definitely given me the motivation to look into hosting a weekly show of my own on Blog Talk Radio, YouCastr, or MVN’s podcast section.
If you happen to take a listen, feel free to leave some feedback in the comments.
Tim Daloisio: Media Mogul
The Daloisio Express is off and rolling! I’ve got new posts up at MVN’s Red Sox and UConn blogs as well as an online radio show appearance booked for tomorrow night.
– Fire Brand of the American League: 2008 Red Sox Bullpen: For Better or Worse
– Husky Connection: It’s all about tempo and we’ve got Tha-beet
My Husky column is currently being featured on the front page of MVN’s NCAA section.
I’ll be speaking with the hosts of “On the Field with Colin and Durden” over at BlogTalkRadio live tomorrow at 9:55 pm. You can find the link here to listen live or to hit up the archive of the event the following morning.
More on the Dunk Contest
I am fascinated with the YouTube promotion of the dunk contest, as previously covered here and here. But I wanted to pull in a little more context.
Rudy Gay’s initial video has been viewed over 1,600,000 times in the past two weeks generating over 2,200 comments and nearly 200 video responses posting dunks that he should try out.
Now that’s viral marketing the way it should be done in the interactive space. The NBA, Sprite, and YouTube combined to deliver a campaign that captivated an audience and built a platform for interaction that has tremendous opportunity for payoff during NBA All Star weekend.
Well done.
Inspiration to do the amazing
Sometimes inspiration finds you in forms you don’t expect it. Thanks to Byron Friedman for pointing this my direction on the Yard.
One of the things that I love about sport, it the ability for it to bring things like this out of people and the ability of these types of performances to inspire others to do more than they are capable.
For more on Rohan Murphy and the US Paralympics visit www.usparalympics.org.
Jamario Moon wets our whistle on YouTube
The NBA dunk contest will be relevant again this year and it might be grass roots build up on YouTube that pushes it back there. It started with Rudy Gay calling out to the community to help choose his dunk (which I covered here). And there have been top ten dunk video montages put together and circulated for each of the four contestants;
– Gerald Green, Minnesota Timberwolves (Defending Champion)
– Dwight Howard, Orland Magic
– Rudy Gay, Memphis Grizzlies
– Jamario Moon, Toronto Raptors
But I stumbled on the icing on the cake today thanks to the community over at Yardbarker in Jamario Moon’s teaser video for a dunk that will knock your socks off.
Moon, an ex-Harlem Globetrotter who has a growing following of NBA faithfuls, shows off his stuff in a YouTube promo. Stick around until the end for the cliffhanger, it’s a little staged and cheesy, but totally worth it!
In case you missed it, here’s a screenshot of where Moon took off from for his two handed jam.
That’s just sick! The only way he could top that would be to pull an “Over the Moon” and dunk over himself!
I haven’t been this excited for a dunk contest in a long time. It’s about time the NBA made this hyphy again.
Super Bowl XLII: New York Giants vs. New England Patriots; A game for the ages
Super Bowl XLII will go down in my memory as one of the most shocking outcomes in a sporting event in my lifetime. Not as much solely because of the outcome itself, but because of what transpired to get there.
I grew up in southwest Connecticut in the small town of Middlebury. We were fairly equidistant from both New York and Boston and had no loyalties per se to either city. But we did develop loyalties to teams. No bond was tighter for me than that between myself and the New York football Giants.
I can remember playing catch with my Dad and being Lionel Manuel or Mark Bavaro or my favorite, Phil McKonkey or diving over the pile of couch cushions piled on the floor as Little Joe Morris. I always have and always will idolize Phil Simms.
When I moved north for college, I found my baseball loyalties slowly shifting. Coming off the strike and as a disenfranchised Mets fan into the heart of Red Sox Nation, one season of attending more games than I could afford at Fenway Park after college in 1997 and I was turned. But my football loyalties stayed true, Giants Blue!
But being a passionate sports fan in the Boston area with no real rivalry or rooting interest between the teams, I allowed myself to get sucked into the Patriots in 2001. I had moved out west for a few months around 9/11 and was sucked into a homesick whirlwind and the only cures were the Giants and the Tom Brady bandwagon. I would go so far as to say, I rooted for the Yankees over the Diamondbacks I was so longing to connect with the northeast. But I digress.
It was easy to follow and root for both teams over the years. Then this year and the only match up I dreaded came to fruition. I wanted to see history. I wanted Tom Brady to lead his team into the record books. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t root for him against my one and only true football loyalty.
So there I sit, alone and afraid to watch this game with anyone and I see a Giants team play the way I grew up watching and loving football. I see an aggressive defense punishing the opposing quarterback and I have visions of Joe Montana slumping off the field after being drilled by Jim Burt as Lawrence Taylor took it to the house. They are bruising and battering Tom Brady. It pains me to relish in every sack, but I do.
Truth be told, I thought Brady had won the game with his final drive. I didn’t think Eli Manning had it in him to march his team 84 yards in 2:30 for the winning touchdown. I can’t believe that they made it through 4th and 1, then watched the ball slip through Asante Samuel’s hands, then watched Eli slip through the Patriots’ defensive linemans’ hands and throw a prayer that was answered by David Tyree.
I watched as Plaxico Burress made good on his prediction with a perfect route and I watched the Patriots last breath get pounded to the ground by Jay Alford.
But for all the celebrating I was doing for the Giants, I must admit, I mourned along with the Patriots. At the end of the day, it didn’t feel as triumphant as I wanted, only because the Boston area sports scene has truly invaded my sports soul.
Husky Connection
I’ve decided to extend my blogging at MVN past just Red Sox coverage and am going to try my hand once a week or so at blogging UCONN basketball at their Huskies blog Husky Connection.
I’ve also added an RSS widget to the sidebar all the way to the right here pointing to my MVN writings for both the Red Sox and Huskies.
Scattered Brilliance 