NERDS AROUND TOWN
Nerds Around Town: Texans, New York Comic Con and funny commercials
Oct 7, 2019, 7:35 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 and Sports. Check out the podcast replay of the FM radio show at www.nerdthugradio.com!
GOOD DEED OF THE DAY
This week Nerd Thug Radio sets up our plans for Extra Life which will be November 2nd. Donations will be going towards the Children's Miracle Network of Hospitals as they have every year. This thing is awesome, basically on November 2nd we'll be gaming all day. ALL DAY. And then we collect donations and bring awareness and blah blah blah. Here's what's important, the Children's Miracle Network is awesome and the money goes into local branches so LITERALLY the money you donate could SAVE YOUR CHILD. That's the stuff I'm talking about.
GOOD SPORTS WEEKEND TO THE WORLD
The Astros are winning in the playoffs, the Texans won against a suddenly alive Falcon's offense, the Rockets season is about to begin and the Cowboys lost. This is the kind of sports weekend I like talking about, good news all around is the kind of news I want to have, and hell yes I like when the Cowboys lose. But honestly, Texans, clean up the return game, we got lucky that the referees don't know the rules either but at some point mistakes will burn us.
NEW YORK COMIC CON
I've been to it before, it's awesome. This is the one where all the creators go to, where all the news comes out of and all the fun stuff gets announced. This year I want to start getting out to all the various events and meeting more people, that's the next step for me as a writer. The industry is tight knit and it's hard to break in although once you break in, you are in until you suck. Anyway this is where the big time happens and tons of cool stuff was announced, and Birds of Prey were there hanging out. They announced a new Wolverine book with Kubert on it, which is one of the guys who needs to be drawing Wolverine or the x Men all the time. I'm pumped for everything to start coming out.
GOOD ADS
Tide and Head and Shoulders have been making some good ads lately. Peyton Manning is the perfect football pitch man and Patrick Mahone's (weird voice and everything) has made some great commercials himself. The one between him and Troy Polamalu is great, they added to it this week with them disagreeing on tons of words and then there's a great bit with the wind blowing their hair back and I won't ruin it, but it's worth seeing.
NOT THAT YOU ASKED
DC has released a timeline of its comic book history and honestly this is always a mistake. Always. Lining up how long ago something is or was on paper suddenly makes things look wrong. For example now by one creator's estimate World War 2 was in the mid-1960s… oops. This doesn't make any sense at all and this is exactly why you don't put these things down on paper.
Feel free to check out my brand new comic book Another Day at the Office or buy a shirt from Side Hustle Ts where some proceeds help people struggling with cancer or listen to Nerd Thug Radio. 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.”