Some wondered why the Warriors gave $7 million to Kwame Brown shortly before this season started. Now they know why, because we’re seeing a world where the Golden State Warriors don’t have an NBA center, and it’s not pretty. Who’s the closest they have? Tonight it was Jeremy Tyler, who took advantage of Andris Biedrins’ relative nonexistence and a terrible game from Ekpe Udoh. Tyler played 15 minutes, including several at the end of the Warriors’ 120-109 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. “He made mistakes but he battled,” Mark...

Henry Schulman had an interesting note about the San Francisco Giants signing Ryan Theriot, who’ll compete for a utility spot: Sabean loves competition, especially when the incumbent is a young player. Like most GMs, too, he doesn’t like to set his team in stone before spring training even begins. Bring in a bunch of guys, let them play, and laissez les bons temps rouler! Fans and players like defined roles. Fans would love to see their favorite baseball team have an 8-man lineup of excellent position players set in granite by February 1, all set to play 158-162 games. Players...

It’d probably make more sense to grade the San Francisco 49ers based on how they performed over the past season, a season that ended less than 100 hours ago. The only problem: I have no interest in doing so. Today I ate lunch with David Fucillo of Niners Nation (and I swear, no tears over the NFC Championship Game were shed … actually, Fucillo wears glasses so I can’t totally confirm). We haunt Flippers about once every two or three weeks in Hayes Valley, where we annoy the patrons around us with loud chattering about the 49ers, and order the same thing every...

On Jan. 14, Ted Robinson ordered everyone listening to “never doubt Alex Smith again.” On Jan. 22, despite the 49ers’ play-by-play announcer’s instructions, the doubts were back. Such is life for any quarterback who wears the red and gold. Super Bowl or bust, and that’s never going to change. This isn’t to say Smith’s the epitome of quarterback perfection, but he led a team that won 14 games. While the defense and special teams carried them, Smith also saved the 49ers’ bacon on numerous occasions at the ends of games. Several quarterbacks...

No doubt, the Blazers were tired on Wednesday night, their third game in three nights. Gerald Wallace, who took an extremely punishing charge against Marc Gasol the night before in the Grizzlies home win over Memphis, looked exhausted. So did Raymond Felton, whose failure to close out on Curry at one point upset Nate McMillan, and McMillan definitely let him know. Still, even with the Blazers’ team-wide fatigue effectively rendering this game meaningless in the long term, there were some interesting minute-by-minute decisions by Mark Jackson. Brandon Rush, who played extremely...

Monta Ellis scored 4 points on Wednesday. The Golden State Warriors defeated the Portland Trail Blazers 101-93. The last time Ellis scored that few points was back when he scored half that many on 1-for-9 shooting against the Utah Jazz. The Warriors won that game too, 96-81. Stephen Curry makes the prettiest passes on the team, and he made several standout full court and behind-the-back passes against Portland. However, it was Monta Ellis that led the team in assists with 12. Curry’s playmaking ability seems to come in the form of keeping things moving, even while he’s...

As I was finishing up the post that effectively took the metaphorical bridge that never really existed between myself and the Cohn family and detonated it with a ton of C-4, Lowell Cohn wrote a piece titled “Advice to the 49ers.” It isn’t that long (unlike my last post), so I’ll reprint it in full: The 49ers need to help Jim Harbaugh. They need to teach Harbaugh how to interact with the media and how to act in public. No matter what you think, Harbaugh is a flop with the media. You may think it doesn’t matter, but it does. He is the face of the franchise....

I didn’t have any real access to the 49ers at all this season, besides the last training camp practice open to the media. It was a pretty vanilla practice, and Alex Smith wasn’t particularly sharp. I certainly had no idea I was watching a winning team, let alone a group that would narrowly miss reaching Super Bowl XLVI. One topic was on the minds of many writers covering the team full-time that sunny afternoon — the fact that it was the last practice they’d be able to watch from the nearest sideline. Jim Harbaugh was unapologetically closing off the kind...

The San Francisco Giants and Tim Lincecum avoided an arbitration hearing, as reports have the two sides agreeing on a 2-year contract that pays $18 million in 2012, $22 million in 2013 and a $500,000 signing bonus (which should come in handy during those pesky legal disputes with landlords). The Giants tried to see if Lincecum would be open to a bit of a long-term discount, and Lincecum repeatedly signaled that he wasn’t interested in relinquishing the opportunity to maximize his post-2013 earning potential. After working alongside Barry Zito all these years, it’s...

By Raiders Sports Guy I’ve had a few concussions, unfortunately … one so serious I peed my pants and was out cold for at least a few seconds and as long as a minute after being hit by a car while riding a bike. I had another concussion while wrestling in high school and was out for about three to five seconds. Luckily it happened at the end of the second period and I landed out of bounds or I would’ve gotten pinned. I woke up to my coach screaming at me, and I guess I never closed my eyes and he thought I was being lazy. The ref grabbed my arms and asked if...

