“Football”
Surprise! NFL coaches can no longer reward players for intentionally injuring other players. The New Orleans Saints have been busted for a running a bounty system where players were rewarded for injuring key members of the other team. Bounty prizes varied according to how important the opposition player was, how badly they were hurt and whether or not they were able to return to the game.This is quite shocking even for a sport as violent as NFL. The assistant coach who ran the scheme has been booted out of the League. Head coach Sean Payton has been suspended for the coming season and some players have also been suspended. Apparently the scheme reached its peak when the Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010.
In the recent NFL draft the Colts picked guaranteed superstar quarterback Andrew Luck first. The Redskins picked a fast and exciting quarterback second called Robert Griffin III. At this point it’s too far out from the start of the season to say which teams will be worth watching, but NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has spent most of his holidays trying to make his sport safer and therefore less fun to watch.
Ice hockey
I am not going to pretend that I know anything about the NHL. It’s down to the final four teams, two of whom will compete for the Stanley Cup. An interesting fact about the NHL play-offs this year is that two of the four teams that remain are from so-called “warm-weather” cities, which means they aren’t traditional ice-hockey cities (they have no frozen ponds to play on). No franchises from Canada even made the final eight. Unfortunately the “Mighty Ducks” didn’t make the playoffs this year, so the bash brothers will not be making an appearance.In hockey-related news, Wayne Gretzky’s daughter has been posting some raunchy pictures of herself on the internet recently. Apparently “The Great One” is less than impressed. Who will win the Stanley Cup? Who knows, let’s say … the LA Kings, that sounds fine.
Baseball
Most Major League Baseball clubs are around 30 games into their 162-game seasons (yes you read correctly, 162 games in a season). The MLB regular season is so long that predicting who’s going to be around at the end is almost impossible this early on. Four teams have started well and are sitting on 19-10 records (Orioles, Rays, Rangers and Dodgers). Matt Kemp has the most Home Runs with 12.The biggest news this season has been Albert Pujols (poo-holes, haha, I know) who accepted a reported US$254 million contract to move from the St. Louis Cardinals to the LA Angels. Pujols won the World Series with the Cardinals last season and has been one of the best home run hitters in baseball for the last 10 years. Cardinals fans will be happy to know that it’s taken Pujols 110 times at-bat to hit a home-run for his new club, the longest drought of his career.
NBA
It’s playoffs time in the NBA. By the time you read this all the conference semi-finalists will have been decided and we’ll be down to eight teams. The Eastern Conference has been ruined by injuries to the two superstars who could have dragged their teams past the evil alliance in Miami (I know Dwyane Wade isn’t evil but Bosh and LeBron are just terrible people).Dwight Howard and Derrick Rose are gone for the season, which leaves the geriatric Boston Celtics as the only team with the roster and enough playoff experience to call themselves contenders. The West is more interesting. The Spurs and the Lakers have the wily veterans but can either team stop Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder? From what I have seen it just isn’t possible this year, plus he’s developed a habit of coming up big in the clutch (yeah basketball jargon). OKC sneak past the Lakers, then the Spurs but are beaten in 6 by the Heat. LeBron chokes in the finals again but Dwyane Wade carries the team on his back to an NBA title.
