I knew today was going to be a weird day from the start. I woke up to see a headline in the Boston Globe, one of the day's lead story in a major metropolitan newspaper, to the effect that some jackass with a pseudonymous blog (not me obviously) managed to get himself revealed in open court. He actually included a thinly veiled account of the daily proceedings of his trial for medical malpractice in his blog. As far as I'm concerned, important personal details have no business in a blog so long as the blogger wants to keep a private life apart from the blogging life. I'm not sure yet what the details are on the settlement of the other blogger's case look like, but I bet it was one hell of an expensive mistake.

Then as I was driving through a neighborhood in Boston at 7 this morning (I can't tell you which one, lest I compromise my somewhat secret identity), I found myself behind a Nissan SUV. The guy driving it was rocking a cowboy hat. At 7 AM. In Boston. And not the metropolitan area, either. The city itself. If that's not a bad omen for the start of a day, I'm not sure what is.

And there is the whole A Rod mess. So what if he yelled at a guy who was trying to field a pop fly at third base? If any other player on any other team did that it wouldn't have been a story. If one of the Red Sox players did that, Red Sox Nation would be fawning over him as though he cured polio. But since it's A Rod, it's the worst thing that has ever been done on a baseball diamond, or at least since he slapped the ball away from Bronson Arroyo. People just need to leave the guy alone for a while.

But tonight's post is really about basketball. The NBA is slowly wasting away before our eyes, and it's almost laughable. I'm not blaming the refs or the league for the on-court violence which is a far bigger problem in my eyes than the off court violence associated with the current NBA player. This degeneration from basketball to a sort of half-assed rugby is the responsibility of the players. They put up with it, so why should the league address it. Every team that whines when its star is hacked turns a blind eye when its goons maul the opposing star. So the players need to do fix this themselves.

And it starts with personal pride. Not ego, but honest-to-goodness "I did my damn job the way it ought to be done to the best of my damn ability" pride. For the love of God, Bill Russell would have been scandalized into committing ritual seppuku if he defended Chamberlain the way Prince and Hamilton played LeBron tonight and he were a samurai. A little bit of contact is fine, but a player ought to find a new line of work if he can't guard his man without hand checking him 10 times in a 24 second possession.

The three most egregious instances of shameful basketball came in the second overtime. First, Webber never should have gotten continuation on the foul that sent Ilgauskas packing. He carried the ball in the first place. Also, the motion which enabled him to put the ball in the basket was not the same motion which was interrupted by the Ilgauskas foul. That cannot be continuation, de facto or de jure. Finally, it probably wasn't even a foul at all.

Then there was the 24 second violation on Cleveland where they passed the ball to Varejao for some strange reason. As he fought for the loose ball, Billups splashed him. That's got to be some manner of foul. You simply cannot throw your body onto another player's body in a non-contact sport. It's just not the way it was intended to be played.

Finally, on one of Detroit's final possessions in the second overtime, Chris Webber tried to set a pick by hand-checking the Cleveland defender (I'm pretty sure it was Pavlovich). There's no way that you can set a pick with a hand check. Hell, according to strict semantics, I don't even think you can hand check on offense, but I don't know how else to describe what Webber did. Instead of positioning his body appropriately, he reached out and put his hand on Pavlovich's hip as the Cleveland player was defending another Piston.

But lost in the hype that will surround this game (and rightly so, it was a legendary performance by LeBron, he played like 3 men in the 4th quarter and 2 OTs), is a rare win-win situation for me. Phoenix has decided to take the GM title away from Mike D'Antoni and install Steve Kerr in that position. I like this move because I do not like the team, and I won't miss Kerr calling games.

First, Phoenix was on a nice run under D'Antoni. True, they have yet to advance past the Spurs or reach the conference finals. However, they have made the playoffs after a very good regular season in each of the past two years. It seems like an interesting time to mess with their chemistry in this fashion. Players seem to like D'Antoni, more to the point they have responded to his leadership fairly well when it comes to wins and losses.

And what exactly has Steve Kerr done to show that he's ready to build an NBA championship caliber NBA organization? Was it sitting next to Marv Albert night in and night out without being bitten? So what if he were a cog in title runs by the Bulls and Spurs? Where does that translate to successful GM?

After all, if that were all it took, maybe Danny Ainge would be helping to hang banners in the rafters of his own building. Can Phoenix not see the parallel? Role player on title teams, terrible broadcaster, terrible 80s hair. Ainge and Kerr might be the same person, for all intents and purposes, with the exception of one key detail. Ainge was a moderately successful coach for a couple of years. Kerr doesn't even have that on his resume. Enjoy the long descent into mediocrity and beyond, Phoenix fans.

So many of our old friends have been up to so much, it's hard to know where to begin. Daisuke Matsuzaka was trounced by the Indians and chased from the game in the 6th. Kobe Bryant has found himself sinking into a morass of his own creation in Los Angeles, but he's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore. And to top it all, there is a rumor of a new football league in the developmental stage and the Benefactor is involved.

After so many wins, I am cautiously optimistic that the Red Sox are due to fall back to earth. With any luck, they'll go straight from dizzying height to terrifying low, bypassing the creamy middle. But for a change, I'm going to do my level best not to jinx this one. After all, Carl Pavano's to do list probably reads like this now: 1). have Tommy John Surgery. 2). track down and apply savage ass whooping to pseudonymous anti-Red Sox blogger who predicted 18 win season in 2007. 3). rehab from Tommy John Surgery. So no more on the Sox for the moment.

I really hate jumping on bandwagons at late stages, but I really do not like Kobe Bryant. For those of you who have been reading this space from jump street, you know that. You also know that I am a big Elvis fan. So when I heard the series of interviews with Stephen A Smith and Dan Patrick today, it reminded me of a relatively obscure country song Elvis released in the early 70s. The song's title is "It's Your Baby, You Rock It" and it includes the following line: "You made that bed you're sleepin' in and I'm tired of hearing about it friend."

Kobe really, really, really wanted Shaq out of LA. Since Bryant was the younger of the two superstars, management obliged him and sent the Big Aristotle to Miami. Shaq has gone on to win a championship with the Heat. Kobe has yet to carry the Lakers to the second round of the playoffs. And now Kobe says team management promised to build a title contender around him in the immediate future. Bryant's hurt, he's betrayed and they lied to him. And yet I am not in tears.

It seems incredibly unlikely, but I guess there is a remote possibility that Kobe Bryant doesn't know basketball. You'd think that he might, since he's played it since childhood, his father was a pro ball player and he chose it for his career. But that might not necessarily mean he knows the game. After all, if management told him they were looking to compete at the highest level in the wake of the Shaq deal, and he believed them, Kobe is either ignorant or full of something unpleasant, particularly in the heat of summer.

The Lakers traded Shaq for Carom Butler and Lamar Odom. Shaq, at that point in his career, was a veteran of 5 NBA Finals and a three time champion. Carom Butler and Lamar Odom may have won any number of titles playing NBA Live on X Box, but neither has played so much as a minute of basketball in the NBA Finals. Moreover, they're both power forwards. They play the same damn position. How could any one not see that as a bad deal for LA?

It is true that the Lakers parlayed Carom Butler into Kwame Brown, who was supposed to be the center of the future. At the time, in literary parlance, that was rather like the Ancient Mariner from the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner trading in the albatross around his neck that weighed him down for a large metal anchor. Since then, the trade has gone on to look much worse, as Butler made the Eastern Conference All Star team this season (yeah, the East kind of blows, but it is still an All Star team) and Kwame Brown is stuck in neutral. He might not be getting worse, but he surely isn't getting better either.

None of the Lakers other moves have panned out since they let Shaq go. Lately, the "brains" of their operation have been taking a lot of heat for failing to deal for Jason Kidd at the deadline. I don't see why. Can you honestly tell me that Kidd would have made the Lakers markedly better than any of the other seven teams that qualified for the playoffs in the West? I just don't think that would have been the case.

So I'm sick of Kobe whining. This was never about winning, this was about getting away from Shaq's shadow. Now Kobe has been jarred back into reality because everything that was his now belongs to LeBron and D Wade. Wade has a ring, and LeBron is fighting the Pistons to a standstill. They're younger and more dynamic than Kobe. Kobe needs to do something or he'll lose his league.

The trouble is, fans everywhere believe he forced management to sell Shaq for pennies on the dollar. Fans have been convinced after the scoring binges of the past two years that Kobe cares more about his numbers than his team. Kobe is in danger of becoming the answer to the trivia question: "Who scored the second most points in a single NBA game?" Would that he had chosen a more dignified route around his present course to oblivion.

Then there's the Benefactor. He's already on board with the proposed venture known as the UFL. Because the American landscape needed another professional football league. Because the USFL and the WFL and the XFL were all unqualified success stories. Because the NFL is much bigger, wealthier, more powerful and infinitely better prepared to adapt its product to the environment in which it exists than it was when the AFL challenged it in the 1960s. That's why the UFL is such a good idea.

What no one on the outside of the football business looking in on it's riches seems to understand is that the AFL succeeded for a reason. It wasn't because the upstart league was able to sign huge college stars like Namath or Mike Garrett, or develop guys like Len Dawson, Lance Alworth and so many others into household names. Those factors helped, but look at the USFL who went for broke luring Herschell Walker, Jim Kelley, Steve Young, Doug Flutie and others into their league and got pretty damn broke pretty damn quick.

The real reason no football league will ever compete against the NFL the way the AFL did is simple. Because there were no collective bargaining agreements, minimum salaries and pensions back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was room for a second league to come in and start a bidding war for the solid, dependable veterans that make up the guts of a professional football team. Now the NFL has all that infrastructure in place for all 32 of its teams.

