This usually isn't my venue for venting on sports in general (unless it's one of my teams fucking up miserably), but I have to make this point available in text somewhere. It's fair to say that a period of two seasons of apparent meaningless basketball may have finally come to an end with that guy making his long awaited announcement. The details are not really important and don't particular affect my point so I'll leave them out there for others to revel or agonize about.

Sports coverage has changed a lot over the years, certainly a lot in my time as a spectator of sports. ESPN once had an interesting idea, a channel that covers sports all day...everyday. I remembered when you would pretty much only see highlights of the most recent sporting events, tantalizing statistics, standings and a top ten list. Not so much these days, sports coverage (especially for the Worldwide Leader) is about analysis, chatter and speculation. While no sport violates this as much as football does (do we really need to have daily episodes of NFL Live talking about the upcoming NFL Draft when one happened days earlier?), but with the NBA summer of free agents that we're witnessing is just sad. Did you know that the Lakers won back to back titles? That's fine, ESPN forgot about that once *ahem* experienced another early playoff exit. In that same light, what about CC Sabathia having to answer question about someone not even in the same sport as he, while he's on his way to another Cy Young and another ring (hopefully).

It is sad that the actual sporting events have taken a back seat to off-the-field business like free agency, contract negotiating, drafting and of course the personal lives of athletes. While every fan of a team or athlete will always share the desire to know about what is going on in their day, it really should be up to the individual fan to seek out that information and not for a national broadcaster to be saturating our lives with athletes that they think we should care about. If only we could get back to where sports coverage was limited to just scores, great plays and being blown away by statistical anomalies as opposed to which former quarterback (also a name never to be mentioned on this blog ever again) got busted for sippin on some sizzurp or how teams will clear up cap space to land free agents that have multiple years remaining on their contracts.

-Mikhail