The Association

The Association Appears on Blog Show XI

by Brett Edwards

You were warned about it yesterday, and now it's actually happened. The Association once again made it to the world of television, this time it was the regionally televised "Blog Show," episode XI. This weekly look around the sports blogosphere is hosted by FanHouse Overlord Editor Jamie Mottram, along with his trusty sidekick Dan Steinberg of the amazing D.C. Sports Bog.

Loyal readers of The Association are well aware that we're known for being, among other things, unabashed Spurs haters, and that was the topic that was of interest in this week's Blog Show. The entire list of topics includes "Blog Show drinking game, Kobe Bryant leaving, Greg Oden blogging, ugly draft picks, mascots dancing, mascots partying, Caron Butler giving, soccer hooligans, flopping, Spurs whining, goofy Brady Quinn pics and Allison Stokke mania." This is your video RSS feed of some of the best, funniest, and hottest topics that sports blogs are covering, so please, do yourself a favor and watch it immediately.

Colin Cowherd Has A Small Penis

by Brett Edwards

This is the story of a national radio host abusing his ability to reach a couple of million listeners, and doing so at the expense of a seemingly random victim. The two largest sports blog sites have already covered this, but I figure the more places we post this, the more people will see what a dick Cowherd is.

So here we go. On his radio show this morning, Cowherd decided it would be fun to randomly "blow up" a website each day, one that he found "annoying." He was doing this for no apparent reason, other than to prove that ESPN radio has a large audience, and that a percentage of that audience would do what he instructed. When choosing which site would be his first victim, it seemed like he simply solicited a site from one of his producers, and then gave it out on the air and instructed everyone to go there at once. The site is thebiglead.com (run by one of my fellow FanHouse contributors), and it experienced (and is still experiencing) significant down time as a result of this.

Now besides the obvious jokes about Cowherd's lack of size between his legs, the fact that he probably drives a red Camaro or a monster truck, and has a blonde wife with 44DD fake breasts, there is a little bit of a conspiracy theory emerging on how this happened. The Big Lead has been linked in Bill Simmons' column in the past, and that didn't crash his site, so why would a radio show giving out the site name to a bunch of people driving in their cars be able to have such a damaging effect on the servers?

UNLESS this was a radio bit that was planned ahead of time, with a full fledged DoS attack already set up to launch as soon as Cowherd mentioned the site's name. That would make much more sense on why the site crashed, and would be even more of a dick move than simply randomly "blowing up" a sports blog site. Here's the audio, listen for yourself and let us know if you think this was random, or something that was maliciously planned ahead of time. Oh, and fuck ESPN, I'm not linking to the audio, you can get it here.

NBA Fanhouse Launch Today!

by Brett Edwards

Today is the official launch date for the NBA Fanhouse, which is basically an All-Star collection of NBA bloggers that will be collaborating on one site for AOL. Craig and I are among the chosen ones, along with the following talented team members:

J.E. Skeets of The Basketball Jones
Bethlehem Shoals of Free Darko
MJD of The Mighty mjd
Marcel Mutoni of SLAM Online

Miss Gossip of Suns Gossip
Nate Jones of Jones On The NBA
Matt Watson of Detroit Bad Boys
The Big Lead

The site address is http://nba.aolsportsblog.com, so go there now and set it as your home page.

What does this mean for The Association? Reduced content for sure, but we will still maintain this site and keep it up to date. We are assigned five specific teams each to cover over at the Fanhouse, so anything that doesn't fit into those categories that we want to talk about will be posted here. Also, anything that may be a little over the line for AOL, we will post here.

So no, we didn't "sell out," we will still be as offensive as possible, just more so on the other site than this one. Direct links for my posts and Craig's are as follows, we hope you enjoy!

