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Nixing Racism: Jeremy Lin Gives Us a Teaching Moment, Along With Lots of Great Balling

Articleman — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:24:32 +0000

I love basketball, so I love Jeremy Lin. He's awesome. I also love to write about basketball, so I was waiting until I had seen more of Lin's play to write a blog about his fascinating rise to celebrity status and into the upper echelon of NBA guards. I was not waiting to blog about Lin until idiots thought it was cool to use the ugly and out-of-bounds racial slur "chink" in prepared text to refer to him. Nonetheless, we have been exposed this week to ESPN making wordplay with this racist slur, and to boxer Floyd Mayweather and even columnist Jason Whitlock joining the racist foot-in-mouth comment club. So before we get back to enjoying the Linsanity where it belongs, on the hardwood (where Lin scored 28 and dished out 14 assists in a nationally televised Knick win over the Mavericks today), let's recognize the teaching moment our culture suddenly finds itself in about the not widely paused upon subject of antiAsian racism.

By way of background, in case you have been unconscious or perhaps visiting the new Gingrich moon colony for the last three weeks, you have certainly heard by now of the meteoric rise of Jeremy Lin, a second year NBA player, into being the first Asian-American basketball star in American history. Lin was an end-of-the-bencher for a listless and 8-15 New York Knicks team, when coach Mike D'Antoni, himself on the brink of being fired, took this inexperienced guard and gave him extended minutes. Linsanity followed, as the Knicks won seven straight games with Lin leading them in scoring and assists over the stretch, hitting a game winner at the end of one road game, and scoring more in his first six NBA starts than any player in the league's 66 year history. New York responded with a lot of love, as did NBA nation. Lin was an underdog and a surprise several times over -- undrafted, he played his college ball for Harvard, having never received a single college basketball scholarship offer, and he had been sent to the NBA's minor league repeatedly. And it is surely part of the Lin story that there had never been an Asian-American player in the modern NBA, which, rolled together will all of those underdog facts I just listed, and Lin's joyful, positive disposition, made his rise a unique and upbeat sports story. People like rooting for the underdog, for the nice guy made good, for the novelty of someone being the first to do something, and Jeremy Lin is all of that. (Although he's too good to be the underdog forever, but hey, let's enjoy the liftoff here.)

Unfortunately, one of the distinctive things about Lin being race (the only other Asian-American player in NBA history was Wat Misaka, who played three games, also for the Knicks, in 1947), there was an opening for stupidity to creep into the discussion. Sure enough, there was a scuffle about race and speech about Lin earlier in the week, when hater Floyd Mayweather, Jr., a convicted serial batterer of women and a boxing champion, tweeted that Jeremy Lin is a good player but that he only receives hype because he's Asian, and that black players do every night what he does. Mayweather had previously been caught on video saying of rival champion boxer, Filipino Manny Pacquiao, "We're going to cook that little yellow chump…. Once I stomp the midget, I'll make that motherfucker make me a sushi roll and cook me some rice." By this standard of racist speech, Mayweather's latest comments sound almost scholarly in tone. It's true that Lin being Asian is a positive part of why people pay attention to him (he's as novel as Tiger at Augusta, and arguably more so than the Williams sisters, all of whom inspired a lot of love), and to that degree only, Mayweather almost had a point. But in having to make it about black versus Asian (a leitmotif on display in Mayweather's diseased rant against Pacquiao), he went off the deep end. It was nice to hear the First Knick Fan, Spike Lee himself, tweet back that Mayweather sounded like Rush Limbaugh making those comments. Spike was right. What Lin did in his first set of starts had never been done by a white, black, or Asian player. Which is part of why it is cool, and raciaizing sour grapes over Lin's attention is bad news.

I was surprised while researching this to see that a figure in sports I actually like -- columnist Jason Whitlock -- had gotten into the act. Mayweather is the kind of violent idiot jock who our culture elevates improperly onto a soapbox through Twitter and media coverage. But Whitlock is a good and often thoughtful sports columnist. And he tweeted the other night that after another good performance in New York by Lin, "Some lucky lady in NYC is going to feel a couple inches of pain tonight." Get it? The joke or stereotype about Asian men and their genitalia. Nice. Jason apologized, and was not suspended. Yecch. Whitlock considers the joke "inappropriate" and "immature." He didn't call it "racist," which means he hasn't accepted responsibility, a failure even more evident in his whinily criticizing the sincerity of those criticizing him. He'd rather walk around in little circles pretending to be some racial truth-teller when he should just say he screwed up and give supposed racial insight a rest for the week. That his employer Fox has not suspended or punished him remains more pathetic and unacceptable than what he said in the first place, as it amounts to tacit endorsement.

Speaking of Spike Lee, as we did two paragraphs above, ESPN provides a generally praiseworthy contrast to Fox in how you do the right thing. As the virus of racist cracks spread through the intertubes, ESPN employees twice this week made racist "chink" wordplay in text about Lin. Friday night, ESPN ran the racist headline "Chink in the Armor" to explain the Knicks' first loss with Lin starting. Someone had the presence of mind to pull it down within 35 minutes, but thankfully not before the screen-shot of ugliness went viral, and called the question as to whether this was ok. Saturday morning, as HuffPo and others focused attention on the headline, we learned that ESPN had done the same thing two days earlier when anchor Max Bretos asked in this video whether there was a "chink in the armor -- where can Lin improve his game?" Remarkably, ESPN had already come under criticism for using "Chink in the Armor" as a headline to refer to a USA Basketball loss in China. Anyone knows that this continuing conjunction of China with the slur "chink" was not accidental. Sadly, fans taunted Lin with "chink" even while he played college ball in the Ivy League.

Happily, ESPN stepped up and recognized at least the rough equivalency of the slur in its headline with the N-word, which America learned you don't get to use as an epithet at someone decades ago. It fired the headline writer, and suspended Bretos for 30 days. (And it pointed out that someone broadcasting over ESPN Radio who is not an ESPN employee, thus beyond its disciplinary reach, who turns out to be Knicks radio voice Spero Dedes, had used the same "chink in the armor" language in his live broadcast of Friday's game -- audio here.) There is a good argument for firing Bretos, but I am betting that he showed great contrition (he tweeted that his wife is Asian and that he would never intentionally disparage the Asian community) and that he may have been ad libbing on air, though one would tend to assume otherwise. In Bretos' defense, it says something about American acceptance of casual antiAsian racism that nothing happened as a general cultural backlash after his comment for two days. Only when the headline two days later raised the issue to critical mass was ESPN was forced to confront what appeared to be its third racist use of "chink in the armor." The delay, the indifference from Bretos' point A Wednesday to the headline's point B Friday cannot be laid at the doorstep of ESPN, but instead at the doorstep of how America still sometimes fails when it talks about race.

In that continuing American conversation about race, one thing that shone through to me is that even though this antiAsian C-word stands in rough parallel to the antiblack N-word, as a totem of hate and disparagement and dehumanization, we haven't evolved rules as clear about antiAsian disparagement, partly because there was no Asian counterpart to the African-American civil rights movement of the 1960s. We have had many more Al Campanis moments in our popular culture than Jason Whitlock or Floyd Mayweather moments. I know one great illustration from my own youth of the disparity between how clear our cultural prohibitions have been against using overtly antiblack language, compared to our softer prohibitions against overtly antiAsian slurs. As a teen, I had a girlfriend in Pekin, Illinois, so named because someone stupid thought that if you burrowed through to the opposite side of the earth, you'd be in Peking. I say someone stupid because Pekin and Peking are both in the northern hemisphere. (I guess if you want to imagine that you can connect any two points on a sphere through the center, all towns in the world could be named Pekin. But I digress.)

Having made some acquaintances in Pekin, I was shocked back in 1984 to learn that Pekin's high school nickname until 1980 -- far into the post-MLK world -- had been the Chinks. This was their logo. You cannot imagine a sports team with a comparably disparaging ethnic nickname (ok, the "Washington Redskins" comes close and persists) existing in 1980. By then, America had too evolved of a consensus against the N-word to permit its use in such a casual and authoritative way as in nicknaming a school. Yet when the school in all-white Pekin (a town with longstanding Klan ties) resolved to change its nickname from Chink to Dragon in 1980, there was a protest in which students stayed home en masse. Fortunately, the school stood its ground and there were mass suspensions and discipline, greatly to the displeasure of the disciplined. Remarkably, even after Pekin retired the disgraceful nickname, Pekin still had a roller rink called "Chink Rink," which had outside it a cartoon logo caricature of an Asian man in a long robe, with slant-line eyes, a coolie hat, an idiotic grin, and roller skates sticking out from under his robe. Thankfully, I cannot find an image of it to paste here. The rink name passed around 1985, as I recall.

The story of casual racism this week has an interesting parallel with the purging of Pekin's offensive mascot and nickname. By 1975, the nearby Peoria Journal-Star, which was the primary newspaper in the area, resolved that it would never use "Chink" in covering Pekin's teams even while the nickname persisted, to avoid offending readers. The Journal-Star's decision helped start the push to put the slur out of bounds. You can see the discussion of that in this interesting history of the Pekin nickname controversy, at pages 55-56. And when ESPN issued a full-throated apology, with heads rolling today, it helped draw the line more clearly, as we drew it long ago on the N-word, against this very ugly disparagement. Thank you to the worldwide leader (as it calls itself) for the moral clarity Fox, Jason Whitlock, and Floyd Mayweather lack. I have confidence we're going to move forward from this week as a teaching moment that helped, and that we all benefit from that, not just kids like my half-Asian son who asked me this morning during a Lin discussion how he would have been treated during Old South segregation.

