It’s Friday, and in an effort to further stifle any and all productivity, here are some fun/interesting/moderately entertaining links with which to kill the last few minutes and/or hours until the weekend.
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- Avery Johnson’s first interview after being fired Wednesday, with Randy Galloway from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

- Always the pessimist, Tim Cowlishaw paints a bleak picture for the Mavs in the near future.

- Interesting article on the merits of D-League affiliation.

- Mike Modano has added to his Stars legacy by accepting a new role this season, and has a near Western Conference Finals appearance to show for it.

- Oh, indeed.

- Here’s a video of members of the Houston Rockets giving their best Dikembe Mutombo impersonations. They still should have brought in Michael Wilbon as a guest impersonator.

- As of Day 2 of the NFL Draft, the Buccaneers have a whopping EIGHT quarterbacks on their roster. But you better believe they have high hopes for that eighth-string signal caller.

- Here’s a virtual tour of what exactly $1.1 billion will buy you these days, in the form of the new Dallas Cowboy’s stadium.

- It might be rebuilding time for a Texas baseball team that isn’t the Rangers, according to Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle.

- Is Dwyane Wade really dating Star Jones?? Surely the Chuckster can get to the bottom of this. I was really pleased to find out that ‘cougar’ somehow made the cut for Charles Barkley’s sometimes lacking vocabulary.

Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

It would be entirely inappropriate for me, on the day after the Stars won their first round series against the Anaheim Ducks, to offer some half-assed analysis as to how the Stars won because the fact is, I don’t really know anything about hockey.  But that’s not important.  What is important is that the Stars did win, and subsequently my interest in hockey was reborn.

I’m aware that the obvious retort to this statement is that I’m just jumping on the bandwagon, that I was just waiting in the woodwork for the next successful playoff run before I broke out my old Modano jersey, the same way that there are all of a sudden hundreds of thousands Red Sox fans in every city across America.  But this isn’t the case.  After all, I’ve always maintained that my interest in hockey waned in the wake of the lockout season, and not after the Stars were no longer in the Finals every season.  Continue reading Sports: Stars Beat Ducks, Win Over Fan

As a member of one of six universities who care about collegiate hockey, it has been a disappointment of monumental proportions to witness the defeat Michigan at the hands of Notre Dame, in what may go down as one of the greatest choke jobs in college hockey. In spite of having the best regular season record in the CCHA at 33-5-4 and a number one overall seed, Michigan has managed to perform the feat of underachievement, an aggravating new trend in Michigan athletics.

Continue reading Sports: Profiles in Hubris: Michigan Hockey

I was surprised to hear earlier today that the NHL set an all time attendance record for the 2007-08 season. Not that I’ve been to a single game this season or watched more than a handful of games on TV, so I don’t really have any sort of reference, but it seems for the last couple of seasons all the sports pundits have talked about with regard to hockey is its demise as one of the major American sports. Regardless of what kind of premonitions I had on the subject, though, I do find myself legitimately excited about the NHL postseason, which kicks off Wednesday night.

Although to be fair, I was pretty excited about the playoffs last season as well, and for me that excitement ended along with the Stars’ season in the first round. But if hockey is to return to its stature as one of the four major sports in this country, it’s going to take at least one fantastic playoff season to draw the fans who have moved to the fringe back into the mainstream.

Hockey’s greatest strength, and its greatest asset in differentiating itself from the other three major sports, is its postseason. The postseason is what originally drew me to the sport in ’97 and I’m hoping a great postseason can once again get me hooked on hockey. What makes postseason hockey special is that, more so than any of the other major American sports, the level of intensity rises far more between the regular season and the postseason.

Continue reading Sports: The NHL Needs a Big Postseason, Hopefully it’s this One