Can I have last weekend back?
I mean, seriously. The playoff games were duds, almost all of them. And the one game that went to overtime happened so early Saturday afternoon, lunch was not even finished. Watching playoff games should never feel like a chore, but it sort of felt that way the past two days.
The second-most compelling thing I saw on video was Blake Griffin posterizing Aron Baynes twice in a row, and technically that did not happen over the weekend because the clock had already struck midnight in New York when those dunks happened.
Finishing in first place in video of the weekend was the sickening TMZ smartphone video of Thabo Sefolosha getting struck in the leg by an NYPD officer who swung a baton at him while numerous other officers took him down and handcuffed him.
Sports Business Daily is reporting that ESPN’s weekend ratings were flat compared to a year ago, and TNT’s three games Sunday were down 7 percent from a year ago — this despite the fact that one of those games was Clippers-Spurs, which was thrilling to any neutral observer simply for seeing the Clippers finally look like a finely-tuned product that confounded everything Gregg Popovich through at them. Hall of Fame columnist Mark Heisler weighs in on that Game 1 in this column.
So are we seeing the imminent demise of the Spurs?
To that question, I will pose one of my own: Do you remember the Spurs’ 21-point loss almost exactly one year ago against the Dallas Mavericks? What? You didn’t?
Well, Noah Coslov of CineSport remembered it, and he and I had a lively discussion about the Spurs’ comeback hopes in what is the one and only (thus far) truly compelling first-round series.
Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. Follow him on Twitter.