So with that confidence in where we're headed, I'm going to put this angle aside, and get back to enjoying Jeremy Lin's game. If you missed today's Knicks victory over the Mavericks, you missed something special. The defending champion Mavs were up in the second half in a loud Garden. Bringing them back, Lin knifed through the lane twice for tough layups, absorbing hits and finishing one as an and-one. He got teammate Steve Novak raining threes from the outside by drawing the defense and making the smart pass. After Novak hit two threes in the fourth quarter to put the Knicks up six, with the shot clock running out, Lin coldly nailed a long three over a long defender to make it nine. And after the Mavs clawed back to 100-97 down in the last minute, Novak batted a long rebound of a Mavs miss to Lin, who casually tossed a perfect 50 foot pass upcourt to J.R. Smith, who had released early, for the layup that proved decisive. Playing the best field-goal defense in the NBA, the Mavs yielded over 100 to Lin's Knicks, who are 8-1 with him starting. Cheering on Lin's eyepopping 28 points, 14 assists, and 5 steals, the First Knick, a man whose films have improved our conversation about race, was wearing a long, baggy Harvard jersey, with Lin's name and college number 4 on the back. Think I'll be getting one of those myself. God help me, I'm starting to like the New York Knicks. Peace out.

Bulls Well-Positioned To Win It All in Weird Lockout Season

Articleman — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:52:08 +0000

Three weeks into this weird, compacted four month NBA season, the experts who rated the Chicago Bulls less likely than the Miami Heat, Oklahoma City Thunder, and even the Los Angeles Lakers to win the championship look pretty dumb. The Bulls are 12-2 (and an eye-popping 7-2 on the road), and are easily the class of the league to this point. Here's why the Bulls look like they are set to repeat as the best regular-season team, and have the best chance to win the 2012 NBA championship.

1. The Lockout Season Is An Aid To the Bulls, and Hurts Less Deep Teams.

The structure of this season is a great help to the uber-deep Bulls. The conventional wisdom was that older teams like Boston and Los Angeles would benefit from having fewer games to play, and that they could concentrate on the playoffs. That suggestion looks silly at this point. Never mind that the Celtics are too old to compete in the upper quartile of the Association (and they are); their age makes their defense ragged and offensive sets sluggish in the onslaught of games that is this absurd sprint through 66 contests in four months. The Lakers have suffered from having to play a clusters of games before Kobe Bryant could heal his injured wrist. The Heat likewise floundered on their western trip this week, dropping three straight while Dwyane Wade fought an injured foot and sprained his ankle badly.

The Bulls, on the other hand, are built for this weirdness. Rip Hamiton is out? The answer is Kyle Korver, who hit a series of killer threes at Orlando. Joakim Noah's energy flagging? Thibodeaux has been closing games with the league's best backup center, Omer Asik. Same goes for Deng and Taj Gibson. And when Rose's hurting toe caused him to need a night off, Thibodeaux played third stringer John Lucas 46 minutes Wednesday, and he put up a 25/8/8 stat line in a remarkably energized Rose-lite performance. Despite the insanity of playing seven games in nine nights and a road-heavy early slate, the Bulls have stormed to an 11-2 record based largely upon the consistent energy of all 12 players, and their ability to platoon in a manner more like hockey, or a football team changing personnel on third downs.

The other big beneficiary of the lockout, and for the same reasons, is the second-best team thus far, the extremely deep Thunder of OKC. Modeled much like the Bulls on defense, ball-sharing, and lots of interchangeable depth, the Thunder have one truly great player in Durant, an excellent second in Westbrook, and an emerging star in James Harden (who I grabbed late in my rotisserie draft, because he's nominally a backup, though he plays starter minutes). It is no accident that the only two teams to sweep back-to-back-to-back games (we haven't seen three games in three days since the last short season, and hopefully won't again) are the Thunder and the Bulls. As the season stretches out, and beats down teams that would prefer to play seven or eight (Lakers, Heat), look for the Bulls and Thunder to wrap up one seeds in their respective conferences.

2. The Decline in Offense Is Helping the Bulls.

The shortened season is creating a deficit on offense. Team scoring is down sharply, from 99.6 per game in the 2010-11 campaign to 94.4 this year. Three pointers are also down from 35.8% to 33.6%. It appears that the lack of training camp is causing the development of crisp motion and offensive sets to lag behind defensive fundamentals. Additionally, the same compacted schedule that favors deeper teams is causing most squads to look relatively ragged late in more games. All of this favors defense-first teams. The most defense-oriented team among the league's elite? Chicago, by far, and the while the Bulls can top 100, and can score efficiently down the stretch, they have put up some uglyball wins too, including a 78-64 throwback last Wednesday.

Look back at the last lockout-shortened season. Do you seem to remember that NBA scoring hit an all-time low during the hideous Rileyball era, when the Rockets seemed to beat the Knicks in the Finals by scores like 64-58? If so, you'd be wrong. NBA per game per team scoring hit a post-1954 (shot clock era) low of 91.6 in the lockout-curtailed 1998-99 season, which also featured a compacted schedule and little training camp. The eventual champion in that disjointed season? Disciplined, defense-oriented San Antonio, featuring the Big Fundamental, Tim Duncan. While they would then be followed to the winners' circle (three times) by a flashier, higher-octane, higher-scoring Lakers crew, the short season belonged then to discipline, balance, and defense -- precisely as it has so far.

3. Derrick Rose Is Still the Best Closer in the League.

Last year, Rose stormed to the MVP, scoring a remarkably high percentage of the fourth quarter points of the team with the league's best record. He is repeating that performance this year, though a still-maturing Luol Deng and a steady Rip Hamilton offer him more complements as the game winds down. But in the early going, Rose has shown himself to be the league's best crunchtimer. In Los Angeles, D-Rose opened the season by hitting a gamewinner to hand Kobe's Lakers their only home loss. The next week, the challenge of playing Chris Paul at Staples Center motivated Rose to put up a surreal 29/16/8 stat line, punctuated by shooting, passing, and locking down Paul repeatedly down the stretch (no easy task) as the Bulls handled the Clippers with ease. Last night, after the Celtics cut the Bulls' 20 point cushion to 1, Rose took over with scores on consecutive possessions to restore the lead to 5 (below which it never fell). A pair of threes down the stretch despite his hurting toe preceded a Jordanesque layup, flying down the lane with two bodies (including the tough and long KG) ping-ponging the smaller Rose, who absorbed the contact, hung in the air surreally long (all while facing away from the hoop), and flipped in a behind-the-head reverse layup with backspin. The ESPN crew remarked that after a move of that type, the game should be stopped to honor Rose. He'll just take the W, and did.

Bron-Bron? Well, he had his shot in the Clip joint on Wednesday, twice missing one of two free throws in the closing moments as the Heat eased into overtime and lost to Paul and Griffin. More to the point, and this is much more an indictment of the mediocre coaching of Erik Spoelstra, in the fourth quarters of the Heat's losses at Golden State and Los Angeles, the team put up two assists. This is a function of Spoelstra's "offense", which consists of letting the star players who really run the Heat go one on one. LBJ and Wade are of course gifted passers, but when 24 clutch minutes result in two assists and two losses with players of their caliber, put the blame on Spo. (But please don't tell Pat Riley.)

Regardless of how it ends up that way, through the first three weeks of the season, when one gets to the minute Magic Johnson loves to call "winnin' time", the folks you want handling the ball are D-Rose or the Thunder's gifted Kevin Durant. The overhyped Bron-Bron? Not so much. Agreement with this view comes from an interesting corner -- the Heat's Chris Bosh. Violating what should be a cardinal rule of not criticizing teammates in the press, Bosh observed to GQ (Noah is so right about the Heat being very Hollywood) that he would prefer Wade taking last-second, game-deciding shots over LBJ doing so. Putting aside the sniping and injury to team that represents, that Bosh says it draws a line under the fact that LeBron is not his team's best closer, much less the game's. These Heat remind me more and more of the 1978 Philadelphia 76ers, with Dr. J, and George McGinnis, World B. Free, Darryl Dawkins, and Doug Collins. Since they couldn't play with 5 basketballs, they didn't win a championship.

And neither will these sniping, me-first Heat, regardless of whether LeBron or Kobe wins the George Gervin Memorial Scoring Title. More than LeBron, D-Rose has Jordan's will to win, and more than Kobe, he has Jordan's understanding of the difference between team and taking over. Unlike either of them, he has an ultra-deep, balanced team that neither shows envy of him nor chafes at his leadership. Look for the Bulls to top Oklahoma City 4-2 come June for the meaningful hardware.

Articleman owns both a D-Rose jersey and a Nash Los Suns jersey, and periodically reveals the truth concerning the NBA in this space.

After Nixing Paul Deal, Stern Needs To Channel Commissioner Landis and Reverse Course

Articleman — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:29:24 +0000

In a move that won about as much favorable press as Bud Selig declaring the All-Star Game a tie, NBA Commissioner David Stern tarnished his legacy when two days ago he voided a completely legitimate trade that would have sent star point guard Chris Paul from the New Orleans Hornets to the Los Angeles Lakers, Lakers center Pau Gasol to the Rockets, and three starters and a first round draft pick to the Hornets. The move was a blatantly illegitimate kowtow to the owners of other franchises. Stern needs to reverse himself, and with a figleaf of the trade being resubmitted to him modestly tweaked, hopefully will do so imminently.

Don't get me wrong. I hate the Los Angeles Lakers as much as the next guy, and I also think the general idea that animated the Commish in nixing the trade is a good one -- that it is desirable for stars to stay in small markets. It just isn't a valid basis to nuke an arms' length deal among league executives. I also think it's a good idea for all of the best players in the league to play for the Chicago Bulls. That just wouldn't be a valid basis to invalidate trades that cut against that entirely laudable end.

