It is so on today in Washington, when Game 4 gets going in primetime between the Cavaliers and the Wiz.
Wizards coach Eddie Jordan is doing his best Pat Riley by pointing out ahead of time how he’d like the game called differently from Game 3. We appreciate that’s part of the job now, but isn’t it all kind of obvious at this point?
Play the game, listen to the media talk about how the NBA’s so much softer now than the 80s/90s, then the coach comes out with their complaints about officiating. We have a hard time believing the refs even hear this stuff anymore, because it all sounds like a bunch of canned speeches.
“Officials are human, and they see a great move by a great player,” Jordan said. “They see a secondary defender come over or they see a hop-through move that’s a travel and they say: `That’s a great move by a great player, an exciting move; it’s a great finish, we’ll let it go.’ That’s how I look at it. Michael Ruffin gets fouled, and he’s Michael Ruffin. Gilbert Arenas doesn’t get the calls LeBron gets. LeBron gets the and-ones, and Gil doesn’t get them. It’s clear that Gil doesn’t get the calls that LeBron gets.
I’m just telling the truth. I want our players to understand that we did a lot of things to win the game, but because a traveling wasn’t called, we don’t win the game.”
Eddie, we’d look more at your 13-point third quarter as the reason you lost than one blown travelling call. Through our biased completely objective view, LeBron was fouled three times on that play, so it all evens out, yes?
And didn’t Gil get a questionable and-1 on the previous play when he clearly should’ve been called for a charge on LeBron? Or what about the play right before that, when he barreled headfirst into Varejao, but somehow had his head snap backward? Here – for all of you DCers who think this thing is fixed:
1) Why have the Wiz shot 20 more free throws than Cleveland in the series?
2) Why did the “crooked refs” allow Z to foul out with five minutes to play?
3) Why didn’t Haywood get suspended, or even a flagrant, after he clotheslined LeBron in Game 2?
4) Why does the Washington crowd have the enthusiam level of a summer league game?
If you’re looking for a series to get ugly, this is the one, and not just because of Caron Butler and Michael Ruffin.
You’ve got a Wiz team (who thinks they should be up 2-1) at big risk of having it all slip away, and their sole focus is stopping LeBron James by any means possible. With all the talk about roughing him up in Game 2 doing the job, you can be sure LBJ’s first drive to the hole tonight will be met with great anticipation. It should set the tone for the entire game.
In conclusion, yes or something. Something even better than yes.
Let’s get this other junk out of the way, so we can charge headfirst into today’s true passion: complaining about Eddie Jordan.
Detroit Bad Boys cared about last night’s loss more than the Pistons themselves.
Jeremy Piven carried Vanessa Marcil out of a bar. We only mention this because we needed an excuse to do that Photoshop thingie, and because asthetically speaking, Vanessa Marcil is our ideal woman.
Go read this girl’s blog – she’s good looking, knows about sports, and is a fellow Buckeye.
New Jersey ties it up 2-2 with the Pacers, and suddenly it’s all not so scary anymore. Once again, only one team came to play, which is why we refuse to watch this series.
Deadspin loves the NFL Draft, hates Chris Berman. YAYsports! hates the NFL draft, hates Chris Berman. Agreed, except we hate both.
Clippers – one win from the second round. Melo – one loss from perpetual sad face.
Raptors HQ hands out their grades in an extensive review of Toronto’s season.
Dirk and the Mavs done broke dem Grizzlies’ hearts. Congrats to Zack.
We’ve got a teaser poster ready for Project: YAYsummer! that will be unveiled tomorrow. We’re likely going to turn this into a straight pledge drive, as Jason at LowPost.net suggested. Sonia has seen what we’re planning, and she’ll vouch for us when we say, “uh, yeah, you’ll want to see this happen.”
We love how they set up the schedule this weekend – basically, all the series we find boring went yesterday, and all the ones we’re into are today.
What that means is we were planted in front of the TV all day Saturday anyway, even though it made us miserable. That said, one highlight was surely Milwaukee’s rout of Detroit.
There was a real subtlety in how the Bucks did this, and it’s a strategy not often seen in the NBA anymore. They attempted to put the ball through the hoop more than the Pistons, and their wily antics completely worked. Chauncey Billups was completely indifferent and unintimidated stunned.
“It’s simple,” Billups said. “Our defense wasn’t what it normally always is. They got cooking, for sure, but we helped that. We gave them too many shots in their sweet spots and it was like a snowball effect. They just kept going and going. Give them credit. They came to play.”
Translation – “yeah, we’re kinda bored.”
