Letters to the Editor
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mavs and other things
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.