And Stern isn't admitting he vetoed the trade simply to keep a good player in a small market, and throw a sop to the small market owners who were aggressive in forcing a lockout to try to remake the Association more to their benefit. No, he's standing behind the asinine assertion that "basketball reasons" are why the trade was vetoed. I guess everything touching upon the league could be deemed "basketball reasons" at some level. But what is meant in this case is that the trade violates some notion of competitive balance.

How can Stern say that with a straight face? The Commissioner did nothing to invalidate the insane handover by Minnesota GM Kevin McHale of Kevin Garnett to the Celtics and McHale's longtime buddy and former Celtics teammate Danny Ainge. The trade, which brought Al Jefferson to the Twin Cities, destroyed Minnesota and allowed the Celtics to move from one of the league's worst teams to a championship the following year. It was a ridiculous trade that reeked of conflict of interest, as McHale aided a buddy and his former team. And the league stood by.

How about the equally ridiculous Pau Gasol trade, that sent the big man from Memphis to the Lakers for Kwame Brown, Javaris Crittendon, and Aaron McKie? Stern stood by quietly as that travesty was foisted on the rest of the NBA (taking a star from a small market team to LA for far less in exchange than the Hornets are getting for Paul.) If time travel were possible, all Laker and Celtics-hating fans in America would like to go back in time and undo those two ridiculous deals, which just incidentally returned us briefly to having the Lakers and Celtics predominate in the sport. But time travel is impossible, and until this week, so was David Stern mucking around with competitive balance in such a hamfisted way.

The deeper problem I see here is the league trying to micromanage who gets what. You saw this with the invention in the new collective bargaining agreement of the Derrick Rose rule. The league undercompensates rookies in their early years, keeping them in compensation lockstep in relation to where they are picked. But now, under the Rose rule, If you've twice been voted an All-Star starter or won an MVP, that player can receive 5% more of his team's salary cap. It isn't that the rule makes no sense; it does in the abstract. The problem is that the "rule" appears to everyone fashioned to a particular case. It seems tailored to permit the Bulls to keep Rose in Chicago, a major market, which is good for the league. The point of rules and laws is that they are neutral and of general application, and are not ad hoc choices of the powerful.

So it is with this trade. The league owns the New Orleans franchise, and though New Orleans has a general manager (Dell Demps), the league does have oversight over Demps. The small-market owners insist on having a system that helps them. In the abstract, that's fine too. But they can't veto particular trades by the Hornets, because that's not having a system that helps balance, it's creating balance by authoritarian fiat. It isn't rulemaking or neutrality, it's a power grab. Lest one harbor any doubt on this point, Cleveland owner Dan Gilbert plays the ugly tycoon in his letter-tantrum arguing against the trade. His basic gripe? The Lakers helped themselves, not that the Hornets failed to get some value for Paul. And there is a legitimate argument that the trade favored New Orleans. Paul's bad knees could lead to early retirement, as happened recently to the Blazers' Brandon Roy. The Hornets are going to lose Paul to free agency after this year and get nothing, as would have happened to the Jazz with Deron Williams. They made the right move.

Now Stern needs to make the right move, to restore some semblance of neutrality and authority to his position. The NBA did not become the success story it is by being ruled by the whims of angry Dan Gilberts. Even Laker fans are entitled to the benefits of a well-engineered trade. And the Hornets franchise deserves some value for Paul. (Maybe Gilbert could find a player or two to add and make it a four-way deal, to help the Hornets out.) The Commish is not a dumb guy. He understands the storm of criticism his move engendered. He also understands that if the trade is not amended and approved, any eventual deal for Paul (imagine him, say, going to the Knicks) will look like the Commissioner chose his destination, just as conspiracists like to claim the Ewing draft was really fixed, or claim that playoffs are manipulated by referee assignments.

Frivolous as sports are, they require a gloss of neutrality and fairness, or the story line they peddle fails. It's why baseball hired Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis after the Black Sox scandal to clean up baseball's image. Landis was the first Commissioner. He demanded lifetime tenure and unlimited power, to bolster his credibility. He got it. Stern has had that tenure. But he has become far too beholden to the owners, as the Rose rule and the Paul trade imply. He needs more distance and neutrality. More Landis, and less Gilbert. Commissioner, reconsider and approve that trade. Your sport and legacy demand it.

Why Our Need For Narratives Made the Cardinals' World Series Win Inevitable

Articleman — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:26:36 +0000

We love sports because they are narrative. We organize everything into narratives: our jobs, relationships, and lives. Sports can be morality plays of good guys against bad guys, nationalistic narratives of the USA against the Russians, redemptive narratives of comebacks, little guy narratives of the-underdog-become-the-champion. But they are always narratives. The 2011 World Series illustrated an immutable law of sports, that is at once a narrative principle and yet entirely true in reality -- that catastrophic, emotional collapses in championship baseball make a series loss inevitable.

Put more directly, once the Texas Rangers lost two championship points in Game Six (within a strike of victory in the ninth and tenth innings consecutively) en route to an eleventh inning loss by walk-off home run, there was no point in playing Game Seven. The outcome of the narrative was compelled. The players were just enacting it, like characters trapped in The Sims.

Many examples from recent baseball history make this clear. Most of us will think back to Bill Buckner, and the groundball that trickled past his aging knees, allowing the Mets to complete a comeback in Game Six of the 1986 World Series. The Red Sox, like the Rangers, had gone two runs up in the tenth. It was 5-4 with two outs in the tenth when Mookie Wilson hit a slow, playable roller to Buckner, who was unable to field it for the third and final out, and what would have been the first Red Sox championship since 1918. There was no need to play Game Seven. The Red Sox stormed out to a 3-0 lead in it before coming from ahead to lose. Mets 8, Red Sox 5. Your 1986 World Champion Mets.

Among inevitable Game Seven losses, though, an even better example than The Buckner (and one well-known to Cardinal fans everywhere) is The Denkinger. The Cardinals of Ozzie Smith and Whitey Herzog entered the 1985 World Series as prohibitive favorites, with a 101-61 record, playing the less-heralded 91-71 Kansas City Royals of George Brett and Brett Saberhagen. The Cards even led this series three games to one at one point (as did the next two teams I use as examples after them in this piece of inevitably lost Games Seven). After the Cards dropped Game Five, the series moved to Kansas City for its conclusion. With the Cardinals leading 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth of Game Six, Jack Clark tossed a grounder to pitcher Todd Worrell for the first out in the final inning. Except first base umpire Don Denkinger called Jorge Orta safe when he was out.

After the Royals took advantage of Denkinger's horrible call and rallied for two runs and evened the series, the emotions took hold and made the narrative, and there was really no point in playing Game Seven. Manager Whitey Herzog berated Denkinger throughout Game Seven as he worked home plate. The Royals got out to an early lead on the Cards' suddenly flummoxed and unsteady ace John Tudor, before he left, and punched an electric fan, cutting his finger. Joaquin Andujar in relief charged Denkinger and had to be restrained before leaving the game and destroying a clubhouse toilet with a bat. Final score: Royals 11, Cardinals 0. The Denkinger is the best example of how sports are emotion, and the experience of collapse leads to emotions that fuel more collapse.

But there's no need to stop with long-ago history. In 2003 and 2004, we had The Bartman and The Four Game Collapse of the Yankees, which make these points very well. As I recently recounted in a blog gloating about the Cubs' 103rd consecutive failure to win a World Series, the 2003 Cubs were set in Game Six of the National League Championship Series. They had Mark Prior (18-6 that year) on the hill in the eighth, staked to a 3-0 lead and five outs from the World Series, when fan Steve Bartman interfered with a pop foul. Moises Alou cursed about the play when it happened. The Marlins put up eight runs in that inning. The emotions of the collapse made Game Seven, again, a formality. The Cubs led 5-3 early on, but the Marlins took command in the fifth and never looked back, winning 9-6 and moving on to play (and beat) the Yankees in the '03 Fall Classic.

The 2004 ALCS was a great example of emotion and collapse. The first time in either basketball or baseball that a team down 3-0 came back to win a series, it saw the wild card Red Sox defeat their archrivals from New York with four consecutive wins following three consecutive losses. The closeness of victory and its seeming inevitability of the championship for the '85 Cards, the '86 Red Sox, and the '03 Cubs was a force multiplier for failure when the inevitable did not come to pass. The '04 ALCS took this math to a higher level. No one had ever gone from 3-0 up to losing a seven game series in the sport. The Red Sox had to cobble together a game-tying run in the ninth inning of Game Four by stealing a base while the game's greatest closer, Mariano Rivera, was on to nail down the American League championship. David Ortiz's walk-off homer in the 12th gave the Red Sox life. The next night, in Game Five, the Red Sox tied the game off of Rivera in the eighth, and took six more innings before Ortiz blooped home the winning run in the fourteenth. Game Six showed the emotion building to a crescendo. Curt Schilling pitched in the infamous bloody sock game, but a better illustration of the emotional dynamic was A-Rod slapping lamely and illegally at Bronson Arroyo on a first-base line tag play, costing the Yankees a run though his ineffable (and here, unmistakably uptight) A-Rod anti-clutchness. Game Seven? The Yankees still haven't come out of the clubhouse to play it. The Red Sox were up 6-0 after 2, and won 10-3, as the Yankees looked like listless zombies, with a sense of inevitability settling like a pall over The House That Ruth Built. The end.

