Letters to the Editor
michaeljb
Published Letters: 10 Editor's Choice: 3
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mavs and other things
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm more willing now than I was to call Nowitski a great player, though I might say a great offensive player is more accurate. He's an excellent defensive rebounder, but still pretty awful on straight up D (just watch every time he got switched to Duncan, it was a massacre, plus his lateral quickness defensively is suspect), but I was very impressed by how hard he played offensively and especially how he went at the rim in that final shot, this after coming up well short and fouling from behind on two previous plays (though one letter writer makes a good point about what we'd be saying had Ginobli made that little 5 footer at the buzzer. Conversely, what would we be saying had Dirk's drive to the basket rolled out and they'd lost? We'd still be impressed with the drive, but there would be some voices saying he can't finish when it really counts. Makes you realize how NBA reps really teeter on a knife-edge of chance).
And I really don't get the letter writer who finds the NBA playoffs boring; seems to me he just must not like basketball much, though to use a mid-season game against the Hornets as an example seems disingenuous at best. The NBA season is too long, everyone knows that, and teams inevitably have to coast their way through sections of it (Jordan's Bulls were brilliant at coasting for long sections of a game, then putting on little 5 minute spurts at the end of quarters, just enough to keep them ahead without having to exert too much energy through the entire game). But these playoffs have been magnificent, the best players in the world playing as hard as they can from beginning to end; the quality of play, the intensity, and the athleticism is so far beyond college basketball (which I only mention because it's a classic sports fan thing to decry the quality of play in the NBA while trumpeting the pureness of the NCAA), it's like two different sports.
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da flop
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I guess it's that time of year when some sportswriter gets all self-righteous about flopping. Is it annoying? Well, duh. And as bad as Manu is, no one compares to Reggie Miller who used to do his Raggedy Andy thing out on the three point line if anyone got near him while he was shooting, flailing his arms and legs like he'd been shot, it was just about the ugliest thing going and worked at least half the time.
The better question is, what is the alternative? Do we really need to give refs one more judgement call on something like that, with a technical foul shot and the ball in the balance? As ugly as it is, right now when Bell (for example) goes to the floor on what seems like a flop, the ref feels like he has to call something (because a player went down hard) and it's a 50/50 proposition as to who gets the foul called on them. As flawed as that is, it seems far preferable to a new rule that awards a technical, forcing the ref to once again make a judgement call on whether it was a flop or not.
And to the letter writer who brought up that tired mantra about traveling in the NBA, have you been watching? Particularly in the second round, they were calling traveling consistently on both sides of the ball. Tony Parker alone must've gotten called for traveling half a dozen times in the Mavs series, almost always on some spinning up and under move around the rim where replays show he did indeed shuffle that pivot foot.
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heat/mavs
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree it's amazing to talk about this series and not mention Wade, but I think the Mavs can still win the series if Wade just goes off and scores 35 each night because Shaq remains the key. Wade may be the best young player in the game (and I rate him over LeBron at this point, because he's a better shooter and has much better shooting mechanics than James and because he's head and shoulders above James as a defensive presence), but Shaq is the key. If he can keep his energy level up and keep out of foul trouble (something which largely depends upon how the refs are calling the game), he remains the most unstoppable force in the league. Just ask Ben Wallace, who did a fine job last year on a lazy, out of shape Shaq, but who was simply dominated this year by Shaq. I still think Shaq remains one of the great disappointments in league history; with his size and athleticism, he should've been in his prime a 30ppg/20rebounds/5 blocked shots guy and never was, mostly because he was never really committed to getting in great shape and doing the work he had to do, but he has a chance to redeem himself this year and should he win a fourth championship with a second team (and I don't rate his Lakers team that highly. Look who they beat in the Finals: Philly and the Nets twice), he has to be considered a top five center all time.