Where Will Amazing Happen? (Bulls-Celtics Game 7 Open Thread)

I’ll be here listening to the game on the radio, but in the meantime …

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In My Dreams Tonight

You know it:

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Deciding the Game

Predictably, Bill Simmons doesn’t think that Rajan Rondo’s shot to the head of Brad Miller in the closing seconds of yesterday’s Game 5 – “about the most blatantly obvious flagrant foul you could commit”, John Hollinger calls it – was worthy of being tagged a flagrant. “That play shouldn’t have decided the game,” Simmons writes. “And it didn’t.”

Sorry, but huh? An inexplicably great play call leaves a man open for a potential game-tying layup, he gets whacked across the face, and then he has to try and make a pair of free throws with less than three seconds left. Oh, and he has to do it with his eyes glazed over and blood dripping from his mouth, since if his coach takes him out of the game then the opposing coach gets to choose a sub. Yep – in contrast to giving the Bulls a chance to tie the game with free throws and then win it with an unlikely last second shot, letting Rondo off the hook didn’t decide the game at all.

But heck, why stop there? After all, Miller is a pretty good free throw shooter, and it’s not as if the foul left him blind or paralyzed. So why even bother whistling the foul? I mean, couldn’t that have decided the game, if say Miller had made the first free throw and then the Bulls had slammed in a miss on the second? Or maybe they could have called a flagrant foul on Miller, since then the Celtics would’ve gotten two shots and the ball, in which case the play would have been really irrelevant!

As Simmons might predictably have put it had the call gone the other way, The NBA! Where game-deciding non-calls on career-threatening fouls happen!

Anyway, apologies to those of you who don’t care. But it’s my blog, dammit, and given the amount of whining the Celtics were doing after Game 4, I feel entitled to vent. Hopefully the refs will look the other way when I run onto the court in the final seconds of a close Game 6 and remove Kendrick Perkins’s head from his shoulders. Because, you know, we wouldn’t want to let that decide the game.

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Go Bulls!

Let me second Bill Simmons: the Game 3 blowout notwithstanding, this Bulls-Celtics series is already a classic, and not even the shoddy officiating and the horror that is Jeff Van Gundy with a microphone could keep this from being one of the most enjoyable Sunday afternoon Bulls games I can recall watching. (And there have been a lot of those, albeit mostly in the rather distant past – the only thing missing, really, is the trip out to the driveway to recreate, wagging tongue and all, my favorite Michael Jordan moments.) Derrick Rose is just incredible, Ben Gordon quite possibly superhuman, and despite their inexcusable numbers of turnovers, missed free throws, and forehead-slapping defensive lapses the banged-up Bulls have gone blow for blow with a team which, even without Kevin Garnett, still plays a group of smart, talented veterans who are clearly capable of a return to the Finals.

Meanwhile, along with the point guard battle and the I-can’t-believe-I’m-seeing-this shotmaking contest between Gordon and Ray Allen, one of the most interesting aspects of this series has got to be the teams’ respective head coaches. Vinny Del Negro is just in his first year, and the prevailing sentiment among the Bulls faithful seems to be that he’s a bust and will be on his way out by next Christmas. But don’t forget that Doc Rivers, who after last year’s championship is widely regarded as one of the NBA’s best, got pretty much the same treatment through 2007 – and Simmons, who in the column I just linked credits Del Negro with “putting on an anti-coaching clinic through the ages”, was easily among the worst offenders. (I’m not sure that he’s ever accounted for his sudden change of mind, either.) I don’t mean this as an argument in favor of Del Negro, who has made some awful decisions this year and whose improvement over his predecessors has obviously got a ton to do with winning the Derrick Rose jackpot and John Paxson’s brilliant trade for John Salmons and Brad Miller, but if Rivers and Mike Brown can be back-to-back Coaches of the Year there’s an obvious case to be made for patience.

Anyway: 50-55 wins for the Bulls next year, and a similarly impressive trip to the playoffs in what is increasingly looking like the stronger of the NBA’s two conferences. But first we’ve got to take Boston to seven. Bank it like a Ben Gordon runner.

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Death of Print Journalism Watch

Veteran sportswriter John Walters has recently taken up a gig guest-blogging at Notre Dame football über-blog The Blue Gray Sky. His latest post discusses the democratizing effects of the rise of online sports journalism, and along the way serves up some utterly infuriating anecdotes – including one in which an editor at Sports Illustrated changed “grunge” to “groove” in an article’s mention of an athlete’s musical preferences, and when pressed on the decision refused to acknowledge that such a thing as grunge music existed – from his many years of working in print. Here’s how Walters concludes his piece:

This much I do know. Fifteen years later, the “Inside College Football” section of SI is well-written, meticulously edited, fact-checked and copy-edited. But the earliest you’ll ever read it is five days after Saturday’s games. In terms of 21st century college football coverage, it may as well be written on papyrus.

Filed under: media/culture, sports

Nifty Time-Waster of the Day

The Times has viewer-controllable, all-around panoramic views of the new Yankees and Mets stadiums, both of which look gorgeous even while, as George Vescey rightly notes, they can’t help striking one as strangely anachronistic monuments to the triumph of a consumeristic excess that suddenly seems a distant memory. (The new Yankee Stadium is apparently damned expensive to get a seat in, too.) Very cool stuff, though, and worth a spin (as it were); here’s a screenshot of the shadow of the poor guy who apparently got stuck holding up the camera to take the on-the-field pictures at the new Shea:

Earlier: How the A-Rod era Yankees made sure that the new Yankee Stadium would never be my Yankee Stadium; another variation on that theme.

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April Fools

This one had me going until they quoted Coach Weis saying that a day of practice should be enough preparation for USC. I can’t believe I bought the line about increasing the number of NBC’s television timeouts … I’ve actually been pretty on the ball with sniffing out the jokesters today.

Nice job, BGS.

Filed under: miscellany, sports

Makes Me Want to Cutler Myself

Apparently the Jets have expressed interest in acquiring Jay “Don’t Hurt My Feelings or I’ll Demand a Trade” Cutler from the Broncos. Because, you know, going after an interception-prone gunslinger with an outsized ego and a near-guarantee for clubhouse unpleasantness just worked out great last time …

Questions: Can’t we just get Chad Pennington back? And, does this show that it’s possible for a sports franchise to turn itself into the latest version of the Yankees without having had any postseason success? Or did Dan Snyder and the Redskins already take care of that?

Earlier: I told you the Brett Favre era would be a mistake. I was right.

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My Bracket

I’ve got Oklahoma over UConn in the championship game, with Pitt and Louisville as the other semifinalists and Kansas, Marquette, VCU, and North Carolina rounding out the Elite Eight. Western Kentucky over Illinois is my obligatory 12-5 upset, and I’ve got every #10 seed except for Minnesota winning in the first round and WKU upsetting Gonzaga to get to the Sweet Sixteen, with no one from the Big Eleven except for Purdue getting past the round of 32. Before taking my advice, however, please note that last year I came in last in my department pool, though this did mean that I got my money back. You all?

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Posted Without Comment

Nothing to see here, non-Notre Dame football fans:

H/T: domer.mq of Her Loyal Sons, who adds a great line:

When top football recruits ask ND players, “who’s Bon Jovi?” the players respond, “I think he’s the guy that sings most of the songs that get played at the ‘Backer.

Actually, I’m the guy who sings most of the songs that get played at the ‘Backer. Er, was the guy.

Filed under: miscellany, sports