icant subsidies. The deal at the moment is that the Championship develops international players, whose marketability in the inte

LOS ANGELES -- Even as their leads expand to 30 and sometimes 40 points, the Clippers swear theyre not paying attention to the spread.For the NBAs best team, its all about consistency.Chris Paul had 21 points and nine assists and Blake Griffin added 20 points in a 127-95 rout of the Brooklyn Nets on Monday night that improved the Clippers to 10-1 with their seventh straight victory.We have a singular focus, Paul said. No excuses, we said were going to come out the same way every night. Its all about playing the right way. We got to keep building.Los Angeles came in having outscored opponents by an average of 15.1 points, largest in the league. Brooklyn quickly found itself relegated to the Clippers growing scrap heap.Its actually good for our guys to see a team like this, new Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said. They can see how well they are playing and their cohesiveness. Theyve been together for a while and theyre executing well. They turned us over and got us out of our game.Bojan Bogdanovic led the Nets with 18 points and Sean Kilpatrick added 14. Brooklyns season-high 22 turnovers led to 35 points by the Clippers.J.J. Redick added 18 points, Luc Mbah a Moute scored 11 points and DeAndre Jordan had 14 rebounds for the Clippers, who shot 53 percent from the floor while extending the best start in franchise history. Their 127 points were a season high.The defense is so good right now our offense is allowed easy baskets, Clippers coach Doc Rivers said. Theyre angry when the other team scores.Los Angeles raced to a 35-7 lead to start the game, highlighted by Jordans reverse dunk off Griffins alley-oop pass. The Nets didnt score the rest of their 14 first-quarter points until the last two minutes of the period and finished with their lowest point total in a quarter this season.Brooklyn went on its only run of the game in the second, scoring 10 straight points to close to 51-34.Paul re-entered and hit a 3-pointer that launched a 20-13 spurt to give the Clippers a 71-47 halftime lead.Leading 89-59 in the third, Griffin and Jordan energized the fading crowd with consecutive one-handed jams. Griffin stuffed a pass from Redick , and on their next trip up the court, Jordan dunked in front of Justin Hamilton, whose only defense was to stick his arms straight up in the air.The starters work was done after that, with Griffin and Jordan joining Paul, Redick and Mbah a Moute in sitting for good.The Clippers bench increased the lead to 102-71 heading into the fourth, when Griffin was on his feet laughing and pumping his arm in the air.TIP-INSNets: They havent beaten the Clippers in LA since 2010. ... Brooklyn fell to 1-4 on the road. ... G-F Caris LeVert (left foot rehab) and G Jeremy Lin (strained left hamstring) sat out.Clippers: Jordan needs two made free throws for 1,000 in his career. ... G Jamal Crawford, the king of four-point plays , had one in the fourth, making a free throw after getting fouled on a 3-pointer he launched from in front of his teams bench. He fell down and was quickly helped to his feet by giddy teammates. ... Crawford led the bench with 17 points and Raymond Felton had 11. ... Wesley Johnson missed his second straight game with a left heel contusion.LESSON LEARNEDNets rookie reserve guard Yogi Ferrell had a close eye on Paul.Its very interesting playing against Chris Paul, Ferrell said. Im going to continue to be aggressive and push the ball and Im not going to back down from anyone.FIRST POINTSClippers rookie Diamond Stone finished with six points, his first in the NBA. He played the games final eight minutes after making his debut on Oct. 30 against Utah.HE SAID ITCP is into the hardcore metal rock so he gave me a little head bump. -- Jordan on his sideline head knock with Paul in the second half.UP NEXTNets: They remain in town to play the Lakers on Tuesday to complete a back-to-back. The Nets have lost two straight to them.Clippers: Host Memphis on Wednesday, with LA having gone 5-1 in the teams last six regular season meetings.Cheap Nike Shoes Online . Pirlo limped out of Sundays 1-0 win over Udinese after just 13 minutes. Juventus says Pirlo underwent tests on Monday which revealed he has "a second-degree lesion to the collateral medial ligament in his right knee. Wholesale Nike Shoes . - Oakland Raiders running back Rashad Jennings was speaking to a group of local high school students earlier this week when the conversation turned to the importance of being prepared when opportunities in life arise. http://www.cheapshoesnikechina.com/ . Aaron Harrison scored a 22 points for Kentucky (6-1), which has won four in a row following a Nov. 12 loss to current No. 1 Michigan State. Julius Randle overcame a scoreless first half and added his sixth double-double in as many games with 14 points and 10 rebounds. Cheap Air Max From China . The Lightning are 2-0 so far on a four-game road trip, giving the club five straight wins as the guest and improving Tampas away record this season to 11-8-2. Sale Nike Shoes . SIMONS ISLAND, Ga.A year and a half ago, Death Of A Gentleman, a cricket film that I co-wrote with Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber, was screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. It was the first time that anyone outside of the makers had seen it, and it was an amazing moment when, at the end, where Sam had inserted little updates on what had happened to the protagonists since filming finished, the last appearances of Giles Clarke and N Srinivasan were booed by the audience. Sam and Jarrod had pulled off a remarkable trick: theyd made a film about cricket administration - not a subject for which Hollywood or even Bollywood regularly came calling - and turned it into a story with heroes and villains, jeopardy and all of the other tropes that make movies watchable and fun.As the film was shown through the summer, it