NBA Midseason Review

Happy Monday everybody, March is quickly approaching which hopefully means warm weather is on the horizon. Let's look at what's going on in the world of sports.

We've entered the second half of the NBA season and we have two very different playoff races in the East and the West. The top four teams in the East are separated by a whopping eleven games, whereas the top four in the West are all within two and a half games of each other.

The Celtics have been strong all year. Jaylen Brown has lived up to his massive contract he signed and is proving to be a great pairing to Jason Tatum. Brown is averaging 22 points per game and Tatum is averaging 27. Pair those two stars with a great defensive team and solid role players like Kristaps Porzingis and Derrick White and you have yourself a dominant one-seed going into the home stretch of the season.

The West has a two-way tie for first place between two very surprising teams. The Timberwolves and the OKC Thunder. Both teams have lived near the bottom of the standings for most of the last decade but this year they find themselves at the top of the pecking order with less than half of the regular season left to play.

The Timberwolves pride themselves on their defense which then translates to a lot of transition points. Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert provide the team with one of the best big-man tandems in the league. Add an all-star Anthony Edwards into the mix and it's no wonder why this team is special.

The Thunder on the other hand have one of the best young stars in the game with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. He's averaging 31 points per game right now and is proving to everyone why he works as a dominant ball handler. The Thunder have been patient over the last decade, accumulating draft picks and cashing them into valuable role players with bright futures. Chet Holmgren is a star in the making and will develop into an all-star for years to come in OKC.

Transitioning to the MLB, baseball is back, and the regular season is just weeks away. It's no surprise that the Los Angeles Dodgers open as favorites to win the World Series after their historic signing of Shohei Ohtani to the largest contract in North American sports history, and Japanese phenom pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto over the offseason. That being said, baseball comes down to which team is hot at the right time, and if the Dodgers hit a cold stretch in the postseason, they'll have no chance at winning anything.

Unlike other pro sports leagues, the MLB doesn’t have a hard salary cap, meaning owners can spend as more money as long as they can pay a luxury tax which comes out of their own pocket. This means big-market teams with wealthier owners can spend more than small-market teams. This is how teams like the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, and other big city teams with rich owners typically have team payrolls more than double the size of smaller market teams.

Despite this, last year the World Series featured two small market teams face off against each other, as the Texas Rangers beat the Arizona Diamondbacks. Both teams have young stars who stepped up in big moments for them, while many of the big-name superstars that command a massive salary on other teams flopped in the postseason.

The MLB has one of the longest regular seasons of any sports league around the world, so we still have what feels like an eternity until we crown a champion, so let's enjoy what we have and not rush into any wild predictions or expectations.

That's it for today. Hopefully everyone has a great week, and we'll check in later to talk more sports.

John Stanley

Content Writer