The Good Point: Is Andrea Bargnani the NBA's most improved player?

There aren't many storylines - which aren't even a thing, really - around the Toronto Raptors, but there's one that I couldn't get out of my mind: what's happened to Andrea Bargnani this year. Over at The Good Point, I explain how he's changed from a black hole and why it matters:

In a year marked by some bad teams, the Toronto Raptors are one of the worst. This is not a new thing. They’ve been bad for years, with a defense more porous than Havarti cheese. Last year, they regularly allowed 120 per game, sometimes as much as 140. You don’t have to know basketball to know that’s bad. 

The stats bear that out: the 2011 Raptors allowed the fifth most points per game, the fourth-lowest SRS and lost the third-most games in the league. And Andrea Bargnani, their much-maligned star, finished the season with just 2.6 Win Shares and a 16.4 PER, despite playing the second-most minutes on the team. 

Things aren’t much better for the Raptors this season. They dropped eight in a row in January, are 8-16 and have the league’s second-lowest points scored per game (86.8). And that’s mostly because of Bargnani. I mean it in a good way.

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Tim Thomas' politics are a load of puck

We’re living in strange times. The 24 hour news cycle has been shortened to a half-hour wheel, the Internet demands 140 characters content now, now, now and there’s always, always a news hole to fill.

It means that even the most mundane becomes newsworthy.

Take the flap in Montreal, where Canadiens head coach Randy Cunneyworth takes flak for not speaking one language in a city that speaks two. Does it really matter? The team speaks English, the league conducts business in English but a wing of the local media and a large segment of the city’s population doesn’t. Never mind that the coach doesn’t actually talk to fans and that Cunneyworth could always bring a translator to media scrums. The Montreal media pounded that story and soon, it was drawing international attention.

And even now, weeks later, it’s still in the news cycles, thanks to some comments by Jaroslav Spacek. In Quebec, hockey has always had a strain of politics to it. And now, politics has met the puck head-on.

The Good Point: Joe Paterno - Legacy or Lunacy?

When Joe Paterno died, the easy reach was to was say he was killed by the scandal that enveloped Penn State, or to say he was hounded by an irate media. I'm not sure what the proper response is: he was a man with a mythic legacy. Being a head football coach at any major Division One school is as close to having a Supreme Leader as North America gets; as a society we give these people the mythic qualities that the poet Virgil gave to Aeneas. 


Given that Paterno was a student of Virgil, comparing him to ancient tragedy seems apt: his career ended from his own mistake, one transgression so odious it should overshadow everything else. From The Good Point:

Joe Paterno died on Saturday evening at the age of 85. He was coach of Penn State’s football program between 1966 and 2011, a span of 45 years. He both appeared in and won more bowl games than any other coach.

Yet he’ll be remembered for something else completely.

When someone is part of a program for as long as Paterno was at Penn State, the immediate question is one of legacy. It’s a fair question: he was a coach for a long time; his teams went undefeated five times, won three Big 10 championships and two national championships. His career, as a whole, is one of the better coaching careers in all of sports, not just college football.

And it’s all going to be overshadowed.

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The Good Point: The Passion Player

Tim Tebow is polarizing like nobody else in sports. He simultaneously represents everything overwrought about pro sports - the moralizing, the forced storylines, the hype and hyperbole - while at the same time, representing everything to love: the come-from-behind victory, the modest victor, the genuine person.


The cliche is Love Him or Hate Him, but with Tebow there's preciously little room between the two extremes: it's hard to find anyone in the middle ground. We all know the person who's drinking the flavor-aid on him and we all know the person who loathes him. But are these two opinions based solely on Tebow - or on preconceived notions from somewhere else entirely?

There’s nobody in sports right now as polarizing, decisive or cool as Tim Tebow. It’s not just a question of religion, politics or even quarterbacking. The divide he creates is more than that; it’s more personal.

I have a friend who, in most other cases, is a rational person. She is not the kind who jumps headfirst into anything or considers alternative viewpoints and has worked as an insurance adjuster. But she hates Tebow. She thinks he’s arrogant, overrated and a fluke. She uses the phrase “Sheblow” to refer to the quarterback. She is not alone, but we disagree.

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