This article has been submitted by Rob Shaw.

The currently streaking Blue Jays now sit 7.5 games behind the first place Tampa Bay Rays as this year’s trade deadline rolls around. While making up 7.5 games in two months is not impossible, jumping over three teams (Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox) will require the help of Tom Cruise and his trademark disguises – maybe he could disguise himself as a legitimate clean-up hitter. However that doesn’t mean that the Jays should be sellers at this year’s deadline. The Blue Jays might want to start looking to the future, but the future is next year, not two or three years down the road.
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This article has been submitted by Rob Shaw.

Imagine David Stern woke up one morning and realized that he has let the NBA completely abandon basketball fans in the Pacific Northwest, first allowing the Vancouver Grizzlies to move to Memphis and then the Seattle SuperSonics to relocate to Oklahoma City. Imagine Stern felt so bad that he granted the Pacific Northwest a new franchise – obviously in Vancouver because he feels awful that during the first go round Vancouver fans had to endure Bryant “Big Country” Reeves’ hair cut – and gave this new franchise the opportunity to pick up any player in the NBA it wished so long as they stayed under the 2008-2009 NBA salary cap of $58,560,000. The management would have to make some difficult decisions. Would they choose to take Kobe Bryant, the NBA’s best player, knowing that his salary of $21,262,500 would eat up 36% of the cap? Would they choose to take only players on their rookie contacts and hope that they don’t need any veteran presence? Luckily in this imaginary world, the Vancouver Scarier-Than-Memphis-Grizzlies have hired a person with no NBA managerial experience, but someone who has won many championships on EA Sports’ NBA Live and recently wrote an absolutely fabulous article on Jamario Moon.
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This article has been submitted by the debuting Rob Shaw.

“Break out the Salami and Cheese, the HoneyMoon is Over!”

First off all I’d like to apologize for the Chuck Swirsky phrases, but like most Raptors fans I’m suffering from serious withdrawal symptoms and I’m not sure what life will be like in 1 AS (After Swirsky).

Bryan Colangelo and Sam Mitchell had onions, baby, onions to take a 27-year-old journeyman from the Nunavut of the NBA landscape and plant him in the Raptors starting line-up. Jamario Moon rewarded them with solid play and endeared himself to Raptors fans with highlight reel dunks that were getting more hits on YouTube than the Blue Jays got for John Gibbons. However, like his performance in the Slam Dunk Contest, by the playoffs Moon was taking off more than a foot in front of the free throw line and disappointing Raptors and YouTube fans alike.
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