Well, you win some and you lose some. The Celtics, under the inspired leadership of Doc Rivers, managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory this evening despite finishing the evening plus 12 from the line. Under those circumstances, a team must have to try its ass off to lose by 19. Alas, the Seattle Mariners weren't quite so cooperative tonight, and the Red Sox are leading in the 8th as I write this.

It surprised me to see the level of commitment the NBA officials showed to securing a potential Celtics Lakers final. Given the propensity for flopping and what should have been home-cooking, you'd have thought the Pistons would have been on the receiving end of a free throw disparity like that. Just think, Rip Hamilton (who under ordinary circumstances flops and whines to the point where Reggie Miller feels uncomfortable watching him play) didn't get to the free throw line for the first time until the fourth quarter.

And as for those who will point out that the Pistons got away with any number of uncalled holds and hacks, I would ask them if what Kendrick Perkins was doing tonight could reasonably be called basketball? I know he fouled out eventually, but if he'd been called for half the hacks he committed (in limited minutes on account of the actual calls against him), he'd have fouled out in the first minutes of the third.

And the Big Ticket did more than his share of hacking as well. Some might think it showed his competitive fire when he blocked a shot Theo Ratliff took as a lark after he'd already been fouled and the play was whistled dead. As for me, I thought he should have been called for a foul of his own there, because it wasn't a clean block. But perhaps he was still emotionally traumatized from the play where Maxiell came up behind him and made our favorite overrated superstar look ridiculous by blocking a sure dunk from behind.

Far and away the most mystifying event of the night had to be Doc Rivers awkward, verging on sexual harassment compliment of Michelle Tafoya's ensemble in the first half. I understand that his fragile little mind must have been overtaxed trying to reconcile himself to the fact that his team was lighting it up from the line but still trailing, but if he didn't want to answer questions, he should have simply said he didn't want to answer questions. We didn't need to see that.

I have some questions, too, that are bothering me at this point. First, is it ironic that Ratliff has played more productive minutes against the Celtics in this series than he played in his entire Celtic tenure? Sure, they gave him up in the Garnett deal and sure, he was taking up space and getting paid handsomely for it in Boston, but every thing he does to help the Pistons win and the Celtics lose has to sting a bit, no?

I'm sorry I haven't updated this space as often as I probably should have in the last few weeks. This week has been crazy. I had to do some travelling and some drinking not entirely unrelated to said travelling. Plus I've been a bit depressed, what with the Celtics getting entirely too close to lucking their way to a title for their loathsome management team and with Jon Lester's no-hitter being treated as though it were an event on par with Neil Armstrong "walking" on the Moon.

Perhaps I am indeed as horrible a human being as I am told (quite frequently, in fact), but I find myself curiously unmoved by Lester's triumph. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I am pro cancer, even though I don't wear a Lance Armstrong bracelet and I had the temerity to suggest that one could possibly accomplish more by simply donating to research facilities directly than to purchase overpriced merchandise from some trumped-up Live Pink campaign. Or maybe I am right and all of you are wrong.

Before we get all teary eyed and mushy over what happened earlier this week, let's all take a nice deep breath and remember that the Kansas City Royals are still perennial doormats in the American League. It's not as though Ruth, Gehrig and the rest of the 1927 Yankees suddenly came back in some sort of less pretentious and sanctimonious Field of Dreams moment. No-hitting any team is a nice accomplishment, something that really classes up a CV, but it's not as though he single-handedly brought peace to the Middle East, or a consistent viewpoint on Iran to the minions of a certain Midwestern junior Senator.

It's not as though I am somehow less sentimental than the average fan or the average person. Nor am I evil. It's just that I want a few days, a short moratorium on a story being overblown and beaten to death thirteen seconds after it happened. Like when ESPN cut away from its regularly scheduled programming for 3 hours because the New York Yankees fifth starter was tragically killed in a small plane crash. That is what turns me off sports, that and the fact that the average New England sports fan consistently decides to pass on their inferior genetic material to another generation, as though we needed more morons in this country.

