Rants and Ranks

This past offseason may have been the busiest in NBA history.  Not just for sheer amount of movement, but for movement of key players all trying to maneuver themselves that much closer to the Warriors and the championship.  Will it work?  These teams are hoping so. Boston Celtics courtesy: cbs boston In the most shocking move of the summer Kyrie Irving requested a trade from a team that had been to three straight NBA Finals.  On the surface it’s quite baffling.  We can speculate all we want, but odds are we may never know the real truth.  What we do know is that Irving is now on the Celtics.  Joining him on the green team is Gordon Hayward.  Hayward is coming off his first all-star season, and is reunited with his old college coach.  (Something that had been rumored to be in the works for many years now.)  Hayward had been the man on the Jazz for a few seasons, so it will be interesting to see how he coexists with the pola...

Phobia 31.73 Much like what I did with  others   I'm ranking the songs of Breaking Benjamin to establish my favorite songs and then mathematically figuring out which is my favorite album in the process.    Just like last time, here's how it went down:  We Are Not Alone 29.36 So what was my criteria for ranking the songs?  Quite simply it was how much I liked them.  I didn't factor in intricate chord changes or anything that a musical "purist" would count as making a song great.  These are just a list of personal favorites; nothing more, nothing less.  Once I had all 56 listed, I assigned 56 points to the first place song.  55 to the second place, and so on.  I added up the total number of points for each song on each album and divided it by the number of songs on that album. Then PRESTO!  I had a total for each album that I could then rank it by.  Also remember this consists of only songs that appear on albums....

    At the beginning of this season, all anyone was talking about was the Warriors, now with Durant, and the former champs, the Cleveland Cavaliers.  As the season progressed, talks continued, and continued, and continued.  The absolute domination of each team's respective conference made it near-impossible to talk about anything else.  Sure, the Cavs ended up with the east's 2nd seed due to a horrendous month of March, but was there any doubt that Cleveland would make its third straight trip to the Finals?  Maybe for fans of the Celtics, but the Celtics proved to just be pretenders for now.   Durant had an injury scare during the year that cost him numerous games. The Warriors had to sacrifice a lot of depth to acquire Durant, so there was valid concern that this was  the worst possible case scenario for the Warriors.  Well suffice to say they didn't miss a beat, and come playoff time Durant was firing on all cylinders. So much so that...

Spiritual Machines 53.9 I've thought about doing this for some time now.  Listening and ranking every album and song of my favorite band, Our Lady Peace.  I was having lots of fun when I started this project, but naturally the more songs you hear, the more daunting the task becomes.  That being said, I relished in the chance to see the final product. Gravity 52.8 A few notes worth mentioning.  Firstly, this only contains songs from studio albums.  My goal was to use mathematics to figure out which albums were truly my favorites.  I had an idea naturally, but I didn't know if I could accurately lay them out in order without really thinking about it.  So since it was used for ranking albums, there are no rarities (like Trapeze) or covers (Dear Prudence, Drive, Imagine etc.) included here because that would have messed up the math.  Yes it would make for a more complete list of best songs, but again that wasn't the initial point.   ...

courtesy: nba.com Of all the years I have been writing this blog, I've been ranting and raving about all star selections.  Some years haven't been so bad, but others have gotten downright ugly.  This year is about as close to perfect (in my mind) as it's going to get. West: Anthony Davis Kawhi Leonard  Kevin Durant Stephen Curry James Harden Russell Westbrook Demarcus Cousins Klay Thompson  Draymond Green Marc Gasol Gordon Hayward DeAndre Jordan East: LeBron James Giannis Antetokounmpo Jimmy Butler  Kyrie Irving Demar Derozan John Wall Paul George Kyle Lowry  Paul Millsap Kevin Love Isaiah Thomas Kemba Walker The root of the problem every year was the fans voting the starting lineups.  Fans are morons.  (Myself included on that list.)  This year, and hopefully forever going forward, fans only accounted for 50% of the votes.  Which we are lucky that is the case because otherwise Zaza Pachulia would be sta...

It's that time again for my annual thoughts running into the new NBA season.  Let's get things rolling. 1. Even though LeBron finally won his beloved Cleveland a ring, there is one thing that completely overshadowed it from the second it happened.  Durant to the Warriors.  This had been rumored for more than a year, and was something that most people just cast aside.  It was too ludicrous to put much thought into.  Well those rumors heated back up after the Warrior's NBA Finals loss, which was preceded by the Thunder losing in the Western Conference Finals ironically enough.  It still seemed like a stretch though.  How can a team have that much firepower, that much star power, and still coexist without any major issues? On paper I feel this the greatest offensive team ever, but with great power comes great  responsibility.  To bring in such a high-volume scorer like Durant would mean that the other two elite scorers (Klay and Steph) would h...