Results tagged “basketball”

The 2008 Phillies were a surprising and welcome departure from the Philly sports norm. Let's face it: We've gotten used to coming up short—whether short or barely short. Not long after the Phillies paraded down Broad Street last Halloween, the Eagles returned the cosmos to their rightful balance. (Villanova's Final Four appearance was an unexpected bonus that threatened to upset the recently-restored natural order of things. Fortunately for the universe, North Carolina did not allow the end of days to come about.)

Love him or hate him (we love him), Bill Simmons is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, sports columnists on the Internets. Simmons has penned a new book, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy, to be released tomorrow. You can get the book via Amazon for less than 20 bones (or clams or whatever you call them). The book weighs in at right around 700 pages, but don't let that dissuade you from buying it, as Simmons himself said in an interview with the Huffington Post: "If you like my columns, you're going to enjoy the book. At the very least, it's a book that you can stick next to your toilet, read 5 pages at a time and finish five months from now. It will be the best five months of dumping you've ever had. Your colon is going to love this book."

Despite the flurry of playoff wins and losses and analysis pouring in this week, I have managed to keep a steady eye on one Inquirer feature: a Sunday poll that gauged what the "biggest event for Philadelphia fans" was this upcoming weekend. I gave the poll a few days to mature and, as of today at three p.m., these were the results:

If we were cleverer we'd have a smart-ass answer to this: What is Philly style?

...Villanova pulled one of the great upsets in sports history. And with 'nova back in the Final Four for the first time since then, we think this is a good time to take a trip in the wayback machine.

A tall, icy glass of our favorite internet junk, just for you.

We have a safe haven for former prostitutes? Huh.

Drexel (2-3, 0-1): Drexel hasn't really given us much to get excited about over the last couple weeks. After getting past Cal State-Northridge in the battle of mediocrity, the Dragons pushed George Mason to the brink, but ended up falling to the Patriots by a point. Maybe because of a hangover from the George Mason game, Drexel was pretty lackluster in a loss to Fairfield. Can the team pull it back together? They've got a tough test on Thursday, hosting a 6-2 Niagra team (tickets) before going on the road to play Bucknell. And when they're done with that, they've got to travel to #17 Memphis. Realistically, the Dragons will probably be 2-6 or 3-5 after this stretch, so we'll be paying more attention to how they look in these games, particularly the Niagra game.

Drexel (1-1, 0-0): The Dragons got off to as good of a start, realistically, as we could hope for. They pulled out a close victory against Penn, but it wasn't for lack of trying to cough it up at the end. Fortunately for Drexel, Penn's Zack Rosen missed a key free throw in the closing moments of the game that could have possibly sent the game to overtime. In their next game, however, Drexel couldn't get anything going offensively, and ended up on the wrong end of a blowout against Georgetown. Upcoming games: Home vs. Cal State Northridge, Mon., 12/1/08, 7:00 p.m. (tickets).

With college hoops season tipping off, we're going to pick up where we left off last year with the Home Game: College Hoops Edition series of posts, with some modifications. We're going to stick to the Big 5 schools plus Drexel this year, and we're going to keep it to men's basketball—not because we have anything against women's hoops, but because our brains can only handle so much at any one time. So with the season getting underway, what's the outlook for Philadelphia's teams? Here's what we think.

We know you're focused on another sport right now, and the Sixers might know it too. They're offering a 2-for-1 mezzanine tickets deal for their regular season opener against the Toronto Raptors until 11:59 tonight. Just enter promo code DBB01 to get the Buzzer Beater tickets.

• Torontoist featured video of an absolutely insane series of explosions at a propane facility in the north end of the city last weekend.
• Despite an eventful week at the Olympics, Phillyist focused on local, Philadelphia teams.
• Seattlest, freshly aware of their "Junior High Readability Level," implemented a new weekly feature spotlighting a local they’re totes crushing on. First up, a guy they met at the Seattle Tattoo Expo.

 

Here’s the scenario: It’s a beautiful summer day at Citizens Bank Park. The sun is shining, the air is still, and the scent of hot dogs, peanuts, and beer wafts through the crowd. There’s really not much to complain about on such a picturesque afternoon. Our beloved Fightin’ Phillies, however, are down by one run in the 6th inning and we all know what comes next.

The shapeless dough of the internet, formed into tasty pellets and baked to perfection, just for you.

The 76ers drafted Marreese Speights, a 6'10", 250-pound center from Florida, with their only pick in the draft last Thursday. Speights is only 20 years old, and is a bit of a mystery entering the draft as a sophomore who had little college experience, having playing time blocked by NBA lotto-picks Al Horford and Joakim Noah.

If they don't win tonight, they're out of the playoffs. So we'll have our fingers crossed.

The Pistons blew out the Sixers last night 98-81, putting Philadelphia at the brink of elimination. But, the big story from the game was Samuel Dalembert’s new coif. Sammy shaved a fresh mohawk before Tuesday’s game, with the initials “SD” on the side. “SD” stands for “Samuel Dalembert” and “strong defense” according to Sixers play-by-play man Marc Zumoff. Sammy’s nemesis Rasheed Wallace went for 19 points, 6 boards and 6 blocks, so Dalembert might just want stick to telling us it's his namesake.

You may have noticed that another new writer has joined us! And we take it from all the recommends you've given his first post that you like him. We forgot to give him a proper introduction on that post, so we're making up for it now. Mark Downing works in video production, but also wrote at the sports desk of a New Jersey newspaper, and it's that experience, along with his love of the Philadelpha sports scene in general, that we hope to put to frequent use here at Phillyist.

The much-ballyhooed match-up between Cole Hamels and Johan Santana took place at a sold-out Citizens Bank Park. Santana baffled the Phils bats, fanning 10, and David Wright went 4-4 with 2 RBI’s as the Mets nipped the Phils 6-4.

Sigh...

a lead at some point in the game, unlike their male counterparts. The Wildcat men weren't really even competitive in their NCAA tournament loss to Kansas in the Sweet 16.

Eliot Spitzer was a tireless crusader for the cause of cleaning up Wall Street corruption. He also was a sex-crazed fiend who would spend the gross per capita of the average Third World country on a blow job.

So it's everyone's favorite time of the college basketball year: March Madness. That time of the year when everyone is a college hoops expert and every tournament pool you enter is guaranteed to be won by your buddy's girlfriend who picked her brackets based entirely on which school's color scheme she liked more in a head-to-head match-up. So in case you've been living under a rock for the last few days, here's what's up with the local teams in this crazy season.

It’s March already, the time of year for daylight savings, St. Patrick’s Day, and vasectomies—I mean, basketball.