Photo of the Day: Snowless in Switzerland

PETER SCHNEIDER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A farmer works the bare ski slope in Adelboden, Switzerland.

Related: Skiers concerned by climate change.

Photo(s) of the Day: Beards of the NBA

KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

So what do you prefer? Courtside grizzle a la Jack and Morgan ...

KIMBERLY WHITE/REUTERS

... or those charismatic Spurs's neck beard and Parisian ombre d'cinq-heure?

Related: Make your own Pau Gasol beard!

We're waiting (UPDATED - NBA review complete, score stands)

Here we are, nearly four days removed from Friday night's scorer's table debacle in Atlanta. Hello, NBA? Anybody home?

Perhaps the long weekend in the U.S. has something to do with the league's slow response, but as long as the league delays, it amounts to a p.r. disaster. If the checks and balances in place to keep a proper score fail, and during a close game as well, and in a manner in which the game's entire complexion is changed, what do you do?

So far, the NBA's answer is: nothing.

Here's the relevant rule, which would indicate that it's over:

Rule No. 2, section VI (d): Errors which occur in the fourth period or overtime(s) must be discovered and rectified prior to the end of the period.

Replaying the final 4 1/2 minutes next time the Raptors are in Atlanta on Feb. 2, given that the game turned on the missing basket, would be the fairest course. And by then, we can all chip in and buy Sam Mitchell a ticket to the game.

But it's just about a given that the Hawks will be fined. When is the question.

UPDATE: E-mail from the NBA arrived at 3:47 p.m., and I apologize for the slow reply but I was caught in a meeting: According to the league, the review of the play in question and Friday's game is complete: "A mistake was obviously made but the score will remain as is," said an NBA spokesman in an email. I'll try and get more on this and post it here in an update.

UPDATE II: NBA spokesman Tim Frank said no fine would be assessed to the Hawks, whose scorers' table made the error (meantime, the NBA-responsibility referees crew missed it, and so did the Raptors, who can answer only to themselves for their ignorance - total breakdown at all corners) in missing T.J. Ford's basket with 4+ minutes to go, which the NBA agrees was the pivotal play. Frank: "Our philosophy has been once they come off the floor, the score stands ... it's obviously not something you want to see happen."

My take: Either the Hawks have been fined but no one's saying, or the blame can be distributed so evenly by the NBA's basketball operations department (who did the review) that they figured hell, just go with the score.

One thing, though: The score was wrong, and it impacted on the result. Bad call, NBA.
A W-L swing, and it's been sloughed off. Just wondering: How would this have played out if it had have involved New York, say, or the Lakers?

Photo of the Day: Smokescreen

MARCOS BRINDICCI/REUTERS

Diego Maradona: Either a new training regimen, or he's rehearsing to replace pal Fidel.

Related: Diego checks in.

'The Biggest Mouth in Sports'

This works as something of a bookend, at least I reckon, to yesterday's post on goals, fights and fine writing: ESPN.com's Scott Burnside on Don Cherry (via SportsFilter):

Cherry: A poet, and he knows it.

The popular perception is that what separates Cherry from almost everyone else in his position is that his internal wiring system does not include a fail-safe switch, that he draws an average of 1.4 million Canadians every Saturday night who believe what is about to follow is some kind of out-of-body experience, a raw, roiling, undiluted stew of anger and opinion, passion and outrage.
Cherry couldn't disagree more. "I know exactly what I'm saying," he says, "so that when I'm fired, it won't be a slip of the tongue. Everything I want to say, I say."

Some of what's in here won't surprise if you're a Cherryholic - the Lord Nelson at the bridge self-image, the inflammatory rhetoric and the fists-up approach. The Rush Limbaugh/Madden analogy really doesn't work for me either - except perhaps from the self-promotion point of view. Cherry is a unique figure, and although he infuriates at times, life (and HNIC) would be awfully boring without him. The only thing about him that seems contrived is his wardrobe. All caveats aside, it's still a must-read, and besides, it gives an excuse to roll out the latest from The Collected Works of Donald Stewart Cherry, which last season got regular space here:

This, my first Blue
Isn't she beautiful like this
Some lady
sent in this tie
and I can't remember
her name
and
I feel bad.

More weekend bits: Goals vs. fights

Lots of links sent to the email basket this morning, with yet more stuff hanging over from the weekend:

Check out this goal from Francesco Totti, during Sunday's Serie A menu. Then go back and review the weekend Ronaldinho evidence (this time, with the commentary from GOLTV - just a warning, that). Totti vs Ronaldinho. Discuss (and thanks to Peter for the latter pointer).

