Every night before I go to bed, I like to look at all the recaps for the day’s basketball/football/baseball/hockey games on places like ESPN or Sports Illustrated. It’s surprisingly fun. You stay informed about what’s happening in sports, you get to keep track of milestones, upsets, injuries, down-to-the-wire thrillers, all the stuff that makes sports interesting to begin with. After about the third or fourth recap though, you really start to become familiar with all the patterns and cliches of the articles: the lede with a criminally corny pun, the generic quotes…it gets pretty repetitive.

And if there’s some larger outside storyline going on, good look trying to find out about the game because that story’s going to take up half the article. I don’t think there’s been a single Nuggets recap over the past three months that hasn’t devoted a paragraph to summarizing the Carmelo Anthony trade situation. And to be perfectly honest, it’s rather boring.

That’s why I prefer not to read every single piece of news about Carmelo Anthony and Albert Pujols these days. I know a lot of people, including myself are interested in where they will sign, if they’ll re-sign with the Denver Nuggets and St Louis Cardinals, if they’ll be traded and all the other details of their sagas. And I certainly appreciate how, in the Carmelo saga at least, Anthony, the Nuggets and more or less every team seriously trying to trade for Anthony from the Nuggets have all been fairly open and honest about their intentions.

It definitely beats the buildup to the Summer of LeBron last year when at least 10 different rumors were emerging every day about what LeBron James was going to do and it seemed like there was no way to figure out which were true and which were utterly made up.

The problem with all of these huge media stories about players’ impending moves is that they get started looooooooooong before they actually happen. Carmelo became THE hot topic in the NBA the instant LeBron finally signed with Miami. With Pujols and the Cardinals breaking off talks yesterday, there’s a good chance we could be hearing nonstop about the latest non-developments in his situation all the way into October. Now there’s a scary thought.