And then came the Rangers, who executed the heretofore unknown Double Buckner. Like the quadruple toe-loop, a Double Buckner was thought to be impossible to execute in reality. Little did students of baseball failure know what lay in wait in St. Louis in Game Six. Up 7-5 in the ninth, one strike from their first championship, the Rangers yielded a tying triple. But like Buckner's misplay, it was a gettable out: usually stalwart right fielder Nelson Cruz simply didn't catch up to a long fly ball. Had he caught it, the game ends 7-5. He did not. The very next inning, the Rangers wasted a two-run home run by Josh Hamilton that staked them to their second consecutive two-run lead, again coming within a single strike of the championship. When the Cards cobbled together two more runs, and an eleventh-inning walkoff homer, the series was history. I thought it would be 8-3 Cards in Game Seven, but it was 6-2. Whatever. Game Six was the game with meaning, when the teams picked the moods they would feel and the roles they would play the next day. Game Seven was denouement, and inevitable.

So why is this? Why are the collapses inevitable? Because the narrative is the truth in sports. Right now, I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. It's a collection of essays about the increasingly blurry border between art and reality. He writes about how in the videogame The Sims, participants live a reality in a box. About a Guns n' Roses tribute band that lives the GNR lifestyle in shows. About MTV's The Real World and how it ratified cultural caricatures and drove them back out into culture in a seamless cycle. I think he's right. Narratives can inflect reality, and back again. We love sports because we need stories, like I said up top -- stories of underdogs, local boys or girls made good, redemptions, nationalist stuff, whatever your story is. And when the collapses happen, the emotion of the experience becomes the reality for the players and for us. It doesn't matter if the collapsing team is on the road (the '85 Cards and the '86 Red Sox), or at home (the '03 Cubs and '04 Yankees). The teams collapsing play to ratify the emotional dynamic of the series. We expect it of them. They expect it of themselves. And the other team expects to win. It's the same reason the Bulls won the 1993 and 1998 NBA Finals. The Suns should have won Game Six at home, and led late. The 1998 Jazz, likewise. In both cases, it was a psych. The narrative there of Michael Jordan's greatness made him know he could and would execute down the stretch, and made his foils, who knew they were supposed to lose like so many Washington Generals, oblige. KJ and Stockton had threes at the buzzer. They may as well have had to shoot medicine balls the length of the court in those moments.

The Rangers were no more going to win Game Seven than Gary Oldman's Count Dracula was going to live forever with Winona Ryder as his vampire countess in Coppola's 1992 Dracula, or any more than Star Wars would end after two movies because Luke joined Dad in the family business. We love movies for their narrative arcs, their charming, predictable finitude. They start, and they end. We love sports because they bring into a space that is almost reality (baseball diamonds and basketball courts we can see! they must be real!) narratives that are more inevitable than the morality plays in life, where the good guys often lose their jobs, where relationships aren't all Meg Ryan falling into Tom Hanks' arms.

Along these lines, the commercials for cross-marketed World Series swag ask fans to "become part of" the championship by buying a hat or shirt. To join the story. As Klosterman's book of essays implies, to merge their real reality into the entertainment reality. It is thus funny that one knows the outcome of a game played by actual humans in advance, as I knew (and anyone who knows baseball history literally knew) the outcome of 2011's Game Seven. And I did. 8-3, 6-2. Whatever. Dracula is dead again. Jordan didn't really push off on Bryan Russell. Luke connected with Dad, who died, and the Ewoks danced a little jig around a fire. And the Rangers joined the '85 Cards, the '86 Red Sox, the '03 Cubs, and '04 Yankees in our tidy book of failure stories. Because we needed them to, and they knew they had to.

But for the sake of all the little kids in Texas who had their hearts broken by baseball this year, I hope Nolan Ryan signs this Roy Hobbs guy for next year. I hear he can tear the cover off the ball, and could carry any team to a championship. There's always another story to be told. Just wait 'til next year. Or so we tell ourselves, to make our narrative arcs work for us...

Celebrating the 103rd Consecutive World Series the Cubs Won't Win, or, Do the Bartman!

Articleman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:07:19 +0000

Wilt Chamberlain once said, "Nobody loves Goliath." While stories about Chamberlain's personal life tend to belie that bit of self-deprecation, it is true that sports fans love an underdog. This explains why there was so much rooting for the Boston Red Sox when in the 2004 ALCS they came the first team in baseball history to come back from a 3-0 playoff deficit and won Boston's first championship since 1918. It explains how exhilarating the 1980 Miracle on Ice was, when the USA topped the Russian juggernaut in the semifinals en route to a gold medal.

But even our love for the Davids of sport fails utterly to explain why anyone loves the Chicago Cubs. I, for one, do not. And so it is this week that I celebrate the 103rd consecutive World Series the Cubs will not win. And it is in the same spirit that last Friday, October 14, I celebrated the holiday of Bartman, as I do each year. This was the eighth year of Bartman, and every year, it's a little sweeter. The 2005 Bartman was especially sweet because my White Sox were winning a World Series, the first of my lifetime. To think that only two years earlier, I had all but given up on the White Sox playing in a World Series before the Cubs did. But each Bartman is sweeter than the last.

October 14, 2003 was -- for a few hours -- of the darkest days in my sporting life. The Chicago Cubs were hosting the Florida Marlins in the sixth game of the National League Championship Series at overrated Wrigley Field. The Cubs had two of the best pitchers in baseball set to pitch elimination games: Mark Prior for game six, and if needed, Kerry Wood in game seven. Entering the eighth inning, Prior had allowed only three hits. The Cubs were staked to a 3-0 lead. After a popout to open the Marlins' eighth, I gave up on the game and dejected walked to the other end of my house for dinner. As a lifelong White Sox fan, I knew the end was near. The Cubs would soon be in the World Series before my White Sox, and I would never, ever, ever hear the end of it.

When I returned to the TV thirty minutes later, a miracle had transpired. I knew the Cubs had lost, because ESPN News was running a long interview with a depressed and confused-looking Dusty Baker. But how? How could the Cubs have blown such a lead? There was this Zapruder-like tape-loop running on a split screen with Baker, and it was a foul ball on the third base side. The ball kept falling, and Moises Alou kept almost catching it, and this arresting figure in the front row, with headphones, sweatshirt, and -- of course -- a Cubs cap, reaches for it, oblivious to Alou, and prevents the catch. The rest was history. Alou freaks out at Bartman. As if primed genetically for failure, the Cubs get distracted. Prior, already well over 100 in his pitch count, can't get another out. The Marlins, with the extra out gifted to them by Bartman, score eight runs in the eighth. Game Six is theirs. The pall of anticipating doom spread over Chicago. Game Seven was a foregone conclusion, and the Marlins walked right over the Cubs. Myself, the Ligues, and the other dozen or so White Sox fans breathed a sigh of relief that few could understand.

Without Bartman? The Cubs and Yankees play the most overhyped World Series of our lifetime. (Which, by the way, the Yankees would have won going away.) With Bartman? It's Shakespearean. Cub fandom is an art of suffering, an epic masochism, a fetishization of failure ("The Lovable Losers"? Come on.) Because loving the Cubs is all of that, it is almost literary that a member of Cub Nation pulled the Cubs back down into their ineffable Cubness. (Indeed, the meanspiritedness shown Bartman in Cub Nation shows the bad karma that is Cubbiness. Known for cloying camaraderie, the Cub-lovers turned on the poor guy like piranhas. Bartman the human showed a lot of class afterward, never capitalizing for money or media attention, despite many offers. He felt bad, Cub Nation. Let him go, already! Anyway, he's a saint in my house.)

This is all hard to understand if you were not a Chicagoan who is also not a Cub fan. The Cubs get all the media play in Chicago. Their fans are by turns smug and willfully oblivious. The spring is filled with bloated hype about how good the Cubs will be, including in years they end up winning 68 games. The coverage is breathless through All-Star breaks below .500. No, the Cubs are not going to break out of it. No, the Cubs are not going to make up that 11 game deficit on the Cardinals. No, that three game series in August is not crucial, nor is it relevant to anything. No, the field is the other way, you're facing backwards. You get the idea. Growing up not loving the Cubs in Chicago, one gets all kinds of grief, most of it not good-natured. Just because no Cub fan ever got drunk and attacked the first base umpire. And because the Cubs never forfeited a game by causing a riot of crazed rock and rollers (drunk again) watching a mass disco record detonation in center field. Jealousy is so unbecoming, Cubbies.

Oh, this just in: at this writing, no one alive remembers the Chicago Cubs winning a World Series. The last time they did so was in October 1908, when they beat the Detroit Tigers. In 2005, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series, defeating the Houston Astros 4-0.

Damn, that was a fun paragraph to type.

Anyway, here's a video to help you and your loved ones celebrate this fine 2011 World Series between the St. Louis Not-Cubs and the Texas Not-Cubs. Cheers. And do the Bartman!

LeBron James Still Hasn't Won Anything

Articleman — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:43:38 +0000

There is a school of thought that it is LeBron James' detractors who needlessly compare him to Michael Jordan, and that the unfavorable nature of the comparison is either incorrect or even spiteful. That is all wrong. LeBron James invited the comparisons last summer with The Decision and The Pep Rally, which promised dynasties. And so it is that tonight, we note that LeBron James has twice visited The Finals, and two other times had the top seed in his conference, and has won a total of two Finals games, and no championships. With his biological clock ticking, LeBron James still hasn't won anything.

