Blog Posts For Tag: Basketball

I like everyone else was excited by the possibility of watching the Los Angeles Lakers and the Cleveland Cavaliers play in the NBA Finals. I relished the thought of watching LeBron James and Kobe Bryant do battle, I wanted to believe that this would be the passing of the torch from one MVP to another, and I wanted to see two players who were unstoppable defile the other team at will as the competitive stakes were raised. That reality is no more, the series will remain a hypothetical one, but I have just glimpsed into the future and seen something far more interesting, the transformation of the gentle giant into the beast whose hunger will devour all in his path.

I am very excited to watch the Los Angeles Lakers and the Cleveland Cavaliers play in the NBA Finals. I want to watch Kobe and LeBron do battle. I want to see if this is the season James is able to bring home a championship to the much maligned Cleveland sports scene or if Kobe is able to prove that he could win a title in tinsel town without the Big Diesel. The only problem is that I have to wait for two months of meaningless prologue to dispense before I get to see the seven game series.

How would you like to have a team in the early ‘90s with Michael Jordan and John Stockton as your backcourt and David Robinson as your starting center? How would you like that team to be coached by Jerry Sloan? Well that, and famed Rutgers Women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer, is the team headed to the Basketball Hall of Fame on September 10, 2009.

While the Big East certainly proved it was the best conference in the land with five teams making it to the Elite Eight and two teams making it to the Final Four, the conference failed to put a single team in an NCAA Tournament championship. Instead, representatives from two of the most down-trodden major conferences of the year, the Michigan State Spartans from the Big Ten and the North Carolina Tar Heels from the ACC, are taking their place. This match up is a surprise, but it is hardly a big shocker.

I must say that the Elite Eight was a much better round to watch than the Sweet Sixteen. A two seed and a three seed winning might not be much of an upset, but it at least gives the final four a little bit of that Cinderella groove back. Now everyone rooting for the underdog will cheer for Michigan State versus UConn and Villanova in the game with UNC. The question is will those cheers be wasted on teams that are simply too overmatched to keep their NCAA season going.

I love sports. I check ESPN's website dozens of times a day for the latest development on the NFL front and for things as silly as the New York Yankees ERA last season. I am not so completely insulated from reality that I can not appreciate how silly the idea of professional sports can sometimes be, and sometimes I wonder which sport is the silliest.

The 2008 Final Four was perhaps the most disappointing in the history of me watching the tournament (interesting caveat huh). All the number one seed made it. Every single one! Who wants to watch a 65-team, single-elimination tournament in which the predicted top four teams are the actual last four teams standing?

I just read some disturbing news today during my annual college basketball cram session. I just read that the Big Ten could have eight teams in the NCAA Tournament. That is more than the amazing ACC and the mighty Big East hope to have in the tournament. I am a huge Big Ten sports fan, but even I think that is ridiculous.

Teams like the Cleveland Cavaliers are having terrific seasons. The Boston Celtics, second in the Eastern Conference, have clinched a place in the playoffs and the Los Angeles Lakers are blowing away the competition despite the now annual Andrew Bynum late season injury. About this time fans can choose to focus on the playoffs or the lottery, and this year everyone would rather be focusing on the playoffs.

The class is just not that great this year. Only one player, Blake Griffin is considered a sure thing, and only two others are considered worth exploring. These two are Greg Monroe, a freshman power forward from Georgetown, and Rick Rubio, a young guard playing in Spain.

Sometimes it seems like every aspect of our culture rewards greedy brats. I think that trying to teach children to be respectful adults might actually be a detriment to their adult lives. We bail out a banking industry with billions after that cost millions their retirement portfolio. We offer reality shows to rich kids who do absolutely nothing and put them on covers of magazines. We even reward players who act ridiculously with multi-millionaire contracts.

So this weekend Slumdog Millionaire won an impressive eight Oscars out of ten. That kind of dominance is rare in any field. Few musicians have been able to impress the entire Grammy community, sorry Kanye West. Few presidents have been able to have four uninterrupted years of good feeling and inspirational bipartisanship, sorry President Obama. Few sports teams have been able to have perfect seasons, sorry New England Patriots.

Not much happened this time around at the trade deadline as the league has moved on from the Boston Celtics title run in 2008 and has moved onto the practice of making trades in the hopes of acquiring expiring contracts and not talent.