Spring Fever

Have no fear,this seemingly incessant and endless winter will come to an end...how do I know? The spring fever that manifests itself in the brains of NBA and NHL General Managers...you know that incredible urge to blow up the roster and make that big deal that comes from being cooped up with the same old dreary group of players for too long? This year, suits in both leagues have been busy long in advance of deadline day with the promise of more to come. The largest of the NBA trades came earlier this week when Carmelo Anthony finally arrived in New York. Not to be outdone, the Knicks country cousins in New Jersey pulled off an inspired piece of casting by prying Deron Williams from Utah, stealing the thunder from the big team in Manhattan and grabbing some headlines of their own. But the biggest surprise of the day could be Boston/Okc City, swapping Kendrick Perkins for Jeff Green. Obviously both teams think they are close and are trading for skill sets they perceive to be missing from their current collection of talent. A flurry of deals involving big names and conjecture about the possible imbalance of talent league wide providing fodder for analysis done to death. To the frozen pond and the wheelin' and dealin' looks to reach a fever pitch by Monday's deadline. The most interesting of the deals so far are the Tomas Kaberle move from Toronto to Boston and the Blues deal with Colorado. The swapping of young assets like Erik Johnson and Chris Stewart in the Blues/Avs deal inspires more questions than it answers- specifically from the St Louis point of view, as number 1 picks rarely get traded. Toss in the always frustrating and floating Alexei Kovalev returning to Pittsburgh and its game on, tweaking and tuning up rosters for the stretch drive. All this is a boon for the sports media types as cogent analysis and discussion about the games themselves seem ancillary to the endless prattle about personnel moves. Hours upon hours have been and will be devoted to filling programming based on the player deals done to this point and those speculated to happen in the hours and days ahead. For the sports networks, radio, blogs and websites, its Christmas morning as the trade ticker rolls. So crawl from your igloos and take heart... the flowers will bloom, the trees will blossom, the birds will sing and the winter sports will tune-up their rosters giving us all the water cooler and coffee klatch topics to get us through this longest of winters to the spring ahead.