So, um, those Dallas Mavericks have shown that they're pretty good at the playing of basketball recently, no?

Last night, as you may have heard, the Mavs won their 13th in a row — their third double-digit win streak this year — and finished the month of Febraury unbeaten by completely shutting down the T-Wolves 91-65. Dirk went for 23 and 14, and the Wolves scored just 8 points in the second quarter and 12 in the fourth.

Dallas's domination poses a difficult scenario for unaligned fans of the NBA such as myself: what to do with this Dallas team? Cheer against it for being a juggernaut? Root for them because Dirk deserves a championship? Hate them for being owned by Mark Cuban? Hate them for being from Dallas? While they're certainly not as stodgy or dislikable as the dominant Spurs teams of recent years, neither do they have the transcendent beauty of the Suns' style of play.

Hmmm… I think I'm going to play this one safe and go with "cautious dislike." It's a change of pace from my usual "reckless hatred." 

Troubling news from Sports Illustrated, as SI has learned that guests at its Valentine's Day swimsuit issue party may have been exposed to Hepatitis A if they ate any raw food at the soiree.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health urged anyone who ate raw food at the Sports Illustrated event, held at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, to receive an immune globulin shot by Wednesday [today].

As has been previously noted, With Leather's sexy volunteer correspondent Sarah Spain was at the event — along with several of SI's most important employees — so your intrepid editor has sent a worried message to the site's bustiest contributor. Official With Leather policy decrees that all liver disease should be earned through decades of binge drinking; shortcuts like Hepatitis are strictly forbidden.

If I'd been to that party I'm not sure I could even be mad. SI could have told me about the Hepatitis beforehand and I still would have gone. "What's that? There will be ebola-infected monkeys at the party?… Uh-huh… But Marisa Miller's still going, right? Okay, see you at 8:00."

Pat Summitt finally evened the score with Tennessee men's coach Bruce Pearl for his shirtless body-painting episode in January by donning a cheerleader uniform and firing up the crowd during last night's mudhole-stomping of Florida.

This video is everything awesome and lame about college sports. It's great because it's infused with an honest kind of rah-rah spirit that you don't see often in pro sports. On the other hand, it's a completely unnecessary besmirching of the most holy of sports institutions, the cheerleading uniform. This video, with its Dick Vitale soundtrack of "Ohhhhhs," is sure to haunt my purest cheerleader fantasies for the next fortnight. Damn Tennessee. 

Via Awful Announcing 

"Saint Andrew's Net" is With Leather's daily link dump, written by assistant editor/Chicago native KD. Expect sports and tits.

• HockeyNation examines the trade deadline.  Isn't the "real action" always happening in Alberta, Canada?
• Jay the Joke hates Jay Mariotti.  I become so frustrated when ninth-grade girls talk like that, I should really stop dating them.
• Donkey Carnival predicts UFC 68.  Shouldn't "ultimate" fighting have weapons like mini-hydrogen bombs?  How about we name it Dandy Donnybrooks?    
• The Horizon League Tournament breakdown courtesy of the Ladies.  The author picked three winners, so I proclaim her the next Jimmy the Greek.  Except still a woman and much less swarthy.
• The dark side of NCAA recruiting from Signal to Noise.  Maybe Lute Olsen is just an alcoholic - did you ever consider that?  Let's see someone try to use that against him.        
• Cheerleaders on an aircraft carrier.   Truman's 'S' has no punctuation, but, since my 'S' stands for superficial beauty, I won't tell these lovely ladies.  Not enough to wash Pat Summit from your mind?  Get your Rocky Topped here.    

Send your submissions for Saint Andrew's Net to withleather@gmail.com. 

Bad news for all the athletes buying steroids on the Internet. Steroid Nation points out that a yearlong investigation has resulted in a huge bust in Orlando, and I've got a feeling that this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of us learning in no uncertain terms which cheating fuckfaces have been using steroids.

More than two dozen doctors, pharmacists and business owners have been, or will be, arrested in the coming days on sealed indictments charging them with various felonies for unlawfully distributing steroids and other controlled substances, records show.

The customers include Los Angeles Angels centerfielder Gary Matthews Jr., according to sources with knowledge of the investigation.

Sources also said New York Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement investigators recently interviewed a top physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers about his alleged purchase last year of roughly $150,000 of testosterone and human growth hormone.

Whoa, whoa. Why would the Pittsburgh Steelers need so much testosterone and HGH? Certainly demure, classy athletes like Joey Porter don't have any surplus of testosterone. Extra testosterone would make him combative and aggressive.

And what would Gary Matthews, Jr do with performance enhancers? Use them during a contract year to produce numbers markedly better than his previously mediocre career had seen him capable of? That's hard to believe.

Here at With Leather, I don't just post any hockey fight. There has to be something special about the fight — like, it has to happen in the first two seconds of the game, or be particularly vicious, or show a close-up of a guy's broken nose, or feature arena employees scraping blood off the ice afterwards.

Or, like this AHL fight between the Chicago Wolves' Nathan Oystrick and Omaha's Brett Palin, all of the above. Enjoy.

Thanks to Tech Still Sucks