Boston Sports Wrap: NBA Honors Bill Russell, Lou Merloni Leaves NESN, More

- NBA Commissioner David Stern announced Saturday that beginning this season, the NBA Finals MVP award will be named after Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell. Russell, who won the MVP five times, was emotional at the press conference and fittingly thanked his teammates. Russell was part of 11 Celtics titles in his 13 professional seasons.

- In case you were wondering, there are no Boston Celtics involved in any of the NBA All-Star game festivities other than Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen playing in the actual game this Sunday night.

- The Boston Red Sox opened up spring training Saturday, which garnered quite a few hours of coverage on NESN. Expectedly, there isn't a whole lot of news coming out this other than Jason Varitek saying he wants to retire as a member of the Red Sox. Given the interest level from other teams this past off-season, I think that is a foregone conclusion at this point.

- Speaking of NESN, I was surprised to hear that former Sox middle infielder-turned-analyst Lou Merloni will no longer be with the Boston flagship this season. Instead, Merloni will join the fast-growing Comcast Sports New England as an analyst. But there is no salacious story here; he wanted to continue his work with WEEI on the Big Show and this deal allows him to do both.

I thought this was a great quote from the Boston.com writeup today:

When asked if there is any downside to the atmosphere at "The Big Show," where it is sometimes tough to get a word in edgewise, Merloni laughed.

"Unfortunately, after working there for a while, I took that over to my real world," he said. "I was butting into conversations with everybody. I have to separate my work from real life and at the dinner table conversations. It's a lot of fun."

- Also in the article was news that Boston.com will revive the cancelled NESN Globe 10.0 show. Beginning on Feb. 23, the show will be a web feature with two questions answered every Monday-Friday by host Bob Ryan and other Globe writers.

- WEEI reported a record-number of visitors to their website in January, touting a 95% increase from the year before. They've done a great job with making it a destination point for good content, but I do wonder sometimes if there is too much content on there. Seriously, they have like 3,323 bloggers.

Josh Nason is the founder of Small White Ball, a New England-based sports and media blog. He can be reached at josh [at] smallwhiteball [dot-com].