Can you imagine how much capital would be necessary to start 8 new teams at once? Not to mention creating a league office to codify the rules, set up a draft, schedule all the games and make sure that each new team has a home city and a home stadium? And on top of those headaches deal with the fact that the 2,000 best football players in the world are currently under contract to NFL teams? Any one who thinks they can do that with 8 different billionaires who have no experience in football beyond watching a game or two here and there, no current common bonds and Mark Cuban involved is dreaming.

If this new league tries to get off the ground playing in the fall on Friday nights, they'll be destroyed. Maybe they'll get a few high profile college draft picks, some older stars looking for one last big score like an aging thief in a crime drama and some other assorted has-beens and never-will-bes. That might be enough to challenge for a Grey Cup or two, but not to take money out of Jerry Jones' pocket.

People don't often realize, since it takes a little more thought than the average tool is willing to put in to the sports he or she watches on the TV, but Namath made the guarantee and his teammates won the game. Randy Beverly and Johnny Sample were two former NFL defensive backs and they made huge plays in the Red Zone to stop big drives for the Colts. In the old days, guys like that were on the open market. It's just not the case any more.

And what is the Benefactor going to do? Spend like Dan Snyder? We've all seen where that has gotten the Redskins lately. I suppose I ought to shut my mouth. If he wants to waste his money on a colossal failure in the making, that's his business. And the sooner he gets back to his new favorite pastime of hiding and trembling lest David Stern smack him down again, the better for us all.

Tonight was another interesting night watching the NESN telecast. At one point in the second or third inning, Don Orsillo brought up a topic for him to discuss with the Remdawg. I forget what it was, but it was significant because it happened with two out, so there was very little time to discuss it. Remy said curtly that he agreed with whatever point that Orsillo had tried to make during the play-by-play call of the final out of the inning. When NESN came back from commercial, Don Orsillo was very apologetic about his lack of professionalism and on went the show.

Now perhaps I'm looking for cracks in the facade that simply aren't there. If that's the case, I hope you forgive me and bear with me since there has been so very little for me to enjoy in this terrible season to date. But I got to wondering what the Remdawg is like off camera. Could it be that he straightened Orsillo out as Moe Green straightened out Fredo Corleone in Vegas in the early 50s?

Hearing Remy's uncharacteristically curt tone in the exchange prior to them cutting to commercial got me thinking about the famous Kasey Kasem rant from back in the old days of American Top Forty. I don't know if you've heard it, I know it has made the rounds of the internet several thousand times by now but in case you did miss it, or want to hear it again...have at it. It's jarringly funny to hear a guy we've always associated with a good natured affability blow his stack over something that seemed fairly trivial. And I found myself wondering whether that was what we had during the TV timeout between Remy and Orsillo.

As I thought about it some more, I started to wonder just what it would be like if some NESN engineer flipped the wrong switch and those of us watching at home got to hear the Remy-Orsillo behind the scenes conversations instead of the one billionth airing of a Wonder of It All spot that makes even the most kind-hearted among us think that Andrew Jackson's grossly inhuman policies toward the Native Americans might have had a method to the madness.

I don't know if you've seen the classic Elia Kazan film A Face In The Crowd. If you're a Sox fan, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you haven't. After all, you might have to miss a few shots of incredibly expensive bad hair day number 2,224 in a row for Hazel Mae to see a movie like that. But the film is about a bum who becomes a megastar in the early days of television through his homespun wit and man-of-the-people charm.

And if I operate under the assumption that those of you who are reading this are Red Sox fans, I must now spoon-feed the logic behind this particular rant. Remy was basically a bum as a player. Look at the Remdawg's career stats, they're not very good.He was a scrapper, a hustler, an overachiever, and kind of a bum. He's Lou Merloni with a damn good sense of timing.

Remy signed on to broadcast Red Sox games in 1988. And it took him until 2003 to become the local celebrity icon that he is to this day. In that time a lot has changed, the die hards were all but priced out of Fenway, leaving it now a place to see and be seen. Since the die hards are now sitting on their couches and watching games at home they needed some one to latch onto and embody their misguided affection for this organization.

But people love the Remdawg. I find it baffling, since I do not find him insightful or interesting. I think in large part it's due to the fact that Remy with a room temperature IQ is just a little bit smarter than the average Red Sox fan. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, as they say.

But that brings me back to my point about the movie A Face In The Crowd. After his meteoric rise to the top of a nationwide broadcasting empire, the lead character is destroyed through his own arrogance. A member of his inner circle becomes alarmed at the influence the lead has acquired over political campaigns, so she switched on the audio feed from the studio during the closing credits to one of the shows. The lead character was sitting talking to his cronies and saying unflattering things about the American public and his audience in particular. Unfortunately for him, the show was going out live coast to coast, so millions heard his insults and it killed his career.

I don't necessarily wish the same fate on Remy. After all, the odds are that the Red Sox and NESN will replace him with a broadcaster I will end up disliking even more than I dislike the Remdawg whenever his reign of terror ends. I just wonder what he's like off the air. Somehow I think that without his audience around him, Remy is not the same down to earth boy from Fall River who lucked his way into his celebrity status. And I'd really like to hear it.

I promised earlier this week that I would go into greater detail on exactly why I think the Bears would be ill-served in trading Lance Briggs for Donovan McNabb as very, very, very vague rumors have proposed. You will have to bear with me, as it is currently just short of 10PM on the East Coast, it's Memorial Day and I am slightly intoxicated and working my way to full-on drunk. So there won't be any links because I am not very motivated to be a responsible blogger.

Donovan McNabb is not the answer to the Bears problems. I don't think that the team would be any better served with him under center than they were/are with Rex Grossman. I am not saying that Rex is a more talented pure passer than McNabb, or a better quarterback. I just don't think McNabb can win a Super Bowl, so to pick up a high profile, expensive, aging player would hurt a team on the brink like the Bears more than it will help.

Yes, McNabb is a Chicago native, but that seems to be the sole virtue he would bring to the table in this equation. The pressure on him to push himself and the team over the threshold will be astronomical. Anything less than a Super Bowl championship would probably close the window for the player and the team.

This is a very difficult situation for a Caucasian blogger to express any negative sentiments about Donovan McNabb. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh's comments, McNabb is essentially untouchable. Since Limbaugh was so wrong, so far behind the times and so out of his element, it has made it nearly impossible to offer any kind of analysis of McNabb's game that does not take on any taint of racism.

The real problem, in my way of thinking, when evaluating McNabb is that no one stops to ask the question what if McNabb were the quarterback of my team? No matter what you might think of him battling through the broken leg and throwing 5 TDs against the Cardinals some years back or tbat famous episode where he scrambled for 15 seconds and cost the Cowboys a playoff spot, one must consider at least one unpleasant fact.

At the end of the day, there is the denouement to the thirty ninth Super Bowl. Donovan McNabb was vomiting and too ill, apparently, to lead the Philadephia Eagles on a drive that could have tied or won the game. If that doesn't alarm the football fans who venture into this space, I wonder what will.

Donovan McNabb is supposed to be a world class athlete. I might be wrong, but I find myself remembering moments of extreme stress which find athletes prevailing against the odds. Montana's game winning drive against the Bengals, Havlichek steals it or Bird's steal and pass to DJ to win Game 5 against the Pistons leap to mind. Then one must consider the varied late game heroics of Michael Jordan.

If one takes the time to do all that thinking, one should realize that there is one common denominator. Never, in any of the instances I have mentioned, has the hero been so wracked by intestinal difficulty that he could not call a play in the huddle. And yet there was more than a minute left on the clock when the Eagles got the ball for the last time in that game against the Patriots, but he couldn't mount any kind of drive. But Donovan McNabb couldn't manage to bring his team to overtime, let alone a win.

Not only did McNabb fail to accomplish that goal, but he failed to do it in any of the three years prior to that when the Eagles made it to the NFC title game, but never reached the Promised Land. When one considers the fact that the Eagles had the best player on the field in that game against the Patriots in Terrell Owens, the ball and time enough to accomplish what they, as a team had presumably been contracted to do, one has to wonder exactly why they lost. And McNabb vomiting and being too ill to call plays in the huddle has to be at the top of the list.

Perhaps I am too much of a pessimist, but I subscribe to the theory on aging first propounded by Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. People age like wine only in so far as they deteriorate and turn into vinegar. The overwhelming majority of athletes fall apart as they get older. The only sport where that seems no longer to apply is baseball, where players can pitch into their 40s. Somehow, if Clemens had to dodge 300 pound lineman, 250 pound linebackers and 200 pound defensive backs each time he threw a pitch, I don't think he'd be back at age 44. But that's just me.

So with his age, his injury history and his lack of performance in big games taken into consideration, I'd rather the Bears played Grossman for another year. Even if the team has to scramble to replace him in the next offseason, he's younger, cheaper and less likely to get hurt than McNabb (I am not overlooking the fact that Grossman has for all intents and purposes played about a season and a half in his 3 seasons to date). The team had a nice run in spite of him killing them in key moments last season. And when you get right down to it, I don't think McNabb is a champion.

On an unrelated note, I turned off the Sox game when it was 2-0, right after the Lowell double that plated the second run. It was too depressing to watch and Die Hard 3 was on one of the Encore channels. So I don't know how it has turned out, and I am afraid to look at the score. There has been so very little for me to be happy about in the baseball season to date that it's really taking a lot away from my favorite holiday weekend pastime (a bender that would kill 4 lesser men).

But tonight, Remy and Orsillo had a bald loser who appears in ads for the new state insurance coverage system. It was inordinately amusing to me, even though I hate the Remdawg. I don't know how many picked up on it, and I'd try to YouTube it if I were more motivated and maybe a bit less buzzed. But Remy had no time for the loser. I can't say I blame him, because the guest of honor was a tool. Absolute tool lacking even the credentials to become a tool of note on this site.