Next, an eternal question: What's pro hockey gotten itself into now? Is it about skill, or is it about brawn? Regular J-Rich sends along a link to this Boston Globe piece from Kevin Paul Dupont that longs for the good old days of fights, intimidation and Freddy the Fog:

TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

The good old days.

Note to NHL: Bring back the fighting, as fast as possible, I'm begging you.
In the spirit of full disclosure, it is without question that my sentiments are influenced by watching what most often has been an emotionally bankrupt Bruins team here in 2006-07. Even when there is the rare case of group indigestion along the boards, I have taken to murmuring in the press box, "Please, don't anyone get mad down there. Whatever you do, don't throw a punch! Gentlemen, above all -- manners."
(snip)
Think anyone down here in the Lower 50 today would turn away from one of the buckets o'blood we witnessed in the early '70s? Can you imagine the ratings that something like the Bruins' first-round sweep of the Maple Leafs in 1969 -- Pat Quinn's likeness hanged from the second balcony after his hit on Bobby Orr -- would bring today? Absolute guarantee: that kind of NHL would not be on the Vs. network. No, sir. We'd be watching that kind of hockey strictly via pay-per-view. And the third period might cost more than the first.

So that's what the NHL needs to boost its invisible profile in the U.S. - more fights. There's something to what Dupont's arguing - most nights, blood and thunder have vanished from the NHL game (from everywhere but the highlights shows, as Chris Zelkovich points out). It's all surface, and no depth. And I confess, I like a good scrap as much as anyone - but it has to be one that happens because of that passion, and not as a substitute for it absence. There's a huge difference between a thumping bodycheck and a bench-clearing brawl as the ne plus ultra of the passion that's gone missing - or worse. The Flyers of that 'buckets o' blood' era were the end product of a hyper-expanded (NHL and WHA) hockey world that didn't have near the international talent pool to draw upon that it does now, and where deliberate intimidation became a strategy to make up for the diluted product. Go back there? No thanks.

But lest you think it's all a starless void in the U.S., there was this illuminating and very readable profile of the Capitals' brilliant young Alexander Ovechkin, in the Washington Post Magazine:

PAUL CONNORS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The good new days.

On September 17, 1995, Alex turned 10. Two days later, his oldest brother, Sergei, 22, who'd been recuperating after a car accident, died suddenly of unforeseen complications. The next day, Alex's youth team was scheduled to play a game. "His brother wasn't even in the ground yet," the father recalled. "We decided he shouldn't skip the game. He played while tears were flowing down his cheeks. He cried the entire game, but he played. He wanted to play. We were obviously not thinking about hockey that day. I don't even know what the score was. We didn't really think of it as a lesson. We didn't want him to sit at home and dwell, and to cry and to poison himself with his thoughts."
(snip)
To capture the hockey world's attention Alex had forsaken almost every soft distraction of youth. He had done nothing but play hockey. It was a price he was happy to pay, he said. Just being on the ice with his teammates was always, "sort of a high for me," he said through an interpreter. "It's like a child getting his most secret dream achieved. For example, if you always dreamed about a toy transformer robot and you finally get it. That's what I feel on the ice."
Scoring, of course, feels even better. "You can imagine a situation when you are running away from an angry dog," Alex explained. "You've got a bit of adrenaline in your blood, right? Combine that with a sense of accomplishment, and you've got a goal."

I'd love to excerpt more, but go and read it yourself. This is the sort of in-depth, extended feature coverage of the NHL that just isn't done that often anymore - here or in the U.S. Superb stuff.

Photo of the Day: Ham on ride

IVAN SEKRETAREV/ASSOCIATED PRESS

John Kerr, with partner Sinead Kerr in tow, does the Darcy Tucker face at the Cup of Russia.

Weekend bits: Video hits and misses

Some flakes here in case you missed 'em while shivering through the Vanier Cup:

Video replay: Sepp Blatter doesn't believe in it - "We have to help referees and have correct control but we must never stop the match with videos or monitors to look at what has happened" - but Ronaldinho surely does after this wonder goal.

It's ski season, John Kucera and Manuel Osborne-Paradis enjoying career best weekends at Lake Louise. But in Europe it's situation critical: No snow.

New word of the day, courtesy of Pistons GM Joe Dumars: Paradocrity.

Their trumpets confiscated, their complaints lampooned, their team humiliated at the "Gabbatoir" - life's rough for a travelling England cricket fan.

The case of the vanishing basket. Courtesy of emailer Andrew Kwong, Here's the video evidence (wait a minute; where were the referees in all of this nonsense?)