Unfortunately, it hasn't just been my relentlessly negative take on the Red Sox that has suffered in my recent silence. There are a few stories that really needed my complaints that have passed unnoticed lately. Thanks to the New York Knicks missing the playoffs again, Spike Lee was free to go to Cannes and shoot his mouth off about Clint Eastwood and his World War Two films which didn't include African Americans.

First, there were 900 or so African Americans among 35,000 Marines who fought at Iwo Jima. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there were exactly zero African Americans among the Marines who raised the flag on Mount Sirubachi. Flags of Our Fathers was about the raising of the flag and the bond tour that followed it much more than it was about the battle itself.

So by my calculations, there were a good 34,700 Marines who fought bravely on that God forsaken island but didn't manage to have their stories told by Clint Eastwood. This wasn't a racist decision, it was simply a question of whether the movie should be 2 hours long or the movie should be 2 years long. And as for the Japanese version of the story, Letters from Iwo Jima, it told the story from the enemy's point of view, so what's the big deal? The bottom line of this whole mess is that Spike Lee really ought to shut his yapper and make a half decent movie for a change.

Two other items that I want to mention are a recent release concerning the drug from Pfizer that helps people quit smoking. Among its side effects are depression and suicide. While that sounds scary as hell, at least you can't keep smoking if you've killed yourself. Who supervises the FDA now? Is there any way to get a drug on the market that doesn't have horrific side effects? When your means to quit smoking can trigger a suicide attempt, you just might want to revisit your faith in medical science.

And recently, a panel of astrologers convened to predict a victory for Senator Obama. Over 1,500 devotees from 44 countries worked on this effort. Seems a bit like the 1,000 monkeys at 1,000 typewriters producing Shakespeare (which still seems more plausible than Roger Bacon). I wonder if all of these devotees from all of the nations saw what they saw in the stars or what they wanted to see. But I guess I'm skeptical like that...

And finally tonight, the hopes of Celtic fans everywhere took a serious hit when the Green Machine allowed a visiting team to push them around in their own house for the first time this postseason. I don't want to hear a lot of whining about how bad the calls were. Terrible officiating in crucial basketball games is one more of the rites of spring we just have to accept. It might be nice if the league held a seminar for its officials and reintroduced them to the rules of basketball, but miracles no longer happen.

The bottom line is the Celtics are a flawed team with a terrible coach. The best weapon they have in this series is Flip Saunders, who is, in his own way, as bad a coach as Rivers. I don't know what made less sense, leaving Allen in to pick up his fifth foul with over 14 minutes of basketball to be played or not challenging Allen, who is a shaky on-ball defender when he was lighting it up in the fourth quarter all the while playing on the verge of fouling out. Maybe Saunders was waiting for Allen to score 15 or 18 points in the quarter before he got his players to challenge him. Maybe he didn't want to end the fearful symmetry of the Celtics yo-yoing home wins with road losses. Who knows?

It's almost sad to see how useless Rondo is on the offensive end. He might as well just start chucking shots up even if they have no shot of going. He's a turnover waiting to happen the way he forces bad passes and compounds the degree of difficulty by attempting said bad passes in a manner that would be all but impossible for a much better point guard like Deron Williams or Chris Paul. This leads to him committing dumb fouls on the defensive end because he's overeager and frustrated.

In the long run, Eddie House isn't really the answer either. One can't win a playoff series substituting offense for defense at the point guard spot all game long. Nor will Rondo ever truly be an effective player if he can be taken out of the game so easily by simply ignoring him. If Rondo can't make shots, this team will not beat the Pistons in a seven game series. It's just not happening. But I'm not too worried about that.

So, tonight is the pivotal game 5 in the series with Cleveland. If the Celtics don't win, I guess we'll finally see if this team is for real or not. Obviously, they put up a tremendous regular season, but the regular season will have meant nothing if this team doesn't make the NBA Finals. Each year it seems the NBA regular season means less and less because there are at least 12 terrible teams. And now with the epidemic of fire sale trades this season (KG to Boston, Gasol to LA and Shaq to Phoenix) it seems like the bad teams will get worse and the few good teams will get better more quickly. That might make for better playoffs, but it won't make for better basketball.

