League Notes
In N.Y., Jack Bell reports MLS officials around Wednesday's All-Star Game in Salt Lake City are "expected to discuss expansion," among other issues. USL Montreal Impact President Joey Saputo claims that an MLS team in the city is a "matter of when, not if." Saputo: "MLS is aware we would love to be in the league in 2011, with Vancouver and Portland, so the issue has really become the player pool." Vancouver and Portland also have USL teams that will move up to MLS, and Saputo said, "My argument is that you can't really consider us and those two teams as expansion teams. We don't need 22 to 24 players, but 5, 6, or 7 to make a difference for us at the MLS level" (N.Y. TIMES, 7/28).
ANTI-LOCKOUT BRAKES: ESPN.com's Bill Simmons wrote the NBA and NBPA "keep pretending we aren't heading for Armageddon in 2011, and meanwhile, some season-ticket renewal numbers are catastrophic while others are deceivingly high." The salary cap for the upcoming season "dropped for a reason; next year's will drop even more." The NBA is "headed for a league of have and have-nots ... with big-market teams, small-market teams and a middle class that could swing either way depending on the season" (ESPN.com, 7/27).
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Prominent Author Lipsyte Claims
Baseball Is A Bad Fit For Olympics |
IF THE GLOVE DON'T FIT: USA TODAY's Robert Lipsyte writes under the header, "Baseball Has No Place In The Olympics." The Olympics and baseball separately are "two of the better ideas in sports entertainment," but together they "become one of the worst, a lingering mess." The "essential difference in the characters of baseball and the Olympics makes them a bad fit." Baseball is "regional, intricate, intelligent, intermittently exciting." But the Games are an "anthology of highlights," so "jamming baseball into the Olympics is like reducing an epic film into a music video" (USA TODAY, 7/28).
PICKING THE WRONG BATTLES: YAHOO SPORTS' Dave Meltzer wrote the "odds were greatly against success" for recently shuttered MMA promotion Affliction because of "several major flaws in its business models." The "outdated belief that heavyweight is fighting's marquee division" led Affliction to "overspend in an effort to corner the market on those it judged to be the top heavyweights, all in the name of making the promotion a major player." Another "flaw was the idea of promoting pay-per-view events without a strong television show to build up" the fights. Affliction also made a mistake by thinking that "Internet message boards and blogs reflect the opinions of the overall MMA fan base" (SPORTS.YAHOO.com, 7/27).
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