UngsungBlog: A (Fantasy) Sports Blog

Quick-hitters:

- Answer:  24 and 12.

Question:  How many points and rebounds did the Lakers’ newly acquired superstar collect in his Lakers debut?

So far so good!

- Current rebate-o-meter:  nearly $1700, no thanks to more tax software deals.

Not to mention, I’m really asking for trouble by doing more shady rebates on software purchased from Fry’s.

- That was one heck of a game on Sunday, eh?  Here’s what I thought about it:

1) HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

18-1!  18-1!  18-1!  18-1!!!!!!!!

Now that I got that out of the way…

2) We knew that the Giants’ D-Line had to play out of their minds.

Honestly, who expected them to play THAT well?  Forget Eli Manning as the MVP; the entire D-Line should have shared the MVP award.

And yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the final sack on Brady.

3) Manning to Tyree might go down in history as THE greatest play in Super Bowl history.  In fact, it was so unbelievable, you could separate the play into its respective parts—Manning’s escape from a sure sack by Richard Seymour, and Tyree’s ball-on-helmet one-handed catch—and call both the TWO greatest plays in Super Bowl history.

Think about the situation:  third and a mile, two minutes left in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, and if Manning gets sacked, the Giants probably have to punt.   Ditto if Tyree drops the ball or has it knocked away.

(BTW, why wasn’t Rodney Harrison trying to knock Tyree down, rather than trying to play the ball?)

How ridiculous was that catch???  Not to take away from Manning’s scramble—which reminded me a lot of Steve McNair’s scramble away from Rams’ defenders prior to the “One Yard Short” play—but that catch was light years better than the scramble.  Not only did Tyree catch the ball at the peak of his jump, but he also had to pin the ball on his helmet, while preventing Harrison from knocking the ball away, but did anyone notice that he landed on top of Harrison?  Once that happened, he had to prevent the ball, which was stretched over his head, from touching the ground as well (remember:  in order for a receiver to be down by contact, he must first be down; since he landed on Harrison, he was not immediately down!).

By the way, who is David Tyree?

4) For all the praise that the Giants are getting, did anyone notice how pedestrian the Patriots’ offense looked?  For about three quarters, I saw little variation from a standard three-wideout set!  What happened to the triple-TE, power run sets that they used against SD so effectively?  How come we didn’t see much five-WR sets?  Was Bill Belicheck coaching, or Herm Edwards?

(Tangent:  You’ll notice that I am no longer using those pesky asterisks.  I feel that there is no need to anymore, since this team will now be in the record books for one reason:  18-1.)

5) Greatest Super Bowl ever? Not really.  Greatest Super Bowl fourth quarter ever?  Close.  Greatest upset in history?  Nope (SB III).

(Tangent:  I’m really happy that this win will knock the Pats-Rams SB off people’s radar as the greatest upset in recent history.  Honestly, I didn’t think that the Pats win was as big of an upset as people were saying it was; I was almost certain that the Rams were not going to be able to cover the 14-point spread.)

6) The Ung-hex lives!!!

(I had wagered $25 on the Pats to win outright.  Pats fans, you may blame me for their loss.)

And as a last, painful barb to all Pats fans out there…

7) Yes, this season was a failure.  You can’t be considered the Greatest of All Time and NOT win the Super Bowl.  You can’t set records left and right in the regular season and flop in the Super Bowl the way the Pats did.

BTW, I hope some team (not named the Pats) plans on going 19-0 next year.  Mercury Morris:  please get off my television!

- So I fired up my laptop earlier tonight, and saw this little blurb on ESPN:

If Miami rumors are true, a 35-year-old Shaq will end up with the Suns.

Huh?  Well, I was pretty sleepy at the time, so certainly I was imagining things, right?  Then I saw a similar blurb on Yahoo! Sports.

(EDIT:  According to Yahoo! Sports, this deal is DONE pending a physical on Shaq.  Holy crap!  Note that the rest of this blog entry was written prior to knowledge that the deal was done.)

If the rumors are true, the Miami Heat will trade Shaquille O’Neal to the Phoenix Suns for Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks.  I’ll ask again:  HUH?  How does an overpaid, overweight, oft-injured center way on the downside of his career, who’s making $40 million in the next two years (what would you rather have:  two more years of Shaq at $20 million, or one more year of Marion—or perhaps he opts out, and then you get cap space!—at $18 million?), fit onto a run-and-gun team like the Suns?  How does moving one of your key wing players like Marion going to make this team better?  Is Shaq going to magically turn Phoenix into a half-court team?  Sure, Shaq is a good passer from the high post, but so is Chris Webber…
And I thought the Suns were trying to avoid taking on salaries!  Now they’re going to pay a 34-year-old Shaq $20 million a year until 2010?  It almost sounds like the Suns are taking the addition by subtraction approach:  by dumping Marion, that frees up valuable PT for Diaw and Barbosa.  Or maybe the alleged Marion-Stoudemire chemistry issues boiled over, forcing the Suns to move Marion for Shaq!  Sure, the Suns get to dump an awful contract in Marcus Banks, but is that really worth trading Marion and getting Shaq in return?

As for the Heat, does a Wade-Marion-high draft pick core get the Heat back into championship contention next year?  Probably not.  However, if Marion opts out, the Heat are looking at tons of cap space (only Wade, Haslem, and Mark Blount are under contract next year, although Smush Parker and Dorell Wright may accept their options).

I don’t see how this trade works out well for Phoenix at all.  Then again, maybe Shaq will prove me wrong.

TTYL.

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