Sweet Justice

The good news:

Boston beat the Pistons today, bringing us one step closer to the Lakers-Celtics final that we all have been dreaming of.

The bad news:

The Finals, again, are merely a formality, as the Lakers winning another championship is what David Brent would call...

a foregone conclusion.

Ahem.

This happens all the time, though. The NBA Finals are usually one of the least interesting series in the whole playoffs. The playoff format is a broken model of inequity. Everybody knows it, and there's little chance it will change. Lately, the only people who even watch the Finals are supporters of the teams in it. Who in their right mind, besides people in Detroit and San Antonio, would waste time watching Pistons v Spurs again? Not me, and I love basketball. I probably wouldn't watch one game. If it went to Game 7, maybe I would watch it, if that night's 60 Minutes started to drag a bit.

Anyways, great win for LA last night. Brent Barry obviously got fouled at the end of the game, and the refs didn't call it and the Spurs lost. Again, a great win. It's pretty weird being a Lakers supporter all of a sudden, for obvious reasons, but as I've been saying all year, it's not hard to like this Lakers team. What's changed? Besides the obvious personnel movement, Kobe has started to play and act like the underdog, which endears him to people like me. If there's a basketball or soccer game on, and I don't know much about the teams playing, I will support the underdog no matter what. I don't even care if a team has rad jerseys; if they're the favorites, they're the enemy. Plain and simple.

After the rape charge nonsense, Kobe turned into the underdog. The world was against him. His mugshot graced Time magazine. Rumors of trysts with strippers spread like wildfire. His coach badmouthed him in a tell-all book. And Kobe focused on basketball, and became obsessed with winning another championship. Many people doubted him, including me.

I said this one day: "Kobe Bryant will not win another championship."

I even said this: "Mark my words."

He's well on his way. I was dead wrong.

Other playoff ramblings:

- Boston and Detroit are obviously headed for another Game 7 showdown, which Boston will win because:

a) they have home court advantage,
b) Theo Ratliff, Jason Maxiell, and Rodney Stuckey are getting major playoff minutes for a banged up Detroit team, which actually isn't working out that badly for them, but seriously, give me a break, and
c) the league would do anything for a Celtics-Lakers final.

I hate using the "NBA is corrupt" line in this instance, but it's true. I know one person - ONE - who wants San Antonio to beat the Lakers, and based on what happened last night, he's up in arms about the league loving the Lakers, and they'll make so much money with a Boston/LA final, etc etc etc... and I can't really argue with him. Does that make me a hypocrite for being okay with corruption as long as the denouement benefits me, not to mention the vast majority of people who give a crap about basketball? Is my hatred of the Spurs so intense that it is affecting major internal organs? Am I a douchebag for using "denouement" as if I didn't have to look it up to read what it meant like everybody else?

- The thing is, with Doc Rivers, now that he's won the Coach of the Year award, and his team's one game away from the Finals... he will have a job forever, even if the Celtics realize he knows less about strategy than a relatively sturdy box of Cheez-its. He'll be riding this season out for twenty years. His tactical mistakes would be expected from a middle school JV team manager, if he (the team manager) was forced to take over coaching duties because the head coach got tossed. And by the way, if he's a Master Motivator (a great bureaucratic term for a boss of any kind if you don't know what they do, how they do it, or if they do it well), why can't he (Rivers) motivate Garnett to take over games? If, say, Richard Hamilton, for some reason, is checking Garnett, possibly because Flip Saunders is more focused on his post-game meal options, why can't he (Rivers again) get Garnett (Garnett) to destroy Hamilton by banging him down low and dunking on him every time? Sure, that's mainly Garnett being too unselfish, which is a legit complaint about him, but shouldn't Doc shoulder some of the blame as well?

- Why can't TNT and ESPN stream the games online for free? Why does the NCAA do it and the NBA can't? Why can I watch Lost for free online and I can't watch NBA basketball? Are NBA execs really ignorant enough to think that it wouldn't be a wise business decision to take advantage of the Internet to the full extent? At the very least, offer it for a monthly fee. It seems to me that more people would watch the games, and more people would be exposed to the advertising, and the NBA would become an even bigger force globally.

- How can Tyler Perry's House of Payne be the "highest rated show ever on cable television"? TNT actually used those words to describe the show the other night. Furthermore, who is Tyler Perry? Is he the dad in the show, or the creepy guy wearing a turtleneck who walks onto the screen at the end of the advertisements? Is he such a household name to the extent that anything he does now is preceded with his name, like the Sixth Sense guy? Don't people need to be responsible for something popular to earn name recognition? Ladies and Gentlemen, Tyler Hinds' and Kevin Thomas' Rip City Forever!

- On a similar note, my friend Travis has determined that the new Bill Engvall show looks like a "third-rate Home Improvement." I concur.

- I know, I know - the site looks like crap. Give me a few days, it will look better.

TJH