THE NERD REPORT
Nerds around town: Comicpalooza week, Disney news and the floods are back
May 8, 2019, 6:47 am
ART BY JESUS RODRIGUEZ
Born with a comic book in one hand and a remote control in the other, Cory DLG is the talent of Conroe's very own Nerd Thug Radio, Sports and Wrestling. Check out the podcast replay of the FM radio show at www.nerdthugradio.com!
Hey Nerds!
Hump Day! That's right, bust out the booty pics, the bad jokes about camels and embrace the week, cause it's halfway over. Wednesday!!
GOOD DEED OF THE DAY
Cancer sucks, we all know that. We all know someone dealing with and fighting against cancer and we all know the toll it can take on them and the effect it can have on their life both physically and financially. Cancer is a hard and expensive disease to fight and because of that Crits for Cancer is uniting nerds to help fight it. Let's all take a second, click here and let's work together to fight cancer. Some proceeds from that shirt go directly to Crits to help them in their battle against the big C. #NerdsUnite
COMICPALOOZA WEEK!
If you aren't going to Comicpalooza you are missing so many awesome and amazing things, including the college eSports championships. They will be having the championships at Comicpalooza this year for Overwatch, Hearthstone, Starcraft 2 and Street Fighter V, so get excited. Also they'll be having tournaments going on for people to compete in so that's nice, I'm registered in an NBA 2k tournament on Friday and my little brother is booked in a Super Smash Bros tournament as well, I'm going for the fun and the chip, you know what I'm saying? Seriously, how could someone not be super excited about Comicpalooza? Come get your nerd on with everyone else in Houston this weekend!!
RESPECT THE MOUSE!
Big news coming out of yesterday's Disney Movie Studio plans. They announced their plans with the last bit of Fox movies and then moved over to new business so to speak, New Mutants has pushed back again to early 2020 now, this poor movie has all kinds of people in it including Arya Stark herself as Wolfsbane and yet… no one will see this movie for a long time. Also Disney canceled the long planned but never really happening Gambit movie with Channing Tatum attached, basically he wanted to do what Ryan Reynolds did with Deadpool for Gambit, except no one else wanted that. They also made some HUGE announcements, including 8 new Marvel Film Dates and 5 new Star Wars dates and they pushed Avatar back a year. Disney is in the business now.
THE BATWOMAN
If you're a CW Arrowverse nerd you already know that they have announced that this will be the final season of Arrow. With Legends of Tomorrow always seeming to be on the edge of being cancelled or picked up, this at first seemed like a bad omen for those fans because maybe it meant that these shows had run their course on CW and perhaps as an independent universe away from the DC Streaming service. But now with the announcement of a Batwoman season staring Ruby Rose, the fans can relax. It's looking like next year the line up will be Black Lightning, Supergirl, Flash, Batwoman and Legends of Tomorrow, that's pretty exciting. While I'm not a huge fan of the shows overall, I don't like the tone and the 90210 feel of the various shows, I totally dig that this whole cohesive universe exists and these characters interact and crossover and have a great cohesive world to play in. That's a very cool part of it because it's the thing that made comics cool way back in the day and I'm glad to see comic book shows embrace it as well.
NOT THAT YOU ASKED
On a personal note, yesterday during those ridiculous rains, my entire street flooded in less than two hours of rain fall in the middle of the day, and my car had water seep in. This is such a pain in the ass, seriously, now I am going through the process of drying everything out and dealing with that, it's not fun. Plus I feel like you never get it all the way clean again, I dunno, it's just one of those annoying things where you have no one to blame and there isn't anything to do but go out there and just get it taken care of. I think I like it more when there's someone to yell at.
I'm going to jump out and wish you guys a great Wednesday and remind everyone to be kind to each other and try a little harder to have a great day! I'm coming back Thursday and we'll be bringing more good times your way. Feel free to check out my digital short story The Wilson House or buy a shirt from Side Hustle Ts where some proceeds help fight cancer or listen to Nerd Thug Radio or support our Patreon Page. Thoughts, complaints, events and comments can be sent to corydlg@gmail.com.
