Jake

Safety is by far the most pressing need. By the end of the season, our DL was the second best position on the D after the corners. Now, most of our interior DL (the part that was playing borderline adequate) is not under contract. But if we can bring some of them back, I'd certainly pay more attention to safety if all else is equal. With that said, I'll take the best players I can get at any defensive position.

What I really don't get is why the pick would get protected from 56-60

ss2k5 said it best -- if they think Castro is going to be great but see some flukiness in Quintana, they'll deal. If they feel really strongly in just one of those directions, they'll try to swing a deal. If they think both are going to be 4 WAR players for the foreseeable future, they probably won't do it.

If you don't want to vote for anyone, that's great -- in some ways, it's better than speculating on who did what. But don't vote for anybody then!

You are probably underestimating the productive capabilities of Android by quite a bit. Either way, tablets are very useful as consumption devices as well. I do most of my reading and posting on Soxtalk from my Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, for instance. The active digitizer (aka, the S Pen technology) makes it much more useful for productivity for me, since I can take handwritten notes on it. I also wrote this entire post via handwriting recognition. Curious why you don't trust Asus, as they are held in extremely high esteem throughout the tech community and have pioneered Android in the tablet format. They made the first mainstream convertible. To each his own of course, but I wouldn't want you to miss out on a good product for you at some point.

I honestly love having as many physical/capacitive buttons as possible. For some reason I feel like I "trust" them more and I've never been fond of the black bar on-screen for that kind of thing. It may just be that I am so used to it, though my One lacks a physical button (there are two capacitive buttons). What Samsung has done here IMO is the worst way to do things, which is to keep the button but change the function. If I had one, I'd hit it to get to my home screen all the god damned time.

good find Zoom. Also, I don't blame Deng one second for trying to find his way to the open market. This is the NBA. GMs are f***ing dumb. Someone will pay him a bunch.

QUOTE (Jenksy Cat @ Jan 7, 2014 -> 12:27 AM) Love it...but what the s*** is Cleveland thinking? Vaults them into the 8th seed for no reason? You get sick of being a s***ty team after a while. It's not like the high draft picks have been doing them a ton of good, anyway

As we are learning with the Charlotte pick, even a terrible franchise tends to get a pick outside the top 10 over the course of several years

Bulls twitter: Bulls convey contract of Luol Deng to Cavs for multiple draft picks & contract of Andrew Bynum http://bit.ly/1fa6OW9 pic.twitter.com/xe9vIdbllG I'd say we're going to release him since the Bulls aren't even willing to admit that we not only received his contract, but the player himself as well

So...can we all take back the ridicule towards the FO for not making a deal? There was a lot of premature criticism up in here and the Bulls did a great job of not revealing their plan and not making a deal without getting what they were looking for, which is talent over savings. In the end, we got both. Great. All that for a freaking expiring contract.

Yeah, Bynum is going to go. Having Bynum on the team would be the ultimate way to run Thibs out of town, though

In the chat, they talk rather favorably on Danish and the guy definitely knows the Sox plan to start him. This year's writer (new editor-in-chief of the entire publication) really knows his s*** and did a great job. I'm guessing he won't cover us next year, but at least it won't be Phil Rogers

In other news, DeAndre Jordan continues to post my favorite stat lines in the NBA. 14 points on 10 shots, 17 rebounds, 8 blocks

This is pretty much exactly what we would have wanted. Getting a first round pick, especially one that could potentially be rather high, is a great deal for Deng, who no longer had any value for us.

The pick is from the Sacramento Kings and is top 10 protected for the next two seasons

Some cool stuff at CES: Pebble is releasing Pebble Steel, a new, much-less-dorky-looking version of their pretty great smartwatch. They also announced Pebble 2.0, a major update to its operating system that includes its own appstore. Their most notable new partner is ESPN, so checking scores on your watch will be pretty easy. Each watch will come with a leather and metal band. Samsung announced another line of tablet updates, finally making their Tab line non-s***ty while releasing a much larger Galaxy Note 12.2. I just bought a Note 8.0 and would have liked an update to that, though I really am fond of what I have...most of my beef is with the plasticky, rounded build of the whole thing. ASUS had a quite well-received presentation, rolling out all kinds of new s***. I'm intrigued by their Vivotab Note 8 (did I mention I like the 8 inch size for tablets and really want an active stylus?), which has the much-improved Bay Trail Atom processor, runs full W8.1, has a Wacom active digitizer, and also comes with a free full copy (not a trial) of Office. $299, awesome Their new ZenFones look very interesting as well. They have Zen 4, 5, and 6 models which correspond to size. 4 looks like it will be great in the budget part of the market. The ZenFone 6 has one particularly interesting feature - "PenTouch," a feature which they say allows you to use a pencil, pen, or anything like that on your screen as if it were a stylus. Sounds awesome if implemented well, but who knows. I'm still waiting for active stylus/things like this to be implemented in non-enormous phones. And finally, they announced the Transformer Duet -- a 13 inch convertible (detachable screen to become a large tablet) that runs full versions of Windows 8.1 and Android. No virtualization. You press one key to switch over, which they say takes 4 seconds. I think Android needs some work to take on this size and functionality, but the option to dual-boot may get enough people to jump on board that they get the development needed to make it work. TBH, I think W8.1 is a big enough step that it may squash some of this competition, particularly from the mobile OS side. Intel confirmed that they will be making a line of chips meant to support dual OS, which suggests this will be a thing the industry tries to implement further.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Jan 6, 2014 -> 07:46 PM) Apparently the Mini sounds better than the regular, so I'll pass on that! I thought I was crazy when I felt that way at an in-store demo.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Jan 6, 2014 -> 06:20 PM) Right. We aren't even seeing the picture that she took, because there is a no way a camera phone can get that close of a shot, unless maybe she had that ridiculous Nokia Lumia with the 41 MP. So really what happened was a NY Post reporter took a picture of a girl and there was a potential jumper in the background? Why was he taking this picture? The whole "story" just sounds so stupid and pointless. And, of course, even the Lumia doesn't have all that power in its front facing camera.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jan 6, 2014 -> 05:39 PM) I feel like a key to bringing Mirotic over is starting him. He's on the best team in Spain getting paid very well, a star in his home country. Oh yay let me leave to play with Kirk Hinrich. He hasn't been in his Spanish team's starting lineup until this season and really doesn't get great minutes even now. When he was drafted by us, he hardly played at all.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 6, 2014 -> 05:39 PM) One thing from your numbers to note though is winning the cy young twice. That means that there was a 6 year-ish stretch where Glavine was one of the top 6 pitchers and 2 years where he sat at the very top. Neither of the other guys were described by you as having won the CY award. That's a big deal. So it's not just the longevity, he's got 2 things going for him...an incredible peak combined with a degree of longevity equal to the other guys, if not in some sense greater (more AS appearances, for example). That's true, for sure -- I suppose I only give limited credence to that award since it constantly has too much of a "popularity contest" influence that is the exact thing sullying the HOF process. Nonetheless, it is one of the best things he has going for him given how almost all advanced statistics find him to be a worse pitcher than the other two despite pitching much longer to accumulate more WAR

