Is the NBA the awesomest sport? Obviously. Are the Jazz the absolute coolest of the cool? Without question. But there ARE other sports. And for these sports, we have fantasy leagues. So Shums is donning his commissioner's cap for the upcoming NFL season.

My rules: 12 teams, standard Yahoo! scoring, unlimited roster moves.

I've already sent out invites to some of our returnees. Among them will be BBJ, UtesFan89, clarkpojo, and reigning champ jake1ar. I also posted a notice on Twitter, but I'd like to give Dunkers priority. Leave a comment if you want in. First come, first served.

A new year and a new season requires a new Manifesto. Or at least an updated one.

The SLC Dunk community continues to grow, and that means new site visitors, lurkers who are venturing out into commenting and posting for the first time, and fans of other team fishing for news. Like any long-running website, SLC Dunk has a few unwritten rules and customs that might be unusual to newcomers. We're trying to make this the best Jazz fan site out there, but a website is only as good as its community. We want you all to be a part of that.

With this as our goal (and with the approval of our gentle host Basketball John), I'd like to lay out a few of the principles that have helped make this site what it is, and what it will be.

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This Sports Illustrated piece really puts the Arenas-Crittenton situation into perspective. Even the Mailman, noted hunter, outdoorsman, and all-around hillbilly, doesn't approve of how this whole thing went down.

All the years I played, I've never heard of anything like this alleged incident or of a player bringing guns into the locker room. Doing that in the locker room, with so much that can happen? It's one of those things you just don't do. I can't make any sense of that. You can't tell me one good thing that can happen with a gun in an arena, but I can tell you a thousand bad things.

If I'm a player on that team, of course, I'm saying to those guys, "What the hell are you doing?" Even if, as Arenas insists, he brought the guns to the arena because he wanted them away from his children at home, I wouldn't have bought that excuse. Buy a safe. Put them in there. End of story.

It's a great read (even if it was obviously tidied up to eliminate some of the more obvious Mailman-isms). Also, pretty hilarious that the only photo they put with the story is one of Malone as a Laker. Thanks for that, SI.

So I’m sitting on my couch and someone knocks at the door. Not the main door to my apartment. The door that leads out to my front deck. The front deck that is situated about fifteen feet above the ground floor. HOW DID SOMEONE GET TO MY FRONT DECK AND KNOCK ON MY DOOR.

… then I realized that the deck connects to the other side of my duplex. Turns out this dude came over to visit my roommate but entered the wrong side of the house, thus showing up on my front deck.

This incredibly boring story is brought to you purely to underscore how UTTERLY AWFUL this game was. By comparison, that story was friggin' Shakespeare.

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Since the Jazz are in Atlanta to play the Hawks tonight, Deron Williams made an appearance on the TNT broadcast of "Inside the NBA" with Ernie, Kenny and Chuck. And they didn't cut him any slack. Observe:

Wow. Is it just me, or did it seem like, after unanimously proclaiming him the best point guard in the league (even specifying "better than Chris Paul"), they all really went after Deron and the Jazz? And our ninja did NOT look comfortable. In fact, he starts getting a little feisty with Barkley, who keeps insisting (as he did during the Laker game last week) that there is "tension in y'all's locker room" and that "you KNOW what's going to happen [at the end of the season when Boozer is not re-signed]."

Deron dutifully gives the party line, that there are no chemistry problems now and that no one really knows what's going to happen next offseason. But as each of the hosts repeats essentially the same question -- "Why isn't this team better than it is, or as good as it could be?" -- D-Will has to just keep shaking his head, and you can sense his frustration growing as he admits "...I wish I knew" after an awkward pause.

Consider also Deron's Tweet after his appearance:

@d_will_8_4real: Segment is going to Air on the post game show! Kenny and Charles didn't let me off the hook at all! Had a good time

Deron's never really been one to hold back his emotions. If he's annoyed, you can usually tell, even if the words themselves don't show it. He was annoyed tonight.

So I'm left wondering what to read into this. Is he just sick of having the same questions fired at him and being expected to give the golden answer? Or is this indicative of the very internal "tension" that Barkley suspects and Deron denies? (Or am I overreacting? Because that sounds like something I would do.)