And watching Remy pretend like he gave a damn and wanted to ask the bald dude who called himself an actor despite only appearing in two commercials for the state health insurance program some questions made it slightly less painful to see the Red Sox take yet another early lead. The Remdawg had his hands in his pockets, he only half-looked at Baldie when he and Orsillo were doing the interview. Remy may have even rolled his eyes once or twice. It was probably his finest hour as a Red Sox broadcaster, very nearly reaching the point where he said: "Look, douche, you're a bald waste of space and you have no business appearing in the booth during the damn baseball game." If only he had more balls to tool on the guest for more than an impending marriage that will last a mere six months.

Unfortunately for Humpty Dumpty, all Tito Francona's horses and all Tito Francona's men could not put him back together again this evening in the Bronx. The Yankees took two out of three from the Sox, and there are some signs that everything that has gone so spectacularly awry to this point just might start coming together over the next few weeks. Whatever else may happen, it's sure to be a downbeat post on 38pitches, and that's usually cause for celebration on this end.

But baseball is only a peripheral concern this evening. Over the last few weeks, the story that Michael Vick owned a home where his cousin lived and allegedly operated a dog fighting ring has for some strange reason become the biggest single problem in America today. A very, very, very small part of this is my fault because I enjoying ripping Vick and his alter ego Ron Mexico. But now it has gotten way out of hand.

Out of all the parties that have weighed in on this sordid little mess, it is hard to determine who is the most wrong (not grammatically or stylistically elegant, but this situation defies conventional forms of expression). Somewhere in all of this, a tool of note is waiting to be mocked. Clinton Portis, tailback of the Washington Redskins, is a good place to begin.



Portis has waded into the midst of this farce and attempted to defend the indefensible player (Vick) and pastime (dog fighting). NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was not only disappointed, but also embarrassed at Portis' words of something less than wisdom. I don't know if Portis found much time to study jurisprudence in his time at the University of Miami, but that's no excuse for some of what he said.

I particularly enjoyed this gem from Portis' comments: "I don't know if he was fighting dogs or not, but it's his property. It's his dog. If that's what he wants to do, do it." While I appreciate the sanctity of private property as much as the next man, I don't think the "a man's home is his castle" defense is going to fly in this case. Just because you own a house doesn't mean that you or your guests can commit felonies there till the cows come home. You (or your cousin) can't run a meth lab or fight dogs or ritualistically kill people in your home and get away with it. That's just not the way the world works.

But some of the forces that have arrayed themselves against Michael Vick in this are little better than his would-be defender Clinton Portis. Animal rights groups are calling for the NFL commissioner to make sure that dog fighting is treated with the greatest possible severity under the newly adopted standardized personal conduct policy. And even better, a member United States House of Representatives agrees. And all I can say is...who cares?

Dog fighting is a felony. As such, it should be treated like any other felony under the terms of the new conduct policy at best. At worst, people should realize that just because they have formed inexplicable attachments to a vaguely domesticated four-legged pest-carrying civic nuisance doesn't mean the rest of us have to follow suit. Domestic violence, operating a motor vehicle, providing dangerous narcotic substances or partaking of same are far more serious offenses than going to the occasional dog fight or sponsoring a combatant.

Don't get me wrong, I do not support dog fighting. I think it is an antiquated, barbaric, disgusting endeavor. It should be illegal. Offenders should be punished when caught in the act. I just hate dogs. And before any reader rises up with bleeding heart over my egregious insensitivity to man's best friend, consider this proposition: when should a felony committed against an animal be regarded as more serious than a felony committed against a person? If your answer isn't never (the malapropism is deliberate, hoping to shock the dog lover back into consciousness), then you're a jackass, and the world would be best served if you opted to save the next generation from the burden of your progeny.

And as for Congressman Tom Lantos, who feels that he needs to take time out of his busy day to press Roger Goodell to strike down on Michael Vick with great vengeance and furious anger, I wonder would the Gentleman from California kindly consider the notion that he and his 434 colleagues might want to exercise the power of the purse to stave off financial ruin from the nation? Perhaps it's better that the Congress confine its powers to regulating sport. God only knows what a mess they could make out of the nation if they actually addressed issues of immediate concern like the war.

I will leave you to decide which of the interested parties can best be described as a tool of note from this post. If I say any more, I fear my readers and I might meet in the Place Where There Is No Darkness.

I am not often given to quoting Scripture in this space, but tonight it seems appropriate. In Proverbs Chapter 11 Verse 29, there is an eloquent bit of advice from King Solomon, it reads: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind and the fool shall be the servant of the wise at heart." Unfortunately, Danny Ainge probably didn't read that particular passage before he dealt Antoine Walker to the Mavericks in 2003.

Tonight has just provided the culmination of the Boston Celtics inheriting the wind from that bad trade. I predicted (one of the very few instances where I have been correct) that the Celtics would lose out on the Oden-Durant sweepstakes. I didn't dare hope, however, that they would fall all the way to 5th in this year's draft. This team earned this karmic suplex by making bad choice after bad choice and then compounding the affront to good taste that was this season by tanking games down the stretch.

Why did Danny Ainge deserve a chance to derail the career of Greg Oden or Kevin Durant? Because he's honestly submitted his best effort at producing a winning team in his four seasons at the helm? Because he conducted himself as a model of professional decorum? Because the two best things about his reign are the creation of a cheerleading squad and unloading Raef LaFrentz? It never ceases to amaze me that this man is still employed. I could work 2 hours a week and do a better job than he's done. Hell, the monkeys at the zoo could do a better job and still have plenty of time to fling feces at one another.

Take a look at the Celtics trades under Ainge. This list of transactions made by the team since he took over basketball operations is an appalling roster of ill-conceived decisions. Since when has it been advisable to shuffle players in and out of an organization? And yet it's the Ainge MO. So the question lingers for Celtics fans: do you want Ainge to use the pick or trade it?

They traded the rights to Randy Foye to Portland for Sebastian Telfair and the carcase of Theo Ratliff (who earned $1 million for every four minutes of basketball he played this season), Foye went on to earn a place on the NBA All Rookie Team. Portland turned around and traded Foye for the rights to Brandon Roy who won the Rookie of the Year award. Telfair is going to be cut from the team because his play was sub-par and his off-court behavior unacceptable. So that's what Ainge can do with a draft pick when it comes time to trade.

Among the veterans he has managed to acquire include Ratliff, Chris Mills and Raef LaFrentz. Ainge has managed to come out on the winning end of a trade once, when Gary Payton refused to report to Atlanta after the Cs traded him for Antoine Walker. When the Hawks cut Payton, he returned to the Celtics. So does that inspire confidence that the Celtics could somehow trade a pick that will not become Oden or Durant in a package with Pierce or one of their young players for Garnett or Gasol or Jermaine O'Neal or some mystery player who might not suck as a Celtic?

I have found myself wondering lately whether Ainge's determination to get into one-sided trades which have benefited the Trail Blazers at the expense of the Celtics have some connection to the shameful manner in which he stabbed the Blazers in the back in 1992. In case you have forgotten the story, Ainge (an Oregon native, by the way) was on the Blazers as the 1991-92 season ended and was due to be a free agent.

He promised the team and the fans he wanted to stay and would contact the team to make the necessary arrangements. And then, all of a sudden, on the very first day of the signing period, Ainge came to terms with the Phoenix Suns. I am all for clearing one's conscience and atoning for past transgressions, but I must say I hate to see the Boston Celtics serve as a vehicle to help their GM help a team he shafted 15 years ago.

Then there is the fact that some player from the Roy Hibbert, Joakim Noah, Al Horford, Brandan Wright, Corey Brewer or Yi Jianlian mix will be available in the fifth spot. I have heard as many times as you have that this is a ridiculously deep draft. Maybe I'm stubborn (I'm not alone, my man in Maine emailed me tonight to complain that this draft isn't what it's been billed to be), but I'm not convinced.

Roy Hibbert is a project. He may be great, and for the sake of the league he'd better be great. Greg Oden needs a rival like I need to marry a beautiful heiress. But Hibbert's not going to come in right away and dominate. Frankly, I'm barely willing to believe that he can come in and contribute. Think Emeka Okafor with a steeper learning curve, and I think you'll have a good picture of what Hibbert's future is going to be for two, maybe three years.

I have expressed my distaste for Joakim Noah's ability to play in the NBA a number of times in this space. He's not big enough to play NBA big men. He's not quick enough to hang with a Nowitzki or a Bargniani. He's nowhere near polished enough to score from the perimeter, and he handles the rock like a wildebeast calf on ice. Joakim Noah will be the death (certainly from a career stand point, and maybe literally also) of an NBA GM. I don't want it to be Ainge, though, as the Cs would be stuck with Noah, or Acie Earl with less marketability and talent.

Horford is probably the best of this sorry lot, provided you want a player to come in and help a team win games in the near term (of course one wonders whether NBA teams really want to win based on their personnel choices). The problem here is that he seems to be a more athletic version of Al Jefferson. Al has impressed a lot of Cs fans and the reporters who cover the team, but I still believe he's at his ceiling right now. Adding another power forward named Al won't help him. Plus, as much as I like his game, I don't think he's worth half of what the number five pick in this draft will earn.

Brandan Wright is a great unknown. He has all the potential any basketball fan could dream of, but he isn't seasoned enough to be the face of a franchise. To my way of thinking that's what the Cs need more than anything right now. They have too many young players with potential trying to develop into solid pros as it is, one more guy like this isn't going to help the team, especially when they're in salary cap hell and there aren't enough minutes and shots to go around.

