On this week’s episode of The Sportive, the gang and I get depressed about basketball, then depressed about the Twins. But first, a recap of a Western Wisconsin bar tour – and later, some absurd and absurdly fun ideas of how to improve the NBA.

There are probably more than ten guys who have a chance at being in the Twins’ Opening Day rotation. However, after writing short profiles of the first ten, I lost the will to live.

Four of these guys had surgery to remove bone chips from their elbows in the off-season. Two are returning from Tommy John surgery. Another is the most injury-prone pitcher ever and hasn’t thrown a pitch in a baseball game since 2011.

You could be forgiven for assuming the Twins will lose 120 games, with the starting rotation they’ll trot out this year. And now that I’ve typed that, they’ll probably win 105.

*NOTE: As always, this also appeared at RandBall, your home for karaoke. *

Every so often, I will read a quote from some sports team or league executive about promotion and marketing, a quote that’s some variation on this misbegotten theme: “We want to promote our team / league / sport as an entertainment product – as an alternative to the movies and TV.” In practice, what this “entertainment product” generally means is some combination of cheerleaders, rock music, and scoreboards – effectively, distracting attendees from the action on the field.

It’s worth considering this, because while sports may be entertaining, sports fans don’t experience them in the same way as they do entertainment, unless they genuinely don’t care about the outcome of the game. It is possible, for example, to enjoy going to a baseball game just for the experience of sitting outside on a warm night, eating hot dogs and drinking beer; indeed, this particular passion has been the genesis of 99% of the St. Paul Saints’ revenue over the years. But, save for a few die-hards, most of the people who go to a Saints game can’t tell you a week later who pitched, who the Saints played, or even who won.

It’s also particularly strange that while sports fans have a more personal connection with a team than, say, music fans have with a band, the sports fan’s outward expression of that passion is – unlike the music fan’s – entirely impersonal. For example, those that wear a T-shirt or hang a poster of a favorite band or movie or Internet comic strip are doing so to express something about themselves as a person, in terms of this thing they like and are passionate about – but you would never, ever, hear the same person refer to that group as “we.” Sports fans’ love of a team is entirely personal, but the outward expression is to show off that they’re part of something bigger than themselves. The depressed-looking folks in Wild jerseys walking the streets of St. Paul tomorrow evening aren’t donning red and green to tell the world something about themselves, personally – they’re doing it because they are Wild fans, part of a plural, and wearing a jersey to the game is what Wild fans do.

The point I’m trying to make is that entertainment is transient, but fandom is permanent, and that those who’d try to sell sports as entertainment are always destined for worries about the box office. I enjoy going to Saints games, don’t get me wrong, but I’m always going to weigh my options, because it never rains at the movies and my backyard is just as warm as the ballpark (and has cheaper food besides). But the Twins – I’ll plan ahead for the Twins, I’ll pay actual money for the Twins, and all because they’re my team and I want to be there when they win so that I can be part of something that’s bigger than I am. Even when they’re terrible. Even with Kevin Correia on the mound. They’re not competing for my entertainment dollar. They’re competing for something else entirely.

*On with the links:

*John Rosengren heads up to Warroad to catch the latest Warroad-Roseau game and write about it for SB Nation Longform. It’s such a well-known rivalry that it borders on the cliche, and yet Rosengren’s story is captivating, as it’s told through the eyes of the fans and – especially – the parents that are drawn into the great historical circle of Warroad-Roseau for one night.

*Wright Thompson of ESPN profiles the 50-year-old Michael Jordan and discovers what we might have expected: without the competition of the game, Jordan seems completely and profoundly miserable.

*At Esquire, Tom Junod talks to NFL players about injuries – not just head injuries, but the day-to-day painful existence of football. In all of the discussion about safety in the NFL, it is worth remembering – it’s surprising, even frightening, but still worth remembering – that most of the guys who play in the NFL are willing to trade daily pain and lifetime health problems and shorter lives, just to keep their spots and help their team win.

*Sports Illustrated went to Antarctica for the Swimsuit Issue this year, and Steve Rushin went along for the ride. (WARNING: cheesecake photos of penguins.)

