With March Madness in our rearview mirrors, it's time to shift focus from the basketball games college players actually played in to those that they wish they were playing in (thanks, David Stern). That's right; if you see wing players actually shuffling their Nikes on defense and big men turning sure-fire highlight-reel dunks into second-degree felonious assault (uh, not literally, Ron Artest), you know the playoffs are coming.
But at this point, what do we make of the 82-game glorified preseason we've been subjected to? Let's sift through the regular season trash bin littered with Bucks/Celtics Tuesday nights and find something that actually means something as we look toward the postseason. Thirty teams played 82 games (okay, I'm cheating, there are still a few to play), and I boiled every minute down to these five written-in-stone truths:
1. Short of injuries to multiple key players, any game not involving Dallas, Phoenix, or San Antonio is irrelevant.
TNT and ESPN will try to convince you there are 13 other teams in the playoffs that could win the title. Don't be fooled. Between the sheer excellence of the Suns and the Mavs and San Antonio's experience, nobody else matters. These three teams have been in enough postseason wars with each other to know that, contrary to popular belief, not only can they hit the switch to start playing at full intensity at will, but it's a necessity to survive a grueling NBA season. Which leads us to truth number two...
2. The Mavs and Suns haven't been fighting for home court against each other; they've been fighting to avoid the Spurs.
In all honesty, this has been about the simplest regular season we've seen since 1996, when the Bulls established alpha dog status by Christmas and everyone else knew they were playing for second place. With their dueling streaks of dominance, Dallas and Phoenix both figured out early on that they were far better than everyone else in the league.
Once they had put enough space in the standings between themselves and the rest of the West, both teams turned down the intensity a bit, as evidenced by both sprinkling in curious losses in the second half. In a funny way, both of their regular seasons ended once they jumped out to those great starts. Throw in both teams scoring key victories on the other's home floor in the last two years — a point Jack McCallum brings up in ":07 Seconds or Less" — and the distinction between the one- and two-seeds in the West has little importance. It really didn't matter to them who hosted a potential Game 7.
However, both coaching staffs know that San Antonio could derail their destined matchup in the conference finals. And, aside from the most pressing threat from San Antonio — the Spurs actually beating them — the West's two-seed Phoenix faces the possibility of winning a pyrrhic victory over the Spurs, only to find themselves depleted for the showdown with Dallas. The Suns will have to run a grueling four-week gauntlet to get to the NBA Finals.
3. LeBron James better be damn good in these playoffs.
In all fairness, the pressure on James isn't entirely his or his team's fault. For a player who entered the league to a Sports Illustrated cover reading, "The Importance of Being LeBron," James has consistently outperformed expectation. But 2006-07 hasn't been as kind to Akron's wunderkind. James' effort visibly lagged this year, most obviously in the season's first half.
Yes, I can read my own sentence three paragraphs above that says NBA players have to pace themselves for the season's grind. While that may work for the Phoenixes and Dallases of the league, it only flies when teams backup those doldrums with late spring success. I can accept James' January lethargy if it leads to him performing at a level above everyone's heads in April, May, and, most importantly, June. But the LeBacklash against James will be fierce if the Cavs fail to replicate, if not improve on, last season's playoff run.
4. Kobe will get off at least one game where you will call your friends to tell them to watch.
The Lakers are a runaway fright train with a riot going on in the engine room. A player named "Smush" is openly sniping at Phil Jackson. The team managed to pull off a subtraction-by-lack-of-addition move at the trade deadline, dampening their players' and fans' excitement by failing to land Jason Kidd after doing everything but hang a purple-and-gold No. 5 jersey from the rafters at Staples.
Even the league is dragging down the Lakers, painting Kobe as Dr. Richard Kimball in its campaign to track down fugitive errant elbows. Can't you just see David Stern pointing a gun at Kobe in that giant drainpipe as Kobe insists he didn't elbow Manu Ginobili on purpose, followed by Kobe jumping into the water below? We're all thinking this, right?
(And while we're on the topic, allow me to dislodge a couple of Kobe-flavored gripes stuck in my craw. First, the analysis of Kobe's second elbow-incident on Marco Jaric was hysterical. Pretty much every member of the national media said, "Well, the NBA set the precedent for the suspension with the first one on Ginobili, so they had so suspend him for this one." Are you kidding me? What kind of logic is that? Our country had the precedent of slavery for the better part of a century. Does that mean we shouldn't have reconsidered the policy when the issue came up again?
Look, I'm certainly in favor of a set of rules that applies to everyone at all times (you hear that, Dick Bavetta and Bennett Salvatore?). But to suggest that the NBA had no choice but to suspend Kobe for the second elbow based on the punishment for the first is silly. How about this? The second elbow was very similar to the first, meaning it deserved very similar punishment, if not somewhat more severe, simply because it reflected a pattern. But blind punishment in the name of precedent is absurd.
Secondly, to the producers of the NBA on ABC: when you shot your hoochie montage that bumps in and out from commercials, did nobody realize that Kobe changed his jersey from No. 8 to No. 24? Because the only other alternative is that this was shot before Kobe made the change during the summer and ABC couldn't muster the $20 bucks for each girl to dance around while the song played. And don't ask how I know how much it costs for those girls to dance for one song. Please.)
5. The NBA superstars have an attitude problem ... and I'm talking about the referees.
You thought I meant the players. As I put the finishing touches on this Sunday afternoon, I saw Joey Crawford eject Tim Duncan from Sunday's Mavs/Spurs game for laughing. Now, I understand both sides of the refereeing debate. Every year in the playoffs, the debate over the quality of officiating gets its 15 minutes. On one hand, there certainly have been plenty of dubious calls (see the 2006 Finals for the introduction). But at the same time, most teams have some sort of superstar who could seem to "get calls," and in all fairness, we aren't exactly giving credit when it's due to officials when they get it right. Being an NBA ref has to be very, very hard.
But watch this postseason and see if there isn't a trend to the controversy. Isn't it a little odd that Dick Bavetta and Joey Crawford, most notably, almost always seem to be in the middle of it? To gauge just how highly these guys think of themselves, look no further than Bavetta's race against Charles Barkley at the All-Star Game. Was it hilarious? Of course. Was it the highlight of a very watered-down weekend? You bet.
But could you see Ed Hochuli taking on an NFLer in a bench-press contest or John Hirschbeck taking batting practice before the Home Run Derby? Of course not, because in all of the other sports, the refs and umps try to stay out of the spotlight. We always hear the ruling that the ref or ump is "part of the field" when a ball or player collides with him (or Violet Palmer). I think there's a more symbolic meaning to that rule that some of these guys could look into.
And this brings us back to Crawford giving Duncan a second technical Sunday for laughing while on the bench. Would he have done the same in the Western Conference Finals? Most likely not. But read the following quote after the game Sunday and tell me Crawford doesn't have an inflated sense of his own importance: "And then he went over to the bench and he was over there doing the same stuff behind our back," Crawford said. "I hit him with one (technical) and he kept going over there, and I look over there and he's still complaining. So I threw him out."
Doing stuff behind his back? If Crawford has enough attention to monitor 10 players on the floor, plus two head coaches in perpetual motion and play teacher, sending Duncan to the principal's office for throwing spit-balls, then this man needs a job with the CIA. Just keep an eye on Bavetta and Crawford during these playoffs. And don't look now, but we're looking at LeBron vs. Shaq/D-Wade in the first round, not to mention the rematch between Kobe's elbows and Raja Bell's flying clothesline maneuver. When you're watching and reading analysis of the referees that supersedes the actual games, well, don't say I didn't warn you.
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