| Hockey Fix: The week in the NHL
There are scoring streaks, and then there's what Tampa Bay's Vincent Lecavalier (right) did the last few weeks. Lecavalier had an eight-game streak during which he scored multiple points in every game. That run came to an end in a 2-1 loss to the Rangers on Wednesday. During the streak, Lecavalier scored seven goals and 14 assists, including a five-point night against division-rival Carolina, while the Lightning went 5-2-1. He also vaulted into the league lead in points. Lecavalier had more points in those eight games than players like Markus Naslund, Jason Spezza and Marian Hossa have tallied this season. After being kept off the score sheet on Wednesday, Lecavalier tallied two points Friday at Carolina. .
Redskins' Taylor dead after shooting at home
ASHBURN, Va. -- Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder's eyes were red. His voice cracked and was barely audible. Next to him sat coach Joe Gibbs, barely more composed.Safety Sean Taylor's violent death had left his team in tears and the NFL in mourning."This is a terrible, terrible tragedy," Snyder said.Taylor died early Tuesday of a gunshot wound from an apparent intruder, a tragic end for a 24-year-old man whose life was transformed by the birth of a daughter 18 months ago."We're going to miss him," Gibbs said. "I'm not talking about as a player. I'm talking about as a person."A day earlier, Taylor and his girlfriend were awakened by loud noises, according to family friend Richard Sharpstein, who learned the details from Taylor's girlfriend, Jackie Garcia. He said Taylor grabbed a machete he keeps in the bedroom for protection.Someone then broke through the bedroom door and fired two shots, one missing and one hitting Taylor, Sharpstein said.
Crew caps season Tuesday with Tecos exhibition
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The Columbus Crew will officially close out its 12th season on Tuesday (Nov. 13) when it plays host Tecos UAG of the Mexican Premier Division in an international exhibition at Crew Stadium at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday's match will be broadcast live exclusively via webcast at TheCrew.com, with Neil Sika on the call. The game is included in all Gold-level Crew Soccer Nation memberships, designated as Special Game "C." Tickets - priced at $12 adults/$10 youth (south end), $17/$13 (north end), $20/$15 (upper sideline), $24/$17 (lower sideline) and $37/$27 (club seats) - are on sale at the Crew Stadium Box Office, all central Ohio Ticketmaster retail locations, via Ticketmaster phone at 614-431-3600 and on-line at TheCrew.com. Group pricing is available and may be acquired by calling 614-447-CREW.
John Nicholson
If the football media was a bodily function, this week it would have been projectile vomiting. It may turn out to be a defining week in English football so what better time to start a weekly trawl through the highways and byways of football media in all its twisted glory. Monday morning comes on heavy like an illness and so I ease into the international week with the excellent Times podcast, The Game, presented by Gabriele Marcotti and Guillem Balague. Marcotti is the primo pundit and journalist around at the moment. His gig is to be arsy, argumentative and be well armed with facts, figures and anecdotes. Everything he's involved with has a real spark about it. An ongoing theme of the week is the increasingly tedious 'are there too many foreigners' debate. Carragher speaks the most sense on this saying it's not the quantity, it's the quality of them.
Knights in national spotlight
With the Rutgers women's basketball team playing nationally or regionally televised games at least twice a month all regular season, I started thinking about what these big games can do not only for the Scarlet Knights program, but also the sport of women's basketball as a whole.
RU plays on the big stage 12 times this year, including three of the five games that the Knights have played so far this season.
The increased exposure is due to a few factors: the team's heightened profile following last season's finals appearance and the fact that 12 of the Knights games are against preseason Top 25 opponents. In fact, the Dec. 30 game versus Temple on ESPNU is the only televised matchup that does not involve one of the aforementioned ranked opponents.
Playing in to both the toughness of RU's schedule, as well as the increase of TV time for the Knights, is the strength of a Big East Conference that sent eight teams to last year's NCAA Tournament.
Bend It Like?Blanco
The Chicago Fire striker, like Beckham, has amped up pro soccer's star power. Plus, he's pulling in Latino fans
It was David Beckham, the fair-haired English midfielder, who garnered all the headlines early this year when he came to the U.S. to ply his trade for some $250 million over five years, including endorsements. But as American pro soccer has come of age this season--at least financially--the player most responsible isn't Beckham. Instead, it's Cuauhtemoc Blanco, a fiery striker who grew up in a barrio outside Mexico City. With an explosive season, Blanco has helped boost attendance across Major League Soccer (MLS), with the draw for his own Chicago Fire rising 60%, to 16,000 people a game. .
2007 InfoWorld 100 Awards
Abbott Laboratories www.abbott.com Sales and Financial Data Warehouse Initiative Project Lead: Peggy Mathias, Senior Manager HQ IT Applications, International Division Project Description: Abbott launched an international sales data consolidation effort, developing a flexible information management infrastructure capable of accommodating future organizational changes and rapidly evolving business needs. The project integrated Kalido as a data warehouse, Oracle and PL/SQL for data staging, and Cognos for its reporting front end, providing 250 finance and marketing executives in 65 countries access to consistent, high-quality data. Industry: Pharmaceuticals .
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 .
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