There’s an interesting and undeniable symmetry at work this evening, as both #1 seeds are playing on the road, down 3-2.
While some longtime readers look at that and say “Symmetry! Oooh! Someone got a dictionary!”, others know that this is a natural time for an edition of Matchup!!! No, no, says the author. You think we’d go for the obvious in this situation?
This is completely different.
Also – Jason Terry says he’s sorry about punching Fin in the crotch area. For the record – we’re not really confident in the Mavs prediction. (Sorry.)
Click to enlarginateWe’re a little distracted by things in the Eastern Conference, but the happenings out West are something to behold, as well.
In addition to Clippers-Suns battling for the orange roundie tonight in Game 6 (consider this open letter to the Clips your preview), the Mavs and Spurs are in an absolute war. The Spurs won the latest battle last night, and this thing has the feel of a 7-game series – one we desperately want the Mavs to win.
Whatever happens, everybody in Texas is watching, even when Katharine McPhee’s big boobs are the competition.
The Mavericks-Spurs on TNT earned a 16.5 household rating, which translates into approximately 379,500 homes. Fox’s penultimate American Idol elimination of the season scored a 13.3 rating for Channel 4, the equivalent of almost 306,000 homes. It is rare for Idol not to rule Wednesday nights. Idol, for example, had no problem with the Winter Olympics back in February. ABC’s Lost clocked in at 11.2 for Channel 8. That’s about 257,600 homes.
So that means the Spurs are -
LeBron James just continues to amaze, can we all agree on that? We just watched last night’s game on NBATV again, and we’re re-pumped (as all hell).
We spent awhile on the phone with a friend back home this morning, and he said the city is equally pumped. After that we both agreed that having friends is nice and made plans to speak again.
Look, we can’t talk about Tim Duncan and Le Crepe when this is all going on, okay? We can’t do anything, actually. It’s a constant rotation of checking the comments here, going to Cavs message boards, scouring everywhere for new words to read, eagerly anticipating what they’ll say on PTI, and playing Super Cocoa Man at the Fruity Pebbles website.
In other words, life is perfect. Don’t forget to do your Who Shot Mamba? dime-toss, if you haven’t already!
It’s too bad David Stern’s rejiggering of the playoff seeding didn’t happen for this season, because the Mavs’ brand new 3-1 lead over the Spurs would be just a little cooler if it were in the next round.
Yep, everything is perfect in Dallas. Jerry Stackhouse didn’t even try to blow the game last night, and the Mavericks won a fun-filled game in OT.
We watched this one closely – like from 2 feet away – and while it’s hard to say one team really wants it more than the other in a tight overtime game…the Mavs clearly want this more.
“Our guys are hungry,” Josh Howard said. “Every guy in this locker room wants this bad. And it shows.”
“It’s a heavyweight fight, a slugfest,” coach Avery Johnson said. “Each team was throwing punches. Fortunately, we had a little bit more in the tank in overtime.”
Yep – in the heavyweight slugfest, always take the German/billionaire combo over the Argentia/France/Virgin Island threesome. That’s a new rule we just made up for this year, since every other year, it’s been the other way around.
Seriously though, the Mavs just look like they care a little more. The Spurs can play the “Dick Bavetta is a terrible ref” card over all they want, but the fact is, Tony Parker loves the Eiffel Tower.
He goes there, and he looks at it, and he gets all emotional, and wipes his tears on his beret, and then he goes and says things like “Oooh-la-la! La mancaille!! Et tu la Louis XIV!! Le guillotine! Le guillotine dans la 07!!”
That said, don’t think for a second that if the Mavs were losing we wouldn’t be making ignorant fun of Germany, because we totally would.
Well, it’s been a downer morning, between Cavalier losses and content-stealing losers, so let’s hop on something everyone can behind – the Mavs slapping around the Spurs in their own building.
Tim Duncan had some foul trouble, Tony Parker has an ongoing le boo-boo, and the Mavericks made the necessary adjustments to tie everything up at a game apiece.
Leading the way in adustimacations was Devin Harris, who got a start for Dallas and did a nice Tony Parker imitation, minus the rapping and crepes in the oven.
“We played pretty much our style and our pace this time, as opposed to Game 1,” said [Mavericks Head Coach Averionius] Johnson afterward. “A lot of that had to do with Devin being out there. We were saving him for this round. We had our eyes on this round with Devin.”
“We feel like we can get penetration,” said Harris, who played 32 minutes, doubling his playoff average. “Tony’s one of the best penetrators in the league and a way to attack him is to make him play defense.”
Much like Joe Johnson last year, Devin Harris is one of those players we’ve never actually looked at. We have no idea how the dude’s face is put together, but we’re sure glad to see he’s the anti-Spur. Anything to prevent Pistons-Spurs II is good from over here.
As for the rest of the team, we recognize each and every one of them. Seriously – if you lined of the Dallas Mavericks and were like “Hey, I’m going to read a name and then you point to which Maverick I’m talking about,” we’d be able to correctly identify every player on the first try, often without hesitation.
When it was all over, you’d have no choice but to sit back, shrug your shoulders, and admit we know our Dallas Mavericks roster inside and out. You’d have mixed feelings initially, but later on you’d realize it was an amazing way to spend an afternoon.
Usually we use that phrase as an all-purpose that can mean literally anything, but after Jerry Stackhouse’s performance in the final seconds of Spurs-Mavs I yesterday, we’re fairly certain if there were a dance, and the Mavs were attending, his teammates would be distancing themselves from him.
In case you missed it, Stack needed two to send it to OT, so he got the ball, dribbled it inexplicably back to the three-point line, made sure he was absolutely mega-covered, and launched. After the game, his teammates were polite in their assertion that what happened simply “wasn’t the play”.
