Basketball, Tennis, Baseball

NBA: Musical Chairs, Again! /// TENNIS: Wimbledon-2013 & the Unexpected /// MLB: the Standings, All-Star Week. . . For more analysis, go to Mile High Sports Radio AM1510 or FM93.7, and to Denver’s best sports blogging team, milehighsports.com . . . SPORTS NOTEBOOK posts its columns Tuesday and Friday of each week. Ed. & Publ., Marvin Leibstone; Copy & Mng. Ed., Gail Kleiner). NBA: Some years, the more that faces and names change within the NBA the more everything stays the same. Other years, it’s different. It’s hard to know what new and old assets will do “precisely.” Still, we ponder about NBA outcomes, we try to figure out if numerous changes made will really make a difference for the win curve. Recently, the NBA seems to have undergone serious overhaul, Doc Rivers from Boston to L.A., Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce from Boston to Brooklyn, Dwight Howard from L.A. to Houston, Brian Shaw from Indiana to Denver, Jason Kidd from the Knicks to being a coach for the Brooklyn Nets, so many other moves, all implying that when the 2013/14 regular season kicks in the NBA will be unrecognizable compared with last year’s layouts. What to expect? Will the playoff also-ran teams now reach second-round berths and maybe travel higher? Will the status quo maintain? New acquisitions don’t always pan out. Shaq to the Lakers was a boon for the L.A. team, but his return to the Magic in years after wasn’t as great a gift. And, no amount of musical chairs in the 1990’s helped teams engage the Chicago Bulls sufficiently enough to topple them, Phil Jackson then Chicago’s head coach, Scotty Pippen turning down offers from other teams. In later years, Michael Jordan couldn’t lift the Washington Wizards to glory, neither as an executive nor as player. Last season, Steve Nash and Howard going to the Lakers hadn’t spoiled the brew for other Western Conference teams. No trade involves players and coaches of such stature that their presence guarantees a championship ring, and there’s no guarantee of the 50 wins that usually pitches teams into post-season slots. In other words, LeBron isn’t on his way back to Cleveland, Tony Parker will remain a Texan, there will be more thunder from Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant, and Kobe Bryant isn’t leaving L.A., nor is Carmelo Anthony turning his back on New York. Yes, Doc Rivers coaching the L.A. Clippers could make a huge difference, and surely Shaw will have the Denver Nuggets in playoff mode early on. So, too, will Garnett, Pierce, Howard and others add value to their new homes during the 2013/14 season, yet new and veteran coaches will want to structure franchises that can win big well beyond 2013/14, which for reconstituted teams requires cautious starter + bench rostering and lots of trial-and-error easing into new strategies and tactics. An issue here is that the best of players do not always readjust to new teammates quickly. Re-invented player-combinations rarely begin a best and enduing ride during a first run out of the stall. It’s likely, then, that the NBA’s recently rebuilt franchises will see steady progress toward best possible team + individual player execution, but such usually comes about after more than one NBA season. It’s a foolish bet that coach and player differences for 2013/14 will result in the Heat, Spurs or the Knicks floundering and going down in flames. WIMBLEDON -2013 --- A sport can begin to look like Ground Hog day, same as yesterday, same athletes reaching the top, same bottom of the pile, no change at mid-point. Then comes a storm with twists and turns that no-one predicted, such as United Kingdom player, Andy Murray, winning the men’s title + trophy at the 2013 all-England Wimbledon Grand Slam tennis event (grass), a feat last accomplished 77 years ago. But that wasn’t all that rained down from wizards on high. The leading world tennis players that analysts thought would finish at the top of Wimbledon-2013 were eliminated as if failure dust were sprinkled all over them, example: the 2008 Wimbledon winner and this year’s French Open winner, Spain’s Rafael Nadal, fell away in the first round to a player ranked 135th, Steve Darcis of Belgium. Then Darcis was gone in a subsequent round. Pundits were saying, “It will be last year’s Wimbledon winner, Roger Federer, vs. Serbia’s Novak Djokovic, at the finals.” BUT---Federer fell to Sergiy Stakovsky, the Ukrainian eliminated soon after, and 2011 Wimbledon winner Djokovic left the scene after being beaten by Argentina’s Juan Martin del Porto, who had defeated Spain’s David Ferrer, a favorite for the Finals. Also against a reasonable expectation was last year’s Wimbledon women’s title winner, America’s Serena Williams, losing early to Germany’s Sabine Lisicki, a surprise defeat after Serena Williams had won 34 matches straight. Then Lisicki dropped at the finals to the now Wimbledon-crowned, Marion Bartoli, of France. Was anything predicted about Wimbledon-2013 that turned out to be so? Yes, that the 11 American Wimbledon “male” singles entries would be eliminated quickly. It didn’t just happen; it happened as the record for one nation’s entire number of players zapped