Author: Tanner Notch

Time passes slowly in baseball. There is no game clock and no final buzzer; baseball moves through a 162-game season at its own pace, often laboriously, working toward the final out that won’t come until the players on the field manage to orchestrate it.

After months of deliberation among the NHL, the NHL Player’s Association, the International Ice Hockey Federation and the Olympic Committee, an agreement was finally reached to allow professional hockey players from the NHL to compete in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. As part of the agreement, the NHL will halt the 2013–14 season so that an estimated 120 players can take part in the hockey competition scheduled for February 12–23.

Tom Thibodeau is a fairly low-key figure in professional basketball, but he just so happens to be one of the driving forces behind a significant shift currently underway among NBA franchises.

With the Midsummer Classic now officially in the books, Major League Baseball gets ready for the second half of its regular season. It has been an interesting year in the majors thus far, as story lines both familiar and unexpected have developed through 3 1/2 months of play.

When Dwight Howard officially became a free agent at midnight on July 1, NBA insiders unleashed a torrent of tweets, most of which were content to speculate on the featured topic of the day rather than report on it. The events kicked off with rumors that all five of the teams targeting free agent Los Angeles Lakers center Dwight Howard—Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Golden State and the Lakers—were still in a virtual tie to sign the disgruntled All-Star.

The hockey season that almost didn’t happen came to an end last week as the Chicago Blackhawks closed out Game 6 on the road in Boston to claim their second Stanley Cup in four years. They capped off the victory with a parade through downtown Chicago on Friday, leading up to a rally at Grant Park’s Hutchinson Field.

A split decision at the end of a boxing match is among the most controversial outcomes in any sport. Unlike an overtime period in basketball or a tennis match that comes down to a tiebreaker in the last set—adaptations that allow a contest to stretch beyond the finish line in order to determine a clear winner—there is no extra time in boxing. When the final bell rings out, a victor must be crowned, no matter how close the bout happened to be up to that point. It certainly doesn’t help that the decision is determined by a panel of judges who, in the absence of a knockout, are left to consider a wide range of dangerously abstract criteria like command of the ring, sharpness of the punches and general aggression when forming their assessments.

Last month, San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich was asked to comment on the remarkably consistent play of Tim Duncan, the 37-year-old future Hall of Famer who has spent his entire career with the Spurs. The team was in the midst of its sweep of the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round of the NBA playoffs, and Popovich stated his intention to follow his star player into retirement when Duncan decides to leave the game for good.

Championship games can rarely be relied upon to provide the memorable and evenly matched encounters that fans long for. Any diehard can relate to the experience of sitting down to watch a thoroughly hyped Super Bowl only to get bored sometime in the second quarter as another one-sided blowout becomes the backdrop to a string of Budweiser commercials and a musical halftime show.

The timing of this article could be seen as a little strange, as we are currently in the midst of one of the more evenly matched and compelling NBA playoffs in years. But as a total college basketball junkie, I felt it my duty to commemorate the heights reached at the NCAA level this past season, while providing a scouting report for those who are (wisely) not spending their time poring over recruiting blogs.