By Scott Warfe The Raiders, in a very un-Raider-like move, are conducting a diligent search for their next head coach. Among those rumored/confirmed to have interviewed for the position, Marty Mornhinweg is possibly the most intriguing candidate, if only for one reason: ESPN’s Seth Wickersham said so. According to Wickersham, NFL teams and independent researchers have devised a quantifiable method for determining head coaching greatness. After reviewing the careers of 100 head coaches, these researchers found that great head coaches usually possessed at least one of the following...

The New York Giants felt going into the NFC Championship that Kyle Williams’ past problems with concussions — including a recent brain injury suffered in Seattle when Michael Robinson and Adrian Moten sandwiched him while he was sitting on the turf at the end of a kickoff return — made Williams a smart player to target for a Giants team looking for 49ers to rattle. After the game, reporters crowded around the locker of Jacquian Williams, who’d forced the second fumble, hoping for an angle: Had the Giants noticed something about Kyle Williams’s...

In an effort to superstitiously boost Michael Crabtree’s performance on Sunday after a quiet game against the Saints, my wife and I had dungeness crab and sourdough for dinner on Saturday night. Not a tough choice, since we both love crab and the season’s not going to last much longer around here. I’m referring to crab season, although I guess that last sentence holds true for football as well (sigh). While the dinner was delicious, Crabtree (AKA #yungcrab) was a shell of himself during these playoffs, capped by a 1-catch, 3-yard outing in the NFC Championship...

These are the hardest posts to write, so thank God my favorite teams don’t lose the Conference Championship Game all that often. The worst thing about losing to the New York football Giants (and we’re pulling from a long list here) is not that they lost to an east coast team, or even that Kyle Williams had a nightmare evening subbing for Ted Ginn. The worst part is that the 49ers have never had a defense this good. It’s about time someone said it. Someone had to say it. It needed to be said! I absolutely LOVE all those old Niners teams and their defenses. I...

Today could be the last time The Stick matters. You’d have to assume with Jim Harbaugh around that the 49ers will be in the mix for years and years and years … but nothing in life is guaranteed. Players get hurt. Sometimes things just don’t work out for whatever reason. It seemed to come so easy, this 13-3 season. The wins kept piling up, the rest of the NFC West kept shrinking in the rearview. Even the 49ers’ losses weren’t bad — a grand total of 15 points behind the Cowboys, Ravens and Cardinals. Could anyone have imagined before this season...

We get a little too sensitive around these parts about the whole east coast bias thing. I’m guilty too, but I guess that goes with the territory when you write a blog with “Bay Area” in the title. When I ran a wide swath of picks from known football “experts” throughout the land, a theme emerged. Most high profile media pros are comfortable with what they know and have seen, just like fans. The 49ers faithful believe their defense and special teams units walk on water, while Giants backers feel like Justin Tuck, Osi Umenyiora and Jason Pierre-Paul...

It’s the rite of passage every franchise goes through when they experience success. Local artists, both excited about their team and eager to capitalize on a potential audience that’s both large and energized, hit the recording studios. It used to be that the songs would come from the teams themselves. The 1985 Chicago Bears had the most famous “rap” tune when they shuffled their way to the Super Bowl, but they were just copying the 1984 49ers. Teams are more reluctant to face the scrutiny that putting out a boastful song would surely attract nowadays,...

I’m pretty much tapped out. It’s still over 24 hours away, and I’ve been overanalyzing the NFC Championship game so much that I’m starting to see the “Manning Face” wherever I go. Hit the corner store for a 40 oz and some bubble gum (just kidding, it was a 6-pack), and the clerk gave me the Manning Face. Buzzer went off in my apartment and I didn’t get up in time to let the UPS guy in the building, so he had to buzz twice — total Manning Face from the UPS guy. Questioned my wife about why we’ve received shipments from Amazon...

 ”That’s a great win, that’s a great win for US! That was a great win for our team, that was a great team win. That’s a classy team over there. That’s a darn good team. That’s a physical team. Good chance they’ll be playing long into the playoffs, too. But you outplayed them. You outplayed that team, okay? And that’s what you had to do to win, that’s what you had to do to win this game.” – From Jim Harbaugh’s postgame speech after the San Francisco 49ers defeated the New York Giants, 27-20, on Nov. 13.  After...

Since the New York Giants’ 17-14 win in Super Bowl XLII over the almost-perfect New England Patriots represented the apex of east coast biasism, it’s no surprise that most of the so-called “experts” are dreaming of, and predicting, a rematch in Super Bowl XLVI. The San Francisco 49ers finished the regular season at 13-3. The Giants, 9-7. The 49ers defeated the Giants 27-20 on Nov. 13, but the injuries the Giants were dealing with (Ahmad Bradshaw, Michael Boley) meant more than the Niners losing Frank Gore to a knee injury in the first half. But most of...