I don't know enough about Yi Jianlian to offer any kind of assessment of his game. Beyond hearing that he's a Chinese Dirk Nowitzki on Outside the Lines the other day, I know nothing about him. I can spell his name only because I have today's Globe sitting on the desk in front of me. I do know that Yao Ming is monstrously overrated. He's an adequate big man benefiting from the total lack of centers in today's NBA. He ought to be able to score 30 points a night when he's 7 inches taller than 95% of the guys trying to cover him. So I would be inclined to stay away from another Chinese player, considering how much money goes to a #5 pick.

Corey Brewer captured the attention of fans across the country with his defensive play in this year's NCAA tournament (and last year too, but I try not to face the fact that Florida won two consecutive championships). This instantly makes him the most NBA ready guard of his generation. It's a little knows fact, but if you can handle Aaron Afflalo and Mike Conley Jr., then you can shut down any player on any team at any time. I bet you Iverson is soiling his drawers at the prospect of facing Brewer as we speak. Give me a break, he's not ready for prime time. At least not for $50 million.

And that is why I am so happy tonight. The lottery was Danny Ainge's last shot at keeping his job beyond this season. He can't keep getting chances to ruin what little future this franchise has. Maybe Jefferson, West, Rondo, Perkins, Powe, Gomes and the rest are better than I think. Maybe they're a lot better. But with the group of them competing for minutes, touches and shots there is no way that this group of players can form a team. They need leadership, and the team has no pieces to trade to get value in return.

This situation is so very perfect for Ainge. He traded Walker and then gradually had to punt away the magic beans he got in return. And even better, he acquired Telfair in his scramble to get out from under that Walker trade and that blew up in his face. He traded for Ricky Davis only to give up on him a little over a year later. In short, he created a hell of a lot of trouble in his own house and he just inherited the wind losing this lottery.

And if you aren't miserable enough, Celtics fans, just think... Portland got Brandon Roy thanks to the Cs terrible draft day trade last year. Now they have the inside track on Oden even though they had a 5.3% chance to win the lottery. At least the Cs threw one hell of a lottery party at Clery's on Dartmouth Street. I couldn't quite make it, I still remember a time when the Celtics didn't throw parties for anything short of a title.

I wonder now, whether this season's inevitable pennant looks ever so slightly less inevitable now. It might only be one game, early in a long season, but cracks might just start appearing in the facade of the 2007 Boston Red Sox. It would have been much easier if the Red Sox had just sent the Yankees a memo that the home team was expected to lose the game under the standards of modern decorum. How dare they find a way to win?

I have a habit of noticing things before they become apparent to Red Sox Nation. For instance, is it terribly unreasonable to wonder whether this series might mark a turning point in the respective fortunes of the Yankees and the Red Sox? Sooner or later, old age and summer heat will take their toll on Mike Lowell, Sox fans can only hop that his mother's little helpers can continue to make miracles. And on the horizon is the inevitable return of Roger Clemens.

Think about the series the two teams played last month. The Yankees were the ones scrambling to put together a series of spot starters; now the Red Sox are wondering if Josh Beckett's finger boo-boo might place too great a burden on the collection of spare parts waiting in the farm system. Granted Gabbard pitched the single greatest five inning start of this generation, but Sox fans must be sweating the fact that blisters and loose skin might stop their young ace from winning 30 games.

I think every one who is any one realizes that tonight's pitching performance from Chien Ming Wang was, if not exactly a miracle, then a good sized country wonder. He still has a long way to go before he will have earned the right to buy property right behind the Great Wall (on the good side, of course). Mike Mussina is allegedly healthy, and it might be possible that he could pitch to form for the first time in a long while. God knows he'll have to, nothing but the finest effort of a quality pitcher can beat a horse like Julian Tavarez.

The Schilling vs. Pettitte matchup on Sunday shapes up to be very interesting, since Pettitte probably should have beaten the Sox twice already this year. There was the bullpen collapse in the first game between the two back at Fenway, and then the short relief stint when I felt he had another inning in him, even though it was his side day. I know Andy's not as young as he once was, and it's a long season, but he seemed like the best chance the team had for winning that game when the Yanks needed to slow down the Red Sox momentum.

But even more than Wang's performance, the fact that Hideki Matsui could not have been worse today unless he used his bat to throw a beating on the entire Yankee pitching staff shows me that the Yanks just might have turned a corner as a team this season. I got the feeling as I watched them in April and earlier this month that if one guy (e.g. Abreu) went cold, the entire team would panic if he came up in a big situation. Then they'd go into a funk, and every player went cold.

Tonight, Matsui went 0-5 and left 7 on base. That was the type of performance that would have crushed morale and crippled momentum at any point prior to tonight. But his teammates picked him up, they put up 6 runs. Wang scuffed, shined and spat his way to holding the Red Sox to two runs (You know he must have cheated to keep that potent lineup to under 30 runs in 6.1 innings of work). If these Yankees can pull together as a team, with help on the way, I think we'll be looking back on this lead the way paleontologists look back at the dodo.

It is entirely possible that I'm seeing signs that aren't there because this recent Red Sox winning jag has been depressing me to the point that I have to clutch at straws, but I get the feeling that the Sox lead will be back down around 4.5 games come June 15th. This is the biggest lead in the division the Sox have had since what? 1995? The Red Sox were foundering until a late trade in 2004, so maybe this lead on May 21 isn't a good thing.

In other matters, why didn't some one tell me that Sunday was the 10th anniversary of Bill Simmons' first online column? Truly that was a date which will live in infamy. His recent "effort" to explain why he dislikes Dane Cook actually made me begin to like Cook. So what if Dane Cook showed up to a Crank Yankers taping wearing a Yankee cap, even though he came from Arlington, MA?

Obviously, I'm not going to criticize any resident of New England who doesn't feel obligated to root for the Red Sox on account of a coincidence of geography. But I do wonder when Bill Simmons became the arbiter of what attire from which teams residents of particular areas can rock in a free country? Then there is an issue stemming from a visit Cook made to the Jimmy Kimmel Live set while Simmons was a writer, where Dane struck the Sports Guy as a hypocrite and a fraud for being scandalized by bathroom humor before going on to carve out a niche for himself on film with similar material.

I find that particularly shocking, considering Simmons seems to love ripping guys like Isiah Thomas and then wilts when Isiah threatens him with a street beating. And when the Sports Guy plays the victim with aplomb when blogs like Deadspin and the Big Lead treat him harshly, it sends him lamenting the state of the internet. Alas that the internet allows people to do to Simmons what he has done to so many others as he built himself into the institution he is.

And then there's this story, which I devoutly hope is false. There is a rumor kicking around that Donovan McNabb might become a Chicago Bear. While the part of me that hates the Philadelphia Eagles would like to see them make a mistake like turning the team over to Kevin Kolb, who just might become the worst second round pick of all time, the part of me that become emotionally invested in the Bears NFC Championship season last year knows McNabb devotes most of his pregame preparation to fashioning a plausible excuse as opposed to finding a way to win. More on this later in the week...

I've been waiting nearly a week for the chance to publish this post. On Monday, I got a call from the guy I go to for my Red Sox information. Thankfully, he didn't want to talk baseball. One of his closest friends from college was en route to the Meadowlands to watch Game Four of the Cavs Nets series. And that night, my Red Sox source wanted to talk basketball.

The two of us had gone to see Game Three and Game Four of the Celtics Nets Eastern Conference Finals Series back in 2002. We were there screaming ourselves hoarse during that epic comeback. He hasn't abandoned the Celtics during the shameful administration of Banner 17 and Danny Ainge, so he asked me an interesting question. His question: if I looked back to that series, who would I have projected to be a playoff team five years down the road?

I think most people would have gone with that Celtics team. They were young, athletic and they enjoyed playing as a unit. Essentially they were like this Celtics team, but with leaders and their players who had hit their developmental ceilings (Walker, Williams, Battie and Pierce) were to a man better than Al Jefferson, Ryan Gomes and Delonte West, all of whom will never be as productive as they were this year. Think about the fact that this year's lottery selection will have to take minutes and touches and shots away from some one and tell me I'm wrong.

The Nets, on the other hand, weren't young (Kidd was a bit slower than he was in Dallas/Phoenix and legitimately rattled by fans like me reminding him that he had hauled off and punched his wife in the mouth), they weren't very athletic and their window was closing. Let's not forget that Kidd and Jefferson are the only members of that team contributing to the squad that just collapsed in the fourth quarter tonight (I can't exactly define what Jason Collins does on a basketball court, but I wouldn't call him a contributor).

And that brings us to the Nets of today. As you may have deduced, I still harbor a certain amount of personal animosity toward the Nets as a team. I may have had my affection for the Celtics wrested from me in the horrible, haunting episode that is the Walker for LaFrentz and Welsch trade (don't forget that the release of Telfair was one more in a long line of catastrophic effects from that mistake), but I have not been robbed of my hatreds stemming from my days as a Cs fan. Like the Count of Monte Cristo, I still cherish those hatreds.

Jason Kidd's decline has not been as fun as I had anticipated. He is obviously slower and his skills have deteriorated. Unfortunately, a true point guard in the NBA has essentially gone the way of the dodo. If people really understood basketball and were not hoping for a highlight reel of posterizing dunks, they'd know that Nash and Kidd are fortunate to play in this era.

If they played when guys like Oscar Robinson and Bob Cousy walked the Earth, no one would even give them a second look. It's just one of those things, like the fact that no one bothered to mention that Hank Aaron played in a canyon in Fulton County Stadium, or that the wall in straightaway center field in the house that Ruth built was 457 feet away when Ruth was in the process of building it. For all today's sports fans pretend that they know the history of sports, they have a superior command of the hydrodynamics of the Marianas Trench in late August of odd numbered years in which a Federalist was President of the US.