Final point: We know Deron (or his representation) is pushing more publicly to make the All-Star Game this year. (And again, you can tell in his voice when Ernie asks him about it that it would mean an awful lot to him, more than he wants to let on.) Kenny says that his goal shouldn't even be set there, but rather as a first- or second-team All-NBA selection -- a goal he accomplished as a second-teamer in 07-08. I think it's interesting that people around the league seem to have such respect for D-Will... at least to his face. But when it gets right down to it, he still hasn't made an All-Star team, and he still isn't recognized for his game by the public at large.

Lots of interesting things in that five-minute interview to parse out. Let's hear what you all thought about it.

I attended seven Real Salt Lake home games this year. I would have liked to attend more, but lack of funds, failing to plan ahead and work obligations made it tough. I did subscribe to the MLS internet broadcasts and eventually watched every match this season, including every glorious minute of the MLS Cup Final.

While I don't hang out on the Big Soccer boards all day or watch match replays over and over, I read every mainstream media article and most of the fan blogs, and consider myself a pretty big RSL fan. Now I'm ready to become a season ticket holder.

So my question is: what's the best option? Cheapest seats possible? Any particular section? Do I join a supporters group? Which one? (I know Denz is a Rogue Cavalier Brigade guy.) Looking for some advice from anyone on here, or maybe some fellow committed fans to sit and watch with. Or anyone else's experiences with buying season tickets or joining supporters clubs would be useful too. What say you?

Yes, it's that time of year again. The time of year when you actually start paying attention to basketball news from other teams. The time of year when you purchase huge tomes of stats and opinion, pore over them and discard them an hour after the draft. The time of year when you participate in that most joyous of activities, at the crossroads of Sports Fan Drive and Dweeb Boulevard.

That's right, suckas: fantasy basketball.

I've booted up last year's league for another year. The URL and password are the same as ever. All managers from last year's league have already been e-mailed. Otherwise, if you want in, leave a comment or send me an e-mail. At the moment I have a 12-team limit, but I will expand it if there's enough demand.

Let me know how I might better serve you in this capacity. Prepare to die. Commissioner Shums out.

(From the FanPosts...)

A recent post on Mountain West Connection got me thinking. The post simply asks the question: Would you root for your rival?

A lot of sports fans would consider this a stupid question. And depending on the sport, they could be right. In the NBA, for example, I am a loyal Utah Jazz fan. The good of any rival team, whether the Lakers, Spurs, Nuggets, Rockets, or anyone else, can only mean bad news for me. There is absolutely no benefit to another NBA team doing well. This is the way of it in pretty much all professional sports.

College is different. Especially in a smaller market like the Mountain West. Especially football. College football is subjective by nature. In football there are polls and formulas. Recruiting budgets and TV deals. Haves and have-nots. For us in the Mountain West, this means it's not just about winning. It's about making an impression. It's about proving people wrong. It's about getting noticed. And unfortunately, a lot of that is out of our hands. (Okay, technically all of it is out of our hands, since we're not actually out there with a Y on our helmets. You get the point.)

(Continued after the jump...)

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Okay folks: it's for real this time. The SLC Dunk Fantasy Football League is a go. Initial plan is for 10 teams (although I know I had more votes than that, but I really want committed teams, so let me know if you really want in and I'll expand the number), with a live online draft scheduled for Sunday, Aug. 30 at 6pm Mountain time. More specifics will be available in-league.

So. If you're interested, leave a comment here, or send me an email (you can find my email on my SB Nation user page), and I will send you the league ID# and password. You can see the rules and scoring once you're in the league, but a brief description: 1 QB, 2 RBs, 2 WRs, 1 TE, 1 Flex (W/R/T), 1 K, 1 DEF/ST, standard Yahoo scoring, no waivers, no transaction limit (sort of like I did with our basketball league: make as many moves as you want, whenever you want).

Any questions, hit me up; I'm more than happy to help. (And by the way, if you've been lurking here and not making any comments, this is the perfect way to get to know some of the regulars! We don't bite! Except UtesFan, but he's been better since he had his shots.)

So yeah. Let's do this. Commish out.

I'm always interested to hear about why people became fans of their favorite teams. In the case of the Cougars, there are three likely reasons: you're a student, you're from Utah, or you're a Latter-day Saint. The school's connection to the LDS Church is well known, as is the way BYU travels well for away games, since many Utah and LDS transplants show up in their Cougar blue.