seemed almost too prescient. The Big Three takeover that it had caught on camera floundered as the tectonic plates of cricketing realpolitik shifted beneath it. From nowhere, Srini was out and Clarke changed roles and things went in a new and different direction. The rows were different and the people having them were different, but somehow cricket administration remained broadly the same, an old game struggling to find its place in the pixellated, digitalised 21st-century world.If Death Of A Gentleman had a broader point, this was it. Cricket administrators did what they did for their own reasons. They all (probably) began with a love of the game, but that was one of the only common factors. Their power to affect the game always seems somehow disproportionate to who they are.That Sheffield screening was only 18 months ago, but it might as well have been 18 years. The BCCI is involved in another schism. The ECB has just relegated one of its counties, Durham, while bailing it out financially. Another county, Kent, may sue because it has not been invited to replace them. Rod Bransgrove, the chairman of Hampshire, the county that did benefit from Durhams relegation, issued a remarkable statement about the future of the game in England. And on Friday in Dhaka, Englands players, nurtured by this financially tortured system, produced more evidence that we may be entering a golden age of on-field talent.You know all of this, of course. George Dobell has written magnificently and passionately about Durhams relegation. Its fair to say he captured the national mood, in as far as there is a national mood about county cricket, a mood that had been heightened by the wonderful end to the Championship season at Lords. Yet Bransgroves statement, and the exposure of the parlous financial condition of many counties, made a persuasive case that city-based T20 cricket could be the only way to get people that arent interested in the game interested in the game. This isnt a blog about the rights and wrongs of those arguments. Its about how hard it is to navigate a path through them. Cricket has a deep respect for its past and its history, a respect perhaps unmatched anywhere else in sport. Football, for example, established its clubs and leagues around the same time, but its most important and obsessed-over competitions are new: the Premier League and the Champions League began in 1992. Theyd think little of ripping them up if something even more lucrative came along. In fact, financial power has become a part of the storyline that keeps everyone hooked.Cricket has been gifted its futuristic format. The ECB even thought it up. But the sheer vaariety of interests in the English game makes it hard to know how to best use it.dddddddddddd. The most successful piece of sports administration in recent years has come in an arena - the cage - that was barely considered sporting when it arrived. The Ultimate Fighting Championship has legitimised its offer to the point that it has moved from a Wild West of barely sanctioned ultra-violence to a one-stop entertainment industry that was this year sold by its owners for $4 billion. Thats billion. They had bought it in the year 2000 for $2 million. It succeeded because it did something that its direct competitor, boxing, with its internecine politics and lack of structure or governance, did not: it made the fights that the fans really wanted to see. It did that because all of the fighters were contracted to the same organisation. As that organisation grew in power, so everyone benefited.The UFCs administration had one crucial point in its favour. The fans and the sport all agreed on the direction of travel. Equally crucially, its a luxury that cricket does not have.A couple of weeks ago, I blogged here on the finale of the County Championship. It was obvious from the reaction to Middlesexs win that lots more people than the few who attend the matches want the competition to survive, and see city-based cricket as a threat.Its easy to sit back and write about problems, especially intractable ones, without offering a solution. Well, heres an idea, and its called One Day. Everyone that followed the County Championship last year on social media and live blogs commits to attending one day of live cricket next season. Doesnt matter which team or match, just that a ticket is purchased at the gate for a Championship game, and a days cricket is enjoyed. Lets see if it makes a difference to the health of counties.All administrations will fail if they cannot connect to the fans, or if the fans do not connect back. There is a constituency in cricket that wants the County Championship. It is not currently large enough to sustain it without significant subsidies. The deal at the moment is that the Championship develops international players, whose marketability in the international game creates the finance for those subsidies. Its a delicate ecosystem, and like a coral reef it is dying, because the core group of fans is not being replenished. Thats why a city-based franchise to bring in newer supporters is needed. We dont hear their voices yet because they have not arrived. Instead we have the voices of existing fans and of administrators.In Death Of A Gentleman, the great Gideon Haigh makes the point that cricket is the only sport that is actually contracting in terms of the countries and the people that participate in it. In part, that is due to failures of vision in administration. But as the IPL and Big Bash have suggested, a new audience is there, waiting. India and Australias Test and domestic cricket have not perished as a result.What sports like football and the UFC prove is that the market decides. As fans, if what you want is in the marketplace, then you have to buy it or lose it. The common truth about all administrations is that they will usually chase the money.If you follow the Championship, why not commit to One Day next season. Then it may continue to exist as the future hurtles towards it. ' ' '