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The star power forward might return to his native Texas once he enters free agency in the offseason.
Rumors about LaMarcus Aldridge potentially leaving Portland have been surfacing for a while. After a teammate said he believed there was a 50-50 chance that Aldridge could leave,ESPN's Marc Stein reports that two Texas teams, the Spurs and Mavericks, believe they have a shot to get him.
Before the seasonAldridge said in an interview that he wanted to re-sign and become the best Blazer of all time. Portland can offer him more money than anyone else, as well as the possibility to be in the playoffs year in and year out. That might not be enough for him, as the Trail Blazers have not been able to make the conference finals in his time there and look on their way to an early postseason exit after losing to the Grizzlies, 97-82, on Wednesday.
Wesley Matthews, Arron Afflalo and Robin Lopez are also becoming free agents, and if even one of them leaves, Portland would have to replace them with a quality piece or take a step back as a potential contender. There are a lot of variables at play, but it's looking more and more like Aldridge will at least listen to offers, which would make him one of the most sought-after free agents in the market.
The Mavericks and Spurs are good destinations. San Antonio could carve up enough cap room for a maximum contract without completely gutting its roster if Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili retire. Dallas could build a team around Aldridge with the cap flexibility they will have after this season.
So let's take a closer look at this potential return to Texas for the Dallas native.
Why it makes senseRumors about Aldridge returning to his home state have been around for a long time. He reportedly believed the city of Portland was too small for him and wanted to play in a bigger market. Dallas fits the bill. The other reason he was said to want out was because the Trail Blazers couldn't put a competitive team around him after injuries derailed the careers of Brandon Roy and Greg Oden. The Spurs have the best track record of success in the league in the past 20 years.
The Mavericks can offer him the chance to play next to Dirk Nowitzki and another free agent, as they will likely have a lot of cap room. The year after next, the cap is supposed to explode, so the Mavericks could add yet another piece. Then Dirk Nowitzki's and Chandler Parsons' contracts expire and would allow Dallas to rebuild its entire roster around Aldridge. Mark Cuban's willingness to spend and the Mavericks' ability to attract free agents could be huge selling points. Few teams can offer so much future flexibility while also offering the chance to make the playoffs in the short term. If the choice is between the Knicks or Lakers and the Mavericks, choosing Dallas seems like a no-brainer.
The Spurs don't have a typical big-market allure, but they could offer Aldridge the chance to join Tony Parker and Kawhi Leonard as the third piece of an established core and would have Tiago Splitter, Patty Mills and potentially Danny Green on the roster as well. Slotting Aldridge in Duncan's spot in the starting lineup would mean instant contention as well as a chance to play next to one of the league's best young talents in Leonard and its best coach in Gregg Popovich. The fit would be perfect, as Aldridge would not have to defend centers. With Leonard in tow, the future would look promising.
Why it doesn't make senseAldridge is 29 years old and his next contract could be his last big one. He might be tempted to go for the biggest amount of money possible, as Carmelo Anthony did in New York, especially considering he has not made much from endorsements. The Blazers can offer that. If they retain all of their free agents, Portland will be a playoff team for the foreseeable future. All thing considered, Aldridge is in a good situation already.
Nowitzki is the Mavericks' starting power forward and that will likely remain the case even with his eroding skills. You don't send living legends to the bench. That means Aldridge would be slotted at center if he comes to Dallas. He can play there, but the grind of doing so for an entire season might take its toll and that team will likely struggle on defense. Unless the Mavericks already have another free agent committed to sign along with Aldridge, a move to Dallas doesn't move the needle in the short term as far as contending goes. Who knows what the future will bring?
The Spurs make more sense in terms of on-court fit, but if Aldridge wants to raise his public profile as it was reported, San Antonio is not the place for him. The Spurs love flying under the radar and Leonard is one of the quietest stars in the league. They don't promote their players for awards and don't always play along with the national media. It would be really hard for Aldridge to build his brand under those circumstances.