And then there's Vince Carter. His defining moment will always be the day he attended his college graduation and then flew to play the 76ers in Game Seven of the Eastern Conference Finals. I don't know what impact it would have had, had he stayed with the team and prepared for the game as he should have. I don't know that his ostensible commitment to education had any effect on his fan base. Maybe he made the right call, and for a few of my readers the fact that I think it was the wrong decision will absolve Vince Carter because I am almost always incorrect. Who knows?

I do know Vince has always played the game with an eye toward the audience. I will always believe that Vince Carter is more concerned with looking good than he is about winning games. Even when he mailed it in to force a trade out of Toronto, people were inclined to sympathize with him. The problem there is that only Jordan has (with apologies to St. Thomas More and the excellent film about him) been able to be the man for all seasons in the NBA. He's the only guy that could handle being the face of a team, the league, a dozen corporate sponsors and win while doing it.

Bird didn't really start doing major national campaigns until after 1986 when the Cs were slipping into mediocrity. Magic always had Kareem with him. Kobe had Shaq. Kobe is also an interesting case, because he didn't suffer through bad seasons and playoff catastrophes the way Jordan did. So people didn't empathize with him before he got to the pinnacle, and as such are little now that he's struggling.

And finally there is the most overrated "superstar" in recent memory, Richard Jefferson. If the media and casual fans were given to reflection on events as opposed to making immediate judgements and clinging to them in the face of all reason, I think they would look back and realize that Jefferson's status as a star is tenuous, at best. At worst, the Nets should have arranged for him to have been run over by a truck the day after the Celtics traded Antoine Walker and surrendered the division to them.

Jefferson's reputation stems from the fact that he owned Paul Pierce in the two playoff series the Nets played against Boston in 2002 and 2003. Some people might think that that is a tangible achievement, but I do not. Paul Pierce is a petulant crybaby. Slow him down, hold his jersey when he tries to come off a screen, get away with a hack on him, handcheck him and do that for a quarter, and he's done.

He'll spend the rest of the game whining to officials and rushing ill-advised shots with ample time remaining on the shot clock. Occasionally, he might lower his head and try a suicide charge on the basket in the face of 4 defenders for the sake of variety. And doing that will net him the 25 points he needs to pretend that he contributed to a team effort. That's what Jefferson did to him, and it took Pierce off his game enough that the Celtics lost each series to the Nets.

LeBron James was a different story. After this series, I think Jefferson should be morally obligated to carry LeBron's baggage for the rest of the playoffs. LeBron would have humiliated Jefferson if there were a reason for Richard Jefferson to feel pride in the first place. It was edifying and depressing to see, all at the same time. Good to see New Jersey exposed by a one man show Cavaliers team, and depressing to think that the Celtics should have been at this point had they not made a trade that atoned for the Joe Barry Carrol deal of 25 years ago.

I am not the only one who is not impressed by the "galaxy" of stars on the Nets. My friend up on the frozen tundra south of Portland emailed me to talk about the same thing. The two of us can see it, but will USA Basketball? If Team USA takes Kidd, Jefferson or Carter (to say nothing of any combination thereof), they'll be lucky to reach the medal round. These guys may command star treatment from a league that has no idea what it's doing at this point, but international officials don't know (and don't care who they are). Without that star treatment, they aren't even three average players.

Today was a bad day in Sedition in Red Sox Nation. Nick Cafardo beat me to a punch. And I take very little consolation from the fact that that puts me in a very, very, very small fraternity of people who have been beaten to a punch by a writer notorious for being slow to the punch. I imagine the Red Sox ownership did their very best to conceal the fact that JD Drew is in a persistent offensive funk from keen, penetrating minds like Cafardo's, but the scribe got wise.

Unfortunately for Nick Cafardo, living in the era of Google means that I can simply type his name and JD Drew's name in a search window. Within seconds, almost by magic, I can read articles like this one where Cafardo wrote in December that JD Drew has gotten a bad rap over the years. It would be ironic if it weren't so pathetic.

For my part, I have been reluctant to point out the fact that JD Drew is underperforming in a big way. In part, I have been hoping his offensive woes would get worse before I posted on the subject. I have also been waiting patiently for the team to reverse field and come back to the pack in the American League. To this point, I have been disappointed in that simple ambition. But cliches tell me that sooner or later all good things come to an end and what goes up must come down, so I have yet to panic.

This team simply isn't good enough to keep winning at this pace over the course of a 162 game season. Drew is hitting .250, and may have hurt his back in an effort to look sublimely ridiculous whilst breaking his back on the right field wall last night. Coco Crisp is hitting a stately .231, and begging the question why aren't Red Sox fans demanding his immediate departure with his performance (or total lack thereof) on a daily basis. Manny has come alive, but we all expected that.

JD Drew needs to be a productive player for the Red Sox to maintain any kind of momentum through the dog days of summer. At some point, the teams in the AL East are going to get better. Everything that could have gone right to this point has gone right for the Red Sox. They haven't had any injuries to speak of, the Yankees are ravaged by injuries and their offense is apparently wrapped up in the graduation season (they've hit four homers in the last ten games, and two of them came today).

The Red Sox can afford to harbor a .250 hitter with 2 home runs and 13 RBI right now, but what will things look like for the Nation if their #5 hitter is putting up numbers like that in August and September. I imagine that Red Sox fans will stick out their chests and boast that they will have clinched by then, so a slight statistical correction won't make a difference. Of course, there isn't a group of people in the world that can front-run with Red Sox Nation.

The real question is can Red Sox Nation afford to pay a guy to bat in the five hole where they desperately need protection for Ramirez and Ortiz $12 million to hit .250 without producing solid power numbers? It will make it all the harder to sustain the pleasant fiction that the Red Sox are the victim of the Evil Empire's spending sprees.

I think the problem here is that the Red Sox expect JD Drew to play like a guy worth $12 million a year. If they really wanted him to play as though he were worth $12 million, then John Henry should have signed him for $18 million a year. When this situation becomes a problem, and it will because another hitter is due to go into a slump any minute now or a pitcher will lose his mojo (maybe Beckett has with his litte finger issue), I won't enjoy it as much as I ought.

Red Sox fans have a way of passing their misery on to the rest of humanity. As soon as I get my first "I told you so" post up, I'm sure I'll have comments from Red Sox fans saying they knew this was going to happen because they went to one of the dozen websites that enable baseball superfans to find the statistics they use to bore normal humans into submission and were able to calculate the minute disparities in WHIP and OPS to the 35th decimal place which explains why the team flopped down the stretch.

Speaking of flops, so much attention has been paid to the incredibly harsh suspensions of the two Phoenix Suns following the incident in Game 5 of their series against the Spurs that the underlying hypocrisy of the situation has been overlooked. I think that the one game suspension should have been extended once the Suns tried to sell the fact that their players had left the bench area because of offense-defense substitution patterns to people who should have been too intelligent to buy it.

That was one of the more ridiculous statements I have heard in a long time. First, unless there are some special rules for Phoenix, no one could have come into the game until a stoppage. Considering that there were fewer than 24 seconds to play and the Spurs were over the foul limit, how was the clock going to stop? Unless magical elves intervened, the only way the clock was stopping was a foul by San Antonio.

Once that foul was committed, Phoenix would have two free throws, which is ample time to insert players. In the time it took for all of the players to line up at the other end of the court, two healthy men who are ostensibly world-class athletes should be able to walk the thirty feet to the scorer's table in time to be admitted to the game between the first and second free throws. It happens all the time, in every game and it could have happened there.

A more interesting question is that Phoenix knew, because Mike D'Antoni is the brilliantest mind in basketball (so brilliant that any effort to describe it in one word requires the writer to resort to expressions that are grammatically and syntactically impossible as I just did), that San Antonio would foul trailing by 3 with fewer than 24 seconds on the clock if they wanted any chance at winning the game. So if San Antonio is going to foul and said foul will end any offensive possession and transition immediately to defense, were the Suns really going to substitute two players in an offense-defense pattern?

I don't like it when teams lie to me. Phoenix players left the bench for one reason, and one reason only - to get after some member of the Spurs. I don't want to have to examine their case as if I were Lt. Caffey trying to find out from Colonel Jessup why Private Santiago didn't pack his gear or make any telephone calls prior to his 0600 flight out of Gitmo. If Phoenix didn't try to weasel their way out of the suspensions with such a blatant fabrication that ought to insult the intelligence of any person who has ever watched a basketball game, maybe I'd be a little more sympathetic to their plight.

However, the real travesty of the unpleasantness at the end of Game 5 is that we are expected to treat a small, gutless overachiever from Canada as though he were the victim in all of this. Steve Nash took a step before he went down, he flopped. If I were the type of person that believed that sort of gamesmanship had any place in civilized competition, I would offer kudos to him for that kind of initiative. Unfortunately, I find it reprehensible and I am not amused.

As a point of comparison, I don't know if you remember when Chad Clifton was crushed by Warren Sapp. I tried to find the video on youtube, but it wasn't available. The site was doing routine maintenance, which might have been part of the problem. Chad Clifton, who was slightly bigger than Sapp, went down immediately. But Steve Nash, who was a good deal smaller than Robert Horry, managed to take a step in the process of his collision? It doesn't make sense to me.

As I've mentioned in this space before, there is a serious problem in the NBA right now. Some one needs to step in and put an end to the culture of flopping. Surely I am not the only basketball fan who is horrified that flop artists and hacks like Raja Bell, Bruce Bowen and Shane Battier are considered top-flight defenders? Michael Cooper, whom I hated as a kid, would be rolling over in his grave to see that, provided, of course, that he were in fact dead.

