Still maybe one of my favourite Blue Jay nicknames ever. 

To stay on that serious note, if a sport is struggling then, like it or not, you need to win over people who “weren’t fans in the first place”. The whole idea of growing the game is finding people who aren’t fans and then, by various means, convincing them to become fans. High level play is one way to do that but,…

They would have been rumbled pretty quick. This is how we celebrate goals in a blowout:

It would avoid negative attention. Say what you want but clearly on these boards opinion is at least somewhat split as to whether or not this was bad sportsmanship and a sport that’s struggling to attract fans as is doesn’t need a sizable portion of people thinking the players are thin-skinned jerks in addition to…

You know the funny thing about this whole thing? My initial joke wasn’t really something I wanted to say. I originally wrote a joke about how this sort of display from the USWNT must be why their sport is so popular with fans but that felt mean(and tenuous) so I had to edit my post and the whole “can’t take criticism”…

Like, literally, everything I’ve written in this thread has been a joke. First I joked that Americans can’t take criticism, then I joked that you provided an example of that for me, then I joked that your country started a ridiculous war 18 years ago against the wrong target. So, I don’t get “Woah, buddy, why so…

Well, I’m sort of now at just the “I want to make shitty jokes” stage of this discussion but I think it’s pretty clear that while the editorial perspective here is that the celebrations were all fine and dandy and a non-story, what they consider to be a real story is the idea that people who disagree are engaging in…

Oh, I absolutely am being smug about this bare minimum standard of decent sportsmanship. Similar to how I’m unbearably smug about expecting my neighbour wears pants when mowing his lawn or my friends wipe thoroughly after shitting.

“We’re all at the same skill level”

Hey man, I already made the joke. You don’t need to come along and provide yet another example of why it’s a good joke. 

In Team USA’s first game they beat Thailand 13-0. Some people thought that the Americans over-celebrated some of their later goals in that win as scoring, say, the 10th goal over a much smaller and less developed program isn’t an incredible accomplishment and their celebrations came off as bad sportsmanship.

Obviously Eddie’s a big bat and a serious upgrade over giving ABs to Kendrys Morales but it does seem a little strange to add a guy who can really only DH when you have Judge and Stanton coming back from serious injuries and who you maybe don’t want in the field every day.

Literally, yes. 

I really don’t want to be mean about this but when Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan were running up the score and mean mugging against Angola they were dinks but at least they were millionaire dinks who didn’t have to care what people thought.

Americans not reacting well to gentle criticism? Whoda thunk it?

Also a good point. 

I don’t think you can reduce what they wrote about “The Process” down to just “It was a failure”. I never agreed with their take on it but it was a little more nuanced than that. 

Bosh and Love were never elite defenders the way Davis is though. Taking touches out of their hands, turning them into spot up shooters...that was really changing their identity. Davis is going to be a terror defensively and a first-rate second option with Lebron who, let’s not forget, is pretty freakin’ unselfish…

I don’t know that it is. I really do think that the market for a player, even one as good as Kawhi or AD, isn’t that great if the team is pretty sure he’s going to leave after a year. Unless you’re like the Raps and taking one wild desperate shot at a championship, most GMs aren’t going to want to take the risk of…

Kind of inevitable. For all of the “Boston’s offer will blow LA’s out of the water” stuff I think Ainge has proven he’s too obsessed with assets to part with a ton for what he knew would be a year of AD.