NBA Commissioner David Stern announced Saturday that beginning this season, the NBA Finals MVP award will be named after Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell. Russell – who won the MVP five times – was emotional at the press conference and fittingly thanked his teammates. Russell was part of 11 Celtics titles in his 13 professional seasons.
– In case you were wondering, there are no Boston Celtics involved in any of the NBA All-Star game festivities other than Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen playing in the actual game this Sunday night.
– The Boston Red Sox opened up spring training Saturday which garnered quite a few hours of coverage on NESN. Expectedly, there isn’t a whole lot of news coming out this other than Jason Varitek saying he wants to retire as a member of the Red Sox. Given the interest level from other teams this past offseason, I think that is a foregone conclusion at this point.
– Speaking of NESN, I was surprised to hear that former Sox middle infielder-turned-analyst Lou Merloni will no longer be with the Boston flagship this season. Instead, Merloni will join the fast-growing Comcast Sports New England as an analyst. But there is no salacious story here – he wanted to continue his work with WEEI on the Big Show and this deal allows him to do both.
I thought this was a great quote from the Boston.com writeup today:
When asked if there is any downside to the atmosphere at “The Big
Show,” where it is sometimes tough to get a word in edgewise, Merloni
laughed.
“Unfortunately, after working there for a while, I took
that over to my real world,” he said. “I was butting into conversations
with everybody. I have to separate my work from real life and at the
dinner table conversations. It’s a lot of fun.”
– Also in the article was news that Boston.com will revive the cancelled NESN Globe 10.0 show. Beginning on February 23rd, the show will be a web feature with two questions answered every Monday-Friday by host Bob Ryan and other Globe writers.
– WEEI reported a record-number of visitors to their website in January, touting a 95% increase from the year before. They’ve done a great job with making it a destination point for good content, but I do wonder sometimes if there is too much content on there. Seriously, they have like 3,323 bloggers.
Josh Nason is the founder of Small White Ball, a New England-based sports and media blog. He can be reached at josh [at] smallwhiteball [dot-com].
Small White Ball...a boston sports blog 