Ticketmaster.com: just another skills competition that boils down to one judge

I know how you feel, Iggy.

I just had the worst experience this morning trying to get tickets to the 2007 NBA All-Star Practice at the upcoming Vegas All-Star Weekend. I'll give you the short version and the long version. The long version only exists because I decided to cap off my waste of two hours in cyberspace with a four-page letter to the NBA, which you can read in detail further in this blog entry.

Here's the short version. Trying to get tickets to the All-Star Practice, which I estimate sold out in two minutes, was like a veritable skills competition on the keyboard. Only thing is, even if you were like Andre Iguodala and you thought you did everything right, a little computer program could be that final judge that keeps you from attaining glory.

It might as well have been a lottery.

Read the rest of the story

__________

LeBron's global strategy now hinges on playing 1-on-1 with Chinese kid (from Chicago?!)

Our beloved beacon of basketball brouhaha, TrueHoop.com, reported earlier on Tuesday in a line item that LeBron James just "announced" a promotional deal with Microsoft, so I had no choice but to drop everything and embark on a writeup which I was hoping could wait until the holidays.

I put "announced" in quotation marks because this is actually pretty old news. Microsoft has sponsored LBJ's Bike-A-Thon in the past and there's even an insightful transcription (scroll to the middle of the page) of LeBron's budding relationship with Microsoft, through a dialogue between Maverick Carter and a Microsoft executive at an advertising conference not too long ago in late September.

In fact, as you might remember from our dreamleague-wide posts (before we had this blog) on Nov. 27 entitled Chinese Youth with Skillz for LeBron Commercial (scroll almost all the way down), LeBron has been scouring the country for a male Chinese kid age 10-14 with good basketball skills to go one-on-one in his forthcoming commercial with Microsoft...

Read the rest of the story (UPDATED 1/15/2007)

__________

Wonder-trail of MJ DYK?'sPart I of III: The so-called "Love of the game clause"

It's amazing how interesting a particular strain of TrueHoop, YouTube, and Google can turn into. So let's surf this nice little wave that is the Internet, the first of a series of Did You Know ("DYK?" for ESPN watchers) nuggets I found on the O.G. Michael Jordan...

It all started when last week, TrueHoop.com came across an old 60 Minutes interview with Michael Jordan from 1986, posted on YouTube. I couldn't help but press the pause button when they flashed MJ's so-called "love of the game clause" up on the screen -- a camera shot of the actual document!

For those of you who grew up in the Magic/Bird/Jordan era, this is like finding the Rosetta Stone or a copy of the Declaration of Independence in your attic -- okay, terrible metaphors, but I think you feel me...

Rest the rest of the story

__________

dreamleaguer breaks finger playing with NBA ball

The previous Sunday 12/3, due to another one of those rich youth basketball leagues that pushed us out of the usual nice main gym, and as the league of the Poor Man's Commish, naturally, we were forced to play in a high school's "auxiliary" (read: "abandoned") gym.

Here, we found out that "auxiliary" really meant the older, dusty building across the way that looked like it could have been used as a set of the movie Hoosiers. The one that got overlooked by the district for earthquake retrofitting. The one even the janitor doesn't have the keys for.

Not surprisingly, we found a ton of dead spots on the floor.

Meanwhile, I had brought one of dreamleague's two new Spalding NBA balls with me...

Read the rest of the story

__________

A bunch of Allen Iversons play in dreamleague

Over the Thanksgiving holiday (Fri Nov 17 to be exact), I was watching the Philly vs Phoenix game on ESPN when Jim Gray reported that Allen Iverson was paying for the funeral of Kevin Johnson, a kid who got shot refusing to give up the AI jersey he was wearing...

Read the rest of the story

__________

dreamleaguer coincidentally adds web hoops fixes/recommendations

By pure coincidence, our new Bay Area dreamleague beat writer, Alec MacDonald, chimed in late Wednesday night with his weekly report. His timing was impeccable, as we were right in the midst of launching Poor Man's Commish's dreambLogue (which was an all-nighter up thru Thursday morning!). Here's his take on the hoops blogosphere, with a few comments of my own...

Read the rest of the story

__________

First story dedicated to James Love

Back about one week before the Warriors' Nov 16 game against Sacramento, we got another yearly donation of 25 tickets from Abusheri Ohwofasa from Warriors Community Relations. I sent out the usual Evite to all the dreamleaguers who have helped us, encouraging them once again to bring out the kids they work with.

I hadn't used the Evite since last season and noticed that James's sister Inez was still on the list, the only one in the Love family with whom I had an email address. That prompted me to call Ibyn, but his phone number had since changed...

Read the rest of the story

__________

TrueHoop.com

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon TrueHoop.com, which is written by accomplished sportswriter Henry Abbott. TrueHoop is widely viewed as the best NBA-related blog out there, and I whole-heartedly agree. Here's why:

• It basically summarizes all of the latest topics around the Association for you...

Read the rest of the story

__________

Goals and "Ground Rules"

In case you didn't know, we're in the midst of a website revamp here at www.dreamleague.org. Things are going rather smoothly, but when our web guru Big Monkey T said he didn't think we'd launch until March, I just had to scratch the blog itch. After all, I had been commenting on TrueHoop.com with the moniker "DRMLG" for quite some time now...

Read the rest of the story

__________

What's a Poor Man's Commish?

We are the anti-thesis of David Stern.

He oversees one league of thirty-plus teams consisting of elite, privileged, wealthy athletes who play basketball for a living. We oversee dozens of leagues spanning hundreds of teams consisting of Average Joes -- and Janes -- who wish they could play basketball for a living.

His yearly salary is a reported $25 million. Ours is roughly $1/25-millionth (i.e., zero).

We all know what life is like for Superman, but don't you ever wonder what a day in the life is like for Bizarro?

The basketball world through the eyes of Bizarro Stern, in which we might be considered indulgent, placable and undemanding, or even friendly or genial.

Strangely, sometimes we're more alike than we are different.

That's what the Poor Man's Commish is all about.