Should the Cs win tonight, they will be in a strong position in the series, but overall they still have the nagging issue of their inability to win on the road this postseason. I imagine it may have happened at one point in history, but I sincerely doubt a team has managed to win a title without winning at least one game on the road in the playoffs. Theoretically, it's possible as long as the Cs could win every game at home. But what exactly are the odds of that happening?

Say they get past the Cavs, that puts them up against the Pistons. And if they should beat Detroit without winning a game at the Palace, they would go on to face the team that emerges from the Lakers, the Jazz, the Hornets or the Spurs. By the time the playoffs are all said and done if the Cs advance to the Finals without winning on the road they'd have played 21 games on top of the regular season. Throw in the fact that Pierce, KG and Allen aren't really all that young any more (consider the fact that LeBron seems like he's been in the league forever, but he's only 23 then multiply that effect for the Boston Three Party).

And is it really likely that with the playoff savvy veterans in Detroit and San Antonio looming (I'll believe that the NBA won't allow the Spurs to hack and flop their way to yet another disappointing NBA Finals series when it happens) couldn't find a way to win in Boston at least once between the two of them? These teams know every dirty trick in the game today. And they have no silly superstitions about playing basketball the way it ought to be played, so they can either wear down or frustrate the Celtics with tactics that would make Pat Reily's Knicks teams blush.

And if the Cs should lose tonight, they'll be in a world of pain. Not having won on the road and facing elimination in Game Six, we would see a Celtics team that has been hit (for those of you who read this space regularly, you'll remember my fondness for quoting the maxim of the Michael Douglas character from The Ghost and the Darkness that in prize fighting, everybody has a plan until he gets hit). With a suspect coach in Rivers, and three superstars who have had a knack for coming up small when it really matters, would you really be confident that the Celtics would be dangerous with their backs against the wall?

I wouldn't, but then I don't want them to do well as long as Ainge and the boys from Banner 17 are minding the store. In other matters, the NBA is going to suspend play for the 2008-2009 season in the next few days. Since the Benefactor has signed Rick Carlisle to coach the Mavs, it is now officially a foregone conclusion that Mark Cuban will be celebrating the first of many NBA titles this time next year.

Or maybe we'll all remember that Jason Kidd will be a year older, and against everything that seems logical, will be even more of a douche. Dirk Nowitzki will still be some bizarre hybrid of the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz. Josh Howard will still have peaked in 2006. Jason Terry will still be Jason Terry, and Rick Carlisle probably won't have acquired the magic to do what he failed to do in Indiana and Detroit.

In case you needed further proof that Mark Cuban is a douche, read his latest entry on BlogMaverick. He drinks Bud, he listens to Jethro Tull and he ponders how to overthrow Google. Bud is swill. Bud Light is fine, but High Life is so much better than Bud it isn't funny, in fact it makes up for those awful Commissioner of the More Taste League spots. Jethro Tull blows. And I rather imagine his machinations against Google are a bit like the Pinky and the Brain cartoons, except without a super-intelligent leader opposite the dim-witted Benefactor and only accidentally funny.

Finally, I received an interesting comment on my last post. An anonymous reader wanted to know why I haven't been posting on the Red Sox. And I guess, like anything else, I don't have a reason. But I will be picking back up with that in the next week or so, as soon as I have something to say. I was surprised to get that comment, though. I figured most people would be glad I haven't posted on the Red Sox lately. I'm sure it would make a far too successful start to this season even more pleasant, but what do I know?

So, I realize that the world of sports is progressing rapidly toward championships in the NHL and NBA, and the baseball season is underway (I could have said in full swing, but I try not to be a douche as much as humanly possible. It's what separates people like me from people like Simmons, Mariotti and the CHB, that and I don't get paid for this). But I don't have much to say about those topics right now. Just that if San Antonio wins another title this season, that's it for me with the NBA.

