NFL

The Reds are on a roll thanks to a youth movement, plus unpopular NBA Draft opinions

by
SaC Bot
June 21, 2023

This is an article version of the CBS Sports HQ AM Newsletter, the ultimate guide to every day in sports. You can sign up to get it in your inbox every weekday morning here.

Good morning to everyone but especially to…

THE CINCINNATI REDS

It’s a new era in Cincinnati, and the future is becoming the present with young guns leading the way.

With their 8-6 win over the Rockies, the Reds have won 10 straight games, their longest winning streak since 2012. They haven’t had a winning streak longer than 10 games since 1957.

Rookie sensation Elly De La Cruz had three hits, including his second career MLB home run, Will Benson also had his second career homer, and TJ Friedl had four hits and a home run. All three of those players are 27 or younger (with De La Cruz only 21).
This is tied for the third-longest winning streak ever by a team that lost at least 100 games the previous season.
At 39-35 this season, Cincinnati leads the NL Central.

Making matters even better, Reds GM Nick Krall said the team might actually be buyers as the Aug. 1 trade deadline nears. After a number of years of low spending and poor play, Cincinnati is thriving with a young, exhilarating team. It’s awesome.

Honorable mentions

And not such a good morning for…

EA SPORTS

Don’t give up hope just yet, but EA Sports is running into another issue as it attempts to bring its College Football video game franchise back.

The sports video game giant is being sued by The Brandr Group, which negotiates licensing deals with more than 50 Division I schools. EA Sports reportedly reached out to The Brandr Group in 2021 and 2022 to discuss offering NIL deals to athletes.

In May 2023, though, EA Sports partnered with OneTeam Partners to negotiate. Per several reports, every player that opts into having their name, image and likeness used in the game receives roughly $500.
In the lawsuit, The Brandr Group states, EA “places TBG’s Partner Schools in the unenviable position of either breaching their contracts with TBG or potentially losing the opportunity for themselves and their athletes to participate in the game. EA’s tactics will also cause irreparable harm to TBG’s Client Athletes, and to every student-athlete who opts-in to their scheme for unfair compensation, because they are being deprived of the opportunity to have their own representative negotiate on their behalves for fair compensation for the use of their NIL.”

Here’s our full explainer on the matter.

Not so honorable mentions

NBA Draft: Unpopular opinions, pro comparisons, more mock drafts 🏀

USATSI

After Wembanyama, Scoot Henderson and Brandon Miller, this NBA Draft is all over the place. And that’s not all that unusual.

Further down the draft, the tiers of players get bigger and bigger. How do you value production vs. promise? Do you want best player or best fit? Who has helped or hurt themselves in the pre-draft process? How do prospects fit your team’s timeline and needs? Those are all questions NBA front offices are trying to answer.

Different teams, of course, will have different opinions on players, too. And that’s the same for our group of draft experts. So we had them state their unpopular opinions on this year’s class, and that potentially starts at that wide-open fourth pick for our Colin Ward-Henninger.

Ward-Henninger: “Cam Whitmore will have a better NBA career than both Thompson twins — To me, Whitmore has a much more direct path to NBA stardom. With a 40-inch vertical, he’s just as athletic as the Thompsons, and he already uses his strong body to bully defenders. He’s immediately going to fit into the ‘3-and-D’ mold, with good catch-and-shoot numbers in college, and he’s going to be an absolute menace in transition… I’m not usually one to put huge weight on college experience, but one year at Villanova for Whitmore should have him much more prepared for NBA competition than the Overtime Elite path that the Thompsons took.”

As a perfect encapsulation of this debate, both Gary Parrish (here) and David Cobb (here) released their latest mock drafts: one has Whitmore going fourth and the other has a Thompson twin going fourth.

Where the Thompson twins go and how they fare will be a major storyline as the first top-tier Overtime Elite products. Who, exactly, do Amen and Ausar resemble, though? Our Kyle Boone has pro comparisons for the top 10 prospects.

Boone: “4. Amen Thompson | Pro comp: 99th percentile athlete version of Dejounte Murray — Unorthodox shooting mechanics aside, Thompson has one of the highest ceilings of players eligible in this year’s class with a rare blend of athleticism and playmaking. … 6. Ausar Thompson | Pro comp: Andrew Wiggins — Ausar had more assists per game last season than his brother and developed into a more natural scorer with Overtime Elite, too. He brings playmaking upside and scoring punch as a potential top-five pick who can be a difference-maker on both ends when engaged.”

Here’s more from our NBA Draft crew:

Mike Trout is one of the greatest players ever. He’s already a Hall of Famer-worthy player… and that’s without a single postseason win. That’s right: Trout has made the playoffs once, back in 2014 when he and the Angels were swept by the Royals.

Trout’s superstar teammate Shohei Ohtani has also never won a playoff game, much less even played in one. The Angels have four of the last nine AL MVPs yet haven’t won a playoff game since 2009. Is this the year that changes?

Led by yet another marvelous two-way season from Ohtani, the Angels are 41-34, and if the season ended today, we’d finally get Trout and Ohtani in the postseason together. If you like baseball, you should be rooting for that.

Our Mike Axisa has four things that the Angels need to do to end their playoff drought, including…

Axisa: “They need another starter — If they determine they need help — and they do need help in the rotation — they’ll go get it. They are desperate to return to the postseason and will act accordingly. … I assume erstwhile top prospect Jo Adell, who is again annihilating Triple-A, is on the table in trade talks. That doesn’t mean the Angels will give him away, of course, but there’s no reason to not make him available.”

With Ohtani barreling toward free agency and Trout not getting any younger, it’s a huge trade deadline for the Angels.

Ranking NFL triplets: Who’s bringing up the rear? 🏈

Kim O’Reilly, CBS Sports

Here’s the tough thing about any sort of competition: Someone has to be last. It’s an unfortunate truth. Usually, we focus on the top teams and players — for good reason — but today we start with the bottom in our NFL skill position triplet rankings.

In a tier all by themselves, according to our experts by unanimous decision, are the Cardinals. Our Jared Dubin explains.

Dubin: “QB: Colt McCoy RB: James Conner WR: Marquise Brown — Kyler Murray tore his ACL in December and the Cardinals have what is pretty clearly the worst roster in football, so there is zero incentive for them to bring him back at any point this season, let alone a significant portion of it. For that reason, we went with McCoy at quarterback, and the Cardinals were a unanimous pick in dead last by our panel.”

That’s a tough drop for a team that ranked 14th in this exercise last year (reminder: DeAndre Hopkins is gone, too). You can see teams ranked 32-21 here, and we’ll be releasing teams 20-7 today and 6-1 tomorrow, so stay tuned!