The Sports Review

When you look at the Houston Rockets, you can see an especially good team this time around. The team is 4th in the Western Conference and will be able to really take down some major teams this year. You can already get Rockets playoff tickets, that’s how certain we are that they will be in it. With Yao Ming, Ron Artest and Tracy McGrady, this team is getting ready to bring in the title again for the first time since 1995. Yao Ming has really taken the lead on this team in the last few weeks, while some of the other players have been injured, and has pushed this team to levels of greatness that would have surprised anyone if you’d talked about it last season. It’s going to be great to see the Rockets back to dominate in the playoffs!

The Women’s NCAA Tournament featured Ball State against the Tennessee Volunteers this weekend. If you think about this, it’s kind of odd. Tennessee is number 5, but Ball State is 12. Actually, that’s normal in the tournament, but the odd part is that Tennessee lost. Ball State took them out by a score of 71-55. Tennessee won the championship last year. This is the first time in a long time that the defending champions didn’t make it any further than the first round. Tennessee, therefore, goes home to disappointment for this year. Ah well, last year was a great run and Ball State is clearly a very hard-working team. Congrats to them.

Kansas survived! North Dakota State was unable to pull out a win against the #3 Kansas team after keeping the game close throughout both halves. ND almost won, in fact, with the team leading at certain points. Kansas clearly didn’t expect ND to go toe to toe with them today and ended up needing some heroics at the end which let them breathe well in the end. This is a tough team, and they are still very talented, but we also have to watch some of these other dark-horse teams who might actually take them out at some point along the way.

Jay Cutler is infuriated at the Denver Broncos. They’ve been going at it for a couple weeks, ever since the trade rumors that went around about whether Denver was going to get Matt Cassel for QB. The team was unwilling to give him assurances that they wont do trades for his position. So now he’s requested that they trade HIM out. So where will he go. There are many candidates for a quality quarterback in the league right now. Chicago, Minnesota, Cleveland, and Carolina. Denver can, in a sense, cash in on this guy now. But they will need to find a real quarterback in the process, and that’s going to be tough for them. So they will have to pay close attention to what they get in the upcoming trade talks, if it gets that far.

Remember the World Baseball Classic? There was a great game earlier this week. But I have to take you back a couple of steps. Last weekend, the Dutch finally hit it big by beating the Dominican Republic. Anyone knows that the Dominicans are a better baseball team than the Dutch. Generally. But this year, the Dutch beat them once, and then they beat them again earlier this week to send the DR home. It’s a really interesting thing to watch such teams get better at this. While the Dutch got sent home too, the team did a great job imroving themselves to that point. The Dutch hardly have any baseball, but they did a great job of putting themselves in a great position this spring for that. Meanwhile, most of the remaining World Baseball Classic teams are from the Western Hemisphere, so it was fun to watch the Netherlands play so well.

David Beckham is going to be coming back. He is going to stick around with AC Milan for the next little while, but then he’ll be coming back to the LA Galaxy later this spring. He says that he would like nothing more than to have helped Milan back into the Champions League and to have LA win the MLS title this season. That would make his 2009 a great year, and we can imagine that he might retire after a season like that. He seems to enjoy playing for Milan more though, as there were some rumors that Milan might just buy him back. This sent the whole MLS world into a tizzy because they had hoped that Beckham might be the spark that brings them into the realm of real sports in the American style.

Sticking with Texas sports. Yesterday, Terrell Owens was released by the Dallas Cowboys. Let’s just get that out of the way. We’ll try not to mention all the trouble that he’s given to the team and what other kinds of things people are going to be talking about. The Cowboys aren’t so dumb, even though Owens is one of the best receivers in the game still. So what next? Where will he go? Clearly he’s going to get picked up by someone. It’s not like Barry Bonds. Owens may be a jerk to a lot of people, freaking out his teammates and everything, but let’s also be clear: he’s not a criminal nor is he charged with any crime. He’s just high maintenance. This is why several teams are looking at him and Minnesota may be one of the teams interested. He would fit in with their needs and their team fairly well.

Jason Kidd made his 10,000th assist last night against the Toronto Raptors. Kidd is one of the best players in the NBA over the last years. He is one of the best team players in the league but isn’t one of the flashy players that are in the top tier of players that people always talk about. He has a little way to go until he can actually break the record. But it will be fun to watch him!