No one seems to have the guts to say this, but the problem in the NBA begins at the top. David Stern is the problem. I have been reluctant to say this because I thoroughly enjoy it when he oppresses Mark Cuban. But he has let the product be debased. He was given a mulligan when the experiment of expansion into Canada proved so disastrous that Vancouver relocated to Memphis (a city that has a claim to fame other than Elvis???) in just a few years of existence. The closest thing to a proactive policy he has instituted is a dress code for players, which hasn't exactly been a smashing success.

Chicago fans, especially, ought to be griping about this situation more than I am. That nice layover between the series with Miami and the second round killed the momentum for the Bulls. Absolutely murdered it. Plowed it under and sowed salt in the furrows. It's been amazing to see the Bulls claw their way back to force a Game 6. But it makes you wonder what this series would have been like had the Bulls with limited playoff experience not had to deal with a week of downtime between playoff games. If it's any consolation, at least TNT had the convenience of running forty games in forty nights promos.

I must apologize for my long silence. I had some personal business which occupied my time for a few days and I had some travelling I had to do. I really hate flying, so I wasn't in much of a frame of mind to post. The problem with the long delay, beyond the fact that it puts a dent in the slowly increasing stream of visitors to my site, is that I have a few topics I need to cover in a hurry before they get too stale.

First, toward the end of last week, an unnamed source close to Ron Mexico informed a Sports Illustrated writer that the embattled Falcons quarterback (my three word effort at conventional sports journalism) almost certainly knew of the dog fighting ring that allegedly operated out of a Virgina house owned by Michael Vick and inhabited by some of his relatives. This story has been covered thoroughly, but I have to discuss it because it's been bothering me.

I have never understood the rationale that allows sportswriters to cite unnamed sources. Investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstein need to use unnamed sources because they break important stories which could result in death or serious injury for the whistle-blowers who leak key information. Sports journalists use unnamed sources to carp at athletes, coaches, team executives and owners with immunity for both source and writer with little or no reason to fear anything more than an ass kicking.

Journalists who cover sports aren't breaking stories that will cause the planet to spin off its axis, literally or metaphorically. Even Game of Shadows was little more than a series of leaks from grand jury testimony that did not conclusively prove what 99.9% of sports fans suspected about Barry Bonds in the first place. I have long suspected, with neither the access or to be honest the inclination to ferret out the cold hard truth, that those who use unnamed sources in their coverage of a team or a player are simply protecting a good man for a sound byte because said source makes their jobs easier. To wrap that up in a mantle of journalistic ethics fails to impress me.

But long story short, back to the Ron Mexico story. Don Banks, the SI writer in question, has an unnamed source who has the dirt on the nature of Vick's association with a family member who allegedly ran a dog fighting ring out of the notorious Virginia home and on the nature of Vick's relationship to Falcons owner Arthur Blank. The writer claims that the multiple sources whom he consulted in writing his piece on Michael Vick had to remain anonymous because of their close relationship with him. Perhaps you are willing to accept this, but I am not.

Reviewing the small segments of quotations from these sources provided by Banks, I just don't believe that they came from a member of Vick's inner circle. I know next to nothing about Vick's entourage, but I bet there are very few (if any) guys in his crew who make a habit of using words like affinity. It just doesn't strike me as a word that makes the rounds of those connected to the dog fighting subculture (another choice phrase from the Banks article).

The sources go on to talk about Vick's posse and circle of friends being a part (if not all) of the problem. My question here is simple - if Vick's posse surround him at all times, who is telling Don Banks about his affinity for barbaric sports best left in the medieval period? Sources go on to say (it was unclear whether these were the same unnamed informants or a whole new crop) that Arthur Blank and his wife coddle Vick and let him get away with murder.

Not being a journalist, I can indulge in all sorts of wild speculation. When I first heard the quotes from the article on ESPN, I was no more convinced of the authenticity of the source close to Vick than I am now. For some reason, I got to thinking that it could have been a guy like Jim Mora (Sr. or Jr.) or Greg Knapp who made the comments to Banks.

There is no easy way to prove that either Knapp or Mora made the comments. It would make sense for either one to stay anonymous if they had any hope of landing another coaching gig in the NFL but still wanted to air some grievances against Vick or Blank or both. I couldn't find any smoking gun to that effect, however (this was about as close as I could come).

It's getting so that a person can't take a look at the world around him or her without feeling a strong sense of disgust at the brotherhood of human beings. Every once in a while, it will work out that the event that triggers said disgust is also uproariously funny. An example can be found in the famous episode from last month where one Red Sox fan channeled his displeasure at another fan who questioned his taste in haute cuisine into a small ball of rage and hurled a slab of pizza off the offender's dome.

Tonight, another event must be discussed which shows the breakdown of common decency in a very amusing fashion. One moron went to the symphony and would not shut his big yapper, to borrow a phrase from the late, lamented Chris Farley. Another patron requested that the chatty man keep his peace. And somewhere between there and comic immortality, a donnybrook erupted in the balcony at Symphony Hall in what once passed for the Athens of America before Music City (Nashville) built a replica of the Parthenon and stole the title away from Boston. And that brings us to tonight's tool of note segment.

What manner of man gets into a fistfight at a Boston Pops concert? Maybe if it were the big show on the Fourth of July outdoors on the Esplanade, I could see it. But at Symphony Hall? I know no man likes to get shushed (I imagine no woman cares for it either, but I try not to speak for my female readers), but this is simply not the way adults ought to behave. But have we really sunk so low as a society that unfinished business must be settled amid the dulcet tones of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony?

Lost in all this fanfare is a better question: why was Ben Folds performing with the Boston Pops? I understand that his work will be regarded by subsequent generations as the acme of technical precision and heart-felt passion in popular music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but does he really belong on stage in Boston Symphony Hall? Hell, who even knew he was still alive before all this happened?

I suppose I shouldn't lament the decline and fall of American civilization. After all, if it weren't for people acting like tools and other tools recording the scene for posterity (and our enjoyment), where would I find my material for these tool of note segments that so delight you. That's the nature of a catch 22. The world is falling apart around us, and all you can do sometimes is laugh.

It's just sad to see that once was the Cradle of American Liberty has descended into a morass of license. In case you wonder, the difference between liberty and license is simple. Liberty implies that you have the freedom to do what you want and the common sense to employ common courtesy. License means you settle your differences by throwing punches or pieces of pizza or worse as the opportunities present themselves with no regard for decorum.

If you are a BC fan, you might want to watch Jeopardy at least once before the end of the week. I do not offer the suggestion because of any particular contestant, but because it's the College Tournament and it's being held at USC's Galen Hall. The producers have arranged for the school's marching band to play its fight song at the beginning of each show. In the wake of a recent announcement, I think that BC fans might want to accustom themselves to hearing that song. Come 2011, they'll be hearing it all too often.

In case you haven't heard, Boston College has grown tired of playing in the Who Gives A Damn Bowl evey year. Apparently they have reached the conclusion that a non-conference schedule replete with MAC also-rans and New England's finest 1-AA schools isn't going to get them the into big money games. So now BC is planning to venture from it's cushy lair and play a real, honest-to-goodness, no-foolin' powerhouse, the Trojans of the University of Southern Cal.

BC must be desperate to make a move like this. Leaving the Big East hasn't exactly panned out the way they'd hoped. Rutgers, Louisville and West Virginia have all garnered more national attention playing in the conference where Eagles no longer dare than BC has received in the new ACC. Stuck up on their island in New England, BC's football program is facing a crossroads.

The school they wish to consider their big rival, Notre Dame, doesn't feel compelled to play BC. And it has nothing to do with the fact that BC has beaten Notre Dame in the last four meetings. Notre Dame has huge rivalries with USC, Michigan, Michigan State, and Purdue. The Irish have played these teams year in and year out for decades. Even the longstanding series with the Naval Academy has roots in the fact that the US Navy used Notre Dame as a satellite officer training facility, enabling the then all-male school to stay open during World War II.

BC has yet to build a rivalry with any school because they have a mediocre program in a region not known for producing great high school football players. And the best high school player the region turned out in the last 30 years, Mark Bavaro, played at Notre Dame. I am aware of the midget QB who drop-kicked conversions in the autumn of his years. But Bavaro's run while dragging the 49ers defense including the great Ronnie Lott is still more impressive than one long pass, all the Grey Cups in Canada and the cereal war with Jimmy Johnson.

And yet that is not the only football related story on my mind these days. I wonder sometimes why Crystal Pepsi is hardly ever remembered these days while New Coke is a comedy staple for every tool who thinks he's ten times funnier than he is. I realize that New Coke was a worse idea implemented on a much bigger scale, but can we get a moratorium on New Coke references? They tell me variety is the spice of life, people. So can we have at least one other soft drink included in the common store of bad jokes?

I say that to point out that one NFL team has placed the franchise tag on an important piece of its defense and been killed in the media for that decision. Meanwhile, another organization which has long been deemed the benchmark of excellence in sports has also franchised a malcontent from its defense. Both players are threatening to hold out this season, but only the first team is being pilloried.

On the remote chance that I have been too subtle to this point, the first player is Lance Briggs of the Chicago Bears (sort of). The second player isn't Justin Smith who needed to step up his game to earn a franchise tag, but since he's yet to be arrested, he was incredibly valuable to the Bengals. It's Asante Samuel, whose ten interceptions would have tied him with Champ Bailey for the league lead if three of Samuel's picks hadn't come against Rex Grossman so they can't be counted. Now Asante has been tagged as the Patriots franchise player, and he's not happy about it.