The Spurs would also have to make some sacrifices to carve out room for a maximum contract. One of Green, Boris Diaw or Splitter would have to be let go or traded, which would weaken their roster for the immediate future.
Likelihood of happening: 4/10If Aldridge indeed leaves Portland, him landing with one of the Spurs or Mavericks makes much more sense than him signing with the Lakers, Knicks or any other team with cap space. There's a reason there have been persistent rumors about Aldridge wanting to go home, and Texas not having an income tax would make leaving millions on the table to make a move easier to swallow.
Aldridge staying with the Trail Blazers remains the most likely scenario, but if he leaves, one of the Texas teams will likely get him.
Source: http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2015/4/23/8478317/lamarcus-aldridge-mavericks-spurs-free-agency
Would you trade one team's disgruntled star for another team's disgruntled star?
Dallas Morning News' Bob Strum was asked if the Dallas Cowboys should trade Dez Bryant to the Minnesota Vikings for Adrian Peterson and a second-round pick, which they could use to help replace Bryant at receiver.
'); You must login to view the full content on this page.Source: http://www.tulsaworld.com/sportsextra/osusportsextra/dallas-cowboys-dez-bryant-for-adrian-peterson-trade-scenario/article_7fe8f727-f778-5ad1-9634-3de1579386c0.html
Photos: Chile volcano eruption 8 photos
Chile's Calbuco volcano erupted Wednesday, April 22 2015, billowing a huge ash cloud over a sparsely populated, mountainous area in southern Chile.
Photos: Chile volcano eruption 8 photos
Chilean officials say the eruption was preceded by a rise in seismic activity approximately an hour before the eruption, which sent a gray column of ash more than 15 km into the sky.
Photos: Chile volcano eruption 8 photos
Officials have declared a state of emergency in the town of Llanquihue and the town of Puerto Octay, as well as a red alert for Chile's Lakes Region and the towns of Puerto Montt and Puerto Varas.
Photos: Chile volcano eruption 8 photos
Ash and smoke shoots into the sky from the Calbuco volcano.
Photos: Chile volcano eruption 8 photos
Authorities have ordered people to evacuate within a 20 kilometer zone of the volcano.
Photos: Chile volcano eruption 8 photos
The volcano has not erupted since 1961. In 1996 volcanic activity took place but only a mix of gases and vapors was registered.
Photos: Chile volcano eruption 8 photos
The eruption could be seen clearly from Puerto Varas, a popular vacation destination.
Photos: Chile volcano eruption 8 photos
There have been no reports of deaths, missing people, or injuries, said Chile's Interior Minister Rodrigo Penailillo on Wednesday.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/22/americas/gallery/chile-volcano/
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DALLAS (105.3 THE FAN) The NFL hasreleased the 2015 regular season schedule.
The Dallas Cowboys will open the regular season at AT&T Stadium against the NFC East division rival New York Giants in the leagues first Sunday Night Football game of the season on Sept. 13.
Home game opponents include: (NFC East:New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins) Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Seattle Seahawks, New England Patriots, New York Jets.
The Cowboys will travel to play: (NFC East:New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins) New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Green Bay Packers, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins.
The Official 2015 Regular Season Schedule
Week 1: Sunday, Sept. 13 vs NY Giants
Week 2: Sunday, Sept. 20 @ Philadelphia
Week 3: Sunday, Sept. 27 vs Atlanta
Week 4: Sunday, Oct. 4 @ New Orleans
Week 5: Sunday, Oct. 11 vs New England
Week 6: Sunday, Oct. 18 BYE
Week 7: Sunday, Oct. 25 @ NY Giants
Week 8: Sunday, Nov. 1 vs Seattle
Week 9: Sunday, Nov. 8 vs Philadelphia
Week 10: Sunday, Nov. 15 @ Tampa Bay
Week 11: Sunday, Nov. 22 @ Miami
Week 12: Thursday, Nov. 26 vs Carolina
Week 13: Monday, Dec. 7 @ Washington
Week 14: Sunday, Dec. 13 @ Green Bay
Week 15: Saturday, Dec. 19 vs NY Jets
Week 16: Sunday, Dec. 27 @ Buffalo
Week 17: Sunday, Jan. 3vs Washington
The Cowboys 2015 preseason schedule was announced on April 9and includes two home and two away games for Dallas.
