The collective minds of NBA basketball are much smarter than the NHL. They will agree on a new collective bargaining agreement before the start of next season. The players’ union and David Stern disagree on two important issues. Stern wants a twenty-year-old age limit for NBA players – it’ll never happen – and he wants to expand the NBA development league so players can be sent down to the developmental league just as baseball players can be sent to the minor league – it should happen.

I’ve talked about his before. A true basketball minor league, a league whose players are under contract to NBA teams, should help crumble the pretense of college basketball. College basketball is based on the idea that the players are amateurs, that they don’t get paid. You might not pay much attention if Maurice Clarett says he received $3,000 a week for a no-show job but you better believe that Chris Webber received $280,000 from a booster while he was one of the fab five at Michigan because it’s there in the court records.

Basketball players could choose to be true student-athletes instead of taking courses called “Playing Basketball” and “Officiating” to meet eligibility requirements. Boosters won’t need to pay for no-show jobs because a player coming out of high school could actually make a living in minor league ball. Players will have somewhere they can mentally and physically develop instead of sitting at the end of the Portland bench for four years as Jermaine O’Neal did. Speaking of the bench, it might stop the practice of assigning the last person on the bench a phantom injury when a better player comes off the injured list. Send them down so they can play.

It also gives teams more options. The next time a rookie refuses to go back into a game, as Carmelo Anthony did last year, threaten him with a minor league assignment. If Darius Miles has a fit and drops the “N” word on coach Maurice Cheeks over twenty times, what can Portland do? They can suspend him for a few games but so what?

Here we get we get into the third contentious issue in the collective bargaining agreement: shortening maximum guaranteed contracts from seven years to four. Probably a good idea. Miles has a six year, $48 million contract, guaranteed.

It’s a funny thing. I was looking for all the evidence that colleges make money hand over fist from sports and I kept finding research that says it isn’t so. One third of Division 1A athletic programs are losing money. And if schools were forced to include capital expenses – upkeep, new facilities – in their costs, every Division 1A program loses money.

The only one who isn’t losing money is the NCAA. The television contract for March Madness is $6 billion over 11 years. After spreading the money around to member teams, they have $20 million left over this year for administrations costs.

A basketball minor league could help universities help themselves. Academic institutions could return to educating students instead of trying to educate athletes who don’t want to be there. Colleges might begin to rein in sport program budgets. Schools would not bankrupt themselves by becoming Division 1A program without the necessary millions.

…if schools were forced to include capital expenses – upkeep, new facilities – in their costs, every Division 1A program loses money

And I would have enough money to go to a professional basketball game because I could see my local minor league team play. It’s a good thing.

Spring training is here. The posturing has started up where it left off – Schilling calling out Alex Rodriguez for slapping the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove has turned into the Red Sox piling on Rodriguez as soon as camp opened. Lots of fans call up radio shows to talk about football and basketball but it’s nothing compared to baseball talk.

I can’t count how many new friends I’ve taken to a baseball game who have refused to ever go again. “Jeez, it’s so boring. I don’t know what you see in it.” I’m jabbering their ear off about an upcoming pitching change and the left handed pinch hitter, the available setup men and the player they’re showcasing because the trade deadline is near. And they are not getting it. Half of baseball is the undercurrent, all the things that could possibly happen and all the talk that leads to more talk that could, just might, turn into a defining moment on the field. Teams know that only a handful of players would ever run out to the mound and start a fight with a pitcher who throws at their head. Most players posture and yell but don’t stray more than two feet from the plate. Jason Varitek has a toughness that Rodriguez doesn’t and their fight helped define the Red Sox last year.

This year, though, it’s been laughably over the top. A newspaper reports a Red Sox player saying that Rodriguez is not a Yankee – in other words he’s not a winner. Another player called him a deadbeat dad because he was running steps at 6am instead of attending to his newborn baby girl. Rodriguez’ teammates don’t have his back. How silly does all that sound? Before I could get around to weighing in on the silliness, Harvey Araton’s column in the New York Times shows how the media misrepresented the Red Sox players’ comments and says that reporters repeatedly asked questions about Rodriguez when they’d already been given an answer that wasn’t negative enough for them. Araton calls it “one of the most distasteful instances I have witnessed in 45 years of covering baseball,” which is a bit much. Where has he been? What does he think sells newspapers?

Half of baseball is the undercurrent, all the things that could possibly happen and all the talk that leads to more talk that could, just might, turn into a defining moment on the field.

Still, I’m happy that he set things straight. It does point out the place of posturing and jabber in the undercurrent. Coming back from 0-3 to win a playoff series is thrilling and winning the world series is thrilling. Talking about it, though, that supports entire radio stations and a year round season of newspapers.

Practice and Competition Report: practiced for and hour and a half and played three sets with T, 6-4, 4-6, 6-2
Solutions Analysis:
1. Looking for a solution to trying to hard. Three times I approached the net with the intention of smashing the ball instead of just getting it into my opponent’s court. Three times I hit an unforced error.
Success Analysis:
1. As I’m warming up my serve, I use a very relaxed service stroke. Instead of trying to crush the ball, I used the relaxed stroke throughout the match and my first serve percentage was very high. Watch Federer, relaxation incarnate.
2. At the beginning of the match, T was hitting the ball short to get me to the net and then lobbing me. I kep hitting my overhead into the net. I hung in there, though, and started getting the overheads over the net and started to win points at the net. Rather than get upset after hitting the ball into the net a few times, I persisted in focusing on getting the ball across the net and eventually that’s what I did.
3. I returned serve very well.