ABC 24 News Story on Battier that features the show

Shane Battier live in studio (The Audio)

Shane Battier came back to Memphis, and joined us in our studio on Friday.  If you missed this, you really should listen to it.  If you heard it, you should listen again.  He was great.  30 minutes - tons of questions about everything - Shane Battier in studio...

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One of my finest moments (Hasheem Thabeet)

The blog from the night of the 2009 NBA Draft

Goodbye Hasheem.  I wish the Grizzlies front office would have listened to me.

Breakin out the old Battier swag

Get on my level - and didn't even include the little Russian doll of Battier, cause I didn't want to embarrass you.

CHRISVERNON.COM BREAKING NEWS

The Grizzlies have completed a trade with the Houston Rockets for Shane Battier.  The Grizzlies will give up Thabeet and a protected 1st Rd pick.

The Grizzlies are close to finalizing a deal with the Indiana Pacers that would send OJ Mayo to the Pacers in return for Josh McRoberts and their first round pick.

Grizzlies and the trade deadline

Here is what I have gathered...

I will be surprised if the Grizzlies do not move Thabeet.  There are multiple teams willing to take him on, so the Grizzlies will hopefully just take the best deal.  A deal with Houston with Thabeet and Shane Battier being the major pieces has been talked about seriously.  I'm told Houston wanted more than just Thabeet to get the deal done.  The deal may not be totally dead but by one source said that it had looked like it was going to happen at one point and may not now.

I was told that the offers for OJ Mayo are bad, really bad.  Heisley loves Mayo, and it will be hard to convince him on trading OJ, even if there is really good return available.  Maybe something will come up close to the deadline but I was told that teams were offering "laughable" return for Mayo at this point.

When I hear the name Charlie Sheen...

Over the past few weeks you may have heard about Charlie Sheen, and his troubles (or fun), roughly a trillion times.  I don't watch the TV show he is on, and have seen very few movies that he has been in.  Am I the only person that thinks of the movie "Cadence" when I hear the name Charlie Sheen?  I don't know if there is anyone more famous that I identify with something so obscure.  I know I should think of Wall Street, or Major League, but I don't. Charlie Sheen is the absolute master of looking like he has no idea what is going on. I have no idea how he was not given the Oscar for this scene alone. When I watch this you can hear me screamin - "Now that's acting!" I'd bet I watched this scene 1000 times when I was a kid...

Tell me it's a nightmare

1. Got out of bed

2. Grab my coffee

3. Opened up my laptop

4. Check twitter to see if anything is going on this morning

5. First tweet I see is from Cardinals beat writer and it reads as follows - "Wainwright going back to St. Louis to have ligament examined in right elbow.  Mozeliak believes it's "significant injury."
6. Check the other Cardinals news feeds - each one with worse news - including the Cardinals official feed that says "At this time things don't look good, will have more info after he sees doctors"
7. Sat in chair, pinching myself, praying that I am still asleep and this is all just a nightmare

The Tony Allen Effect

     I've been a big proponent of Tony Allen playing more minutes for the Grizzlies since the beginning of the season.  I'm confident my listeners and Grizzlies GM Chris Wallace grew tired of me exclaiming "This dude can guard Kobe in the Finals but can't play for the Grizzlies?!!"  Well, Lionel Hollins finally warmed up to Tony and started playing him, and he has reaped the rewards of his decision.   But how much?

    Here are some of the numbers that I gave out on the show on Monday -
I wanted to find some measure of  the effect Tony Allen has on the offensive and defensive ends of the court (in regards to team performance).  Some explaining - Offensive and Defensive efficiency is simply how many pts the team scores, or gives up, per 100 possessions.  The Grizzlies are currently 19th in Off. Eff. and 10th in Def. Eff. in the NBA.

I went to find what the Grizzlies do when Allen plays 25+ minutes (a lot), and what the team does when Allen plays 0-10 minutes (a little). 

     When Tony Allen plays (0-10) minutes...
The Grizzlies are 8-11 in 19 games
They have an Off. Eff. of 102.5 (23rd in the league)
They have a Def. Eff. of 104.5 (16th in the league)

     When Tony Allen plays (25+) minutes
The Grizzlies are 8-2 in 10 games
They have an Off. Eff, of 106.1 (10th in the league)
They have a Def. Eff. of 100.3 (6th in the league)

The sample sizes are obviously small, but I was surprised to find that not only are the Grizzlies better defensively (which I expected), but they are better offensively, when Allen plays big minutes.  There is no doubt that Allen will be playing big minutes while Rudy is out - will he still have a huge effect on both ends?  I guess we will see.

Buzz Bissinger was on the show

Last Friday Buzz Bissinger joined us on the show to talk about his latest column on The Daily Beast (find the column HERE)  Here was our conversation about him writing that white people have a hard time rooting for black athletes in the NBA...

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Ohhhhhhhhhhhh! (The HS dunk)

Steven Kaspar plays for ECS and he is going to play basketball in the Patriot League at Bucknell next year.  In the Div II A West Regional Championship he had the dunk of his life (:23 sec mark)...



My favorite part of the video is when the kid that gets dunked on tries to run away from the scene. Like, "Gee, what happened over there? I was way over here." Come on man, the video caught you jogging away. Congrats Steven, you will never forget that moment and that kid you maimed will have nightmares about it forever.

So I finally own chrisvernon.com

      Several years ago, when I was going to start a website, the closest thing I could get to chrisvernon.com was cvernon.com.  I wanted chrisvernon.com badly.  My web guy looked up who owned the site and it just so happened that the guy that owned chrisvernon.com was...you guessed it, Chris Vernon.  Chris Vernon that lived in Cleveland, Tn.  I could not believe that of all the places he could live that he happened to live a few hours down the road from me.  I considered just driving down the road and challenging him to a Chris Vernon duel, or nicely suggesting that he change his name. 
      We tried to make an offer for the site but Cleveland Chris wanted to keep the site, which he used for pictures of his family on vacation.  Long story short, last week Cleveland Chris emailed me out of nowhere to say he no longer had use for the site and wanted to offer it to me.
      I asked him how much he wanted for the site.  He said $1 million.  So, of course I told him that he had himself a deal.  Since I had started the twitter account I had kind of ditched the blog outside of posting something every once in a while.  Anyway,  I now own chrisvernon.com and I guess I have to get this blog going again.
Welcome back.