A certain someone made a bold prediction prior to the season that the Memphis Grizzlies would be facing the Indiana Pacers in the NBA finals. OK, it was me. Which means you can guess which way my prediction is going to go, for better or worse. You do not get to divorce yourself from your preseason predictions unless something crazy happens along the way, such as a team trading away its best player of something similar (that was the case last
In terms of competitiveness and venom, nothing comes close to matching what this series should bring. These teams simply do not like one another, and their rivalry has been building over the course of two seasons in which the hatred between the teams has only grown with each encounter. If you had to pick one series and one series only to watch every minute of, this would be the winner among those who like their hoops with some histrionics. If you had
Well, we might as well start things by reminding everyone how the Spurs should be the team calling themselves the defending champions, except for the part where Gregg Popovich had his three best players on the bench at the end of Game 6 in Miami. That’s when we stopped calling him “genius” and vowed to never do so again. So this spring, we will laud Pop with congratulations for finishing with the league’s best record, for putting together a 19-game winning streak,
I was listening to P.J. Carlesimo on the radio yesterday morning (how many of y’all remember that he guided the Brooklyn Nets last season?), and he made a good point. Almost never is there an upset in a 4 vs. 5 series. The teams are usually too evenly matched. In this case, we have two teams that finished with identical 54-28 records. Houston gets the home court by virtue of winning the season series 3-1. And if they get past the Blazers,
Well, this series brings together two polar opposites. On the one hand we have the Miami Heat going for their three-peat, striving to get as close to perfection as possible before they move on to the second round. On the other hand we have the “just happy to be here” Bobcats, who have never won a playoff series in their existence and aren’t about to start now. The Bobcats are listed at 250-1 to win the championship, the same odds as the
The Wizards made us really, really upset on the final night of the regular season by moving up from sixth place to fifth place, denying us a rematch of last year’s Bulls-Nets series that went seven games and was won by Joakim Noah in his old home borough. Well, I guess it wasn’t the Wizards’ fault. All the Nets needed to do to lock up that matchup (and avoid the Heat in the second round) was beat Cleveland. Instead, they lost
Do they have to play this series? Do we really have to watch it and pay close attention? Look, we all know how bad the Leastern Conference was this season, and we all knew that there would be at least one bad team crashing the party. And the one we ended up with is an Atlanta Hawks team whose general manager, Danny Ferry, said a few weeks back that it really didn’t matter if the Hawks qualified for the postseason or
The twists and turns for the Brooklyn Nets and Toronto Raptors over the course of the regular season could almost rival those of the red and purple weddings on a certain Game show based in Westeros. Brooklyn had championship aspirations ever since it acquired Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett on draft night, but ended the 2013 calendar year at 10-21, with All-Star center Brook Lopez out for the season, and searching for answers under rookie head coach Jason Kidd. While Pierce