*And finally: Let’s all watch Phil Mickelson fall over.

The Timberwolves have lost 16 of their past 19 games. That’s pretty bad, but after watching the team for the last decade or so, I’m used to it.

Another thing I’m used to is being told that one young player or another is “figuring it out.” Over the past few years, we’ve been told that Randy Foye, Corey Brewer, Rashad McCants, Wayne Ellington, Jonny Flynn, Michael Beasley, and Wes Johnson – among countless others – have been on their way to “figuring it out,” even as we watched the Wolves lose eight straight of fourteen of fifteen or that sort of thing. What I’ve learned is that “figuring it out” is a nicer way of saying, “Boy, this guy has been completely lost and useless this year, but he’s not so tonight – why, he’s almost league average!”

Wednesday night, Derrick Williams played what may have been his best game of the year. He attacked the basket, he made a couple of three-pointers, he rebounded well, so despite shooting 41% from the floor he managed to score 24 points and grab 16 rebounds in 37 minutes.

You may hear someone, today, wondering if Williams has “figured it out.” Or “turned a corner.” Or “started to get comfortable.”

If you hear someone say that today, you have my permission to think back to Jonny Flynn or Michael Beasley, and then punch that stupid person right in the face.

Episode 2 of The Sportive is up. We talk Percy Harvin in this one, along with some Wolves talk and some college basketball prospect talk. We also discuss why wrestling is being removed from the Olympics, and Brandon comes up with the single worst idea to fix hockey of all time.

Head over to The Sportive to download, or check us out on iTunes.

That headline is misleading. I don’t actually know how to fix the Wild, short of petitioning the league to allow the team to play all of its remaining games at home.

I do know that the solution that most of up have come with involves firing head coach Mike Yeo or general manager Chuck Fletcher, or both. Now, Fletcher probably deserves to be fired entirely for the time he traded Nick Leddy for Cam Barker, one of the dumbest trades in Minnesota sports history that wasn’t orchestrated by Mike Lynn. But Yeo… I don’t know enough about hockey coaching to understand what is, and isn’t, his fault.

Is it Yeo’s fault that the Wild lose every single battle for the puck in their defensive zone?

Is it Yeo’s fault when then team can’t deal with even the mildest forecheck without being harried into making a bad pass?

Is it Yeo’s fault that even chipping the puck out to center ice is difficult for the team’s defensemen, never mind actually breaking the puck out?

Is it Yeo’s fault that the team’s forecheck is so terrible that dumping the puck into the zone is tantamount to just passing it directly to the opposition defenseman?

Is it Yeo’s fault that the team plays 49 different line combinations every night, and not one of them appears to contain two players who have ever met before?

Like I said, I don’t know. But I wish somebody could explain this to me.

The ZiPS projections, which try to predict the numbers for pretty much every potential player in the big leagues, are out for 2013. Over at Twinkie Town, I look at a few selected projections for the Twins, and make some wisecracks along the way.

England 12, Ireland 6

England and Ireland both won in round one, and so naturally this match was billed as more or less the championship game of the entire Six Nations. Never mind that Ireland had played well for about 45 minutes against Wales and then panicked wildly for the remainder of the match, or that England had only beaten Scotland.

It rained in Dublin. Ireland fumbled the ball about 35 times in the first half. Both Simon Zebo and Jonny Sexton went off hurt. It all went wrong for the Irish, and though they managed to tie the game 6-6 in the second half after trailing 6-0 at halftime, they never got within about 40 yards of scoring a try.

England looked like scoring once, so I guess they must have been the better team. Also Owen Farrell kicked pretty well, though every time the camera focused on him, the commentary team reminded us that he’s only 21 years old, so I think we’re all kind of sick of Owen Farrell.

Anyway, England won, so they’ll be hailed as the greatest team ever for the next two weeks, until they somehow screw up and lose at home to France.

Wales 16, France 6

France lost to Italy and were pretty poor in doing it, but at least they were on the road. This time they were at home, and had to deal with getting booed by their home crowd. The crowd booed them lustily at the final whistle, but luckily for the French team, at that point somebody ran on the pitch and eluded security for awhile, thus giving the crowd something to cheer.

