1. Steph Curry (27.9% of his mentions were negative)
2. Russ Westbrook (24.6%)
3. Joel Embiid (22.3%)
4. LeBron James (22.1%)
5. Kevin Durant (21.7%)
6. Kyrie Irving (20.7%)
READ: basketballnews.c
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| Which NBA players receive the most POSITIVE tweets? According to the study: 1. Kevin Love (53.3% of his mentions were positive) 2. Steph Curry (47.5%) 3. LeBron James (46.7%) 4. Blake Griffin (46.7%) 5. Carmelo Anthony (46.1%) MORE INFO: basketballnews.c | |||||
| 2/17/21, 12:17 PM | |||||
| RealGM |
| @RealGM |
Warriors Interested In Trading For Victor Oladipo basketball.realgPrevious first-quarter grade/ranking: B- | Ranked 12th
Updated first-half grade: B-
While it feels like everything has changed for the Golden State Warriors throughout the season, we’re not seeing a change from their first-quarter and first-half grades. Everything revolves around Steph Curry on offense. Defensively, this team is actually quite good, but their offense puts a huge strain on the defense. If Curry doesn’t go nuts, the Warriors have to grind out victories. Hell, they even have to grind them out sometimes when Curry is going nuts. None of that is going to change either. They just have to hope James Wiseman keeps sopping up this experience and using it to grow for a playoff push.
Positive spin? At least Kelly Oubre Jr. isn’t a disaster anymore. He’s shooting nearly 50 percent from the field and almost 40 percent from 3-point range over his last 15 games. If they can get Oubre and Andrew Wiggins to play well at the same time, it might solve that offense issue.
6. Trent Williams, OT, San Francisco 49ers (33)
After missing all of 2019, Williams was traded to the 49ers and performed like one of the NFL’s best left tackles. He finished fourth in ESPN’s pass-block win rate and made the Pro Bowl. Williams is on the wrong side of 30, but left tackles of his caliber are hard to find, and he should still have plenty of suitors. David Bakhtiari ($23 million per year) is currently the NFL’s top-paid tackle. The floor for a Williams deal could be the contract ($17 million per year) Garett Bolles signed with the Broncos. One important note: As part of Williams’ restructured deal with San Francisco, the 49ers can’t use the franchise tag on him.
46. Richard Sherman, CB, San Francisco 49ers (33)
59. Jason Verrett, CB, San Francisco 49ers (30)
107. K’Waun Williams, SCB, San Francisco 49ers (30)\
118. Kyle Juszczyk, FB, San Francisco 49ers (30)
128. D.J. Jones, DT, San Francisco 49ers (26)
133. Kerry Hyder, Edge, San Francisco 49ers (30)
| ProFootballTalk |
| @ProFootballTa |
25. Raiders: minus-$7.01 million
26. Bears: minus-$7.45 million
27. Packers: minus-$9.66 million
28. Falcons: minus-$17.84 million
29. Chiefs: minus-$21.11 million
30. Rams: minus-$26.26 million
31. Eagles: minus-$29.73 million
32. Saints: minus-$46.22 million
This week, the NFL may announce the long-awaited renewal of its TV deals, and while the money the league reaps roughly doubles, there will be little change for fans. Sunday afternoon games will be on CBS and Fox, Sunday night on NBC, and Monday night on ESPN (and maybe ABC).
There is one exception, and it’s a tectonic shift, sources said, echoing a Wall Street Journal report: Amazon Prime will not only renew its slate of Thursday Night games, but also will gain exclusivity on a healthy portion of them. Currently, Amazon shares the Thursday games with NFL Network and Fox, and the league’s in-house organ will almost surely retain some overlap. But a meaningful number of games will only be on Prime. This is the kind of pivotal moment experts may talk about for decades, akin to Fox winning rights to the NFL in 1994 or when “Monday Night Football” moved from network to cable TV in 2006.
“So think about that first NFL deal with ESPN. Think about the first Major League Baseball deal with ESPN where you just, you couldn’t believe that,” said Scott Rosner, Academic Director of the sports management program at Columbia University, who recalled the surprise viewers had when sports properties they considered their “God-given right” to watch migrated from over-the-air to cable TV.
Media analyst Rich Greenfield, emphasizing the historic development, wrote in a report last week: “Amazon Prime taking over Thursday Night Football is a watershed moment in TV history that will undoubtedly accelerate the demise of (traditional) TV and the multichannel bundle. To be clear, (traditional) TV’s downfall was happening with or without Amazon Prime buying NFL rights, but this move simply adds fuel to the bundle’s fire.”
This all sounds good, and the NFL reportedly is getting $1 billion annually from Amazon, but there is the elephant in the room: audience size. Last season’s lone exclusive game on Prime — an experiment of sorts — fetched the equivalent of 4.8 million viewers on Amazon’s Prime and Twitch, far below even a poorly rated NFL game. “The NFL is certainly not known historically for migrating towards platforms where the audience would decrease, right,” Rosner said. “It’s always been, you know, how can we get the greatest number of people.”
