Like Matt Yglesias, I too went to the Wizards-Pacers game last night. The good news for Wizards fans: Your team is good. And Gilbert Arenas is damned good. Flashy, cocky, swaggering — and with ample game to back it all up. Fred Jones isn’t the world’s best defender (would love to have seen Artest on him), but Arenas was scoring at will last night.

Good news for my fellow Pacers fans: Our team didn’t look too bad. We’ve certainly been struggling lately. But a four-point loss on the road to one of the conference leaders isn’t such a bad thing. That comes after two victories, one against a formidable Dallas squad. Steven Jackson looked to be finally getting some rythym back in the second half.

Bonus, gratuitous jab at the WNBA: I can’t ever visit the MCI Center without giggling at those “Washington Mystics, WNBA Attendance Champions” banners. There are five of them now. Trying way too hard, ladies. May as well run an ad saying “The Washington Mystics: They’re Nearly Watchable!” Pretty embarassing. Only in a force-fed, subsidized attempt at a professional sport will you find an above-average, starting player retire at the height of her career for a more lucrative job.

I don’t have anything against women’s professional sports, so long as it’s a sport there’s a market for. The WNBA has been crammed down our throats from its inception. It’s never made any money, and networks, advertisers, and sports media have essentially been guilted into promoting and supporting it. I think my all-time favorite surreal WNBA moment came in 2002, when the players threatened to strike!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 at 11:19 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.