Wales scored the only meaningful try of the weekend, with George North running on to a kick from Dan Biggar to score. This was the only exciting thing that happened this weekend that wasn’t in the Scotland-Italy match. The other 159 minutes of this match and the England-Ireland match combined were pure boredom.

Scotland 34, Italy 10

I thought it’d be fun if Italy could win this one and actually, for a little while, seem like contenders. Instead they were overrun by Scotland, who seemed a little bit hacked off after themselves getting killed by England last week.

Scotland scored four tries, including two in three minutes in the second half. Stuart Hogg scored the second by intercepting a pass and charging 90 yards for a score, which was exciting and should happen more often.

Several months ago, I got an email from my internet friend Brandon, who demanded to know why we weren’t doing a podcast.

I had no answer. So we recruited fellow internet enthusiasts RandBall’s Stu **(BRANDING!) and **Clarence Swamptown, who are the two funniest people in the entire world, and now some combination of the four of us are going to be podcasting as The Sportive.

Episode 1 was recorded over the weekend, and went exactly as well as you’d expect from a bunch of amateurs who had no idea what they were doing. We talked hockey for a good 40 minutes, then somehow got sidetracked onto NASCAR. Eventually we started talking about sports that are popular, but it took awhile.

Brandon also officially launched the Keith Millard Hall of Fame, so stick around for that.

As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, your home for not being able to make it this week.

Last week, Netflix released “House of Cards,” a 13-episode miniseries based on a British miniseries of the same name. It’s doing quite well and people seem to like it, and even better, they don’t have to wait for seven days in between episodes – all 13 were released at once. It’s a great deal for Netflix subscribers, a great deal for Netflix, and for sports fans, it’s the latest indication that someday, the only thing on television will be sports.

Next August, FOX Sports will rebrand the Speed Channel as “Fox Sports 1,” and it will immediately be the third-biggest cable sports channel. It’ll also complete the network sports channel superfecta, joining NBC Sports, CBS Sports, and the ABC/ESPN family of sports networks as cable sports outlets for the Big Four. This doesn’t include FOX’s regional sports networks or NBC/Comcast’s network of the same, or the Comcast-run Golf Channel, or the college conference networks like the Big Ten Network, or the channels run by the four pro sports leagues… you get my point.

I’m not much of a traditional TV viewer – I’m far too busy watching every one of the channels mentioned above – but I can’t remember the last time I watched a live episode of a show that I do follow. Most people I know simply record the shows and watch them at their convenience, or wait until the shows are available on Netflix or Hulu and plow through them all there. Sports, however, are immune to this sort of thing – nobody waits until March to watch sixteen Vikings games in a row. So here’s my prediction – someday soon, every channel on television will be a sports channel. ABC Family will show Pop Warner football. The Travel Channel will show skiing. A&E will be devoted to gymnastics and figure skating. The Military Channel will be devoted to rugby. And TNT, angling to be the most-watched thing on television, will be nothing but Charles Barkley talking for twenty-four hours a day.

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to it. We’re on our way to a future in which every sporting event, everywhere in the world, is broadcast on our televisions. And for sports junkies like me, what could be better?

*On with the links:

*Over at Deadspin, Hamilton Nolan writes about boxing’s Great White Hope problem, which explains why a boxer you’ve never heard of was in a Super Bowl commercial.

*Also at Deadspin, the explanation of the fair-catch free-kick rule, possibly the stupidest football rule this side of Canadian football. To recap: it’s a rule, borrowed from rugby, that doesn’t even exist in rugby any more, but you can feel superior to your friends by knowing it, like knowing the balk rule in baseball.

*Stu tries to figure out what the next improbable Minnesota sports injury will be. This is notable because it drew responses on Twitter from both Glen Perkins and Chris Kluwe, which is both kind of awesome, and for those of us who enjoy teasing athletes on the internet, kind of terrifying because apparently THEY ARE WATCHING US.

*Hey, NFL fans! Want to get into the NHL? Sean McIndoe has a helpful guide.

*And finally: if you missed Brooklyn’s Mirza Teletovic tossing up three airballs in a row, then please watch, and remember: there’s still room for the Wolves to get worse.