Greg Popovich is sort of like the evolutionary Red Auerbach and these Spurs are sort of like the Celtics dynasty of the 50s and 60s, at least in the same sense as JD Drew's numbers are sort of like ARod's career stats and in the same way that getting kicked in the balls is sort of like a good time.

San Antonio plays a disgraceful brand of basketball. And anyone who can legitimately say they enjoy watching a team meld cowardice with bullying tactics has no genuine affinity for basketball. Can anyone honestly imagine a player like Bill Russell stooping to using hack-a-Shaq tactics against Wilt Chamberlain (a terrible free throw shooter in his own right)? Russell probably would have thrown a beating on anyone who suggested such a thing. And rightly so, because that isn't basketball. Or at least it wasn't.

I realize that New Orleans is up 2-1 in their series with the Spurs right now, but I just can't see them holding on to that lead. I am not optimistic enough to think that the Spurs won't find a way to flop and hack their way out of the hole they're in right now. If that team collectively starred in a low budget, crummy horror movie, I think I just might have trouble remembering it was fiction.

And as for Manu Ginobli, can you imagine what his career would have looked like if he had the misfortune of playing in the NBA when basketball was basketball? For every rave review of his play, there ought to be at least a footnote to remind younger fans what Jordan, Bird, Johnson, Barkley, Wilkins and Doctor J would have done to him had he had the misfortune to face any one of them in his respective prime. And don't forget that the league's officials tended to actually call games in a fashion that resembled legitimacy back then. Ginobli would be on the bench in foul trouble or so shell-shocked that he'd have to retire. But the trouble with good old days is that they're always gone for good by the time you realize just what you had.

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to devote some attention to what was wrong with the Star Wars movies. Or at least some of the problems, since there are so many and I get bored fairly easily. I guess the fundamental problem is that the films are science fiction, and science fiction as a genre is created by people who are cut off from the real world where people have to make real decisions and face real consequences. That and they probably smoke a lot of dope.

Look at the way Darth Vader kept choking senior officers to death with the Force. After the first few admirals and generals got choked, that would be it for the morale and the discipline of the Imperial military. Fear is a fairly effective motivator, but at a certain point, a person is just going to say "What the hell, if I fail I'm going to be killed, so why even try?" Also, eliminating senior commanders would logically force his immediate subordinates into roles that they may not be fully prepared to take on in combat conditions.

Then there's the Force itself. What exactly is the Force capable of and why does it keep changing to suit the convenience of a particular film at a particular point in time? One Sith Lord hiding in the capital can diminish the ability of the entire Jedi council to use the Force, but another Sith Lord can't stop a kid with about 6 minute's training from using the Force to blow up a Death Star?

And why can Vader sense his son with the Force and not his daughter? For that matter, why the eff did they call the kid Luke Skywalker? Or is creativity one of the ten thousand things that lead to the Dark Side? It kind of defeats the purpose of hiding the kid if you're going to give him his father's last name.

Then there's the fact that the movies are filled with overrated characters who have massive cult followings and yet accomplish nothing. What was the big deal about Boba Fett? And now that I think about it, outside of putting the whining robot's head on backwards, what did Chewbacca do, exactly? But the most overrated character has to be Yoda. If he spoke normally, no one would even give a damn about him.

Episodes 1-3 suffer, too, from the absence of a compelling bad guy. Darth Vader in the original movies was compelling because he was big and scary looking and he had that cool SCUBA regulator breathing thing going for him, along with James Earl Jones' voice. The Emperor was a kind of a puss with creepy magical powers, but the Palpatine character was just a puss in 1, 2 and 3. I understand that was supposed to be part of his act to fool every one, but he just came off as a marginally talented English actor working with a shitty script.

And Anakin took more from the table than any character in any movie I've seen in the last ten years, with the exception of A Scanner Darkly, where every character not only took things from the table, but came back to steal table itself along with the rest of the furniture in the house. The little kid who played him in Episode One was so annoying that he would have triggered a rash of vasectomies had the average Star Wars fan even had the chance of contaminating the next generation with their DNA.

