This is the logo of another old American Basketball Association team – The Spirits of St. Louis. They weren’t particularly successful, but had 2 players on their roster who went on to have careers in the NBA – Maurice Lucas, who helped the Portland Trailblazers win an NBA title, and Marvin “Bad News” Barnes, who was a very talented player who was out of control off the court most of his career. The team’s radio broadcaster also went on to bigger and better things – it was Bob Costas of NBC.
Major league baseball made an announcement the other day that just boggles the mind. They are moving an inter-league series to be played in late June between the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies from the Rogers Centre in Toronto to Philadelphia, due to security concerns with the G20 Summit being held in Toronto at that time. The games will be played as if Toronto is the home team – the Jays will bat last and a designated hitter will be used. Are you kidding me? This is a series that would have marked the return of star pitcher Roy Halladay to Toronto and most likely would be an attendance boost for the struggling club. This series could be a huge competitive disadvantage to the Phils’ NL East competitors. If the Phillies wind up dominating or even sweeping that series and finish a small amount of games ahead of the New York Mets or Atlanta Braves at season’s end, will those teams have a legitimate beef? Just another Bud Selig-induced nightmare.
In the 1970s and 80s the Buffalo Sabres’ American Hockey League farm team was located in Cincinnati and known as the Swords. This is their logo.
In 1962 Post cereal had a series of baseball cards on their cereal boxes that are scarce today and popular with collectors. New York Yankee fans would consider this card of pitching legend Whitey Ford as sacrilegious, since it erroneously lists Ford’s team as the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Bill Russell rookie card from 1957. He was probably the greatest defensive player in NBA history and one of the greatest players of all time. His Boston Celtics won 11 NBA titles in his 13 years with the team, and he was voted NBA Most Valuable Player 5 times. When you consider that prior to his NBA career that his University of San Francisco college team won 2 straight national championships and that he played on the USA gold medal winning team in the 1956 Olympics, Russell can be summed up in one word – WINNER.
This is an old Chicago White Sox logo from the 1950s, and was their logo in the famous 1959 “Go Go Sox” season, when they won the American League pennant behind stars like Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox and pitcher Early Wynn. When the Sox clinched the pennant by beating Cleveland on September 22nd, the city’s fire commissioner ordered a 5 minute celebratory sounding of the city’s air-raid sirens. Not a great idea considering it was the middle of the Cold War era and Nikita Khrushchev’s threat to “bury” the U.S. was still fresh in the news. It caused a bit of a panic in the city. The “Go Go Sox” were beaten by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 6 games in the World Series that year.
I wrote a post awhile back picking the New York Jets to win the AFC East this season, but what about the rest of the division? New England, with Bill Belichick as coach, always has to be taken seriously as a contender, and Miami, under Bill Parcells’ overall guidance, rose from the dead 2 years ago only to backslide last season. I feel the Patriots will contend but they have gotten to the point where they’ve become arrogant in thinking they can just dump players and plug in replacements without missing a beat. In my opinion they made a mistake in trading away Richard Seymour prior to last season and missed his presence, on the field and in the locker room. They made another personnel mistake bringing in LB Adalius Thomas, and admitted that mistake by cutting him recently. I see the Pats contending for the AFC East crown but settling for a wild card. I give them a slight advantage over Miami for one reason – the quarterback position. Tom Brady is in somewhat of a decline but he’s still miles ahead of the Dolphins’ Chad Henne. Most prognosticators, when handicapping this division, don’t even mention the Buffalo Bills. They have become that irrelevant to the national media the last decade, other than the Terrell Owens distraction last year. They will go into this season, under new coach Chan Gailey, with zero expectations, which is not a bad spot for a young, growing team. There is a mistaken assumption that the Bills have no talent at all. Actually, there is a wealth of potential talent on this team, but the situation was skewed by the fact that 20 players wound up on injured reserve last season and they finished the season with a very depleted roster. The Bills can surprise some people if Gailey is successful at 2 things – sorting through the roster he has and maximizing the talents of the young players, and finding and developing a competent, not great but competent, quarterback among the 4 he has to work with.
This is an early logo of the Dallas Cowboys’ NFL football team, from the early 1960s, before Tom Landry built them into a powerhouse and transformed them into “America’s Team”. Landry was the team’s first coach, when they entered the league in 1960, and remained the coach until being unceremoniously dumped by owner Jerry Jones in the late ’80s.
This card will make people who live in the Niagara region of the country want to run out and grab a cup of coffee. Before his name became known for coffee, Tim Horton was a Hall of Fame NHL defenseman, mostly for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1960s. He finished his career as a Buffalo Sabre before being tragically killed in a car crash on the Queen Elizabeth Way in Canada. He had opened a regional chain of coffee shops to set himself up for his retirement, and those shops are highly successful to this day. So, you’re probably headed out to a Timmy’s right now. I’ll have a large double double and a box of Timbits please.
The word of the day for the NBA conference semi-finals is BROOM! Three of the four series have already ended in sweeps. The 2 teams who met in the NBA finals last year, the Lakers and the Orlando Magic, made quick work of their opponents. The Lakers’ opponents – the Utah Jazz – are perennial bridesmaids in the NBA so the result of that series is no surprise, but the sweep is surprising. The Magic, who look like a better team this year than last, totally dismantled the Atlanta Hawks in a series that wasn’t even close. They now await the winner of the Cleveland / Boston series. The Cavaliers should clearly be the better team in this series, but they have fallen into the habit of only playing hard when they absolutely have to. The Cavs lost to Orlando in the Eastern finals last season but unless they get their act together on a consistent basis, they won’t even get past the Celtics, who are aging but are a proud team only a year removed from being NBA champs. The team that is looking really scary is the Phoenix Suns, who also swept their West semifinal series, over San Antonio. The Suns are normally in the same category as Utah, a good team that fades in the playoffs every season. But they are clicking on all cylinders this year, and their series win over the 4-time champion Spurs was impressive. I like the Lakers to beat them in a long hard-fought series, and I also feel that Orlando will defeat either the Cavs or Celtics, setting up a repeat of last year’s final series.