As to the Jordan comparison, well, let's bring it up to date. Michael never lost a Finals. Never trailed one 3-2. Was MVP in all six in which he participated. LBJ? Oh-for-two in Finals. Lost both on his home court, no less. Hasn't been MVP. And who did MJ vanquish in Finals? Aside from Magic Johnson, he twice bested Karl Malone, and once Charles Barkley, the two players to whom Bill Simmons last week compared Dirk Nowitzki, two high scoring forwards with longevity and no rings. Both top twenty guys, but not top tenners. Yet in this series, Dirk from Wurzburg, who nobody would confuse with an all-time top ten player, dominated the team with two supposed all-time greats, Wade and LeBron. Nothing in the performance of LeBron James to date justifies the suggestion that he could ever been known as the greatest player of all time. Nothing.

Comparisons to Jordan? To date, has LeBron really had a better career than Dwyane Wade or Dirk Nowitzki? I'd say no. Surely not better than Kobe Bryant. Nor Shaq. Nor Hakeem. He probably has about three or four years near his athletic peak in which to win the big one, or he risks becoming the greatest disappointment in the history of the sport. People deride Wilt Chamberlain as a disappointment given his enormous individual talents, and he won two titles. And so the clock ticks on Bron-Bron. Wade will be 30 next year. Tick. The Heat have no point guard, and Bosh is soft. Tick. There is no cap room to bring in anyone new because of every dollar being subscribed to the Big Three. Tick. Meanwhile, the Bulls only need a shooting guard. Tick. The Thunder are surging. Tick. The Mavs are still loaded. Tick.

Of course, in defense of LeBron James, tonight the ineptitude of Heat coach Erik Spoelstra was on full display. Have you ever seen a team so idiotically fail to foul when trailing by ten or so points over the last four minutes of a game? Just inexplicable, like failing to get shots from within half court in the last 3.4 seconds of quarters. Chock full of lapses in preparation, the Heat reverted to their season-long habit of failing to defend the three point arc, and it killed them. (Well, that and not having a point guard.) While the Heat rotate well on defense and fill gaps well, I can't tell how much of that is Spoelstra or good habits learned earlier. And as the Heat settled for dumb threes down the stretch, you could see the thinness of Spoelstra's offensive repertoire as a coach. Maybe Bron-Bron should have concerned himself more with having a coach than recruiting buddies... but then, if one recalls his distaste for Mike Brown, you can see how LeBron has contributed to his own stunted growth as a supposed all-time great.

In the end, karma reached up and bit LeBron James. His immodesty created a national sense of villainy surrounding him and his team that followed the Heat and hounded them. Even surrounding game five, when Nowitzki was ill, James and Wade mocked Dirk as if he was faking the illness to garner public sympathy. Boorish to the last. It is exactly right that the modest Dirk earned his championship at the expense of the horribly immodest Heat, and in the building where some of the worst officiating in NBA history in 2006 cost him a prior ring.

So tonight, the script created last summer by LeBron's staff of PR genuises played itself out just as planned. Consider this: tonight a classy star won his first championship. By taking his talents to South Beach. And a country rejoices, and celebrates his talent. It's just that the country is Germany. And the star is Wurzburg's own Dirk Nowitzki. So congratulations, Dirk. And Dallas. America's basketball fans turn their grateful eyes to you. All is right in the world. For tonight, LeBron James still hasn't won anything.

Scattered Thoughts From the Losing Side

Articleman — Fri, 27 May 2011 03:48:34 +0000

Some thoughts from the one night all season I got to wear my D-Rose 1 Jersey that arrived six weeks after I ordered it...

Nice to see LBJ call Wade one of the best two guards in the league in his postgame. That was big of him. I also thought there was a Hubert Davis foul on Rose's shot to end the game, but I guess Rose would have missed a FT anyway, so it probably doesn't matter.

I can see that the key to the series was that after game one, where I successfully predicted the outcome, I failed to write new blogs predicting that the Bulls would win each successive game.

The Bulls need a two guard. It's that simple. Everything else is there. OJ Mayo makes this team win over 60 next year, but would make it a better team. Paxson/Forman need to go get a solid two guard.

It was apt that former Heat Mourning awarded the conference trophy, because the Heat are so good at stroking themselves.

The great hope for the rest of the league is that Erik Spoelstra probably can't be fired now. I'm already getting excited for next year. Go Spo!

Wade got two dubious calls down the stretch, a contactless drive for free throws, and a three where Rose stood still under his extension. If Rose got such absurd officiating, he would have been good for 20 FTs per game in this series. And the ridiculous technical on Taj Gibson.

This is one of the closest series I have ever seen end that fast. Games one and three were big each way. Game two was tied at 4:37 left. Game four was a Bull lead down the stretch and then overtime, with a single blown free throw likely making the difference. Game five, the Bulls led the whole way and were nosed at the wire. But great players close, and LeBron '11 was the difference in all three games at the end. It was the best series of his career. It mattered and he got it done.

Rose improved his free throw shooting markedly after losing the national championship at Memphis by blowing free throws. Rose lost this series by blowing free throws -- if Rose hit both at 85-84 in Miami, it would likely have been a Bulls win, and a 2-2 series. Then Rose failed to tie as well. D-Rose has one of the best work ethics and great focus. I expect he will raise his game during the summer. He is still only 22, and there's a lot to look forward to.

In my blog opening the series, I pegged this as the Bad Boy Pistons against the Jordan Bulls. Actually, it was the 1993 Knicks against the Jordan Bulls -- a very good team that just couldn't put away superior individual talent in the telling moment. The Bulls' collapse tonight was a dagger like the Charles Smith block that decided the 1993 East Finals -- likewise a psychologically devastating game five at home.

Blowing a 12 point lead with under 4 to go was the ugliest end to a game since the 2005 Fighting Illini overcame a 15 point Arizona lead in 3:58 to advance to the Final Four. But great players and teams do these things.

The Bulls were the little team that could. 71 wins down that road, and after an epic game one pummeling of the Heatles, they fell a hair short three of the next four games. Hard to be down about that. Except for the 2004 Pistons, little teams that could don't win championships. I say the Bulls are one OJ Mayo away from being much more than that.

And I very much hope the Mavs beat the Heat. Someone let me know how it turns out.

Bulls v. Heat Preview: Everything Old Is New Again

Articleman — Sun, 15 May 2011 18:52:06 +0000

I knew there was a reason I kept my Bulls "1993 3-Time NBA World Champs" cartoonized team T-shirt for eighteen years. It was to wear today when Derrick Rose's Bulls 2.0 take on the Miami Heat, what passes for evil in David Stern's kinder, gentler, and less chippy 2011 NBA. That and my Chicago Bulls' six-time NBA Champions hat, both of which will be on display at 8 pm Eastern today as I watch. This series evokes memories of and comparisons to the Bulls' runs of 20 years ago, and this column says the Bulls will surprise this week's chorus of naysaying experts and win it.

2011 as 1990

It's worth backing up to explain why this matchup reminds me of the great Eastern Conference finals -- say, 1990 -- during the Rise of Jordan. It's a contest for supremacy among emerging, would-be champs as championship Celtic and Laker teams fall by the wayside. And in it, you have on one side a combination of tremendous individual play on a team with a crappy bench and no point guard, and on the other a far deeper team built around defense, effort, tenacity and sharing the ball, led by a great little point guard from the streets of Chicago with explosive quickness and the heart of an assassin.

The interesting part of the comparison is that that makes the LBJ-Wade Heat the analog to Michael Jordan's Bulls -- and it makes Derrick Rose's Bulls the analog to Isiah Thomas' 1990 Pistons. Sure, these Bulls don't have the bonecrushing lowbridging, in-your-shirt defense of Dennis Rodman, but the league doesn't do that style of play any more. And there isn't anyone on the Bulls as vile (er, tough, I meant) as Bill Laimbeer. But otherwise, with the deep rotations, Thibs-as-Daly, Rose-as-Zeke, the Bulls' grinding offense and sticky D, it works. LeBron at 26 having not won a game in a Finals works perfectly, as does the guys-we-found-at-Home Depot-at-6 a.m.-looking-for-work bench Co-Exec of the Year Pat Riley so astutely assembled, as does the lack of a point guard, as does the fact that the ball has to run through superskilled wingmen Wade and Bron Bron. Oh, and the Bulls have home court. That's also very Pistons in the 1990 East Finals. Guess who won that series in seven games? Jordan was already the best player in the Association, but with both teams holding serve, the Bulls lost their last (non-baseball season) playoff series of the Jordan era in the Pippen migraine game. The team still had enough to beat the more spectacular but more individual play. And so it will be here.

Round Two Is Over

Repeat: round two is over. While the media types have anointed the Heat as favorites in the Eastern Conference Finals on the heels of its takedown of the Celtics, that's overanalysis that ignores matchups. Remember how after the first round, we heard how the Celtics were playing the best basketball of anyone in the postseason because of the ease of their dismantlement of the Knicks? But the Knicks were injured and supposed to lose, and didn't have the defense or depth to hang with Boston. Likewise, the Heat had homecourt and were supposed to beat the Celtics, and did, though not easily -- narrowly winning one road game in overtime after Rajon Rondo dislocated his elbow and was limited in Game Four. They did not overperform, and the Perkins-less, banged up Celtics were in no shape to beat a top team.

So how to explain the absurd display of premature exult-ulation the Heat put on at the end of Game Five in Miami? Well, they're very good at staging premature displays of self-gratification down there in South Beach, the only place I know of to have a victory parade about nothing when last summer, Wonder Executive Pat Riley was the lucky recipient of the LBJ-Bosh relocation. Seeing LeBron celebrate a second-round playoff victory like he had just won the Super Bowl, the lottery, and a week with Angelina Jolie in the cage scene in Gia, the Heat would do well to recall Harvey Keitel's admonition to John Travolta during the cleanup scene in Pulp Fiction: gentlemen, let's not start... oh, never mind. Yes, LeBron, they don't award Eastern Conference Semifinalist trophies, though if they did, you'd sure have a shelf full of them back at home. And good for you.