Brett Edwards on NBA Fanhouse

Craig Kwasniewski on NBA Fanhouse

Free Shipping At The NBA Store

by Brett Edwards

This is just a quick public service announcement for those of you that don't read your NBA.com spam e-mail. The NBA store online is offering free shipping through this Saturday 11/18. Use promotion code EMBAF756 at checkout to get your order shipped for free. Or you can use NVMBR6FS, it appears there are a bunch of codes for this offer.

This is the perfect time to get yourself a hideous sweet new Michael Redd jersey, (hey at least it's Christmas-colored) so get to it!

Check Us Out On ESPN.com!

by Brett Edwards

Most of the time here at The Association, we're content to toil away in obscurity. After all, we're such huge NBA fans that if we didn't spew all of this nonsense somewhere, we'd most likely explode.

It's FANNNNNTASTIC however, when we get some national exposure, which is what Henry at TrueHoop has done for us in his recent article he did for the Worldwide Leader! He was kind enough to reference our review of the new official NBA ball, which we posted last week.

BIG THANKS to Henry at TrueHoop, and definitely check out the entire article over at ESPN.com, it's a comprehensive look at the new ball "from launch to tip-off."

The Association NFL

by Brett Edwards

With the NBA regular season about two weeks away, the frequency (and hopefully quality) of our NBA writing will increase dramatically. But over the past month or so, we've found it exciting to write about the NFL in our weekly Monday Morning Point Guard feature. I mean, NFL writers have the easiest job in the world, right? Friday's column is a picks/weekend preview piece, Monday's column is a recap of the weekend's games along with a Monday night prediction. And midweek is where you write your T.O. drama piece or Bengals police blotter take. If that ever gets old, just throw in a "start 'em or sit 'em" fantasy football article and you're good to go.

This seemed pretty easy to us, and being big NFL fans we decided to post our NFL takes on a separate site. So go ahead and bookmark http://theassociation.blogs.com/nfl/ so you can read our NFL takes, with a decided slant towards the Broncos and Bears. Although as I type this, the Bears are down 20-0 at the half to the 1-4 Cardinals, so hopefully the wheels won't come off Craig's bandwagon tonight.

We've taken down the MMPG posts from this site and moved them to the new NFL site, so go there to check out our takes on the past 4 weeks in pro football.

That's it for football on this site, so you hardcore NBA'ers can continue to count on us for the latest and greatest in news from the Association. 15 days 'til tip-off, for real!

Things to do While Waiting for the A.I. Trade

By Craig Kwasniewski

News from the NBA is starting to slow down. Except for some minor player movements (that I will cover in Player Movement, Part 3), there's not much going on. So while we're waiting to see if A.I. will get traded or not, I found a few links that you can check out.

BTW - This is what I really hate about this part of the season, the bullshit trade rumors. Talkradio screamers here in LA are debating on whether the Clippers should trade Shaun Livingston and Corey Maggette for A.I. This, like 99.9% of summer trader rumors, will NEVER happen. Yet somehow it doesn't stop all three sportstalk stations from taking calls from "Clipper Nation" on the deal.

Personally, I hope the Clips get A.I. The NBA is in dire need of a team with turmoil (the Knicks are too shitty to count). Unless LeBron cold-cocks D-Wade during one of his 47 freethrow attempts, the NBA is becoming very niiiiiice. We need that constant internal bickering. Admit it, as much as you hated the 2004 Lakers, you still loved hearing all the drama. Bring A.I. to LA and bring in the drama!

But until then, here's some links to check out:

Kevin Garnett: World Traveler - Read what KG's ghostwriter "blog" thinks about his Adidas promotional trip to the far east. Along the way you get some great insight like:

"I don't know if you know that, but I love sushi." - (How nice!)

"the Garnett ’06 India only shoe. There are only 100 total pairs available." - (Guaranteed to sell on Ebay for $1,000 - RARE India Only Exclusive!!!!!!)

"we just signed Mike James... I think our team will be much better next season." - (Oh you think so doctor?)

"Stay tuned. Peace"

NBA Photo Gallery: Ben Wallace - "Fear the Fro" one last time with this 45 photo retrospective. There's some Orlando pics in here also.