It’s cute to go read how excited they are in Milwaukee, but let’s face it, short of huge asteroids coming down and destroying Detroit, the Bucks aren’t winning this series.
Truth time – we had a whole ending to this post written out about how this one certain movie makes us cry, but then we realized we used that joke somewhere already. You may have caught it if you logged on during the correct one minute window it was up during.
If you missed it, you’re quite lucky. It was bad the first time, and somehow, despite the exact same wording, it was worse the second time. The thought naturally becomes, “are we running out of material or is it just Sunday?” Like this paragraph we’re in right now – no idea how to end it. Nuthin’. We got nuthin’.
Great win by the Kings last night at the buzzer to bring the series to 2-1. Not much chance they win this thing, but at least the air got cleared a bit for Frenchie.
If you’re even a casual NBA fan, we don’t really need to tell you what happened in Cavs-Wizards Game 3.
All three playoff games were incredible last night, and LeBron’s performance was arguably the best. 41 points, game-winning bucket, and – let’s stop there.
We don’t care if he travelled on the last play. He was also fouled about three times, and those didn’t get called, either. All-in-all, that was one of the most technically sloppy games of these playoffs, with both teams making horrible mental errors and the officials blowing calls on both ends. It’s actually kind of funny to watch fans on both team’s message boards claim it was fixed.
Regardless, any loss leads to frustration – it’s understandable. Was anyone more frustrated than Washington Times writer Tom Knott, however?
It was no surprise to see the Cavaliers cut into the lead and eventually pull even at 67-67 late in the third quarter, when James made a two-handed, backhand pass to the Amish-looking center that resulted in an easy basket.
James gave his ugly-face pose at this point, so you knew he was feeling fairly comfortable. James has a thing about making ugly faces, for whatever reasons, which is not really a transcendent quality.
If you are determined to be one of Nike’s leading shoe salesman, you should know the ugly face might discourage a number of potential buyers. Who likes dealing with a clerk making an ugly face?
Awesome – in the face of defeat, resort to calling the other team poopy-pants. Of course, we do things like that all the time, but that’s because we’re a professional amateur.
Truth be told, we weren’t sure we’d be alive this morning, as we had a full-on panic attack in the final minute of that game. It’s been awhile since we’ve done this playoff thing, y’know.
Game 4 Sunday should be awesome, but both these teams need to cut down on the mental errors. In the final minute alone, the Wiz threw an inbound pass directly to Flip Murray and the Cavaliers left Gilbert wide, wide, wide, wide open on the final shot of the game.
There’s every chance that if they do that again, he hits it and then we’ll be dead, but that why the NBA Playoffs are so much better than the NCAA tourney. The one-and-done format is fun, but there’s no chance of actual death due to escalating game-to-game tension.
Much like the “when will Cleveland get some help for Drew Gooden” question has been nagging the Cavaliers all year, “when will Kobe step aside for Luke Walton” has been an ongoing drama in Los Angeles for years.
Well, last night it finally happened, as #8 took eighteen shots to Luke’s nineteen. If you subtract one from the other, you get one, which is how many games the Lakers are up on the Suns now.
This is pleasing for everyone, confusing for some, but it’s hard to argue with the results.
“Never happened before,” Walton said, grinning. “Not even in practice. It started during the last couple of games of the regular season. We know this is how we have to play to win.”
“This is not about my shots or Kobe’s shots,” Odom said. “It’s about the name across the chest, which says, ‘The Lakers.’ “
Actually Lamar, you’ve maybe been in LA too long, because there’s no “the” before “Lakers” on your jersey. We’ll withhold the complete judgement just in the case you have “The Lakers” literally tattooed across your the chest.
A the Suns win on the Sunday brings everything back to the even in the universe, but for now the Lakers are totally in the charge, as evidenced by the unbelievable faces the Steve Nash has been making. If you only followed this series via the pictures, you’d think he was the greasiest, strangest little the person the you’d ever seen.
Luckily, we’ve been watching on the TV, so we know he’s only the second greasiest, squarely behind the Caron Butler.
If you haven’t refreshed your browser lately, now might be the time to do so – take a look at just how different things are. It’s all changed, as you can see. We’ll have all our thoughts on last night’s action up in a bit, but for now, it’s time to celebrate this blog’s 1000 posts, each and every one of which is a complete masterpiece.
Yes, that link was to our very first Photoshop attempt, way back on August 15th, 2005. We were also apparently channeling Bill Simmons that day – if we were a wiser man, we’d delete it from the database. That would ruin the whole 1000th post thing, however.
[click to continue…]
Enough of this “Brendan Haywood has lifted the Earth over his shoulders and changed the world” garbage.