The Bulls, meanwhile, are underdogs because they, well, played like the team that went 62-20 and earned the home court in this series. How so? They won a lot of games close and ugly by dint of Rose's ability to close (as in Games Two and Five). And sometimes (as in Games Three and Six) they clicked on all cylinders and played games in which no one in this league could beat them. They won two road games and lost one in each of the last two rounds. Yes, this is the same Bulls team that was already supposed to finish behind the Heat, that was supposed to lose each time they played at full strength, and that is 3-0 today against these Heat. Remember Erik Spoelstra's quip that there were "tears" in Miami's locker room after the third of those losses? Anyone putting all their chips on a team as psychologically fragile as Miami beating a team as tough and persistent as the Bulls based on a series Miami was supposed to win is weighting last week too heavily, and the last year too lightly. John Kerry has three words for LBJ -- bring it on.

Matchups Are a Push

Like all basketball, this series is a contest of matchups. There are three great players in this series, and none matches up with the other, unless and to the extent Spoelstra puts Wade or LBJ on Rose, which he likely won't except briefly, because of the offensive energy he would lose. If the Heat had a bench that didn't look like a bunch of bit characters from 28 Days Later -- hey, I didn't know they signed Ted Williams' head! -- they could afford to put Wade or LeBron on Rose for longer stretches, which could disrupt Chicago's flow. But they can't. So what does that leave us with?

LBJ and Deng: Edge Miami -- but not the vast gulf imagined by the uninformed. LeBron is unquestionably a player of profound offensive skill, whether he's exploding to the cup, posting up, or penetrating and kicking. He sees the floor better than almost anyone, and runs the floor like a freight train. He will score well, and will put up sick stat lines, more because of his greatness than because of the awfulness of players 4-12 on this crew, though that too. But Luol Deng is what people say more than is actually true -- a genuinely underrated player. He should have been all-NBA defensive second team, at least. He is a wily and fairly athletic lockdown defender with size, smarts, and great wingspan. And the Bulls will all be looking to help on LeBron, and they can run Taj Gibson, Ronnie Brewer, and Keith Bogans at LBJ. Over a longer series, this will help more and more, but the key here is that Deng will be outplayed, while not run being out of the building on an individual basis. Think MJ and Clyde Drexler in the '92 Finals.

Rose and Whoever: Large edge Bulls. The Heat have no point guard. Arroyo and Bibby are ciphers. The problem here is that Rose has to dominate half or more of the series for the Bulls to win, so it isn't enough to have an edge here, it has to be substantial. The Heat's help defense when Rose is knifing through the lane like Neo in the Matrix will be key. Also look for Spoelstra to try double-teams, as Indiana and Atlanta did to some effect. The ability of Rose to impose himself despite help in the lane and doubles up top will be the key to the matchup between the Bulls offense and the Heat's solid defense. I see Rose continuing to solve problems, and I see the doublers on the Heat's better-than-Indy-and-Atlanta but thinner team as less likely to be effective than those Rose has faced thus far.

Wade and Whoever: Large edge Heat. This is the mismatch in the Heat's favor, not LBJ. The Bulls do shooting guard by committee, in respect of Rose's outsized role in the offense, and Bogans-Brewer-Korver cannot check D-Wade, though the first two definitely bring defensive chops of some note to the table. And the Bulls cannot slide Deng onto him because of LeBron. Look for Wade to hurt the Bulls more at crucial times than anyone. If the ball ends up more in LeBron's hands at those decisive moments, look for the Bulls to win those moments. They have more answers, and LeBron is more of a headcase and less of a closer with a tougher matchup at the 3. (And my son has this big box of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers with -- Dwyane Wade on it! There are fish crackers, and basketball crackers. Am I the only person for whom Dwyane Wade fish-and-basketball childrens' snack crackers doesn't work? You might agree if you've seen the reputedly awful basketball movie The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. It is -- shockingly -- the only film in which Dr. J, Jonathan Winters, Flip Wilson, and Meadowlark Lemon appear. But I digress.)

Bosh and Boozer: Push. Sorry, Boozer-bashers, but consider this: In this series, Carlos has more of an opportunity to play his game than does ET. I mean Chris Bosh, sorry for the confusion. The Bulls simply need a reliable second option. Boozer's 23/10 in Game Six suggests he's over the toe issues, and the 72 hours between Games One and Two here helps. Bosh is more versatile and talented, but is not a true or effective low-poster, and has been complaining down the stretch of this season about not getting enough bandwidth in this offense. (Think the 1977 Sixers with ace scorers Dr. J, George McGinnis, Lloyd Free, Darryl Dawkins -- and only one basketball! Oh, the humanity!) Boozer will get his points and boards, and will make the Heat pay for doubling Rose. Thibs has been working on this. Trust me.

Noah and Whoever: Edge Bulls. Noah plays with heart and hustle, and creates second chance points. Look for Joakim to be sky-high in this series, and for him to play solid interior defense. The Noah-Joel Anthony/Zydrunas Ilgauskas matchup is one of the many foci (I love writing a hoops column and using "foci") in which the Bulls' hustle-defense-depth superiority will make a difference. Just as the Heat have no Noah, they have no Omer Asik. And no Taj Gibson. The energy, defense, and hustle in the post, and in Noah's case, ability to finish near the hoop and to create second chance points, will matter.

Thibs and Spoelstra: Thibs. Does this require explanation? No, it does not.

Bench: Large edge Bulls. As discussed above, there is no possible dispute as to the size of the Bulls' advantage here. In a short series, it might not make that much difference, which makes winning Game One huge either way. But over two weeks, with Spoelstra playing his Big Three 42 minutes per game, the Bulls' Bench Mob and their minutes, energy, physicality, and ability to win the early second quarter against Miami's "bench" will matter. More than the parade and the overconfidence, this may be the worst Miami Vice.

This Series in Context

So why are the matchups a push when the Bulls have the edge at center and in coaching, the four spot is even, and huge edges at point guard and the bench? Because basketball is also a game of great players. There are three in this series and Miami has two. The conflict between the great team and the great player is time-honored in the NBA: Wilt against Russell's Celtics (almost always failing). The 2004 Pistons shocking the Lakers in five. The 1989 and 1990 Pistons taking down the Bulls who would win 24 straight playoff series with the greatest player of all time (outside Jordan's baseball-interrupted 1995 short season). Walton's Blazers beating the aforementioned '77 Sixers. I'm sticking with team over greater spectacular individual talent, but only because these Bulls have a great player of their own. Just as the 1989 and 1990 Pistons had Zeke, these Bulls have D-Rose.

So in the spirit of true objectivity, I urge everyone to put on their 1998 Bulls championship hats, to pull on their 1993 Bulls championship T-shirts, and enjoy this series. I see the Bulls winning it in six, but it feels either like a long and fairly narrow Bulls' series victory, or the Heat in fewer games. Someone is going to make the leap here -- either D-Rose as the youngest MVP in league history powering Bulls 2.0 into the Finals, where they would be favored, or LBJ and D-Wade destroying Alderaan and establishing evil dominion over the NBA fulfilling the promise of their union, perhaps even setting up a fascinating Wade-Nowitzki-Bennett Salvatore rematch in the Finals (really Stern-Cuban, right?).

* * * *

Today's prediction: Game One: Bulls 93, Heat 83. Rose with 34 points, 9 assists, 14-15 from the line. So let's get it on. (The Bulls' gear, I mean.) Cheers.

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Eleven for '11: This Year's NBA Playoffs Coming Up Rose's So Far

Articleman — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:09:15 +0000

Two weeks in, the most anticipated postseason in recent NBA history is living up to the hype. The West is absurdly competitive. The East is setting up some predicted drama. And there have been a lot of Moments. It is, as Emperor Palpatine remarked to Darth Vader, all proceeding as I have foreseen. (Well, most of it.) Here are eleven drive-by's on the subject of this year's playoffs, written in 36 minutes in an airport...

11. What was more spectacular in Game Four of Dallas-Portland: the Dallas Accordions, er, Mavericks folding after leading by 25, or Brandon Roy's fierce charge after Mark Cuban's crew? When Dallas celebrated so earnestly after Game Five of a first round series it was simply supposed to win (and finally did Thursday, after turning a 17 point lead into a one point edge), you could see that the Mavs have never recovered, and will never recover, from the Bennett Salvatore-Dwyane Wade led comeback/epic collapse in the 2006 Finals.

10. Speaking of Dwyane Wade, guess who is listed as one of the greatest players of all time more and more, but hadn't won a playoff series since, well, the Bennett Salvatore-Dwyane Wade dominated 2006 Finals? If you guessed Dwyane Wade, you're right. But if you were worried about him, fear not, for allied with LeBron James and Chris Bosh, he narrowly, barely, and with a late fade consistent with the Heat's 2010-11 inability to finish, retired the Philadelphia Seven Seeds last night, in five games.

9. Speaking of LeBron James, the lifetime tally of Finals game victories stands as follows: Dwight Howard 1, LeBron James 0. We'll be updating you when that number changes. You may use the restroom, order a pizza, or otherwise entertain yourself for at least 13 months before checking back. Thank you. That is all.