But that little kid ended up looking like Olivier doing Hamlet thanks to Hayden Christensen. God, was he awful. I realize, he won an MTV Movie Award for his performance in Episode 3, but that's not exactly an impressive accomplishment. Perhaps I'm being unfair. Maybe he stole the show in Jumper, I won't know until I happen to see it one night after Val Kilmer's Spartan on USA at 4 AM three years from now, though.

It was more than a bit painful to watch Natalie Portman and Ewan MacGregor in the prequels. After the Professional and Beatiful Girls, it seemed like Portman could act. But it still has to be better to have peaked at 14 than never to peak at all. And MacGregor was excellent in Trainspotting, but with each passing year and each disappointing role, it looks like he channeled every last bit of talent he possessed into that project and that's probably going to be all she wrote for him.

What I've never figured out is the logical process by which Luke Skywalker just accepts the fact of his upbringing without any bitterness. If I found out that I had a twin sister who was adopted and raised as a princess while I was stuck farming water on a desert planet and raised by a broke d-bag who kept scamming me out of a chance to fly space ships, I sure as hell wouldn't take that with a smile on my face. I'd be on the Dark Side paying every waterwalker and do-gooder back for that in a second. But that's just me.

Finally, there's the fact that Lucas keeps revisiting the original films to tinker with them and invariably makes them worse. I didn't like Return of the Jedi much to start with, but the revamped ending and Lucas' midget fetish have made me hate it. Why did he have to edit in Hayden Christensen? What was wrong with keeping the older Vader who actually redeemed himself and not the young douche who went to the Dark Side? And why did he bring in the celebration scenes from Naboo? The Gungans sucked and were probably overly insensitive from an ethnic standpoint to begin with, and they didn't get any better.

It reminded me of something I read in Aldous Huxley's intro to the 20th anniversary edition of A Brave New World. He mentioned that in revisiting the work after that length of time, he saw a number of things that he would have done differently had he the chance and wanted to edit out, but in the end he left it as it stood. And it was the right thing to do. Better to let something that was widely appreciated stand flaws and all than try to perfect it, only to weaken it as a whole.

And like that, the Detroit Pistons are no longer in the hunt for the NBA title. Alas, I am not happy. You may rest assured, however, that it has very little to do with the fact that the Red Sox cam back to beat the Yankees today, thanks to Mike Lowell proing that he is the gutless fraud I always suspected him to be. Imagine if A Rod had maliciously attempted to hurt one Yankee and then succeeded in his second attempt.

Unfortunately, I am not pleased to see Cleveland advance. I want LeBron to win a title. I really do. But I don't want to see the NBA turn a blind eye to Manu Ginobli and Tony Parker running at LeBron to augment Bruce Bowen's "defense." The three of them will hack, flop, whine and coward their way to another ring that would be LeBron's if the NBA allowed basketball to be played by the rules.

The only reason the Spurs deserve to win is that Popovich has a defined rotation and a logical system to govern the way that rotation is rotated. That is not the case in Cleveland. For instance, tell me why Damon Jones has played the number of minutes he has played in the situations he has played them in this series. I am not saying he should have played more or fewer minutes. I just don't understand why he has played the minutes he has played; it never seemed to fit.

Why, then, is there even a series to be played? Why waste a young, healthy, impressive star like LeBron when the NBA has not had the guts to stop a machine that churns out bad basketball? Maybe it might sell internationally, but this brand of basketball annoys American audiences. We want to see teams run the floor. We don't want to see stagnant, let the superstar do it half court sets. But we don't want to see flopping, gutless whiners. So thanks for playing Dallas and San Antonio. Dave Cowens and JoJo White want you to man up before you step on the court again.

But I am scandalized and offended that Bill Russell was on hand to present the Eastern Conference trophy. Not so much because he did it, since this is a free country he can do what he wants. But he and LeBron were the only two people who had any business on the basketball court. Plus he's Bill Russell. The NBA should pay him money to be in Boston to remind Ainge and Banner 17 of the enormity of their crime.