One thing I believe to be true is that the Bulls are not interested in exposing their plan to the media before they put it into action. The best way for us to extract value for Deng is to act like we really want him to be a Bull in the long term and are totally willing to ride things out after the deadline. I also don't believe the NYDN knows a damn thing about what Derrick Rose or Tom Thibodeau are thinking. I sure wouldn't want to run Thibs out of town because I sincerely believe he is the most valuable person to this franchise in the post-Rose's knees era. He is a rare breed of coach that adds value to the on-floor talent. With that said, I don't think we are automatically a tanking team if we trade Deng and amnesty Boozer. As others have said, this should be a team that at least makes the playoffs and in the East may be a top 2-3 seed immediately: PG - Rose SG - Butler SF - Dunleavy PF - Gibson C - Noah BN - Snell BN - Mirotic BN - 2014 CHI 1st round pick BN - 2014 CHA 1st round pick Might flip-flop Snell and Dunleavy. I don't think Mirotic will do much starting in the early going of his first NBA season, though I do expect him to be an important part of the team. There also could be other good pieces involved in trading Deng (Waiters? 1st round pick? "rotational player"?) as well as possibly brought in with the limited cap space that may exist with the losses of Deng and Boozer. There's some real room for growth. In an NBA where you're usually focused on getting a single, super-talented player, that's a pretty deep and young squad under contract for a while. They could all suck, sure, and Rose could be a fringey player for years, but it's not all that bleak in comparison to most other franchises.

Mike Piazza - career 63.6 WAR Curt Schilling - career 83.2 WAR and yes, WAR is position-adjusted. Neither of those players are HOFers. Piazza played before advanced stats were used for catchers, so he actually got that WAR on the strength of positive career value for defense, which most won't agree with. I also don't think Glavine is worthy of first ballot (64.3 WAR), especially when there are others on the ballot that are similar or better and totally out of consideration: Schilling (83.2 WAR), Mike Mussina (82.5) To get outside of simply using WAR to evaluate, we can look at things this way. Mussina - 9 times in the top 6 of Cy Young voting, 6 times in the top 5, 7 gold gloves, 270 career W, never started fewer than 24 games in a season following his rookie year, 5x All-Star, 3.42 ERA/1.10 WHIP in 130 postseason IP, 3.00 ERA in 18 World Series IP Schilling - 6x All-Star, 4x Cy Young Top 5, 2x Cy Young Top 2, 2x MVP Top 10, 4x MVP Top 15, 3x MLB wins leader, 4x MLB CG winner, 3x 300 strikeout seasons, 3x World Series champion, 2.23 postseason ERA over 133 IP, 2.06 WS ERA in 48 IP, bloody sock Glavine - 2x Cy Young winner, 6x Cy Young Top 5, 1 MVP Top 10, 3x MVP Top 15, 10x All-Star, 305 career W, 5x 20 W seasons (led league each time), 1x MLB CG leader, started at least 32 G 21 out of 22 seasons (does not include rookie and final seasons, other season was 29 starts), 1x WS champion, career 3.3 ERA in 218 postseason IP, 2.16 in 58 WS IP Lots of great stuff for Glavine, obviously -- his greatest accomplishments IMO are related to his longevity. Was he definitely better than both of those other guys? I'm not so sure. I don't mean to say that these things I listed are all great ways to measure success, but these can be used as other things with which to weigh for and against HOF status. Signs of dominance, if you will, since an unspoken part of being an HOFer seems to be that you must be one of the very best in the game at some point in time

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Jan 6, 2014 -> 02:13 AM) Currently in a state of emergency. No pedestrians are supposed to drive on any major roads. Tomorrow is supposed to be -16 with a windchill of -48. I'm no marine biologist, but I am pretty sure if I go outside my blood will instantly freeze. If a pedestrian is driving anywhere, they are confused