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They’ll be watching in Canada, not just because of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, though the NBA’s scoring champion and MVP favorite who plays for Oklahoma City surely helps lure in fans who are north of the border.
They’ll be watching from Serbia and Greece, the homelands of Denver star Nikola Jokic and Milwaukee star Giannis Antetokounmpo. Alperen Sengun will have them watching Houston games in the middle of the night in Turkey, too. Slovenian fans will be watching Luka Doncic and the Lakers play their playoff opener at 2:30 a.m. Sunday, 5:30 p.m. Saturday in Los Angeles. Fans in Cameroon will be tuned in to see Pascal Siakam and the Indiana Pacers. Defending champion Boston features, among others, Kristaps Porzingis of Latvia and Al Horford of the Dominican Republic.
Once again, the NBA playoffs are setting up to be a showcase for international stars.
In a season where the five statistical champions were from five different countries, an NBA first — Gilgeous-Alexander is Canadian, rebounding champion Domantas Sabonis of Sacramento is from Lithuania, blocked shots champion Victor Wembanyama of San Antonio is from France, steals champion Dyson Daniels of Atlanta is from Australia, and assists champion Trae Young of the Hawks is from the U.S. — the postseason will have plenty of international feel as well. Gilgeous-Alexander is in, while Sabonis and Daniels (along with Young, obviously) could join him if their teams get through the play-in tournament.
“We have a tremendous number of international players in this league,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this season. “It’s roughly 30% of our players representing, at least on opening day, 43 different countries, so there’s much more of a global sense around our teams.”
By the end of the season, it wound up being 44 different countries — at least in terms of countries where players who scored in the NBA this season were born. For the first time in NBA history, players from one country other than the U.S. combined to score more than 15,000 points; Canadian players scored 15,588 this season, led by Gilgeous-Alexander, the first scoring champion from that country.
Gilgeous-Alexander is favored to be MVP this season. It'll be either him or Jokic, which means it'll be a seventh consecutive year with an international MVP for the NBA. Antetokounmpo won twice, then Jokic won three of the next four, with Cameroon-born Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers winning two seasons ago.
“Shai is in the category of you do not stop him,” Toronto coach Darko Rajakovic said after a game between the Raptors and Thunder this season.
In other words, he's like a lot of other international guys now. Nobody truly stops Jokic, Antetokounmpo and Doncic either.
And this season brought another international first: Doncic finished atop the NBA's most popular jersey list, meaning NBAStore.com sold more of his jerseys than they did anyone else's. Sure, that was bolstered by Doncic changing jerseys midseason when he was traded by Dallas to the Los Angeles Lakers, but it still is significant.
The Slovenian star is the first international player to finish atop the most popular jerseys list — and the first player other than Stephen Curry or LeBron James to hold that spot in more than a decade, since soon-to-be-enshrined Basketball Hall of Famer Carmelo Anthony did it when he was with New York in 2012-13.
“We’re so small, we have 2 million people. But really, our sport is amazing,” fellow Slovene Ajsa Sivka said when she was drafted by the WNBA's Chicago Sky on Monday night and asked about Doncic and other top Slovenian athletes. “No matter what sport, we have at least someone that’s great in it. I’m just really proud to be Slovenian.”
All this comes at a time where the NBA is more serious than perhaps ever before about growing its international footprint. Last month, FIBA — the sport's international governing body — and the NBA announced a plan to partner on a new European basketball league that has been taking shape for many years. The initial target calls for a 16-team league and it potentially could involve many of the biggest franchise names in Europe, such as Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City.
It was a season where four players topped 2,000 points in the NBA and three of them were international with Gilgeous-Alexander, Jokic and Antetokounmpo. Globally, time spent watching NBA League Pass was up 6% over last season. More people watched NBA games in France this season than ever before, even with Wembanyama missing the final two months. NBA-related social media views in Canada this season set records, and league metrics show more fans than ever were watching in the Asia-Pacific region — already a basketball hotbed — as well.
FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis said the numbers — which are clearly being fueled by the continued international growth — suggest the game is very strong right now.
“Looking around the world, and of course here in North America," Zagklis said, "the NBA is most popular and more commercially successful than ever.”