Tidbits

• I want everyone to consider for a moment these words spoken by ESPN's Stuart Scott after a feature on the friendship of Kevin Garnett and Chauncey Billups concluded.

"As always, sports is really about passion more than it is the actual sport."

Now. Please tell me what the heck that means.

• Tim Duncan is calcifying before our eyes, by the way. He missed five point-blank layups in the second half last night and was just horrific down the stretch for San Antonio in a 10-for-26 performance. He looks tired. He looks old. I'd rather have Pau Gasol at the moment.

• Stephen A. Smith's recent column in ESPN the Magazine about the O.J. Mayo case is very good. It reminds me of two things: USC has David Stern to thank for any headaches caused by Mayo or other "student-athletes" the NBA refuses to allow to ply their trade professionally until first pretending to go to college. Second, Stephen A. is more fun to read than listen to or watch.

• You can find any number of smoking guns to point to when trying to make a point about players not getting a fan's perspective but here's one offered by Red Sox DH David Ortiz last week. In response to a new initiative by MLB to try (again) and speed up the pace of games, Ortiz told The Boston Globe, "There's so much stuff involved in this game. When you have a payroll of $180 million, you're doing everything to win, right? So if I'm a team owner, I don't see the reason why, when I put a good team together, why the game has to be rushed. If I'm a team owner and you come to me with something like that ... You know what? [Expletive]!"

Know why the game has to be "rushed," David? Because the length of them — the Red Sox, in particular — is a massive turnoff for fans. If you told Ortiz he had to sit through a two-hour, 40-minute movie six nights a week he'd tell you to, "(Expletive)!" But it’s OK for baseball fans who foot the bill for those $180 million payrolls to be subjected to that?

Consider that, if the average game takes 160 minutes to play, the regular season is a cool 432 hours long. That's 18 days of uninterrupted baseball. That's fun.

• If Deron Williams, Chris Paul and Carlos Boozer don’t wind up on Team USA and Lamar Odom, Jason Kidd and Chauncey Billups do ... well, that will be bad.

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