8. If you weren't watching the Grizz and the Spurs in Game Five last night (and you almost certainly weren't), you missed one of the most electrifying finishes in recent hoops history. The Grizz overcame a 16 point deficit, led by 3 with time ticking down in the last five seconds of a loose-ball scrum, somehow the uber-clutch Manu Ginobili emerges with the ball, floats right into the corner and hits a wild three falling on his ass with 2.2 seconds left, tying the game. Except it wasn't a three, it was re-scored as a 2. With the top seed in the West hanging by a thread, Zach Randolph (irritatingly called Z-Bo by the Grizz TV crew, which worse yet yells enthusiastically about "Z-bounds!", and I am not making this up) calmly cans two free throws with 1.7 to go, making the score 97-94. With only a 20 second timeout left, the uber-pissy Gregg Popovich (who should have been fined for his graceless postgame throttling of innocent media questions: "What? You coaching now? [Awkward silence.] Next.") sent the ball inbounds to rookie Gary Neal. When usually stalwart defender Shane Battier inexplicably *collapsed on Duncan* (what?!), Neal calmly drained a 25 footer that began its descent as the backboard went red for time up. Spurs prevail in OT. If they win the series, what a last three seconds that was. And I hope they don't.

7. Charles Barkley threw down my favorite analysis of the postseason after the Bulls narrowly won Game Three in Indy. Sir Charles opined that he didn't care if the games were close. Derrick Rose was 3-17 going into the last minute, the Bulls trailed most of the game, but they were simply better. The key, he argued, isn't the margin. It's imposing your will and exhibiting control. And he's right. It's what's lost when the Heat pummel the bottom half of the league better than the Bulls all year, yielding distractingly higher score margins and player efficiency ratings. Yet the Bulls win more against the league's elite. LeBron on paper is more productive. Wade may be. And in clutch shots at the ends of games, BronBron and D-Wade were 1-13 this year. Sir Charles would take 3-17 D-Rose knifing lightspeed to the hoop at the game's end, and so would I.

6. Sorry, C's, but the Celtics first-round victory against the New York Parking Lot Attendants and Carmelo Anthony is not meaningful. Read Bill Simmons' Book of Basketball as he riffs on Isiah saddling NYC with "the likes of Jared Jeffries." So who has the ball in clutch time at the end of Game Two? Jared Saddled-With Jeffries. Because the Real Knicks aren't there yet, and only the Ragtag Knicks suited up. The C's performed masterfully, as they always do post-season it seems, but against what? This means absolutely. Positively. Nothing.

5. I picked OKC to win the West, and I'm still right. So there. Having said that, Westbrook and Durant yelling in the huddle midseries was a bad sign, as was Westbrook oscillating between shooting way too much and then woefully but less in Game Five. That rudder needs straightening for the Thunder to be righted (wait, idiomatically, can a vessel that is a storm sail? This is sure awkward metaphorizing. Hmm.), but if regular-season Westbrook returns, look for the Thunder to storm to the Finals.

4. Favorite line during playoffs on Internet. Fan laments on ESPN blog, laden with in-game commentary about Bulls and Lakers, that "no one is watching [then-in-progress] Game Four of Hawks-Magic." ESPN staffer covering event within in-game group blog responds: "If only that were so." Indeedie.

3. Is anyone that surprised that the Lakers are struggling against CP3 and the Depleted Hornets? Ok, I am a little, but the Lakers won't win the West because they don't cooperate well, don't defend speed well, are slow, and built around a narcissistic ballhog. So is it a shock when a lightning-fast young PG who shares the ball just abuses the Laker wings and punishes the older, overhyped crew from Lala Land? The Lakers should still win this series, but it might not have been so with David West. Good news for them, next round the Blazers. On to the OKC-LA final, with the two best in the west. It will be fun. (For Durant.) More later on that.

2. Celtics-Heat is the marquee matchup of this playoffs (so far.) The C's need to break through in the first two. If they do, look for LeBron to perform the Vulcan Mind-Melt in Boston, unmade by two games there of hurtful, truly hurtful booing and clutch situations. I doubt the Celtics will get it done. I say this goes seven, and the Miami Brittle Guys With No Bench (do they use the same nine guys the Knicks do after Melo, Chauncey, and Amare? I can't tell) advance to face the Bulls.

1. Still sticking with the Bulls to win it all. But they badly need Rose and Boozer healthy. A series against the Hawks, now almost inevitable, looks like a virtual bye. The Celtics-Heat bloodbath is just what a conspiracist who wants Bulls-Lakers or Bulls-Durant would draw up. Not that the NBA would EVER do that.... :) I just hope my D-Rose jersey arrives before the playoffs end. It should be smoking hot early June for the guys from Chicago, with the Heat and the Thunder...More on that later too.

For the Love of the Game: My 2010-11 Sports Season

Articleman — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:15:53 +0000

This was the first year I had a share of sports season tickets to see any team (it was to the Phoenix Suns) and the first year I saw a sports championship of any sort (Auburn-Oregon). Thus, in one year, I got to see Derrick Rose's Bulls, Kobe Bryant's Lakers, Kevin Durant's Thunder, Deron Williams' Jazz, and Dwight Howard's Magic, as well as the Auburn juggernaut almost derail when it ran into some Ducks in the desert. But the games, and most of them were really great, were secondary to small moments I was glad to see, some of them pretty odd. This is my homage to the 2010-11 season, through the prism of stuff I noticed in person.

November 24, 2010: Bulls 123, Phoenix 115, Double Overtime

This was before the Bulls were All That again. They came in 7-5, off a 41-41 first round exit. And Derrick Rose, their young star, spent an awful lot of time before he exited the court autographing programs and papers and basketballs for every patient youngster who waited down by the tunnel to the visitors' locker room. Of all the games I saw this year, no star spent longer with kids. This made me happy before the game started.

After the game started, little made me happy for two hours. The Suns led this game 36-13. Had they won it, they would have been 8-7, the Bulls 7-6. But they didn't. They led 78-62 late in the third, and the young Bulls, who had not yet found themselves and were playing without injured Carlos Boozer, looked lazy, as if they had spent their energy almost being the Lakers the night before and couldn't be bothered to play that hard two nights in a row. Then came a fourth quarter in which the Bulls inexorably clawed their way back in, and then a vicious last two minutes in which the Bulls forced Hall of Famer-to-be Steve Nash and his Suns into shot clock violations, wild shots at the buzzer, and only three baskets in the last nine minutes.

The Bulls never led in regulation, and only briefly led in the first overtime. The play of the game came with under a second left in the first overtime, as the Bulls trailed 111-109. Bulls center Joakim Noah (that's Yannick's son, Donal) ended up with the ball at the top of the key. Though the Suns had a foul to give, Derrick Rose streaked along the baseline, Noah waited patiently and hit him with a pass he turned into a game-tying reverse layup past the outstretched length of Grant Hill. This broke the Suns, who were not competitive in the second overtime. It was an early flash of what was special about the Bulls, coming back from 23 down on the second night of a back to back against a (then) solid team, and doing it with will and flair in the moment.

And then there was Cedric Ceballos, who I saw light up Jordan's Bulls for 40 in the old Chicago Stadium in 1992, now a public address announcer imploring the Suns' crowd not to go home during the overtimes. And they did anyway. Ah, Phoenix.

January 5, 2011: Lakers 99, Suns 95

I just had to see Kobe Bryant in person, and am glad I did, but for me this will always be The Violet Palmer-Bob Delaney game. Both are NBA referees, Palmer the first woman referee in the NBA. The Palmer-Delaney split on calls was so decisive, it started to remind me of how lawyers pick arbitration panels -- each side picks one, and then the two selected pick a third. And in this game, Palmer was the referee the Lakers picked, Delaney the one the Suns picked, and Derrick Crawford was apparently the neutral one. She made one call all night on the Lakers, but seven or eight on the Suns, some questionable. Delaney started a little slower, but was every bit as one-sided.

Having already noted the conflicting loyalties of these two refs, during the second quarter, I saw Palmer make a particularly bad foul call on a Suns post defender who was guarding Pau Gasol. (I'm sure it couldn't be the case that Palmer remembered the Suns' Nash engaging in some poor sportsmanship the season before, suggesting that she needed glasses.) On the very next possession, Delaney made an equally indefensible call on the other end involving Gasol -- and called a technical foul on the Lakers to boot, as if he meant negate Palmer's call.

I was joking with my father at halftime about the one-sidedness of each official's calls, and Delaney's correction foul and technical -- and then they did it again! Yes, in the third quarter, Palmer called an even less defensible foul in favor of Pau Gasol. And then Delaney ran down to the other end, and called an equally dumb and arbitrary foul against the Lakers, again involving Gasol -- and then the technical, so his call counted for more. Watching Palmer and Delaney jaw at each other during an ensuing timeout, with Crawford looking on impassively, was more entertaining than most of the game.

Oh, yeah, Kobe. He was as much of a jerk in person as I believed him to be. Created shots with insane degrees of difficulty, as if the game were HORSE and not the Lakers at the Suns, though he made many. And he sniped at teammates, making a show of conspicuously bossing them around, talking to no one in particular off the ball, as if he were doing an imitation of his idea of Peak MJ. At the time of this game, the Lakers had just been shellacked by several teams (Heat by 16, Bucks by 19, both at Staples, and by 15 at the Spurs). And the Lakers kind of lived down to their sporadically malfunctioning face, with possessions roughly equally divided between "basketball," in which all the other Lakers touched the ball and moved well without it to create an efficient, open shot, and "Kobe goes one on five," in which Kobe rarely passed, and then just to get the ball back and take the entire Suns roster and coaching staff off the dribble for the world's hardest HORSE shot. I keep reading about how you have to see Kobe in person, and how he cares more than anyone cares. Well, I saw Derrick Rose and Kevin Durant play, and I will never believe that either cares less about winning or the game or his team than Kobe Bryant. Because they're both better teammates, I tend to think they care more. But that's just me. Oh, and the Lakers beat the Suns. Whatever.