Of course, those reasons also make it more difficult to be a BYU fan, especially these days. Inside the state, the BYU-Utah rivalry (I refuse to call it by that stupid nickname) has reached ridiculous proportions... and, let's face it, things didn't go our way this past year. Outside of Utah, BYU's connections to both the state and the LDS Church make the school and its athletic teams an easy (and unfunny) punchline for the ignorant and the belligerent. Sometimes it takes a special kind of fortitude to stay True Blue. But chances are, if you're here and you're reading this, I don't have to tell you that.

But maybe you're from out of state and adopted the team. Maybe your family used to live in Utah and you follow the Cougs from afar. I'm sure there are lots of different stories. So mark yourself in the poll, and tell your story in the comments.

So, last year's SLC Dunk fantasy basketball league was a success; we had ten solid players, no real dead teams, and a nice competitive spirit. Now, even though it's not the sport of choice for a true blue Jazz fan, the NFL season will soon be upon us, and with it, the delights of fantasy football. For those of you who haven't played, fantasy football is even easier to pick up than fantasy basketball, as there is less constant upkeep (just one game a week per player) and a little more drama in the scoring. Anyway, I'm only in one league right now, and I'm looking for more, so I just wanted to gauge interest in an SLC Dunk league, run by yours truly. I'll keep the poll open for a while, and if there's enough interest I'll start another official sign-up thread. Who's in?

This is just to play devil's advocate to my earlier comments, because I still think this deal isn't altogether unreasonable for Millsap, taken by itself, and it's not as bad as it could be. But taking a closer look at the numbers, I'm having second thoughts. My very-imperfect salary estimates follow. (Feel free to correct me if my numbers are off.) And be warned: it's ugly.

We know about what it will cost to keep Millsap this year, whether we move Boozer or not. And we also know that Korver's and Harpring's contracts are set to expire. But even after that, the Jazz are seriously BONED for the next two or three years if they match, due not just to Boozer, but also (even more so) due to Kirilenko. In 2010-11, he's scheduled to make $17.8 frakking million. Add in D-Will at $15M, Memo at $11M, and Millsap at $8M, and, well, that sucks. A lot. As in, we might not even be able to field a full roster.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but here's what we're looking at:

AK: $17.8M
DWill: $15.2M
Memo: $11M
Millsap: $8M
CJ: $3.7M
Ronnie B: $3.8M just as qualifying offer, probably much more (he'll be a restricted free agent, like Millsap is now)
The Koof: $1.3M
Maynor: $1.4M
Knicks draft pick: $1.5-2M
Total: approximately $62-64M for 9 players
Estimated luxury tax level: $65-69M

Now we're looking at signing like four or five scrubs, at less than $500K each, just to field a full roster of 13 players and avoid the luxury tax again. OUCH.

It gets much better in 2011-12, once Kirilenko's giant millstone of a contract is gone:

DWill: $16.6M
Memo: $11M
Millsap: $8.6M
CJ: $3.7M
The Koof: $2.2M
Maynor: $1.5M
Knicks pick: $2M
Total: approx. $46M

Then we'd be well under the cap and have freedom enough to do whatever. But we'd also have only 6 or 7 players under contract (DWill, Memo, Millsap, CJ, The Koof, Maynor, Knicks pick).

As it stands right now, matching on Millsap and doing nothing else to cut salary will cost us the luxury tax this year, and, unless we manage to move AK, next year as well. All that, and we probably won't even have a very competitive team in 2010, as we'll have to get by with whomever we can sign for peanuts. Forget about trades/free agency -- we'll struggle to sign warm bodies at all.

I still want Millsap here, and I don't think, in a vacuum, this contract is too crazy for him as our starter. But if we match... well, I don't envy Kevin O'Connor. Or Greg Miller. Because they're gonna have to get used to being a lot poorer. And unless some other significant moves are made, we'll all have to get used to cheering for what will probably a much worse basketball team.

via i173.photobucket.com

The date is June 28, 2008. The event is the NBA Draft. The team is the Utah Jazz. Seeking to avoid further embarrassment on the interior defensively, the Jazz worked out such big men as Georgetown's Roy Hibbert, Florida's Marreese Speights, and Rider's Jason Thompson. Yet when it came time to choose, all these men had been selected by other teams. And thus it came to pass that the Jazz selected an entity from the land of the Buckeyes, a being of such unimaginable power that only capital letters are able to harness the force of his utterances, a creation so mighty that his respectful demeanor and grinning countenance only served as ironic counterpoint to his staggering capacity for destruction. This omnipotent creature, this force of nature, this demigod-in-rookie-form, would come to be known only as THE KOOF.