Indeed, for generations, the NFL has been committed to putting games before the widest audience possible, a strategy that helped make it the country’s top sport. For years that meant broadcast TV, until the league put one of its premier products, “Monday Night Football,” on ESPN in 2006. It was actually the NFL’s second foray into cable, since there were Sunday night games on ESPN and Turner Sports from 1987 to 2005, before the Sunday night package became the league’s premier TV destination. But through the mid-2010s the cable bundle thrived, topping 100 million homes, not far off the total number of TV homes. Events as diverse as the college football championship and Wimbledon migrated in whole to cable.
Defenders of the Amazon move make the point that Prime has 142 million US subscribers, and Nielsen-rated TV homes are at 121 million.
“You are now looking at an environment where there’s a larger total addressable market for one of the big streaming services that has a growing sports appetite and growing sports brand,” said Tom Richardson, senior vice president of strategy for Mercury Intermedia, a mobile-connected TV development company.
It is true that Amazon is more ubiquitous in our daily lives for many than TV. But there are the old habits and patterns of watching sports, and Prime doesn’t come to mind first. Sunday afternoons are still about flipping on the television as the NFL’s enormous ratings underscore, notwithstanding this past season’s 7 percent decline.
“Most of us are still viewing most live sports through traditional channels,” Richardson said. “So part of the challenge will be to educate and motivate people to, you know, use these outlets more commonly, more broadly, in terms of what I call first-option viewing.”
Tom Spock, a former NFL executive and co-founder of Scalar Media, countered that those habits are already changing and soon Prime will be seen as just another channel.
“I cut the cord a few years ago, so for me, Amazon is exactly like Netflix. It’s like Hulu with live TV,” he said. “So I still get all the local channels. But when I turn on my Roku, or my iPad, or wherever I’m looking, they’re just channels again. So, to me, Amazon is as accessible to the next wave of entertainment consumers, as you know, as whatever channel Fox is on in your local market.”
Fox is currently paying $660 million a year for “Thursday Night Football,” which the network made clear was too steep for renewal. It needed the resources for the Sunday package doubling to $2 billion a year. (There are another two seasons remaining on the Thursday night deal before the new one kicks in, unless there are changes made with the new contracts). Amazon with its enormous resources can afford to pay more because it has the cash and it doesn’t need the deal to pencil out because it is about marketing the whole Prime product.
4- GIANTS
ST SO FAR:
-RAMOS 2 HRS YESTERDAY
(BAGGS)
-He didn’t need to show off his biceps following the Giants’ 9-4 exhibition victory over the Reds in Goodyear. He did plenty of that during the game, swatting a pair of home runs — one pulled to left field off lefty Sean Doolittle, the other tagged the opposite way over the right field fence against lefty Reiver Sanmartin.
HOW FAR AWAY IS HE?
That belief is spreading. Last month, Giants president Farhan Zaidi suggested that Ramos might have made his big-league debut last season if he had been able to matriculate through the pandemic-shuttered minor leagues. Giants manager Gabe Kapler has raved about Ramos’ maturity and physical tools, but also pointed out that the former first-round pick has played just 25 games at Double A.
“We never rule anything out,” Kapler said. “We also believe strongly in a good deal of development on the minor-league level.”
Perhaps the person in the Giants organization who has the best handle on Ramos’ readiness is farm director Kyle Haines, who spent nearly every day with him at the alternate site in Sacramento last year.
“Especially coming off a two-homer game, I’d love to sit here and say we identified swing flaws and fixed them and it led to all these great things,” said Haines, reached by phone on Sunday. “But we haven’t overhauled anything. We just got him as many live at-bats as possible and tried to make sure he wouldn’t be too far behind in experiencing live pitching.”
BOWDEN HAS BUSTER ON COMEBACK PLAYER LIST (TREY MANCINI WILL WIN IT WITH ANY DECENT SEASON)
BUT WHAT DO U EXPECT?
Buster Posey, C, San Francisco Giants
Posey is a future Hall of Famer in my book, although some say he needs more successful seasons to earn their vote. Posey was last at his best in 2017, when he hit .320 with a 127 OPS+. He has dealt with numerous injuries in his career — hip, leg, knees, ankles, the entire gamut. Posey, 33, opted out of the 2020 season over COVID-19 concerns after he and his wife adopted newborn twin girls. Missing the season was probably the best thing that could have happened to him baseball-wise because it gave his body a full year to heal. He enters spring training the healthiest he’s been in years, and I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t have a strong rebound season.
FANS AT THE PARK BREAKDOWN: (BAGGS)
Here’s how it would break down for the Giants:
San Francisco County is currently in the red tier, so the Giants could host 8,400 fans (20 percent of capacity). But if positive trends continue, there’s an excellent chance that the county could move into the less restrictive orange tier on March 24. That would allow them to sell up to 13,860 tickets (33 percent) for the April 9 home opener. Because counties must spend at least three weeks in a colored tier and cannot skip tiers, the soonest that San Francisco County could enter the yellow tier would be April 14. So that would be the earliest possible day that the Giants could welcome 28,000 fans (67 percent).
No out-of-state fans are allowed, per California health mandates.
Keep in mind that local city and county officials can adopt stricter mandates — something we’ve already experienced in the Bay Area over the past year. But I’m told the Giants have kept an active and positive dialogue with local officials and are optimistic that once they present their detailed gameday and fan safety protocols, they will receive the blessings they need to replace cardboard cutouts with living, breathing (into their masks) Giants fans.
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