Results tagged “kathywillens”

Is it surprising to anyone that the two signature deals of Isiah Thomas’ tenure as GM have ended in ruins? Eddy Curry has been banished to the end of the bench on most nights, but Isiah has gone even further with Stephon Marbury and barred him from the Garden.

John McCain's Straight Talk Express headed into Manhattan today, taking him to Grand Central Terminal where he got the endorsement of former governor George Pataki. McCain, along with wife Cindy, appeared with Pataki, Alphonse D'Amato, Joseph Lieberman and Rudy Giuliani as the Republican candidate appears to be leading in many Super Tuesday polls over rivals Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul.

It may have taken a few extra hours, but the Mets finally got their man. The Mets and Johan Santana agreed to a six-year, $137.5 million contract, with a club option for a seventh year. When the Mets and Twins agreed to the trade on Tuesday, Major League Baseball gave the Mets and Santana until 5 p.m. Friday to reach a deal. With the deadline approaching yesterday, but no agreement reached, the two sides asked for, and were given, a two-hour extension. What's a couple of hours when you're working out the richest contract for a pitcher in baseball history? All that's left now is a physical for the players involved in the trade. Santana will take his today.

Could this be it? Is our long nightmare about to end? It sounds like it might because there are strong indications out of Minnesota that the Twins are finally going to trade Johan Santana and the front-runners right now are the New York Mets!

If there is such a thing as a good loss the Giants earned it when they lost 38-35 to the Patriots last night. History will remember the Patriots 16-0 mark, but unfortunately it will forget that in a meaningless game on a Saturday night they faced their toughest challenge.

Isiah Thomas brought that question to the forefront yesterday when he responded “I don’t know” to a reporter’s question wondering if there was a chance Stephon Marbury would not come back to the team. The Knicks’ VP for media relations, Jonathan Supranowitz tried to defuse the situation later by saying he had spoken to Marbury and that he would return shortly after the New Year, but the damage was done.

Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani spent his Christmas Eve reading Clement Clarke Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas to children in Harlem and explaining to reporters that's he's cancer-free. Giuliani, whose flu-like symptoms (well, according to his press people) and bad headache have raised questions about the prostate cancer survivor's health, said, "I am perfectly healthy. I don't have cancer."

The Lakers cruised to a 70-45 lead and then had to hang on against a Knicks’ rally that happened with the unit of Nate Robinson, David Lee, Malik Rose, Jared Jeffries and Jamal Crawford playing most of the minutes. What changes are coming? It’s hard to say, but a good start would be splitting Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph up. Let’s just hope Isiah doesn’t start making trades.

Isiah Thomas thinks he deserves more time. Not that much more, just two weeks, but time to show he can turn this club around. Of course, he has had four years already, but at this point who is counting? Maybe Isiah noticed that the next two weeks contain six games, but only two of those teams currently have winning records. The two-week timeframe came up as Thomas was asked what he would do to a coach with his record as GM. His response: "That's a better question in a couple of weeks. Not today, but in a couple weeks, that would be a fair question. We'll see if we can come out of this. If we can't come out of this, then those are fair questions. There's still a lot of basketball left in the season. There is time to turn it around."

You know what makes the Pacers special? They actually had the brains to admit their mistake and fire Isiah. The Knicks haven’t figured that out and Monday’s 119-92 humiliation probably won’t change things.

How many times this season are we going to say that the Knicks have hit an all time low? It seems that every couple weeks the team drops another disgraceful notch, and this weekend was the latest. No one knew how the team would react to the death of Stephon Marbury's father last week, but the sense was that they had come together as a unit out of the tragedy, and many might have thought...

Yesterday's Knicks practice was cancelled so that the entire team could attend the funeral for Don Marbury, father of Knicks captain Stephon Marbury. Don Marbury died during the Knicks' Sunday night game. Despite being a team often criticized for lacking chemistry, they all stood together at the Coney Island Gospel Assembly on Neptune Ave. to support their point guard during his difficult time. Malik Rose spoke on behalf of the team to the 600-plus...

Don Marbury Sr, Stephon Marbury's dad, has passed away at age 69. He was in attendance at the Knicks game last night when he suffered chest pains and was rushed to St Vincent's. Stephon learned the news after the game and quickly left the Garden without comment. The team, which kept its locker room doors closed for 30 minutes after the game to allow Marbury to leave, refused to talk about why Steph stormed out...

Barack may have Oprah, but the stagehands' and writers' union have John Edwards! The former senator, currently in third place after Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the hunt for the Democratic presidential nomination, voiced his support of Local One, the Broadway stagehands union that has been on strike since November 9 over a new contract. Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf said, "To interfere with the power of the Broadway community is not...

The news that Stephon Marbury is heading back to the Knicks may be only the second-biggest reconciliation in New York sports this week. There are reports that Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees are talking again and discussing what it would take to bring Rodriguez back to the Yankees. Apparently stung by the reaction to the timing of his opt-out, A-Rod has approached the Yankees and at least discussed the possibility of a new deal. The...

After nine games it is clear that we do not really know what this Giants team is capable of. During their six-game winning streak, the defense looked like one of the best in the NFL but as yesterday’s 31-20 loss showed, they are hugely inconsistent. The same thing can be said of Eli Manning. Eli teases you with just enough brilliance to make you think he is about to live up to his hype,...