I think part of the vast surplus of attention paid to Lance Briggs is due to the Drew Rosenhaus factor. Who of us can forget the fake phone call with Willis McGahee from the 2003 draft? Or the memorable afternoon where he fielded questions while TO did callisthenics in his driveway? Or any other situation where Rosehaus used his client's situation to get himself on TV?

At this point, I'm not sure what value Drew Rosenhaus brings to the table. He gets his clients lots of money, but I am not convinced that he gets the best possible deal for his clients. I think that any competent agent could have gotten TO a truckload of guaranteed money, even after the McNabb situation in Philly. Rosenhaus and the circus atmosphere after the Eagles deactivated TO hurt his client's image more than it helped. If TO had been even slightly less talented, that could have been an eight figure mistake.

But back to Lance Briggs. The Bears have an All-Pro middle linebacker at the moment, and Hunter Hillenmeyer is as good a strong-side OLB as there is in the game, even if you may not have heard much about him. They have a great secondary, even if it did take a step back when they picked up Adam Archuletta. Their defensive line is very good at the moment, and it could be great even if Tank Johnson doesn't get his head out of his ass, provided Tommy Harris (the best defensive lineman in the league) stays healthy and Dusty Dvorcek proves them right for letting Ian Scott get away. The Bears can survive without Briggs, probably better than he will going to a team with fewer players for more guaranteed money.

The Patriots aren't so fortunate, even though they have the best offense that any one has seen for many years on paper. Ellis Hobbs just isn't that good, and he's the best player in the secondary at the moment. Brandon Merriweather needs to demonstrate that he can do more than kick a man when he's down (bullies, particularly of the gutless variety, are a better fit for the local baseball team). Rodney Harrison is one injury away from losing a limb or being featured in an NBC documentary entitled A Nation's Strong Safety.

The rest of their defense consists of a very good defensive line, a high-priced group of outside linebackers and a group of inside backers who are decrepit, on a good day. I don't mean to be unduly harsh, but can you really tell me that if this were one of those Animal Planet shows, the wolf pack wouldn't be eyeing Teddy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel? They'd last about ten minutes on the Serengeti. The Patriots need Samuel more than the Bears need Briggs.

I think the final part of the puzzle to explain why the Bears have taken more heat than the Pats for their respective potential holdouts is the media itself. The Bears play in a big market with an independent and aggressive media. The Patriots play in a big market with a complicated media environment, those who aren't wholly owned subsidiaries of the franchises are lazy and unimaginative. The small amount of effort and thought I put into this post might kill a guy like the CHB. He confined his critiques of the Patriots to the Tom Brady-knocked up ex situation and Randy Moss, bad guy material.

But remember this, New England, the Patriots will live to regret the Samuel situation more than the Branch situation if they let it get out of control. They will also live to regret the Samuel hold out more than the Bears will regret the Lance Briggs mess. When it happens, I'll be there to say I told you so. I may not be here for the beatings USC will apply to BC since that's three years away at the earliest, but we can spare an I told you so for the Eagles too.

Even with a 21-10 start and Josh Beckett pitching very well for the moment, there just might be a little trouble in Paradise. And it's brewing over something of marginal importance at best. Curt Schilling and David Ortiz have found themselves on the opposite sides of the Barry Bonds question. The real question is why are they talking about Bonds when they don't play the Giants for weeks?

To be fair, Schilling was responding to a question asked while he was appearing on Dennis and Callahan when he made his comments about Bonds. It probably would have been better had he no commented, though. Why give your opponent bulletin board material? Why take attention away from important stories like Josh Beckett preparing to fall back to Earth any day now?

Schilling is right that this whole thing has nothing to do with race, at least for the vast majority of fans. What people seem to ignore when they try to make this an issue of race raised is the Barry Bonds is an African-American chasing another African-American's career home run record. This is an issue of a guy who spent 20 years alienating people wanting them to embrace him now as he rides off into the sunset.

The real problem with Barry Bonds is that he spent his entire professional life being a douche. He isn't a good guy, he's been abrasive with fans and media. He has not honestly and genuinely addressed the steroid issue. He hasn't even had the good manners to come out and lie to us. At the end of the day, most people think he doesn't deserve his record because one cannot explain why he looks so much different now than he did when he came up with the Pirates.

Roger Clemens came into the league around the same time Bonds did, give or take two years. Clemens is now bigger than he was at twenty, but it doesn't seem unnatural. Who maintains the same weight into their mid-40s as they did when they were twenty? Barry Bonds came up as a leadoff hitter. Life may begin at forty if you're a menopausal baby-boomer, but even with advances in nutrition, weight training and medical care, life doesn't begin at forty for a baseball player.

Far more interesting were the comments made by David Ortiz in support of Barry Bonds. David Ortiz must know that this could be the last mistake he ever makes. You just don't disagree with Schilling. That's how people end up having to pay a clubhouse attendant to start their cars. It's like trying to kill the don in a Godfather movie.

I found it odd that Ortiz admitted that he may have taken steroids unwittingly with very little prodding. It seems like the sign of a guilty conscience. Maybe that and not the inspired tutelage of former hitting coach Ron Jackson is the real secret of how he went from a marginal player on a marginal team in Minnesota to the most feared left handed hitter in New England in the span of a year. Maybe Theo isn't quite the genius we thought. I guess it explains why Jackson was expendable in the purge of the staff following last season's collapse.

Over the course of this blog's history, I have not had many occasions to compliment Schilling very much. But, as the cliche goes there is a first time for everything. So tonight, I think I ought to congratulate Schilling for saying that he won't bean Bonds. After all, I have criticized the team for its penchant for sending messages by beaning opposing hitters.

So I salute Schilling for that particular comment. I like the idea of a pitcher matching his skill against the batter's hitting prowess. It seems to me that when you get right down to it, that's the object of the exercise. I like to see a strong power pitcher throw his best stuff up against the best hitters in the game. Schilling is proud, maybe too proud, but a proud pitcher ought to challenge a guy like Bonds.

Red Sox fans ought to be ashamed if they're afraid to have what they deem to be the best pitching staff in baseball pitch to Bonds. And if they really want to admire the pitchers for whom they cheer, shouldn't they want to see those pitchers deflate Bonds' massive ego? At the very least they ought to think twice before they puff out their chests with pride in a team that has to bean the best hitter on an opposing team to win games.

PS - I don't think that Bonds has actually lied about steroids. I think that nonsense about flaxseed oil and arthitic balm is more a half truth than a lie. I'd have much more respect for him if he came out and said: "Hell no, I never took steroids."

Today, the Max Mercy Hall of Fame welcomes its fourth member. It's been a long time since the last such ceremony. It is difficult, though, when almost all of the sportswriters cited in this space frequently (Bob Ryan, Jay Mariotti and Dan Shaughnessy) have been inducted. Jackie MacMullan is safe, for now, because her feature on the travesty that is the Celtic business model was too good.

So that leaves the man, the myth, the loser ... Bill Simmons. You know him in his capacity as the Sports Guy on ESPN.com's Page 2. Of late, when I talk to the handful of people who have followed this blog since the beginning, I've been calling Simmons the Zach Braff of sports journalism. Never having seen any of Braff's films, I draw the comparison from the sitcom Scrubs, where he plays the somewhat less than masculine Dr. John Dorian.

I don't know Bill Simmons, so I might be off base here, but I could see him sitting in front of his computer daydreaming about a floating head sportswriter. In Scrubs, Braff's character daydreams that his head and his body can detach so that he can accomplish two slightly less than masculine pursuits at the same time. I could see Simmons wishing that he could leave his body walking on the treadmill while he watches the View or whatever he watches to psyche himself up to do what he does.

In addition to his resemblance to Zach Braff, I have other problems with Simmons the writer. First, he made himself into the "celebrity" that he is ripping guys like Isiah Thomas and saying some harsh things while he did it. That was fine, but as soon as a blog like Deadspin dares to crack a joke or two at his expense, Simmons starts whining about how evil blogs can slander people with impunity.

Then there is the fact that Simmons continually reminds his minions that he is a basketball expert and has seen every meaningful Celtics home game in person from the mid 70s to 2003. I do not necessarily feel competent to dispute his status as an expert, but I would like to remind those few who will read this that Simmons didn't begin to criticize Ainge and Banner 17 for the mockery of a great franchise that they have foisted on the people of Boston until the tail end of this season. Let's not forget that Simmons didn't always seem to disapprove of tanking games.

So what if none of the sports media figures in New England had dared to/bothered to do same? Does that somehow give Simmons credence because he willfully ignored the dreadful effects of the Walker trade until very recently? I have been ripping Ainge for the benefit of my small body of readers for a year, which doesn't seem very impressive but can be explained because this site is barely 13 months old at this point. I haven't gotten a cookie for my efforts, so I don't think we should give Simmons one either.

For a long time, I've been thinking about bestowing this honor on the Sports Guy. I held back because I thought he was funny, a virtue which covers a multitude of sins for a writer. His most recent effort on the big fight and the announcement of the Yankees signing this weekend wasn't funny, though. I think after all these years, Simmons is now a prisoner of his gimmicks like the unintentional comedy scale and anecdotes about his super-cool friends. Any chance he had to progress as a writer is probably gone by now, so it seems like as good a time as any for his induction.

Bill Simmons has ten reasons he is happy the Yankees signed Clemens. The underlying premise of his list is that he has never forgiven Clemens for leaving Boston in the manner in which he left. See, this all unfolded in the days before Simmons became an online celebrity so Roger Clemens was not informed that he owed Bill Simmons, as the voice of Red Sox Nation, something more than 192 career wins.

