It happened.
The people who are annoyed about steroid users not being allowed into the Hall of Fame are finally more annoying than the people who won’t vote steroid users into the Hall of Fame.
A thing about the Hall of Fame is that removing someone from it would be a very, very bad look. Keeping Barry Bonds and A-Rod out? Yes, that’s silly. But it’s not hard to reverse! Eventually, they and the other legends of the steroid era will get in, likely with some sort of contextualization. They have to wait. It’s not that they’ll never be inducted. They’ve just got to suffer a little first. It’s honestly kind of fair.
The guys whose inductions were announced yesterday—Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer—are all awesome. They were pillars of their eras. They were icons for their respective franchises. Good for them. Good for baseball. It doesn’t make Joe Mauer’s induction any less fun and cool to not have A-Rod there for it.
Hockey Canada, Terrence Shannon Jr.
The bad section.
In hockey and college basketball news, we had a few developments on sexual assault cases over the last 24 hours. First, up in Ontario, the Hockey Canada scandal from 2018 (the allegations are horrific*) has, six years later, resulted in arrests. Five players from the 2018 Canadian world junior team have reportedly been asked to surrender to police to face sexual assault charges. Simultaneously, five players from that team have taken indefinite leave from their professional situations. We don’t know with any certainty that these five players are the five involved, and we don’t know that any are definitively guilty. But the five who’ve taken leave are Michael McLeod (NJ), Cal Foote (NJ), Carter Hart (PHI), Dillon Dubé (CAL), and Alex Formenton, a former Ottawa Senator who wasn’t signed as a restricted free agent in the 2022 offseason (the Senators angle is why our blog is so aware of this scandal).
Notably not among the five on indefinite leave is Drake Batherson, long suspected of being involved in the scandal because he was one of the last members of the 2018 Canadian world junior team to make a statement on the investigations, and because his ultimate statement, to reporters at the Senators’ training camp that year, was simply that he was cooperating with those investigations and wouldn’t be commenting further. Does this mean Batherson did nothing wrong? We still have no idea. The allegations involved eight CHL hockey players. But Batherson does not appear to be among the five being charged.
In the college basketball world, Illinois released a statement this morning regarding Terrence Shannon Jr.’s return to action while he awaits trial for a rape charge.* Again, we aren’t making claims about what did or didn’t happen regarding the alleged assault. As for the statement:
The statement seems designed to clarify that decisions about whether Shannon is or isn’t eligible are made by figures who outrank Brad Underwood at Illinois (both the University and, given a restraining order was issued by a District judge, the state). My impression here is that those who think Shannon shouldn’t be playing should probably assign blame to the University of Illinois and/or to the judge who issued the preliminary injunction. It doesn’t sound like Brad Underwood has authority to handle discipline for this issue. If you want to take issue with Underwood’s handling of it, go for it, but the statement makes it appear that Underwood’s bosses told him how to handle this, and it implies there might even be contractual obligations for him to handle cases like this in a specific way.
*If you’re looking for more details, the broad stories are at the bottom of this post.
The Protest!
The Blazers have officially protested last night’s loss to the Thunder, one that came after Chauncey Billups yelled and yelled for a timeout and the refs didn’t give it to him, eventually calling Malcolm Brogdon for a double dribble then ejecting Billups for voicing his displeasure. The Blazers led by one when the timeout was attempted. They were called for the double dribble with 15.8 seconds left. They lost by two.
There’s some precedent for the protest being upheld. Protests have been upheld before in the NBA, and I mean…look, that league loves a good protest, am I right? I hope it happens, even if I don’t understand why Brogdon didn’t start yelling for a timeout himself when he realized he was in trouble. I just think the Blazers flying back to Oklahoma at some point to play twenty seconds of basketball would be a heck of a good time.
Court-Storming, Vol. MM
South Carolina stormed the court last night after its men’s basketball team beat Kentucky, and thankfully, Caitlin Clark was not hurt in the proceedings. Today, South Carolina received its first fine under the SEC’s new pricing. $100,000. It will rise each time they storm the court anew.
Do you think it’s worse for these schools to be racking up a lot of these fines, or to never rack one up at all? Which is embarrassing? Which is cool? That’s a fun game we should play sometime. Which programs do and don’t want to storm the court? I’m putting it on our to-do list.
Chicago: “About the Same as Hiroshima”
Wow. Maybe that’s why the Cubs had to fire David Ross.
KIDDING KIDDING KIDDING Seiya Suzuki said in an interview with a Japanese outlet that Ross told him Chicago’s temperatures were about the same as those in Hiroshima. Can you imagine, though?
