AGRI Biz

There are few definites in sports. If you took/take steroids, you are a cheater. (That means you, Mark McGwire.) If you win one of the four pro championships, you have legitimately earned the championship of your sport. (That very much doesn't mean you, BCS.) And in some circumstances, an athlete's family must come before his job. For some reason, this last rule seems to not apply for Allen Iverson, the Sixers' guard who came ...

When the Cleveland Cavaliers traded Zydrunas Ilgauskas to the Washington Wizards for two-time All-Star Antawn Jamison, everyone in the NBA had the impression that the Wizards would negotiate a buy-out with Ilgauskas for salary relief, allowing Big Z to return to Cleveland for a potential run at an NBA championship. Unfortunately for the big man, while Z'sá"heart is in Cleveland" (according to his agent), his $11.5 million expiring contract still ...

With 16 of the 30 NBA teams getting busy in the week leading up to the NBA trade deadline and making some kind of deal, it seems kind of crazy to weed through the mess of trades and pick out a winner six hours after the deadline. This could change weeks, months, even years down the line, but on paper, six hours after the trade deadline has passed, one team jumps ...

Now that every NBA team has played at least 50 games at the All-Star break, it's becoming easier to separate the contenders from the pretenders. Teams like the 4-and-God-knows-how-many-losses-at-this-point Nets find themselves looking towards the NBA Draft on February 15, while LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers are thinking championship. With all the teams just having taken a three day break to celebrate the ...

As an NBA fan, I have some confessions to make. First, despite the fact he can barely hit a basket from outside 10 feet, I'm as big of a Dwight Howard fan as virtually any player in the league. Sure, I have rooting interest for him this year because I anchored my fantasy basketball team around him (and thus chucked away the "free throw percentage" category), but there's nary a physical freak in ...

It's never a good sign in sports when you find yourself cheering more for when your team loses than when your team wins. Somehow, as the Sixers kept adding wins to their season-high five game winning-streak this past week and a half, that's the exact place I found myself with the team. As the Sixers knocked down Houston, New Orleans, then Minnesota, the writing on the wall became more and more apparent: ...

When the Sixers brought in Eddie Jordan to be their new coach this season, they knew what they were getting—a Princeton offense aficionado, who isn't exactly renowned for his defense (to say the least). What they didn't expect was a coach so intent on putting in scorers during the fourth quarter that he'll completely sacrifice the team's defensive integrity. And (dear God, I hope) they didn't expect a 10-24 record coming out of ...

With news breaking today that ex-Nets player Jayson Williams veered off an exit ramp early this morning and slammed his SUV into a tree (and has since been charged with driving under the influence of alcohol), it was just another reminder of how far the mighty Williams has fallen. Once one of the most dominant rebounders in the NBA and quite possibly the best offensive rebounder since Charles Barkley, Williams' NBA ...

To ring in the new decade, the NBA's two biggest superstars have their teams battling for the NBA's top spot in this week's edition of the NBA Featured Columnist power rankings. After a Christmas Day showdown in Los Angeles, where LeBron James' Cleveland Cavaliers whooped up on Kobe Bryant's Los Angeles Lakers, the Cavs and the Lakers have done everything in their power to cement their foothold on the top spots ...

On Thursday morning, Allen Iverson will either wake up with the comfort of a guaranteed contract likely locking him down in Philadelphia for the rest of the season, or the knowledge that within nearly one month of his triumphant return to Philly, he's once again become a free agent. That's because the Sixers have a crucial decision to make by Wednesday, similar to a choice once pondered by Shakespeare's Hamlet:á"To guarantee ...