January 11, 2011: Auburn 22, Oregon 19, BCS National Championship Game

For me, this game really started at the Lakers-Suns game, because the Oregon and Auburn football teams also attended it, and during the halftime, I ended up walking around the concourse at U.S. Airways Arena immediately behind a couple of Oregon players for ten minutes. It was entertaining drafting in their wake, seeing the suburbanish crowd wishing them luck, seeing girls throwing themselves at players, and hearing the rather salty street language the players employed as they swaggered around, waiting to play for a national title. So when I walked out of the concourse the next week and to our absurdly good seats (25 yard line, row 20), I had the notion that the Phoenix crowd would be more Oregon, that Oregon, being in the Pac10, would travel better. Nope. The whole place was Auburn blue and orange. Maybe 75%. You couldn't buy any merchandise that was purely Auburn-themed; it was gone by kickoff. And that was on the Oregon side, where we were seated.

As to the game, all I can tell you is, don't pick Cam Newton high in the first round. The dude is basically not even Vince Young. He runs reasonably well, but only that, and standing too tall and not evasive enough to make it help much in the pros (kind of like Brad Muster, if you remember him). As to passing, his numbers in the championship were serviceable. But this was against Oregon, hardly a defensive powerhouse. More to the point, Newton made most of his yards and completions that were easily made dinks and dunks. Many of his throws were routes he looked on throughout and was able to lead his man easily, because his man was open by ten yards in a soft zone. This was the antithesis of Tim Tebow's last bowl performance, in which at one point he was 28-32, hitting men in distant seams in full stride. There were maybe two plays Newton made in the whole game that were serious value-adds. I think he's talented, but largely a creature of his system. Nick Fairley, the down lineman, on the other hand, just wow. He kept blowing up the Oregon line, just deforming it with moves and bullrushes. Nick Fairley and the Auburn defense won that game as surely as the New York Giants defense won the 17-14 Super Bowl that toppled the undefeated Patriots in the same building. Newton will be an ok pro. But only ok, and not for that long. Fairley will be playing in Pro Bowls and in 2020. Mark it down.

Auburn running back Michael Dyer's crazy run won the game -- the run in which Dyer was tackled. Everyone thought he was down, but he didn't touch the ground while downed. My dad and I were talking. The Auburn side of the field was quiet. Then you could see coaches waving the downed runner onward. And then he restarted. The roar from the other side of the field followed. And soon, Auburn was in position for a game-ending field goal for the win. This obscured the drama of Oregon, down by 8, converting a fourth down, scoring a touchdown and then a two-point conversion on a pass and catch worthy of comparison in difficulty and drama to the Montana-Clark catch that spawned the Niner dynasty, with Jeff Maehl making a fingertip grab in the back of the end zone of a cross-body throw under pressure. Auburn was better, and would win that game eight or nine times of ten. And in the parking lot, you'd think we'd entered into a brave new world of civility. Auburn fans congratulated Oregon fans on how well their team played, and vice versa. Wearing an Oregon hat, I did the same. All in all, a fun night of pageantry, and a great game to boot.

February 15, 2011: Phoenix Suns 102, Utah Jazz 101

The best part of this game was the set of guys wearing late 80s Jazz retro uniforms (the J in Jazz as a musical note, and some rainbow colors to boot), including even the throwback tighty-whitey shorts. At least one had a wig that looked like a cross between Bill Walton and Greg Brady. Their group was three guys dressed like that, and a fourth in a suit. The Laker game was 30% Laker fans, and they had so many jerseys -- mostly Kobes, but also West and Magic Johnson. The Jazz fans? Well, they'll always have 1988, when Stockton, Malone, and Eaton took the Lakers to seven in the second round. History is not distributed equally to franchises, fans, and cities.

Anyhow, I had wanted to see Deron Williams in person since his Illini days. Just a great creator. But this was the week after he essentially got Jerry Sloan fired. It was funny watching the referees call him for palming in a game when he was far from the only palmer. And you could call palming in every NBA game, certainly on Nash too. It was one of those things where Sloan enjoys such respect, you could just see the crew tweaking D-Will, and you could see on his face a bemused frustration. He knew it. Nash went for 20 points and 14 assists, Williams for 11 and 11, but Nash clearly outplayed him. (If you look at the plus-minus in the box score, Nash was +18, Williams -16. That was about right.) This was the only game I saw the Suns win all year, but hey, I saw them play the Bulls, Lakers, Thunder, Magic, and Jazz. It's the only game they should have won. It made me sorry to have missed the high-octane Suns of Peak Nash in person.

March 13, 2011: Orlando Magic 111, Phoenix Suns 88

At the start of this Sunday afternoon game, Dwight Howard did something that made me really, really like him. His teammates, one by one, pantomimed shaking baby powder onto his hands. And then, with an absurd, extreme flourish, an exaggerated smile, and an exhibitionistic laugh, Howard tossed all his nonexistent baby powder in the air in a cloud, in a not-subtle jab at LeBron James, which is in turn ironic because LBJ stole the baby powder game-opening ritual from MJ, just as Kobe mimics MJ's game. Anyway, Dwight was having some fun. And this was good, because of what wasn't at the game.

Captain Canada, our own Steve Nash (Bill Simmons' #38 player of all time in The Book of Basketball!). You know you're screwed when you're at a Suns game, and when the lineups are announced, it ends… and there's no Steve Nash. I had taken my son for his seventh birthday (I traded the Spurs game to get these, the only day game of the year, so he could go), which was perfect, because he doesn't have the same appetite for truly competitive games that a seasoned fan would. So I just prepared him for how exciting Dwight Howard is, how athletic, and exceptional, and skilled at shotblocking and dunking he is, and we focused on that.

Sure enough, only minutes into the game, wanting to show my son what's interesting about basketball, Howard posted up Robin Lopez not very far from our seats. I got to tell my son, after all the pregame buildup, "Look. Dwight Howard is getting ready to dunk. This man can't guard him. Watch." And Dwight Howard did a simple spin-move and dunked over the hapless Lopez. On the next possession, Howard took the ball at the same spot, again facing us, not too far away. "Look, he's going to dunk again. He knows he can do it all night." And Howard dunked again, quite spectacularly.

And my son spent much of the game looking at ads, looking at T-shirts being thrown during timeouts, at the swiveling ceiling lights, but he also left the game knowing that he really, really likes Dwight Howard. When I was a kid, you could get the other team's logoed items at games. You can't now at many NBA arenas, so I couldn't get him a keepsake there. Since then, I got him a kids Dwight Howard jersey on the net, and he's happy about that. And I'm happy that he is. While it was the only game all year that wasn't dramatic and down to the wire to that point, it was also the best.

March 30, 2011: Oklahoma City Thunder 116, Phoenix Suns 98

With the Suns out of playoff position at this point, the whole point of the game was to see the last of the game's stars on my dance card -- Oklahoma City's great young forward, Kevin Durant. After seeing the Thunder play in person, they're my pick to represent the Western Conference in the Finals, but not because of Durant. While he reached double figures in the first quarter, Durant put up a quiet 22 points in this rout. Of course, any time you put up a quiet 22, you have some game, and Durant has his: long threes, effortless gliding drives, preternaturally easy rebounds with his long arms and great positioning. But the real deal with Oklahoma City is how much the Thunder are like the Borg Cube in Star Trek: OKC is more like a single basketball mind than five guys. More like a well coached high school team with jump-out-of-the-gym athletes than anything I've seen in the NBA in thirty-plus years. Meaning, the young Thunder move without the ball with great discipline, and well. They work, and grind, and set screens, and move, move, move themselves, and the ball selflessly, like five reasonably interchangeable parts of one fluid thing. For a purist, the Thunder are a thing of beauty (are you listening, Glenn Greenwald?).

Some elements in their game jump out -- the ridiculous acceleration of Russell Westbrook, a kind of not-that-poor-man's Derrick Rose, now also a well-deserving All-Star. This night, sub James Harden showed up with an absurdly efficient 7-9 from the field, including three threes. Serge Ibaka hustled all night and put up 15 points and 10 boards. On any given night, the Thunder can hurt you through any of these guys. It looks right now that the Thunder will hook up in the first round with Denver, who they have recently handled, and then the Spurs. We already know the Thunder can handle the Lakers (see this past Sunday). Look for the preseason favorite for the MVP (Durant) to make it deep this year, perhaps encountering this year's actual MVP (Rose) in a LeBronless, Lakerless, Celticless Finals that would still be entertaining.

Meanwhile, back at the game, Canada made a little bit of a comeback. Not just that Nash played, but in the crowd. I had seen Oregon and Auburn football uniforms at Suns games, and all manner of retro jerseys for the Jazz, Bulls, and Lakers. But until a father/son duo sat two rows down and to my right at this game, I had never seen anyone wear fan gear of the team I used to call the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (a CFL football team). Well, it turns out when you see fans wearing their uniforms at a game, that they're actually the "Winnipeg Blue-Bombers." So I guess they launch Blue-Bombs! I mean, who knew? The stuff you learn in sports. Who says those aren't hours well spent? Or well-spent?

As the Winnipeg Blue-Bombers might say, if they were hyphenating my prose, my time at all of these games was well-spent. I took my father to a national championship game (a first for both of us) and to see Derrick Rose before he and the Bulls brought back the magic. I took my son to see Dwight Howard and he was as electrifying as I told my son he would be. I got to see Kobe and the two-time defending champs. (Meh.) At the national championship, I got to see an ecstatic dude in a wheelchair in a parking lot tailgate party hoisting beers and yelling congratulations to losing Oregon fans (which they heartily returned). I have an ex who hated my love for sports. I feel a little bad for folks who don't get games. They're worth loving, and I loved these. On to the play-offs. For more time well-spent. And thank-you for reading.