Isiah Thomas Highlight T-Shirt - WOW!!! What a shock that Isiah Thomas' "Highlights" gear is on sale!!! There's so many jokes here, I can't wait until the Knicks edition comes out... nevermind.

Meet the RimRocker's Dancers - I'm talking about the NBADL's Arkansas Rimrockers. Warning: Do not google "Rimrocker" while at work.

Blazers 25 Point Pledge - I actually thought this was their promise to lose every game by 25 points. Instead it's the Blazers, "vow to restore this franchise to the level of respectability that you deserve."

(You can stop laughing now.)

Personally, I was hoping for more police blotter activity from the City of Roses. This thing makes me sad.

Lucky’s Blog from China - That's the Celtic's mascot Lucky, for those of you keeping score at home (BTW - after 20 plus years since the last title and the deaths of Bias and Lewis, I'd look to rename the mascot).

This first entry starts with, "Hello Celtics fans, this is your favorite New England mascot here... Lucky the Leprechaun!"

I stopped reading there. But if you have free time you can read about the madcap adventures of another shitty marketing idea from the Celtics. And you wonder why Larry Bird isn't working in the C's front office. I just feel sorry for the children of China. Your only NBA exposure is some lame-ass mascot, od-ing on speed and reeking of alcohol dunking off a trampoline. Greg Kite is rolling over in his grave.

2006 Grizzlies Public Address Announcer Auditions - Join in the latest trend of sounding like you inhaled 25 liters of helium while doing your best impression of that announcer guy from the And-1 Tour.

"A missed jumper by Paaaaaauuuuuuu Gaaaaasssssssooooollllllll!!!!!!! OH NOOO HE DI-INT!!"

Spurs Wallpaper Round 2 NBA Playoffs: - Obviously some sort of web error, didn't the Spurs lose Game 7 to Dallas? So why would their website put up a wallpaper celebrating the loss?

06/28/2006 - M. Kupchak on the Lakers' draft - The caption for this video is, "Los Angeles General Manager Mitch Kupchak on the Lakers' success in the 2006 NBA Draft."

Huh? What success was there? (See what I have to deal with as a Laker season-ticket holder?) Anyway, I felt it was appropriate to end this with Mitch Kupchak speaking, because this guy leaves me speechless.

NBA GM Fixit

by Brett Edwards

We entered a contest. Sort of. The guys running the NBA GM FIXIT contest asked us to participate, and being that we are internet whores, we obliged. Craig did most of the work for our entry, which was for the Lakers and will run on their site this Wednesday. Don't worry, if you're like us and have no concept of dates or time, we'll remind you to check it out.

The "sort of" part of the entry is the fact that we're really not that into the technicalities involved in the salary cap, contracts, mid-level exceptions, etc. We prefer just to complain about the problems a given team has, and not offer up any realistic solutions. So it's more accurate to say that we participated in this contest, and expect to finish dead last. We will defend our entry once it's posted, but let's just say the lack of activity in Laker Land over the past two seasons wasn't going to cut it for us.

For the record, we also don't care about the draft, although we're participating in a mock draft as well. Details on that to follow.

ESPN Is Ripping Us Off

by Brett Edwards

Well, maybe not. But we have been posting photo series for a while now, and today the WWL (that's the World Wide Leader for the uninitiated) has a great version of this entitled Faces Of Rasheed. It's a close-up look at 'Sheed from early on until now, along with some of his classic quotes like "ball don't lie" and many others. Definitely go check it out, but just remember who started this, alright?

NBA.com Thinks We're Dumb

by Brett Edwards

Well, dumb but funny. It seems our new contributor Chris has the magic touch, as his first entry to the site has gotten us noticed by NBA.com's "Click and Roll" blog, written by Rob Peterson. Good job Chris! And to Rob, hopefully sometime in the future we'll be able to remove the "dumb" part...ah, who are we kidding.