during early rounds of a Grand Slam, surely a flip side of the 1980’s and 1990’s, when American male tennis players dominated not just Grand Slams but all of pro- tennis (Agassi, Connors, Lendl, McEnroe, Sampras). The last American Grand Slam singles tennis hero was Andy Roddick, U.S. Open winner, 2003. Last male American to win at Wimbledon was during year 2000---Pete Sampras, a seven-time Wimbledon champion, a record after surpassing Bjorn Borg’s five Wimbledon wins. Last year, Federer leaped ahead of Sampras---eight Wimbledon wins. The last Grand Slam of the year will soon occur---the U.S. Open, to be held August 26–September 9, at Flushing Meadows, N.Y. Last year’s U.S. Open singles winners were Murray over Djokovic, and Serena Williams over Victoria Azarenka, of Belarus and Monaco. For the most part, appearing at the U.S. Open will be the same cast of characters that filled out the 2013 Wimbledon story, but if Wimbledon is now the indicator little else will be familiar. MLB --- Monday begins All Star week-2013, when the American League and National League will be competing most of their best players. Surely appropriate, then, is a look at which league is best so far this season and which teams within each and among MLB’s six divisions appear to be superior, the measure being number of games won. As a starter in our exploration, the AL has, as of today, the most wins, 692 over the NL’s 677, and of the six divisions (3 per league) the AL East has the most wins, 255, while the NL Central has the next highest number, 238. Meanwhile, though the AL Central has the least number of wins among all six divisions, 214, the AL has seven teams with 50 or more wins to date, and the NL has only four. Of the AL East’s five clubs, four have 50 or more wins. The NL Central is the only NL division with more than one club having achieved 50 or more wins. Most number of wins obtained by a team within either league today belongs to the AL East’s Boston Red Sox, 57, next the NL’s St. Louis Cardinals, 55. Least number of team-accrued wins is within the AL, those of the Houston Astros, 32, while the NL’s Miami Marlins sit directly above with 33 wins. Moreover, the next two bottom-of-the-pile teams belong to the AL, the Chicago White Sox (36 wins), and the Minnesota Twins (37 wins). When it comes to comparison of percentages, the NL has two teams at and above .600, the NL Central’s Pittsburgh Pirates (.600) and the St. Louis Cardinals (.611), while the AL has only one team within the .600/.600+ category, the Boston Red Sox (.606). In addition, of the 12 of 30 MLB teams that are at or above.500 but under .600, seven belong to the AL, while five are within the NL. Yet within the NL the gap between the division with the most wins and the division with the least is a lot less than within the AL, 19 from the NL Central’s 238 and the NL East’s 219, suggesting that there is more unity + parity within the NL, in spite of this being an unsought occurrence. And, while the NL West is third among the six divisions when it comes to most wins, it has the smallest gap between top and bottom, the Arizona Diamondbacks having 48 wins and the fifth place San Diego Padres having 41 wins, the small difference contributing to the NL’s unity/parity appearance, the NL seeming to be a more cohesive organization. Inside the AL, the gap is much wider, a difference of 41 wins from the AL East’s 255 and the AL Central’s 214. Which league has the most wins between division-first place and division-second place teams? The NL, with nine wins, while the AL has seven. However, the NL lead here is from the NL East’s Atlanta Braves (53 wins) being seven games up over second place team, the Washington Nationals. Except for the AL East’s Red Sox (57 wins) being four ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays, all other division leading clubs (both leagues) have just one or two game leads over the next team in line. Which is the league with the best away from home record? The AL, 316 vs. the NL’s 301. Which division within the AL has the most road wins? That’s the AL East, 113 wins. Within the NL, it’s the NL Central, 107. And, which league has the most home wins? The AL has 377, the NL, 375. Also, the AL has the division with the most home wins, the AL East with 142. Next best within both leagues is the NL Central, 130 home wins, the NL West close behind with 128. Too, the NL has the team with the best road record, the Cardinals, with 28 wins. Next highest are the AL East’s Red Sox and AL West’s Oakland Athletics, each with 26 road wins. Best team home record within either league belongs to the AL’s Red Sox---31 wins. Next, the NL’s Braves, 30 wins. The worst road record belongs to the NL’s Marlins, just 14 wins. Worst home record is that of the Astros, 17 wins. So, what does the above washboard of data tell us? Certainly that determining which of the two MLB leagues is ahead of the other is no easy feat, in that the categories for judgment seem almost endless. Evident, however, is that rough parity is within reach among the two leagues, neither having a significant edge over the other once we get past the AL’s total number of 2013 wins now being 15 more than those of the NL. END/ml