The Cowboys will open preseason out in California, not far from training camp in Oxnard, playingagainst the San Diego Chargers, during the week of August 13-17.
For the 2nd game the Cowboys stay on the left coast and travel to San Francisco to take on the 49ers the week of August 20-24.
Game 3 is against the Vikings at AT&T Stadium in the week of Aug 27-30 and game 4is also athomeagainst the Texans in the week of Sep 3-4.
*Listen to Dallas Cowboys football locally on 105.3 The Fan
(2015 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
Source: http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2015/04/21/dallas-cowboys-2015-schedule-dallas-to-face-off-against-ny-giants-for-opener/
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In 1992, the United States' top professional club at the time, the San Francisco Bay Blackhawks, traveled to Mexico City to face the legendary Mexican side Club Amrica in a home-and-away series at the most fearsome venue in North American soccer: Estadio Azteca.
Located on the high plateau just outside Mexico City, the Azteca stands 7,300 feet above sea level. By comparison, Denver, Colorado, the "Mile High City," sits some 2,000 feet lower.
No amount of training, even at altitude, can adequately prepare you to play on its hallowed field.
"I was probably in the best shape of my life by far," recalled Blackhawks and future MLS defender Mark Semioli. "I was 25 years old. I was the perfect age. It felt like I couldn't even move my legs from the get go. It was as if you smoked 100 cigarettes before the game because the altitude was still strong, but the smog was incredible."
Yet despite the altitude and the elements and the hostile crowd, the Blackhawks took that Hugo Snchez-led Amrica to the brink of elimination in the CONCACAF Champions' Cup (the ancestor of the CONCACAF Champions League).
Since then, no professional club team from either Canada or the United States has traveled to Azteca to play against Amrica in international competition.
That all changes on Wednesday, when the Montreal Impact face Mexico's most successful teamin the first leg of the CCL final (9 pm ET; FOX Sports 2, UniMs in USA; Sportsnet World, TVA Sports in Canada).
From the moment they were formed in 1988, the San Francisco Bay Blackhawks signaled their intent to become the biggest and best professional soccer team in America. The club's owner, Bay Area real estate mogul Dan Van Voorhis, spared no expense in providing the team with the best coaches, trainers and travel possible.
When the San Francisco Chronicle asked him why he would risk so much of his own money on a niche sport like soccer, Van Voorhis replied, "I like to work with creative people and I like challenges. Soccer and the Blackhawks certainly present all those to me."
The ambition of the club was evident from the beginning. At a time when many American professional soccer players were struggling to make ends meet, Van Voorhis treated his players like kings, flying them in his private plane, treating them to extravagant meals and putting them up in the finest hotels.
Van Voorhis's lavish spending helped the Blackhawks lure the most talented American players to the Bay Area. From 1989 until the club's final season in 1993, the Blackhawks were home to some of the greatest American players of that era: Eric Wynalda, Marcelo Balboa, John Doyle (pictured right, on a Blackhawks program), Dominic Kinnear, Troy Dayak and Paul Bravo.
Arriving at a tumultuous time in US pro soccer, the Blackhawks competed in an alphabet soup of different leagues over their short existence, including the Western Soccer League, the American Professional Soccer League and the United States Interregional Soccer League (the forerunner of today's USL). But they always ran at the front of the pack.
Between 1989 and 1991, the Blackhawks played in three championships in a row, winning two of them. The last of those championships, the 1991 APSL title, qualified the Blackhawks for a place in the 1992 CONCACAF Champions' Cup.