In other horrible news for Mavs fans, Dirk was held to 20 by Bruce Bowen and his magical powers of being magical defensively.
“It’s nothing we haven’t seen,” Nowitzki said. “They’ve been trying to do that for years now. They’re not leaving me. I’m not going to get any open looks in this series. I know that. I’ll have to get my shots off the dribble.”
“It’s what you call bear-hug defense,” Johnson said. “That’s the new NBA rule. I’ve got to try to simulate a drill to help him in what you call that bear-hug defense.”
If you’ve read our crap for any length of tie, you’re aware the first thing we thought after hearing that was “that’d be awesome if he meant that literally.”
Two things would happen – either the Mavs spend their whole practice hugging each other, or they go to the zoo, throw Dirk in the bear exhibit, and see what happens. Game 2 is on some day that’s not today – go read a schedule.
By the way, if you thought that first sentence in this post was long, wait until you see what we have planned for May 19th, 2007. You’ll be freaking blown away. We’re actually starting on it today, because it’s going to take over a year to write.
Just so you know, when Zack tried to hijack the last post with Mavs predictions, we almost didn’t do this preview post in retaliation.
After realizing how that cheated everybody, including ourselves, we put aside our raging fury and stormed ahead. What you’re reading here is the result. After all, we’d taken the time to drop a note to Dirk, and figured we’d better use it. (click it to read it)
This thing’s pretty even, but if there’s one advantage the Mavs have is they’re rested. The Spurs have home court, but they’re all dinged and they just played Friday night.
All the kids at ESPN are picking Spurs in 6 or 7, except for Broussard.
Mavericks Moneyball is going to a baseball game instead of watching Game 1.
We’ll be spending most of the game sweating.
The Spurs got all up in the Kings’ grillz last night and are heading back to Sacramento to try and close it out in Game 6.
There are many reasons for the San Antonio victory, not the least of which is whatever Bonzi Wells is doing in that picture. Has there ever been something we had less of a need to Photoshop? (Okay, maybe this one.)
Anyway, Manu Ginolbli shaved his beard before the tip, and while that might have willed the Spurs to victory, the real story for us is still Bonzi Wells, who put up 40 and has been unstoppable all series long.
His 12.3-rebound average is the league’s best this postseason. Wells said he’s just being Bonzi.
“I just try to hustle – that’s all I can really do,” he said. “We’ve got so many other guys that are so much better than I, and I just try to fit in and get in where I can. Make the hustle plays, the little things that guys may not want to do.”
Kings coach Rick Adelman said simply: “He’s just been a monster. They have a hard time guarding him. He’s quick, he’s aggressive, he’s strong. He’s just been spectacular.”
Seriously, we’d love to get more into the game, or even that Bonzi Wells happens to conveniently be a free agent this summer, but what the fuck is he doing in that picture?
It’s not like he’s going for Tony and accidentally threw his arm wildly in the wrong direction. He’s clearly facing Kenny Thomas and trying to shut his mouth. Does Kenny know something the rest of us don’t? Was he about to reveal some dark Wellsian secret at a crucial moment of the game?
Even his face is like “What the hell are you doing? I give! I give! I won’t say anything!”
(In case you were wondering – yes, we’re following the nationwide trend of shortselling San Antonio by writing favorably about a team they just beat instead of the Spurs themselves.)
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.
With the Spurs having clinched the first seed in the West as of last night, all the major regular season work is more or less done.
We guess that means it’s time to take a couple days and look back over the season before looking ahead to the playoffs. ESPN has handed out their awards, as has this guy who comments on the YAY.
Each of them has their own system for doing so, many of which confuse the hell out of us.
The final weights for “expected winning %” were: 2/9 to a .500 winning %, for the reasons John cites in the article; 1/9 to the team’s pythagorean win % this year; 4/9 to the team’s pythagorean win % last year; and 2/9 to the team’s cumulative pythagorean win % over the previous two years.
I then simply subtracted this hybrid “expected win %” from the team’s actual win % this season, and multiplied by 82 to get “Games Above Expected”.
Right, let us run that through our Texas Instruments Scientific Calculator we still have from 6th grade. That’s correct – we were considered gifted, which around age 23 everyone realized was a horrible miscalculation.
Here’s how we grade coaches and everything else – we sit back and think, “did that coach (or everything else) do a good job?” After a couple seconds, we pick a grade of A, B, C, D, or F. Then we move to the next coach (or next everything else). The whole process takes like a minute. Here are our final coach grades, for example:
A A A F D C B A C C C D B A A B C B- C D+ F A C A- C B B B D A+
That A+ is for Popovich, both because he clinched the West, and because like Magic Bob Weiss, he has a doppleganger who does children’s birthday parties.
Here’s what the ESPN gang thought of everything – that number after the name is how many votes they got (Our picks are in bold):
MVP: LeBron 7, Kobe 6, Steve Nash 4, Dirk 1, Biillups 1, Wade 1 *
Defensive Guy: Ben Wallace 9, Bruce Bowen 5, Kirilenko 4, Zo 1, Artest 1
Sixth Person: Mike Miller 11, Stackhouse 3, Zo 2, Speedy Claxton, Antonio McDyess, Leandro Barbosa, & Ben Gordon 1
Most Improvinated: Boris Diaw 12, David West 3, Gerald Wallace, Dwight Howard, Melo, & Diop 1
Rookie: Chris Paul 20
* We’re abstaining from the MVP – if the Cavaliers get 50 wins, we’ll give it to Bron, although the Detroit game last week still rubs us incorrectly. If the Cavs stay at 49, it goes to Kobe.
Nominations for “Sexiest Sports Blog Starting With the Letter Y and Pertaining to the NBA” are still being taken.