LeBron was missing layups before Haywood hit him, and he was missing layups afterward. You have to wonder how many people actually watched the game, and how many are trying to retrofit it into their personal agenda they require to fill their word-count. (Wilbon)
As Bill Livingston points out in the Plain Dealer, LeBron has never shied away from contact, and he didn’t even shy away from it after the Haywood hit.
The Dallas Mavericks sicced Erick Dampier and then Didier Ilunga-Mbenga on James on March 29, both delivering real flagrant fouls, unlike the legal, but rigorous, one Haywood administered. The Cavs won easily, clinched a playoff spot, and afterward James, an all-state wide receiver in high school, who occasionally harbors what-might-have-been thoughts about that sport as Michael Jordan did about baseball, said such hits were nothing compared to football.
“Playing a physical game is not going to bother us,” James said after practice Thursday at The Q. “I can play a physical game or a finesse game.”
LeBron simply had a let-down game, and he’s spent the past two days seething over it, so be prepared.
We know that’s not as fun as Brendon Haywood recasting himself as a series-changer, but let’s try to remember a few things.
1) LeBron James is still LeBron James.
2) Brendon Haywood is still Brendon Haywood.
3) Caron Butler is still creepy and weird looking.
4) Michael Jordan had 19 points the game after his 63 however-many years ago.
5) Brawl-hall.com, when civilly asked to stop stealing our material, called us names, agreed to stop (adding that we “post too much anyway”), and said that we “obviously don’t understand what it takes to be a webmaster”.
Well, dude? Thank. Fucking. God. ‘Cause that would make us a nerd, yes? We were so gonna go Philly, too, but with the next emission being POST 1000, we’re glad we don’t have to.
Game 3 tonight.
FoxSports is running a blog contest to find the Next Great American Sportswriter. We’re considering entering, not because we particularly want to write for FoxSports, but because we want to see how many days we can get away with just copying our material from here over to there.
UPDATE: By cleverly disguising our logo, we can’t fail. Go leave comments there so we get really FoxPopular.
Today’s Celticsblog wonderment goes to Allen Iverson.
Detroit Bad Boys got their Inflatable Ben Wallace and it’s freaking awesome.
There’s just no way this Kobe #24 Theory about the Jordan XXIIIs is true, and here’s the reason: Michael Jordan would never allow it to happen, and there’s no way Nike would do what Kobe wanted over what Michael wanted.
Nothin’ But Nets is disgusted, has had enough, doesn’t want to see anymore, and if they win Game 4, that will all reverse. Such is the playoffs.
Just when you thought a TV show couldn’t be any more grating, Rosie O’Donnell joins The View. The real question is why does a show we don’t watch bother us so very badly?
Need4Sheed is looking for a female Pistons fan to talk about being a female Pistons fan.
It’s a nice thought, but we’re guessing the autistic kid hitting 3s movie not only never gets an Oscar, but doesn’t get past being a TV movie. It’s a cool story and actually made us do the cry, but c’mon.
The Bucks aren’t giving up on winning at least one game!
Nugs beat the Clips. We should interested, but we’re not.
How has Paris Hilton not gotten even a little melanoma yet?
There are a couple reasons magazines are becoming obsolete.
One is global warming causing things like the Great Neosporin Shortage of 2004, which redered papercuts deadlier than ever here in the future. The other are things like ESPN the Magazine’s NBA Playoff Preview arriving yesterday with the cover story “Why Nobody Wants to Play the Nets”.
After Jermaine O’Neal dropped 37 and 15 last night, everyone’s sleeper/darling pick to contend is down 2-1, with Game 4 coming up on the road again. Vince Carter noticed things during the game, always the sign of an astute player.
Carter, who missed all 10 of his shot attempts in the second half, noticed that the Pacers clamped down on defense in the third quarter.
“They hit their shots and we just plain missed ours,” he said. “It obviously wasn’t a good quarter for us. We just know we have to regroup and bounce back Saturday.”
There’s also that whole thing where they clocked you and you couldn’t shoot after that, Vince, although it’s not like you have a history of such things.
Could someone who is actually watching this series tell us whose series it is?
Is it the Nets’ series or the Pacers’ series? We feel like it’s probably one we should be watching, but we can’t stand Jermaine O’Neal, we can’t stand Vince Carter, we can merely tolerate Jason Kidd, and we don’t think we’ve ever been as indifferent about a player as we are toward Richard Jefferson.
Plus, something about the scores (even though Game 1 was close) and the recaps makes it seem like it’s just not competitive. One of those things where one team shows up and the other doesn’t, depending on what night it is. Is this correct or not?