With considerably less fanfare than Diddy or Lance Armstrong, Katie Holmes ran the NYC Marathon in 5 hours, 29 minutes, and 58 seconds. She wore an FDNY baseball cap, black pants and a purple tank top - and was possibly surrounded by a security detail who might have been running alongside her. Mega-star husband Tom Cruise and child Suri Cruise, as well as her parents and mother-in-law, were on hand to give the former...

Remember how excited some people got when Roger Clemens announced he was coming back to the Yankees? New Jets starting quarterback Kellen Clemens -- no relation, but like Roger's kids, his name does start with "K" -- won't get as much attention, but he still has quite a following. Weeks of calls for Chad Pennington to sit in favor of Clemens didn't persuade Coach Eric Mangini, but a 1-7 start has been enough for him...

What better symbol for the Jets' season than cornerback's Darrelle Revis' collision with safety Abram Elam? Revis, going for an interception against Buffalo's Lee Evans, instead got a mouthful of his teammate and a great view at the Bills receiver's march to the end zone. That score clinched Buffalo's 13-3 win in the Meadowlands on Sunday. The Jets have now lost twice to the Bills and have fallen to 1-7. Their only win came against the Dolphins, but the NFL will still insist that it counts.

An ESPN report yesterday cited sources that say the Yankees are ready to offer Alex Rodriguez a record contract extension. The offer for the Yankees third baseman would be an extension in the range of five years and $30 million a year. Rodriguez is currently signed with the Yankees through the end of the 2010 season at $27 million a year, but can opt-out of his contract in the 10 days following the World Series,...

In a 33-15 game, it is cliché to say that it was closer than the final score, but this game really was. It is even more cliché to say that this game turned on only a few plays, but again, it did. The fact is, San Francisco’s inability to hold onto the football was the key difference in the game.

In what can only be described as a shock, Joe Torre has decided not to return to the Bronx in 2008. Torre was offered a one-year deal at a base of $5-million with an additional $1-million guaranteed for each round of the playoffs that the Yankees reached. So, he could have made $8-million for getting to the World Series. The deal also included a team option for 2009 that would have vested at $8-million...

If a change in clothes doesn't help the Jets, what will? Despite looking snazzy in their New York Titans throwbacks, the Jets looked anything but sharp on the field in a 16-9 loss to the Eagles on Sunday. Some creative playcalling, including a reverse, got the Jets deep inside Eagles territory as the fourth quarter wound down, but Chad Pennington couldn't get the ball to Laveranues Coles on fourth-and-one fade.

For a team used to making miracles, conjuring up a disaster had an especially bitter taste. With a sloppily played 8-1 loss to Florida and the Phillies' 6-1 win against the Nationals, the Mets' season ended about a month too early. The loss capped an agonizing stretch of two and a half weeks in which the Mets played some of the worst teams in the National League and still played their worst baseball of the season.

Yesterday at Yankee Stadium, Major League Baseball unveiled the logo for its 2008 All-Star Game. Mayor Bloomberg was on hand to unveil the logo along with baseball officials, former Yankee players (including Yankees legend Yogi Berra) and current Yankees Derek Jeter and Hideki Matsui. The 2008 Midsummer Classic will take place on Tuesday, July 15. The logo, pictured at right, features the historic facade of Yankee Stadium, which will be in its final season, along with the classic pinstripes of Yankee uniforms.

You may have many opinions of Senator Charles Schumer. A man who gives weekly press conferences by way of making the rounds on Sunday morning news shows, someone who will "put a bullet betweens the president's eyes," the senior Senator of New York, orchestrator of the Senate's shift back to the Democrats, husband of a recent Department of Transportation commissioner, imaginer of middle class couple the Baileys, cereal hog. But defender of hedge funds' and private equity firms' desire to keep their low tax rate? Who knew?

Well, it looks like its walls are made out of regular ol' brick. Maybe it's been artfully distressed, but given it goes for $225,000, we were expecting marble, maybe a robot manservant, though some people do go gaga for exposed brick. This the parking space mentioned in last week's NY Times article, the one that made New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike think, "What the hell is going on with the real estate market?" The space is at new building 246 West 17th, whose website is Sim City-ish and really annoying.

The fuel tanker, the White Sea, that ran aground near the Ambrose Channel off Coney Island and Sandy Hook, NJ, yesterday morning, is still stuck in the waters. An attempt to dislodge the 800-foot ship carrying over half a million barrels of "low-sulfur fuel oil" failed last night, so the Coast Guard began plans to "lighten" (remove) 110,000 barrels of fuel after the ship couldn't be moved. Coast Guard officials are hopeful that it can be dislodged during tonight's high tide around 8PM.

Slaughterhouses may have mostly disappeared from New York City's municipal landscape, but they still exist. They tend to only be noticed when one of their stock escapes imminent death via a bolt for freedom. Unfortunately, the city's streets are barely more hospitable to a farm animal on the loose, once it has escaped the inevitable doom of the urban abattoir. Last month we posted a story about a little lamb (whose fleece was about as white as dirty city snow) that was wandering around the Bronx. After a chase-and-be-chased incident, a man named Julio Rivera managed to corral the lamb into a parking lot, where responding police officers took turns capturing camera phone pics with the animal.