Today’s Odds & Ends

WNBA Tip-Off

Friday is opening night for the WNBA, and this is the league’s most eagerly anticipated season in years - maybe since the Brittney Griner/Elena Della Donne/Skylar Diggins draft class from 2013? There are several reasons for this year’s excitement, leading with the carryover from the interest generated from last March’s NCAA tournament. Most of the key stars from the tourney remain in college, but the interest in women’s hoops is at an all-time high.

The second big factor is Brittney Griner’s return to the court. There’s a good reason that Friday’s Mercury/Sparks game is ESPN’s first telecast of the year. Every public appearance she’s made since her release from a Russian prison leads us to believe that her head is in a good place. Not sure where she stands physically. She obviously was not able to work out much during her imprisonment, so it’s unrealistic to expect her to be fully WNBA-ready yet. Whatever happens, her initial appearance this season should be one of the biggest feel-good moments of the year.

Finally, the Superteam era is in full swing. Looking at the star-studded rosters on both squads, it appears that a Las Vegas/New York final is almost inevitable. One could argue that as many as 7 of the league’s top 10 players are on either of the 2 rosters. (The Liberty with Breanna Stewart, Jonquel Jones, Sabrina Ionescu, and Courtney Vandersloot. The Aces with Candace Parker, Chelsea Gray, and my choice for current best player in the game, A’ja Wilson.) Beyond that, there should be some new blood at the top of the standings as some of the more traditional contenders are heading towards a down period - sorry, Seattle. I’m keeping an eye on Dallas & Atlanta; they both appear ready to take the next step. If either of the two big favorites has an unexpected stumble, well, that’s why they play the games.

One Hell Of A Retirement Gift For Gregg Popovich

The San Antonio Spurs have had a rough time the past few seasons, but it looks like it may have all been worth it as they won last night’s NBA Draft Lottery and the right to select Victor Wembanyama next month. A 7’4” unicorn with explosive speed, every scout who has seen him considers him to be the biggest franchise-changing talent in years, perhaps the biggest since LeBron James.

Don’t plan the championship parade just yet. It doesn’t directly parallel the circumstances that allowed them to draft Tim Duncan back in 1997. That draft came in the wake of a poor season largely caused by an injury that kept David Robinson out of action the majority of the year. With Robinson returning, Duncan wound up joining an already strong team; the current Spurs squad has a lot more work to do. What they will have is a major building block, and if he is as good as advertised the longstanding reputation that franchise has will allow them to recruit free agents very easily. This is exactly why Gregg Popovich hasn’t retired yet; it’s easy to imagine the next great Spurs dynasty developing relatively quickly.

There’s Only 1 Explanation

I have a tendency to roll my eyes over unfounded accusations of cheating. People are much too quick to shout “PEDs! PEDs!” and that’s tiresome and weak. I’m not naive, but neither do I want to replicate the Salem witch trials while watching a baseball game. Guess what, the game’s history is filled with players having an unexpected outlier season, with young players suddenly taking two huge steps forward in a single season, with older players having a late in career resurgence. No need to automatically believe the worst if events such as that happen now.

Neither of the recent accusations are PED-related, but they contain an element of baseball McCarthyism nonetheless. Last week WFAN hosts Evan Roberts and Craig Carton speculated that the Tampa Bay Rays must be cheating, with Roberts saying “sometimes you don’t need evidence.” And just the other night Blue Jays broadcasters Dan Shulman and Buck Martinez noticed Aaron Judge peeking towards the first base coaching box while in the batter’s box and let the speculation fly. That one was really over the top; even if he was actually getting word on the signs there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Yanks stealing Toronto’s signs as long as they didn’t do so electronically. Judge seemingly has the last laugh. In last night’s game he hit a homer that traveled so far it actually damaged the maple leaf located above the center field wall. I realize that fandom is often irrational, but I can’t stand accusations simply because something appears fishy. I want evidence before I get start pointing fingers.

If It Sounds Too Good To Be True, It Probably Is

A new service called Telly, introduced by Ilya Pozin, one of the co-founders of Pluto TV, is being unveiled. They intend to give away free TVs. These won’t be cheap little monitors either. They are 55” 4K sets with sound bars and a second smart screen. A setup like this would normally retail for about $1000. But nothing is free, of course. There’s gotta be a catch, and it goes without saying it involves a lot of personal data mining that leads to targeted advertising.

We all recognize by this point that we’ve signed away a lot of privacy. All of us have gotten creeped out by seeing an ad show up on our feeds after browsing a product. Some of these quotes really take it to another level, however.