Come on, man. Winter in Chicago’s not that bad. Aren’t your winters so cold they call ‘em nuclear winters or somethin’ like that? That’s a hell of a lot worse than what we’re dealin’ with!
Charmingly, the article (translated by Google Translate) ends:
“While making fun of the fact that Ross was a convinced thief, (Suzuki) added, ‘Because I was able to join a really good team. It was great,’ he said, revealing his love for the Cubs.”
May we all reveal our love for the Cubs this Valentine’s season.
ToNITe, etc.
- In Game of the NITe action, Maryland is at Iowa. The Terps have now been in the Game of the NITe three times in the last two weeks, and we only name a Game of the NITe five times a week because we believe in treating the weekend as one big, long night that we have to get through before we get to work again. (#Grindset.) Iowa is newer to our spotlight but has been on our radar all year. Honestly, we think they’d travel really well to the NIT Final Four, and the NIT’s biggest need at this moment, by our estimate, is attendance. Sue us.
- Honorable mentions for Game of the NITe: Providence at Seton Hall, NC State at Virginia, LSU at Georgia, Colorado State at Nevada, Arkansas at Mississippi, and Samford at Furman. Are there other NIT-impacting college basketball games? Of course! But you aren’t allowed to watch them. We’re building restraint. (Just kidding. Watch so much NIT-aspiring basketball that you have to call in sick tomorrow due to the ensuing overnight dopamine withdrawal.)
- Shaka Smart and Marquette are down at DePaul, and it’s unclear to me who DePaul’s interim is. I’m guessing they have one. If there were ever a program that might forget to do that part of firing a coach, though…
- Texas got a big win last NITe. I think this is going to be good for purposes of our own entertainment. The best rollercoasters go up, too. Not just down.
- Siena must have announced this recently, because I’m just now reading about it, but they’re going to honor the 1994 NIT third-place team when they host Canisius on February 18th. That team? You guessed it. Siena. At the moment of my birth, Siena was the reigning third-place NIT finisher. Someone please remind me to do NIT star signs sometime. Per the Troy Record, that 1994 team set a Siena attendance record during that tournament in a game against Tulane. Doremus Bennerman—he of the 51-point performance in the 1994 NIT Third Place Game—will be inducted into Siena’s Hall of Fame, making this the biggest piece of Hall of Fame news in today’s sports world. The Troy Record also reports that there will be “an additional surprise recognition.” I have set a reminder on my phone. To remind me. About how there’s a surprise recognition happening that day. Won’t be a surprise to me!
- Great win for the Sens over the Canadiens. The Canadiens stink, but every win is a great win when you also stink. That’s a 3–1 mark over the last four games for Ottawa, and the only loss was in overtime. I know the road trip is over, but the franchise needs to find a way to make the Moms Trip continue.
**
The Hockey Canada general story, as we wrote about it in 2022:
In 2018, a few months forward from winning the World Juniors championship, the best 18 to 21-year-old hockey players in Canada came to London, Ontario for an official celebration put on by Hockey Canada. After official festivities one night, they partied at the college bars, and one, drunk, brought a similarly-aged woman, also drunk, back to his hotel room. Consensually, all parties say, they did what drunk strangers do in hotel rooms after partying at the college bars. Then, seven more men came to the room, all CHL hockey players, some or all (it’s unclear which) members of the World Juniors team, and engaged in sex acts which the woman would go on to allege were not consensual. One of the most disturbing details is that twice during the night, at 3:25 AM and 4:26 AM, the woman was filmed making video statements that she consented to the acts. An argument has been made that the videos prove that she did, in fact, consent. The woman has alleged, though, that she was pressured to film the videos, pressured to say on one video that she was sober, and pressured to take a shower, and that she tried to leave the room at one point but was prevented from doing so. She alleged that she felt intimidated and threatened. In a text message sent just more than 24 hours later, she said, “I was ok with going home with you, it was everyone else afterwards that I wasn’t expecting.”
The Shannon general story, from the affidavit from Shannon’s arrest:
- Shannon was in Lawrence for the Illinois/Kansas football game.
- After the game (it was a Friday night game), the victim alleges Shannon waved her over in a crowded basement bar, grabbed her butt under her skirt, and inserted his finger into her vagina, all immediately, all while she was unable to move away because of how crowded it was and her position next to the male and the wall.
- The affidavit states the victim left the bar after the assault, and that she underwent a sexual assault examination at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.
