JEagle87

I've been back home for the past week and haven't posted anything. No Atlanta Braves game threads on the message boards or any play-by-play on the GameCenter glogs either, so I apologize for everyone who has wonder where I've been. On to some random thoughts from the last week in sports that I haven't gotten around to posting.

Can anyone win on the road?

I've watched the Braves continue to struggle on the road (4-13 this season) and the Boston Celtics drop their 4th straight road playoff game (3 against Atlanta and 1 against Cleveland). Extreme cases such as this with good teams surprise a lot of people, but I am not shocked about either case. The NBA playoffs have been dominated by home teams so far, and people were amazed that the Celtics-Hawks series went the full 7 games. However, I think a lot of people, probably myself included, underestimated the Hawks, and the crowd at an NBA game, especially in the playoffs. As for the Braves, well, it is only early May, and they'll pull out of it eventually. They haven't played a lot of tough teams on the road, mostly divisional games, but did get swept at Colorado and at dropped the first two against Pittsburgh. Any pro sports team needs to win on the road to be successful, whether it's the regular season or the playoffs, and home dominance seems to be a growing trend, unfortunately.

OJ Mayo and the One-Year Rule

I don't care if Mayo accepted gifts or not before or during his time at USC. Ditto for athlete for that matter. This is an issue that goes beyond that. This a rant against the one-year rule for all NBA prospects. I don't understand why the rule was made, because all it does is cause problems. If some one is talented enough to go straight from high school to the NBA, just let them. A lot of the NBA's biggest names, LeBron, Kobe, KG, Howard, etc., didn't go to college and this rule I believe is killing college basketball. It causes to many problems with the NCAA when players rack up violations and it will continue to kill the college teams, while the players who committed the violations don't get penalized for their actions. Maybe this will change at some point, as Mayo and fellow USC player Reggie Bush have ongoing investigations about violations. There are only two ways to solve this problem, change or remove the rule. Either ban the player from playing in the pros or some other punishment or force them to earn a degree while playing in college. Here's an idea David Stern: If you're going to force young players to go to school, make them get a degree. I don't care if it is a two-year degree, but before you can play in the NBA from college, you have to earn some kind of degree from your school. This one-year thing is a joke. Athletes can take bogus classes, like Rocks for Jocks and whatever, for one year (for free, I might add), then move on to the NBA. Having these young athletes accepting gifts and talking to agents are going to continue to happen unless someone (David Stern) fixes the root of the problem. You can't allow players to treat their one year of college basketball as a joke, and right now, that is what it is. Of course, I'm just a whackjob with an internet blog, so who cares right?

On Tap

Braves DH against Pittsburgh tomorrow, then road trip to Philly. I might see one of the games at Citizens Bank with some friends of mine from NJ who are Phils fans, since we're bored and we're only an hour away from Philly.

NBA/NHL Playoffs all week