“You’re giving us your demographics, your psychographics at the individual and household level before you even get your device, so we know who you are, we know where you live, we know your income, we know what car you’re driving, we know when your lease is up,” Pozin says. “We know what your favorite brands are. We know your favorite sports teams are so when you first bring your TV home, you scan a QR code with your phone, all the data is already there.”

Or this:

“It’s provisioned to that device that gives us full targeting and addressability,” he adds. “Similar to other TV makers, we have viewing data, but we also have audience data now at the individual household. When you merge those two things together, the targeting is literally one to one. So if Toyota wants to run an ad to people that currently own a Honda whose lease expires within the next 12 months, we pick and choose those individual TVs and only those TVs and that’s where the ad shows up.”

Yikes. This seems overly intrusive, and a bridge too far. Is a free TV worth it?

Tradition!

I don’t follow the NHL much, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. I don’t have a favorite team, but there are certain groupings of clubs that I like to see do well. I enjoy when cities with deep roots succeed. In other words, I like to see Canadian cities and/or Original Six franchises do well. So, let’s see who has made the conference finals.

Cool, the remaining bracket is filled with the traditional hockey hotbeds of (checks notes) Carolina, Florida, Dallas, and Vegas? Who hasn’t heard anecdotes of young prodigies skating on the frozen ponds of Miami? It’s always a bit amusing to see a winter sport extend its playoff season into June; it’s doubly amusing to see all those games take place in such warm locations. Side note, from living in New York I heard all the “1940!” mockery as the Rangers suffered a long Stanley Cup drought. Fans of the Maple Leafs are going through a wait even longer than that. Ouch.

The FX Schedule

FX announced return dates for their series that will come back this summer. The announcement contained some noteworthy news. First of all, the upcoming season of Archer premiering in August will be its last. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say as the finale approaches, but for now I’ll simply say that at its peak it was one of the funniest shows imaginable, filled with “how did they get away with that?” moments as well as a long litany of cleverly obscure references. 14 years is a long time, and it has been showing his age, not to mention that Jessica Walter’s death was an irreplaceable loss. But Judy Greer remains a goddamn treasure.

July will bring the revival of Justified. The recent spate of returns of long-dead series has been more miss than hit, and I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to tamper with this one. The original run of Justified had an absolutely flawless ending; more specifically a perfect final line. I’m still eager to see if they can pull it off; Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens is an inner circle Hall of Fame TV character.

There are no mixed feelings about July’s return of What We Do In the Shadows. It is the most reliable LOL comedy on the air at this moment. Last season was a good one; it went through some major changes yet by the end of the run everything circled back to status quo, although poor Sofia Coppola wasn’t so lucky. Every scene with the Djinn was a riot, and there is no comedic actor on the planet who reads lines any better than Matt Berry. Can’t wait.

Paris 2024

Last week NBC announced preliminary plans for its coverage of next year’s Paris Olympics. The location of next year’s games is a good news/bad news situation for NBC. On one hand, it must be a bit of a relief to stage an Olympics in Europe after 3 consecutive games held in Asia. But on the other hand, they don’t have as much of a benefit from a more advantageous time difference as one would think. An event taking place in the morning in Asia coincides with prime time in America, so NBC was able to air some events live on their prime time broadcast. Not so next year. Even if NBC goes on the air as early as 7:00 eastern time, that’s midnight in Paris so the events for that day will have already been completed.

In the past few Olympics NBC has made a major change from the Dick Ebersol era. Ebersol’s mandate was to save the major events for prime time, regardless of when they took place. If it meant having to hold back on airing an event for more than 12 hours, so be it. That’s no longer the case, they now air as many events live as they can, so next year the daytime shows will be filled with live content of major events. And they intend to stream the entire games live on Peacock. That’s important because in past games NBC has used multiple cable networks to supplement the network coverage, but since the Tokyo Games both the NBC Sports Network and The Olympic Channel have gone dark. This time in addition to the flagship network events will air on USA Network & E! along with the golf competitions airing on The Golf Channel. It seems unlikely, however, that the cable nets will air competition around the clock the way that the sports-focused nets had done in the past.

This is a particularly important Olympics for NBC. The last 2 games have shown ratings declines, next year will be a good gauge to see how much of that has been due to the fact that the Games were held halfway across the world, or how much has been due to declining interest. Keep in mind that even though the numbers aren’t what they once were, it can still be counted on to be the highest-rated non-NFL sporting event of the year. Even so, with the 2028 Summer Games being held in Los Angeles; I’m pretty sure that NBC would much prefer that the ‘24 & ‘28 locations had been flipped so that the numbers for a US-based Olympics would be sky high and carry momentum into the following Olympiad.

This Is The End

Thanks for reading and supporting Tending The Herd. As always, fell free to pass it along to your heart’s content. See you all on Friday.