There are several ways to ensure you won’t get yourself kicked out of a basketball game. Rasheed Wallace is not familiar with any of them. Loyola (MD) coach Jimmy Patsos (seen in the nightmares of referees who have worked his games looking like this), on the other hand, found a clever way around getting ejected last night.

It all started in the first half when Patsos earned what he called an unwarranted technical foul without any warning whatsoever. The ref told him if he said one more word, he’d be T’ed up again, and kicked out of the arena. So, to avoid the ref hearing him say anything, good or bad, Patsos moved to the very end of the bench, as you can see in the photo above, and let his assistants do most of the coaching.

Things clamed down for a bit, but in the second half, the ref who was giving Patsos trouble began yelling at the Loyola coach and his assistants. Out of options, and unable to utter a word, Patsos did this:

"I didn't want to get tossed out. I had my hands up in the surrender position," he said.

Patsos said video of the scene shows Loyola athletic director Joe Boylan in the stands, placing his hands on his head in astonishment. Seconds later, Patsos climbed about two rows into the seats to sit behind Boylan.

"I didn't want to hurt the school or the program, but at that point I really didn't know what to do," Patsos said.

He later rejoined the team on the bench and made it through the game without getting tossed. Impressive, considering climbing into the stands is a pretty decent way of showing up the ref. Also: NBA players, do not even think about attempting this maneuver.

Why not let an abashed hater of another team call your game? You know announcers have biases, but that does not mean they won't call the game accurately. It also means the game could be infinitely more entertaining, if Italian soccer coverage is any indication of the fun to be had when you let an unabashed homer like Tiziano Crudeli loose in the booth.
This runs counter to the thinking of Yahoo's Doc Saturday, who sees this statement by Chris Spielman as reason for him to be kept as far away from announcing the Michigan/OSU game as possible.

"[The Wolverines] stink, they're not very good. They don't play offense ... they can't run it consistently, they can't throw it consistently, they can't stop the run, they're not very good defending the pass, they're not very good covering kicks, they're not very good returning kicks...I love seeing them beaten down, man. It's great," Spielman said.

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I generally think that Stern and company know what they're doing. But havng Kobe and Garnett endorse the D-League during games ... isn't that just kind of rubbing it in? Here's Kobe's, with Garnett's after the jump:
These two players represent, along with LeBron, the best argument against any need for players to be groomed or "developed" apart from the bright lights of the NBA. They have nothing in common with college cast-offs who couldn't care less about being the next Josh Childress, or even those other teens who probably need more seasoning once they're drafted. They are the overlords. The men who, after about a year and a half in the league, prove they own us all. It's cool if, for the sake of their fellow players, they want to show their support. But the contrast between their careers, and those of anyone involved in the NBDL, almost makes a mockery of whatever goodwill they're holding. Definitely a "let them eat cake" moment.

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Adam Jones, the artist formerly known as Pacman, finished the inpatient bit of his alcohol rehab. Now Roger Goodell will evaluate his clinical data. How Goodell is qualified to do this in any sense is beyond us unless he's picked up a clinical psychiatry degree somewhere in the past month or so, so he's probably going to nod along with whatever experts tell him and make his decision as to whether Jones has recovered from his "alcohol problem."

Putting his phone down for just a few seconds, Chris Mortensen had this to say about the evaluations:

"If they come back and say Pacman Jones doesn't have an alcohol problem, then that creates a whole new range of problems."

Translation: "What if the doctors come back and tell us he's just an idiot." This is a real problem: what if you have a player who, when left to his own devices, will set his own pants on fire and plow cars into innocent trees at an alarming rate? What do you do if the official diagnosis on a player is "terminally stupid; no treatment options available."

The option for the Cowboys is to control as much of his life as possible while getting someone to make sure he doesn't try to fry frozen turkeys or do other insanely dumb things with himself. However, Mortensen is completely right here. A diagnosis of dumb for Pacman might in fact be far worse than a diagnosis of an acute alcohol problem. There are established protocols and treatment programs for alcohol abuse: 12-step programs, therapy, and my favorite, joining the British Theater and becoming a generation-defining actor. There is no cure for just plain stupid, and under the American Disabilities Act there are no exceptions for firing the terminally stupid because of their condition.

Can there be any NHL player right now happier than Dan Boyle?

Think on it for a second. Late last February, at the urging of its prospective new owners, the Tampa Bay Lightning made a great big show out of signing Boyle to a long-term contract to keep him from leaving at season's end as an unrestricted free agent. The deal was ostensibly done to prove to fans that the prospective owners, OK Hockey, headed by Hollywood producer Oren Koules, were committed to having a competitive team.

It didn't take long for all that to fall apart.

Koules' group got the NHL's OK to take over the Lightning. In July, with its payroll expanding as fast as the national debt after a free-agent bender, management needed to shed salary -- and Boyle was its primary candidate to kick to the curb. What came next was bizarre. Lightning officials shopped Boyle in private -- while denying in public they were doing anything of the sort.

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