In international competition for the first time in their history, the Blackhawks believed they could become the first American team to win the entire tournament.
"We had the expectation that we would go far in this thing," said Semioli, who later spent six seasons in MLS with the LA Galaxy and the MetroStars. "We had real plans to win it, and the focus from [Van Voorhis] down was, 'We're going to take this thing.'"
The Blackhawks cruised through the first three rounds of the tournament. They defeated opponents from Panama, Belize and Honduras by a staggering aggregate score of 22-2. All that stood between them and a place in the finals was an eight-time Primera Division and three-time Champions' Cup winner: Club Amrica.
The Blackhawks entered Azteca with a plan. Through 60 minutes of play, it looked like it might actually work. As the Impact did against Costa Rican opponents Alajuelense in this year's semifinal, the Blackhawks played compactly on defense and cautiously ventured forward on the counter.
Semioli explained that his entire job that day was to shadow Amrica's Mexican international midfielder, Luis Roberto Alves. By his own estimation, Semioli didn't cross the midfield line more than five times in the match.
Still, the defensive strategy appeared to pay off. At halftime, the teams left the field deadlocked at zero.
While Amrica got on the scoreboard first in the 47th minute, less than seven minutes later, Jamaican international Peter Isaacs improbably equalized for the visitors. Once again, the teams were even, and the Blackhawks could feel the mood inside the stadium change.
Then disaster struck.
In the 64th minute, Blackhawks defender Troy Dayak (pictured right, with the Earthquakes) was given a straight red card for punching Mexican forward Hugo Snchez then recently returned from Real Madrid in an off-ball incident that was caught not only by the assistant referee, but also by every camera in the stadium.
"We in the United States were so accustomed to bad refereeing and no media coverage at all you think you can get away with almost anything. But not at Azteca Stadium," said former Blackhawks midfielder and captain Derek Van Rheenen.
Dayak describes that red card as one of the defining moments in his career.
"I was playing in a huge stadium in a massive environment," Dayak remembered. "I was doing my job, specifically to mark out their best player, and I was doing that. And the guy found a way to win the game for his team by getting me thrown out."
According to Dayak, who played through the match with a broken bone in his ankle, Snchez repeatedly targeted his foot and ankle with off-ball challenges that went ignored by the referee. After Snchez punched Dayak in the solar plexus, Dayak instinctively swung out. As so often happens, the referee only saw the second punch.
The red card forced an exhausted and demoralized 10-man Blackhawks squad into emergency defending all over the pitch. Within 15 minutes of Dayak's dismissal, Snchez, who would later star in Major League Soccer's inaugural season with the Dallas Burn (now FC Dallas), scored two goals that left the Blackhawks gasping for breath.
Dayak, meanwhile, sat dejectedly in the bowels of the stadium, a sterile, concrete locker room that he described as "the belly of the beast," where he could only listen in horror to the rumble of the crowd above and the stadium loudspeaker blaring the calls: "Goooool! Hugo Snchez!"
"We were in great shape after Peter's goal," Blackhawks coach Laurie Calloway told the media after the game. "But once we lost Troy [Dayak], who we thought kept Snchez under wraps until then, we had a lot of trouble defending."
Part of that stemmed from Dayak's dismissal, but the majority stemmed from a combination of fatigue and Amrica's distinctive home-field advantage.
"Azteca was very hot and a huge field," said Semioli (pictured left, behind Snchez). "It's kind of a spread-out game, and teams [like Amrica] that can possess the ball can run you ragged, much as they did to us."
No Blackhawks player, however fit or fresh, was immune to the debilitating effects of the altitude.
"I don't know how those guys played 90 minutes, because after 20 minutes I felt like there were arrows stuck in both of my lungs," said forward John Garvey, who came into the first leg as a late substitute. "I couldn't breathe. It was just such an advantage. It was the most uncomfortable feeling, that pollution and altitude."