Maybe Clemens could have worked harder to stay in shape over his last seasons in Boston, maybe he shouldn't have confirmed for every one that he was in fact mailing it in by coming alive and striking out 20 Tigers at the tail end of a mediocre 1996 season, but he did. Maybe Roger shouldn't have waxed poetic about leaving Boston to play close to his home in Texas before he signed with Toronto, but he did. And when he was traded to New York in 1999, he really hurt Bill Simmons. Red Sox fans have gotten over that for the most part, and it's time Simmons did as well.

I found the repeated efforts to drop so many not even remotely subtle hints that Clemens has prolonged his career through the use of banned performance enhancing substances to be in poor taste at best, and questionable ethically at worst. Leaving aside for a moment that the only link between Clemens and performance enhancers comes out of the Jason Grimsley trial (which makes it sort of like using material from McCarthy's hearings), there is the fact that Clemens has not undergone any inexplicable physical transmutations like Barry Bonds and his gargantuan cranium.

As for the simple question of his age, Nolan Ryan did break down in his mid-40s, but he also threw a no-hitter in the season in which he turned 45. And contrary to popular opinion, Cy Young won all of his 511 games by the time he was thirty. No pitcher has been able to perform in his mid-40s ever, in the history of Major League Baseball. Not even once. Unless they had chemical help.

Hell, did you think that the legendary Satchel Paige pitched as long as he did through good fortune and hard work? Come on. He was famous for saying he kept himself young by swinging his arms as he walked to jangle his juices around. The operative word there is juice.

Also, it was quite mature of a man who spends 90% of his professional life waxing poetic about his various roadtrips and sojurns in the warm summer rain with J Bug and Hench and Joe House to beat to death the joke that Clemens and Pettitte might be more than friends. It's good to see the voice of Red Sox Nation rise above the frat-boy homophobia that so endears Red Sox Nation to mature Americans secure enough in their identity to refrain from making childish jokes.

There were a couple of other gems in this piece. I liked his little joke about Josh Beckett maybe winning 30 games. I, for one, would love to see that. Not so much because it would carry the Sox to their first division title in many years, but because it would hurt the franchise down the road, and hurt it badly. After winning 30 games in 1968 derailed a promising career for Denny McLain, no pitcher will ever challenge that mark again. It's like setting the record for carries in a season by a running back in the NFL. The record might as well come engraved on a tombstone.

I also love the fact that Simmons missed the real error made by the Red Sox in this situation. It wasn't allowing Clemens to get away and sign with the Yankees, it was making an offer to him in the first place. In case you may have forgotten, Schilling is planning to play at least one more year but he is only under contract for this season. So in offering a prorated $18 million to Clemens, the Red Sox may have unwittingly raised the compensation and benefits package they will have to offer Big Schill to retain his services.

I do not mean to imply that Schilling will want to travel on his own terms the way Clemens does. Or that Schilling will wait until a team with deep pockets and a big hole needs to scare up a pitcher in May or June. But he is going to have it in the back of his mind that they offered Clemens a considerable salary and assented to his other demands just to try to keep him away from the Yankees. And there is plenty of space in that massive dome to hold onto simple facts like that, since it's not exactly bumping up against profound insight into the mysteries of the universe.

Then again, if Simmons didn't miss points, he probably would not have made it all the way to the Max Mercy Hall of Fame. Now there is little to do but wait for some enterprising soul to write a companion volume to Simmons' epic "Now I Can Die in Peace". I would suggest "Well...We're Waiting" for a title since he's so fond of quoting Caddyshack.

Was any one really surprised when the Yankees announced today that Roger Clemens will be rejoining the team in the not-yet-determined but not-too-distant future? THe Yankees have the money, and they really need pitching help, what with the rash of injuries and the fact that Carl Pavano may or may not have left the team to track down a pseudonymous blogger who hates the Red Sox and rashly predicted that a guy who'd barely managed to start 19 games in his tenure with the Yankees would win 18 games this season thereby jinxing said pitcher as little has been jinxed in the history of jinxes. In an unrelated story, I am moving from location to location trying to stay one step ahead of a different nemesis with the initials CP.

Signing Clemens is a huge media coup, but how much can he really deliver for the Yankees at this point in his career? I hope he has quite a bit left in the tank, since the Red Sox were among the prospective suitors. A dazzlingly successful return would be win-win for the purposes of Sedition in Red Sox Nation, as every game Clemens should help narrow the gap between the Sox and Yanks and it will make the Red Sox look bad for not signing the player who is currently tied with the immortal Cy Young for the most wins in the team's 104 year history.

Unfortunately, while the Yankees were busy signing Clemens, the Minnesota Twins were hard at work almost but not quite battling back to defend their home field from the Red Sox. It was a day of good signs and bad signs for me. Among the bad signs, Schilling pitched entirely too well. The good sign is that Okajima allowed a run to score, so maybe he'll tire as the season progresses.

But this day was all about Clemens. Back in October, I had a dream that Clemens was putting away a pinstriped jersey with the number 27 on it. I am a superstitious guy. I believe in the power of dreams and the occult and suchlike things. Looking ahead, I just don't see how this Yankee team can survive the season, let alone advance to win a World Series.

It just seems like a strange, uncomfortable mixture of youth and experience. The young players, especially the pitchers, seem too young, and not ready for a serious pennant chase. Some of the more experienced players just don't seem like they have the chemistry to make a champion. The guys who have rings don't seem as hungry, and the guys like Giambi and A Rod who haven't won yet don't seem like they know how to pull it together at the right time to get the big hit.

The Yankee championship teams of the late 90s didn't have a lot of guys who produced inflated stats. They had smart, unselfish guys who could do a lot more than simply playing for the big three run homer. This current Yankee lineup has players who can do everything on the field, but they've gotten in the habit of waiting for some one else to do it. I wonder, since I don't know, if this is what the Yankee teams of the end of the 1960s were like.

Even if Clemens return takes a lot of pressure off of the starting rotation, that's only half the battle. And since this isn't the human interest moral of the story spot at the end of the old GI Joe cartoons, half the battle is a whole lot of nothing. At his age, Clemens can't be counted on pitching into the seventh inning in every outing. He might not be able to do it more than once in every three starts.

So that leaves the massive problem of the bullpen, which was supposed to be rebuilt around Viscaino in the offseason. Right now, it looks like that particular portion of the Randy Johnson trade is not working as advertised. I don't think I've ever seen a bullpen come out of spring training with so many tired arms. If you think about it, it's not as though these guys started strong and were tired out because the starters have been injured and ineffective. The bullpen was no good from jump street.

It's not just Rivera. I think he's going to go on a run where he saves 18 or 19 in a row any day now. I don't know if that's keen insight or just a part of my brain that isn't prepared to see a guy who has been locked in for the last 11 seasons go out like this. Closing is a tricky business, but Rivera and Hoffman have been like death and taxes over the years. Sooner or later (and probably very soon at their ages), their dominance had to end. I just wasn't expecting it to be quite this soon.

Among the other things that surprised me lately was the ease with which Ottawa brushed aside the New Jersey Devils. I haven't had a chance to watch Ottawa much this season, since hockey is below old movies on the radar screen in my world. To be fair, so is virtually every sporting event with the exception football and compelling baseball and basketball games.

But the Devils were like the Yankee teams that won titles a few years back. The Devils had that same mix of smart players who knew their roles and came up big in crucial situations. And like Rivera, the Devils had the most feared weapon of the era in Matin Brodeur. Now, it seems like the Devils had a blend of guys who could score like Gomez, Gionta and Elias and guys who could defend like Madden and Pandolfo.

The trouble was they weren't young enough and athletic enough to score with Ottawa, nor were they solid, patient and tough enough to offset that deficiency with their defensive play. They have yet to recover from the retirement of Scott Stevens and the departure of Scott Niedermeyer. Rafalski and Colin White are good defensemen, but the unit is not what it once was across the board. I knew all that going into this postseason, but I expected to see the Martin Brodeur I used to know. It just didn't happen.

I guess it's funny, the way a team can age so much in a week. Like the Heat against the Bulls, or like the Yankees when the season opened. The Devils and the Heat were battle tested, they had championship experience, but they ran into opposing teams with youth, athleticism and depth in a combination that proved to much for the seasoned teams with the championship pedigree.

The Yankees should be potent enough on offensive to emerge from the long, long, long season. But what will they look like when they do? They are going to be an old, tired team in October. We all ought to know this, since they look like an old, tired team in April and they looked like an old, tired team at noon today. Obviously they didn't get younger by signing Clemens, but they might be fresher and deeper now.

Clemens has always had guts on the mound. Whether he always pitched with them is an open question. I don't really want to debate Game Six of the 1986 World Series, and his commitment to the Red Sox organization in the mid-1990s left a little to be desired. But Clemens gave his best in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, in Game 4 of the 2003 World Series, in Game 7 of the 2004 NLCS and in his start against the White Sox in the World Series in 2005. This Yankee team needs his toughness right now.

It just won't be enough. The old players are too old. The young players are too young. The tough players aren't tough enough. The hungry players aren't hungry enough. I don't see the Yankees going deep into this postseason. This team doesn't appear to have done enough to address the deficiencies that have contributed to early exits in 2005 and 2006.

But before you get your knickers in a twist and start planning the victory celebration, Red Sox Nation, do me a favor and remember one thing. This Red Sox team is built for one purpose and one purpose only. And it's not to win a World Series. It's to beat the Yankees. They look like they can do that this year. But the bullpen isn't deep, the closer is fragile and the offense isn't what it was back in the dark days of 2004. The Sox aren't going to win a postseason series this year.

And one other happy note this evening. Read this review of some movie I have no intention of seeing from Slate. Just look at the first paragraph and try to remember the last time you read something that jarring that quickly. And then read the rest of the article and see if you can't figure out why we even bother trying to live with one another.