IOC in NYC; The Fighting Illini; Fallen Snow Angels; The Hapless Hornets; Tom Brennan; NBA trades and More with Charlie Pierce; The Jump

NHL Update; Hoops at the All Star break with Mary Schmitt-Boyer; All Star Secrets; Who wants to be a red Ferrari?; NHL Economics with Scott Burnside; Tricksters in the Madhouse; NHL Miracle and more with Charlie Pierce

Nobody who had claimed that black players couldn’t work together to make a team would be as likely to think or say such stupid, bigoted things after the Globetrotters beat the Lakers.

Maybe someday an insider will write a book about how the NHL became the first pro aggregation in which the players and the owners argued their way out of a season.

Baseball is Back…Almost; Shane Doan; Picking A Winner; Women’s College Basketball; Bob Cousy; Manu and More with Charlie Pierce; Letters; A Curling Hotbed

In “Cousy: His Life, Career, and the Birth of Big-Time Basketball,” Bill Reynolds gives us Bob Cousy as a complex, thoughtful, ultimately triumphant man.

The Patriots may be the single most successful reclamation project in the history of professional sports.

Paul Attner’s Super Jacksonville Waffle House Roundup; Jeff Thomason; The Right Thing To Do; NHL Update; You Lose Some, You Lose Some; Carolina Kluft; Commentary; The Super Bowl and More with Charlie Pierce; Super Bowl Haiku XI

In the best of all worlds, the game of games in this out-of-step, violence-addicted nation would find two soccer teams going at it on the big day, but that’s a dream for another decade, I suppose.

The best thing I can say about this book (and it is no small thing) is that I learned some things from it.