Oh... and it could DANCE.

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If anyone is interested, I have created a Yahoo group for the NCAA Tournament. You know, just so I can beat you all at that in addition to fantasy basketball. Okay, I'm kidding. I'm notoriously bad at bracketing. Anyway, like you needed one more bracket to fill out, but I'm doing it anyway. Tourney starts tomorrow, so get a move on.

The group is called SLC Dunk.

The link is this: http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/t1/group/181341

The password is: ninja

Get to bracketing, fools.

Note by Basketball John, 02/20/09 7:08 PM MST ]

via farm4.static.flickr.com

Just received word.

Larry H. Miller, husband, father, grandfather, a well-known entrepreneur, community advocate and humanitarian, died from complications due to type 2 diabetes today, at home, surrounded by his family. He was 64.

More news as it breaks.

Greg Miller is now officially the team owner (he was in charge of operations as the CEO already, but now it's for real). Probably nothing will change for the Jazz in the short-term, but it's still a major loss. I hate to overuse the whole "end of an era" thing, but in this case it's true.

UPDATE: Link now goes to full obit from Doug Robinson of the Deseret News.

[Note by Basketball John, 02/20/09 7:12 PM MST ]

What they're saying...

Salt Lake Tribune Editorial

 

Jerry O'Brien, The Tribune's late publisher, used to muse that the only place in Utah where the Mormon/non-Mormon divide didn't exist was the Delta Center. He was right, and the state has Larry Miller, a dedicated Latter-day Saint, to thank for that.

He was a regular guy. All you had to do to know that was to look at him. His uniform was a golf shirt, a pair of khakis and athletic shoes. He was just Larry. People liked that.

He also was an emotional guy. Tears came easily during press conferences about Karl Malone's latest pronouncement or some other tempest in the Jazz pot or, frankly, almost anything. And he made decisions from his gut. Or, as he put it, "feel."

 

Gordon Monson

 

What's relatively unknown about the man is the personal transformation he underwent over the past eight months, since his initial hospitalization after a heart attack. In our conversation, Larry hit that hard, emphasizing that as his body became weaker, his spiritual awareness became stronger.

"I've always considered myself a religious person," he said. "I've made mistakes, but I never set out to hurt anyone. I've been put now in situations where I am more sensitive to spiritual things, to Gail, to my kids, to my grandkids, to people in general. I hope that's one of the things that stays with me when I get better."

It will have to stay with him now in the Great Beyond.

 

Doug Robinson

Miller considered the Jazz his "gift to Utah." With a net worth of only $4 million, Miller convinced six lending institutions to loan him $8 million to buy half of a moribund basketball franchise that had lost $17 million in its 11-year history and, in its best year, had lost $1 million.

In 1986, it appeared the Jazz were about to leave town again, and Miller appeared unable to prevent it. He actually picked up a pen to sign a contract that would complete the sale of the team, which not only would have erased his original $8 million debt but would have given him a tidy $6 million profit — double his net worth at the time — for just a 14-month investment. After a long pause, with his pen hovering over the contract, he finally tossed it on the table and told co-owner Sam Battistone he couldn't do it. To buy Battistone's share, Miller passed up the fat profit and took on even more debt — to the tune of $14 million — for a total debt of $22 million.

Patrick Kinahan

Often, he spoke for me, the run-of-the-mill fan. All of us felt better when, after an injured Carlos Boozer made that idiotic comment about intending to opt out of his contract, Larry went on the radio to say it ranked among the top 10 most stupid things he’s heard.

...

We want to celebrate his life, an incredible American success story born of  humble beginnings. But as we reflect, all of us need time to mourn.   It won’t seem right, not seeing Larry sitting in his customary courtside seat. Not all change is good.

Governor Huntsman

Every citizen in our state feels a little empty today. Larry was Utah and Utah was Larry. He inspired many and served countless. We all have been made better by his extraordinary life.

Mary Kaye and I wish to express our deepest love and sympathies to his wonderful wife, Gail, and their entire family and wish them a sense of deep condolences at this difficult time

The Cowhide Globe

True Blue Jazz

ESPN  - Visit during last year's playoffs.