| 'Female Yao'
Wei Wei, the sizable center of the Guangzhou women's basketball team, caused quite a stir at the 6th Chinese City Games. Her performance earned her a reputation as a "female Yao Ming". Although her team failed to top the podium last week after losing to defending champion Nanjing 80-72, plenty of observers took notice of the towering talent. The 18-year-old Wei is 2.07m tall, three centimetres taller than Zheng Haixia, the enormous centre who helped the national women's basketball team win the silver medal in the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games. "Other than Wei Wei, we haven't found any other potential stars," said Gong Luming, former head coach of the Chinese women's national basketball team. Standing at 2.07 metres, Wei Wei will be a scene in the WNBA if she realises her dream of playing in the world's top women's basketball league.
Seth Davis: Postcard from Gonzaga
SPOKANE, Wash. -- Here in this sleepy town in the Pacific northwest, a basketball hoop still hangs over the driveway of the house where John Stockton grew up on, appropriately enough, Superior Street. After Stockton graduated from Gonzaga in 1984 and became a star with the Utah Jazz, he purchased a small, three-bedroom house next door. That house would hardly merit a spot on MTV's Cribs, but as Gonzaga coach Mark Few drove me past it last Friday, it provided a snapshot not just of Gonzaga's past, but also its present. "Do you see Stockton much?" I asked Few. "Oh, yeah," he replied. "I just got done working out with him." You see, John Stockton may have graduated from Gonzaga, but he never really went anywhere. The same is true for Gonzaga.
Same teams, boring result
Since the NHL resumed play after becoming the first major professional sports league to cancel an entire season in 2004-05, players have been reticent to criticize their sport. After all, the more tickets the league sells now — or doesn't sell — the more it affects their take-home pay. But players can no longer stifle themselves about the league schedule, which has each team playing a divisional opponent eight times. In the Avalanche's case, it will play a Northwest Division opponent for the 10th time in the past 11 games when it hosts the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday night at the Pepsi Center. "I'm against the eight games against your own division. That's just too many times," Avs veteran Andrew Brunette said before .
TV-RADIO NOTEBOOK: NFL is very fortunate how schedule plays out
In the spirit of this holiday season, let us resolve to take NFL commissioner Roger Goodell at his word regarding the eight-game NFL Network schedule that began Thursday night with the Colts-Falcons. That means we will stipulate to Goodell's assurances that the NFL did not rig the schedule to ensure the league-owned network would have attractive matchups and, more importantly, games it could employ to apply maximum pressure on cable carriers that don't carry the service, such as Time Warner, Charter and Cablevision. And so, given that assumption, we are left to conclude that the NFL this season is not conniving, merely fortunate. Next Thursday, NFL Network will air Packers-Cowboys, a potential preview of the NFC title game. The game will air on over-the-air TV in the teams' home cities but not in some of their most important secondary markets � among them Waco, Austin and San Antonio, all serviced by Time Warner Cable, and Madison, Wis., a Charter Cable market.
Tulsa falls to rival
Oklahoma City scores game-winner shorthanded.
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Oklahoma City entered the game with the Central Hockey League's top power-play unit. Indeed, special teams play proved the difference, but it was a shorthanded goal that the Blazers used to beat Tulsa.
Garrett Prosofsky lit the lamp 1:47 into the final period, depositing the puck into a wide open net, as the Blazers nudged the Oilers 4-2 before a crowd of 8,136 Sunday night at the Ford Center. The loss was Tulsa's third straight and fifth in six games.
"It seems like a roller coaster," said Tulsa coach Butch Kaebel. "We do really good things and then really bad things. Frenchy (Kevin St. Pierre) made some great saves and then the third goal came on a mistake. Every mistake is being magnified.
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