meaningless, and now so is the rest of this tournament for Team

After Indiana Pacers forward Paul George was ejected from Saturday nights game against the Chicago Bulls for kicking a ball into the stands and inadvertently hitting Fox Sports Indiana television crew member Lindsey Yeager in the face, the three-time All-Star made sure to give her an apologetic hug before walking to the locker room.But apparently Georges conscience wasnt completely clear.Doubling down on his condolences, George sent flowers and a personalized letter to Yeager. The bouquet arrived Monday morning, and Yeagers friend, Mika Brown, snapped a photo of the arrangement.Brown applauded George for being a class act and wrote that he does not deserve the negative attention stemming from the incident, which occurred with 1 minute, 42 seconds remaining in the third quarter. After George was called for a foul -- and with the ball still bouncing on the floor -- he booted it into the baseline seats, where it hit Yeager in the third row.It was the first ejection of Georges career, but the NBA still fined him $15,000 on Tuesday as a result of the kick.Too late to send flowers to NBA commissioner Adam Silver as well?-- Nick Ostiller Adrian Clayborn Jersey . PETERSBURG, Fla. James Carpenter Jersey . Varlamov made 33 saves and Ryan OReilly had a goal and scored in the shootout as the Avalanche beat the New Jersey Devils 2-1 on Thursday night. http://www.cheapfalconsjerseysauthentic.com/?tag=authentic-shawn-bane-jersey . 10 Texas Rangers jersey for one last time. Young formally announced his retirement Friday after returning to Rangers Ballpark, his baseball home for all but the last of his 13 major league seasons. Ryan Neal Jersey . He says so-called TRT is only one problem and he wants to go even further than the ban. "Its about time," St-Pierre told reporters at a promotional event in Montreal on Friday. "I think its a good thing. Kendall Sheffield Jersey . The Vikings announced Thursday that Priefer will be one of seven holdovers from the previous staff, along with offensive line coach Jeff Davidson, wide receivers coach George Stewart and others. Norv Turner will mark his 30th year of coaching in the NFL as the offensive co-ordinator, as widely reported for weeks, and George Edwards will be the defensive co-ordinator. TORONTO -- My favorite part of this job is sitting in empty stadiums and arenas. We get to arrive early, and we get to stay late. Bookending a big event with two different kinds of silence -- the calms before and after the storm -- gives you a fuller feeling for the game. Those silences, how they are broken and how they are restored, can tell you so much about what might happen and what did.Tuesday night was the first time I saw Canada and Team USA play hockey in person.Ive watched them battle on TV however many times, and each time Ive wished I were there. Ive had more than my share of fortunate experiences, but I still wanted so badly to watch my country, which happens to be hockey-obsessed Canada, take on the U.S., which happens to be better than us at every other sport.Its hard to explain to Americans why these games matter so much to us. Imagine our countries were brothers, one big and one little. The big one has everything he might want but a single beautiful, perfect toy that the little brother loves with all his heart. He thinks of it when hes awake, and he dreams of it when hes asleep.And then his big brother comes into his room and tries to take his most sacred thing away.I was excited, even nervous, in the quiet before the game. Sweden and Finland had played in the afternoon, and the Air Canada Centre had emptied and been cleaned like a plane readied for its next flight. It was close to silent, just a few workers performing their pregame rituals.It was also pretty dark. It felt as though the entire building were asleep somehow. It wasnt hard to imagine it breathing softly.Then I heard a shout. It was, if Im being honest, a very loud F-bomb. It was startling and out of place in the dim and the quiet. I thought one of the workers had hurt himself somehow.Then I realized it had come from Canadas Joe Thornton.It isnt always easy to see it through his beard, but Thorntons default expression, at least this week, has been a wide smile. He has radiated kid joy.Now he was swearing really, really loudly. This couldnt be good.Closer investigation revealed -- with no small amount of relief -- that he was swearing because he had let a soccer ball drop in a game of keepie-uppie that he and his teammates were playing in one of the tunnels leading to the empty, waiting ice.Maybe an hour before their big game against the Americans, they were laughing and joking with each other and kicking around a ball, and Joe Thornton was yelling terrible things with a smile.I decided right then that they were going to win, and they were going to win big.Im going to try to be gentle here so that I dont sound like Im glooating.ddddddddddddThis American team has been terrible, an embarrassment, badly built and badly coached and deserving of every bad thing anyone ever says about them.I really am being gentle.They have been miserable and gutless. They lost their opener to lightly regarded Team Europe without scoring a goal. They took to the ice against Canada looking as though they were lining up for the dentist. They snatched the early lead and then gave up two goals in 14 seconds and never looked for an instant as though they might recover.This is our championship game, John Tortorella had said before it. His team had supposedly been custom-made to beat Canada at its own sport, to hit and then get hit and then hit back even harder.I wish they had been half as hard as they thought they were. I also wish they had remembered that grit is useless without goals.Whenever I imagined finally going to see Canada play Team USA, I imagined watching a blinding, deafening, electrifying three periods of hockey, and maybe more.Instead I watched an absolute dismantling.One of the loudest cheers came with a little more than five minutes left in the second period. Canada pinned Team USA in their zone. They shot the puck and retrieved it, shot it again and took it back, shot it again and followed it.They did to the puck what these Americans were supposed to do to Canada. They owned it, and when the Americans finally managed to hold the puck long enough to clear it, the crowd applauded.The fans were cheering Canada for their effort, and to be fair, this team is as beautiful and perfect as the toy in that little brothers dreams.But they might as well have been cheering the Americans for getting their first touch in what felt like forever. They almost needed to feel as though their big brother still wants what they have.Thats how unbalanced this game was. Applause could be mistaken for pity. A minute into the third period, Team USAs Max Pacioretty took a dumb boarding penalty against Logan Couture in the Canadian zone, and thats all that remained of the grand American pla