Every year the NBA feels the need to muddle with its product a bit. The big changes this year are two-fold: there’s the new basketball in use, and the ban on players bitching at the refs. In the Spurs-Heat preseason game on Saturday, it was the latter that had the most impact.

The new ball has engendered lots of complaints from players, especially Shaq, for its supposed slipperiness. (Shaq claimed a few weeks ago that players would be dropping the ball like it was a wet mango – and, yes, we’re paraphrasing some.) But Shaq didn’t seem to have any trouble with the ball on Saturday (24 points and 8 boards in 28 minutes), and neither did anyone else. After the third quarter, when most of the starters headed for the benches, the teams had combined for 21 turnovers – not bad for a preseason game. No one dribbled the ball off his foot or dropped it out of bounds. In fact, it was easy to forget that the ball was new at all.

My fellow basketball blogger Dave Mann and I just returned from San Antonio, where we saw the preseason battle between the Spurs and last year's NBA champions, the Miami Heat. It was a decent preseason game, one that Dave will tell you all about, but I'd like to focus for a moment on an element of the game of some local interest: former Toro Jamar Smith.

Smith, a six-foot-eight-inch forward out of the University of (the great state of) Maryland, appeared in 48 games for the Toros last year, averaging 11.4 points and 7.2 rebounds in close to 29 minutes. Then this past summer he was called by the Spurs to play in the summer league Rocky Mountain Revue, where they must have liked what they saw because on Sept. 15 the team signed him to a training-camp contract. Now he's battling the odds and several other hungry guys for the few available roster spots in San Antonio.

Yes, I know, pro and college football is in full swing and the Detroit Tigers are preparing to win the World Series in six over the least-worthy world championship contender in years, the St. Louis Cardinals. I'm sure many casual sports fans aren't even aware that the NHL season started about 10 days ago and our state's representatives, the Dallas Stars, are off to an impressive 6-1 start. Well, Austin sports fan, it's time to refocus your perspective and alter your priorities. With the Toros, Express, and Wranglers all in their offseason, the Ice Bats are back for their 06-07 campaign to give you a hometown professional sports team to root for. They are looking for your support in their quest to hoist the CHL's Ray Miron President's Cup championship trophy and will do their part by fielding a talented squad with NHL dreams, or at least the dream of getting paid to play hockey. This year's team will get tested right out of the gate hosting the Northern Conference defending champion Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs tonight at the refurbished Chapparal Ice Arena. The new Bat Cave is located on I-35 between Howard Lane and Wells Branch Parkway and all fans will receive a free magnetic schedule just for showing up.

St. Louis and Detroit – two honest-to-god sports towns, for the simple reason that without sports they would still be unsurveyed forestland with Native Americans and westward settlers doing battle atop bluffs and amid inlets, all quivers and gunpowder instead of beer and cars, preindustrial jerks instead of postmodern ones whose skirmishes would serve as sport themselves for the privileged few and their "aeroplanes" – will be watching baseball for the next week. No one but Fox, and, by extension, Bud Selig, gives a shit if anybody else joins them.

The official Austin Chronicle preview below the fold ...

The last time I played kickball was in Brooklyn, N.Y., as part of a friend’s pre-wedding bonding; only to find out that kickball had come in vogue. What else can a hipster do with all those headbands and gym shorts that are no longer acceptable in the clubs? Exercise? Hardly. If you break a sweat during regulation kickball, you’re probably doing something very wrong. The only slightly more popular sloshball combines the childhood pastime of kickball with the somewhat more adult pastime of binge drinking. However, kickball plus an inability to pass second base without chugging a beer can often equal a stumbling face-plant into a metal pole serving as a backstop. Or, so I’m told. Taking a few of the rules of kickball and adding in a dash of the anarchy of sloshball is Mojo Kickball. An Austin original, the rules of Mojo are both simple enough to jump right in and complicated enough to merit blog entries concerning the finer points of baserunning. I’ll spare you the details and just say that there are six balls and lots of team communication (read “shouted, cross-field advice”). Almost everyone plays at all times, and assuming there are ample players, you can run yourself silly or take it a little easier. The next game is on Oct. 22, at 3pm at Krieg softball field No. 5. Drinks and snacks are provided, but to offset the field’s reservation fee the Mojo Kickball gods ask that you bring a dollar. And, honestly is that so much when, in return, you can call your friends in Brooklyn and tell them how the cool kids play kickball. Check out www.mojokickball.com for rules, strategies, pictures, and, for some reason, a Mojo Kickball Dating Service. Yeah, it’s that fun.

Like free elections, a system of checks and balances, and the right to trial by jury, the open tryout is one of the great glories of democracy: “Open to all and closed to none,” like the inscription on the base of a noble statue. Surely the present administration would be overjoyed if 10 years from now there were open tryouts in gyms throughout Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Provided they have gyms in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, which I’m not sure they do.

This past weekend the Austin Toros held open tryouts for their 2006-2007 season at the Dr. Exalton and Wilhelmina Delco Activity Center, near the corner of Manor and 183. In case you missed my blog last week about the structure of the NBDL (available now as a book on tape, narrated by John Houseman and featuring Ethel Barrymore as the third contessa of Milquetoast), each team in the league is required to bring at least one player from an open tryout to training camp. That player isn’t guaranteed a spot on the team’s roster, but he is given a chance to make the team. So any man off the street with $175 dollars in his pocket and a sure sense of his own basketball worth can come and take a shot at the NBA dream. Populism at its best.

Ah, the Chronicle-Fadó Adult Spelling Bee. This Austin Public Library fundraiser comes around every fall, and the Chronicle proofreaders scramble to compile a new list of words tricky enough to stump the eerily smart hordes who show up and whose spelling abilities always belie the incredible amount of beer they’re drinking.

Even more strange than the size of the bee's audience and its general level of revelry and mayhem – I remember last year in particular watching a guy and two girls who, when they weren’t cheering, were joyously ballroom-dancing with each other at the back of the crowd – is the frenetic energy of all the people in charge as they run back and forth between the stage and their stacks of Merriam-Webster's.

This year's bee is Thursday, October 26 at Fadó with registration from 4:30pm-6. For more ...

With games this midweek, the European Champions League is now halfway through. In the highlight matchup, Chelsea edged Barcelona 1-0 in London; they'll meet again in the Catalan capital in two weeks. The Londoners had third-string keeper Henrique Hilario in goal, after starter Petr Cech suffered a fractured skull on Saturday against Reading.

The UT Lady Longhorns ran their record to 12-3-1 with a pair of wins last week. Up next: Missouri and Iowa State at home this weekend.

The Lady Longhorns thoroughly dominated Sam Houston State last Friday night, winning 7-0, behind goals from seven different players. Amy Burlingham, Priscilla Fite, Caitlin Kennedy, Jill Gilbeau, Stephanie Logterman, Kasey Moore, and Megan Upah scored as UT outshot the Bearkats 46-3.