Despite the loss, the Blackhawks were in an optimistic mood heading into the second leg. They would be playing at home and needed just a 2-0 scoreline to push the series to extra time. If they could shut Snchez out of the game, they thought, they would have a chance.
Like their opponents, the Blackhawks possessed a home-field advantage of their own: the narrow confines of San Jose State University's Spartan Stadium.
"When teams came to play on that field, we were very used to it: being in very tight confines, how to play smart on that field, how to move the ball around [on] the fast turf that it had," said Semioli. "We felt pretty confident that this would lend itself to a tremendous advantage, even over a highly skilled Mexican team, because we knew how to work the field to our advantage."
That confidence bore immediate dividends when, in just the sixth minute of the match, forward Joey Leonetti headed a Lawrence Lozzano cross beyond the reach of Amrica goalkeeper Alejandro Garcia.
But in the 27th minute, Blackhawks goalkeeper Mark Dougherty tripped midfielder Alves inside the box. Snchez, who had been kept quiet by Semioli, stepped up and buried the penalty. Like that, the game was even.
"There was contact," Dougherty, who later played for MLS' Tampa Bay Mutiny and Columbus Crew, said of the foul after the match. "But not enough to warrant a penalty."
Despite their howls of protest, the Blackhawks pressed on. Their perseverance paid off as fullback Tim Martin a starter for MLS' San Jose Clash (now Earthquakes) from 1996-98 scored with a right-footed blast from well outside the box.
For the second time in the match, the Blackhawks found themselves needing just a goal to send the series to extra time, and in the 63rd minute, it looked as if they had found it. Leonetti took the ball to the endline and crossed to an unmarked Townsend Qin at the far post.
As the players ran over to celebrate with Qin, they turned and saw that the assistant referee had raised his flag. Offside.
While it sounds as if the Blackhawks had been CONCACAF'd Semioli admitted that the team thought that there was a conspiracy to keep them out of the final the assistant referee responsible for the call was American.
Without Qin's goal, though, the 2-1 scoreline was not enough for the Blackhawks to advance to the next round of the tournament.
The next morning, the San Jose Mercury News led its story this way: "Defender Mark Semioli can tell his children some day that he shut down one of the world's legendary strikers, Hugo Snchez. The rest of the San Francisco Bay Blackhawks can tell their grandchildren that they defeated one of the world's internationally recognized teams, Club Amrica.
"By then, maybe, it won't hurt as much to admit that none of it mattered."
But for the players that traveled to Mexico City, the experience of playing at Azteca, the very ground where Pele and Maradona made World Cup history, is one they still vividly remember more than 20 years later.
"It was just incredible, the venue," said Garvey. "There were two World Cup finals there. And when people ask me where I played, I always say I played at Azteca."
Source: http://www.mlssoccer.com/ccl/news/article/2015/04/21/blackhawks-story-american-team-nearly-knocked-club-america-azteca
Google Inc. GOOGL, +1.15% announced on its corporate blog Wednesday that it has partnered with leading carriers to offer a new wireless service that costs $20 a month. The plan, called "Project Fi," includes talk, text, Wi-Fi tethering, international coverage in over 120 countries and 24-hour support. Customers can then pay $10 per month for each gigabite of cellular data, and will get credit for the full value of unused data. Google said its carrier partners include Sprint and T-Mobile. "We developed new technology that gives you better coverage by intelligently connecting you to the fastest available network at your location whether it's Wi-Fi or one of our two partner LTE networks," Google said on its blog. If there is no Wi-Fi available, Project Fi will look for whichever partner network is delivering the fastest speed. Google's stock rose 1.1% in afternoon trade. Shares of Sprint S, +2.01% gained 1.8% and T-Mobile US TMUS, +2.22% climbed 2.2%.
Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-unveils-new-wireless-service-called-project-fi-2015-04-22