One I missed when (too hastily) putting together Friday's post on the gay Leaf movie, so I'll put it up here now: Life in the NHL Closet.

Into the weekend: More Raptor numbers

Wrapping it up for another week, and this one is almost worth its own post, but let’s just make this a little longer than usual thanks to an email gem from Michael Brandon:

I looked back at your Nov. 21 blog entry, referencing 82games.com, a site I appreciate.
Also, I was looking at the stats of minutes played by players that are either rookies or new to their teams, and comparing them to the Raps. Of all the teams the Raps have played this year, new players to the team have accounted for an average of 19% of the playing time, and rookies have only accounted for 5% of total minutes.
In the case of the Raps, 63% of their minutes are played by players new to the team, of which 16% of total minutes are played by true rookies. Anthony Parker, who has not played an NBA minute in years accounts for 13% of team minutes.
No other team the Raps have played come close in new player minutes (Hawks 33%, Bucks 35%).

To me, that underlines the subjective notion expressed here and elsewhere that lack of familiarity is part of this whole debate. But there’s more from Michael:

I also looked at the W/L records of the league for further insight.
As near as I can tell, the East only is winning 28% of their games against the West (in part because the lower-ranked teams by W/L record have been West loaded early), and they only win 54% of their home games against any opposition.
The Raps have won 60% of their home games (3-2), and probably should have won one out west, maybe two if the stars were aligned (or California fell into the ocean).
So, we have people screaming for the head of Sam Mitchell, because a team with 62% of their minutes eaten up by new players, is one game behind the average this early in the season. I thought that consensus was for the Raps to be average this year (41 wins) or less (30-40 wins).
I don't want to quibble with the numbers on 82games.com. There is nothing to quibble about. However, there is more to the story.

Good points. Thanks, Michael.

Early pre-vegetarian pie-eating contest.

One more email. Regular Tim Farrell weighs in with another Raptor-related observation:

Garbajosa suddenly can't shoot . . . could it be . . . the curse of Vince Carter's jersey??

Not only that, Tim, but T.J. Ford is wearing Rafer Alston’s old number and Chris Bosh has Vincenzo Esposito's. You may be on to something.

One more helping. Here’s a sport where expansion is not only encouraged, but inevitable – until this year, that is, the world pie-eating championships, gone from a marathon to a sprint and now including a vegetarian option (from Times Online):

"They’ve taken things too far this year - pies are supposed to be meat and potato and anything else just isn’t normal," said Dave Smyth, 48, a painter from Hindley, who won the first contest in 1992 when he ate an impressive four pies in three minutes.

One more question. Is this the future of newspapers – making ballplayers even richer? Jon Friedman spells it out in DJI's Market Watch (thanks to DD for the linkage):

Your newspaper operations are a mess and your baseball team is a disaster. So, what do you do? Why, invest heavily in the baseball team, of course.
On Monday, Tribune confirmed that it would pay free-agent slugger Alfonso Soriano $136 million over eight years. It's spending more than $200 million total on many players this off-season, as well as hiring a new manager, veteran Lou Piniella.
As the late, great Cubs announcer Harry Caray might shout in disbelief: Holy cow!

One more press release. Don’t know how this was overlooked, but the Detroit Red Wings have been disbanded. VCOE has the release the world missed.

Sports around town. Look no further than the Air Canada Centre Tuesday, and the Metro Hoops Showcase (6:30 p.m. tipoff), apparently the first-ever high school basketball doubleheader to be played on the hallowed, history-laden hardcourt where Negele Knight once trod. Seriously, they'll put on a better show than many of the recent hoop nights the place has seen.

Watching. The Vanier Cup, live from Saskatoon (Saturday, 3:30 p.m., The Score). Saskatchewan vs Laval, and it should be a hooly. And as is the custom around here, Neate Sager’s got the preview (including the weather forecast - cold, very cold).

Pooch punts. Yup, he’s back, tail between his legs after a piddling 0-5 record that puts him squarely in the league of many of the world's best public handicappers – it’s Jinks the Vizsla, scarfing down another set of kibble-or-cookie plays of the week:

Jacksonville –3 over BUFFALO
New Orleans +3 over ATLANTA
Chicago +3 over NEW ENGLAND
Philadelphia +9 over INDY
SEATTLE –9 1/2 over Green Bay

Photo of the Day: Such Great Heights

STEFAN WERMUTH/REUTERS

Daniel Friberg of Switzerland jumps into the void at the FIS World Cup halfpipe in Saas Fee.

Vaguely related: The Postal Service's MySpace page (including the titular tune).