I am also scandalized and offended that the Cavaliers put on such a display to celebrate a conference championship. There are still games to be played. You have to go to war with San Antonio. It isn't time to celebrate yet. No one should be allowed to celebrate a damn thing until the last basketball game has been played. Maybe I'm just old fashioned that way. But I must sign off, since I am running a 5K in West Roxbury tomorrow and I have to go to bed.

I really didn't intend to post tonight. After all, I've been drinking for a long time now, and my drunken posts have been unmitigated disasters. But several things need be said about several topics and if I don't do it, who will? The Coast Guard? And the kick in the ass about blogging whilst somewhat intoxicated is that I do not know where to begin.

I suppose I'll start where I left off last night. I have been reluctant to talk about this particular subject, since I have a way of jinxing players and teams, but in the wake of last night's epic performance, I don't think I can jinx LeBron. Hell, even Bill Simmons is on board, and he's only permitted to notice trends which David Stern and Mark Cuban allow him to notice.

LeBron deserves at this point to hold the title deeds to every team and every property associated with basketball in the NBA's Eastern Conference. Every game he plays is a two-fold kick in the ass to the NBA league offices. First, he is triumphing in the face of the system. The Celtics since the Walker trade should hold themselves fortunate to depend on LeBron's mercy for the right to rebuild.

No one will admit it, but the NBA feeds on its superstars. And yet the league allows manifestly inferior players (like the entire Pistons roster, none of whom is fit to unfasten LeBron's oh so very unMessianic sandals) to flop and hack until the only player worthy of shaking hands with Bird, Russell, Heinshon, Cousy, Havlicheck, Jones, White or Cowens is shut out of the NBA Finals. So there are (and have been) two sets of Jordan rules. Superstars get most of the breaks, but when they don't it's OK to maul them in much the same fashion as a tiger mauls its dinner.

But tonight's was to be a baseball post. After all, the Yankees are back in town. And in my opinion, they should have erased not one but two games from the lead the Red Sox are oh so close to frittering away at this point. You may not have noticed, as it's Friday and all those with social lives were socializing, but the Red Sox managed to lose a game that should have been lost by a much larger margin.

In the early stages of the game, I found myself wondering if Chien Ming Wang had run over the umpire's dog. Red Sox fans might not agree, but Kevin Youkilis struck out in the bottom of the second. There is no way in God's Earth that the 2-2 pitch Youkilis took was a ball. It was at the knees and on the inside corner, a perfect pitch. In a logical world it was strike three.

Hell, Schilling would have thrown a towel over his head and wept as though he were trapped in the Old Testament Book of Lamentations until an ump gave him the call he felt the world owed him on a pitch like that. In a perfect world, some person would have emerged from nothingness to throw an hellacious beating on Youke for no apparent reason before he was called out on strikes.

Then, in the bottom of the fifth, Doug Mirabelli achieved one of the more remarkable feats one could imagine in a professional baseball game. He threw out a runner at third base who could not have done much to be safer. And any one who thinks Abreu was actually out is either a shameless Red Sox fan or a total and complete moron. Although, to be fair and to quote the Sinatra song at the same time, you can't have one without the other.

And there is very little that a Sox fan can do to try to answer my allegations. Not only because the average Red Sox fan barely has the intelligence to invilve him or herself in a "Less Filling" "Tastes Great" debate, but because the Lizard King of Red Sox Nation is on my side. If you watch the footage again, you'll see that the Remdawg agrees with me in both cases. The Sox got all the calls and still lost the game. And that's why I think the Yanks should have picked up an extra game out of this exchange.

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.

Even though the Red Sox managed to come back against the Mariners tonight and win the single most impressive game a team has ever played in their 27th contest of a 162 game season, today was still a good day in Sedition in Red Sox Nation world. Tom Brady was seen walking through NYC sporting a jaunty Yankee cap. Bob Halloran wrote an uninspired post for his blog, and there was a mind-numbingly dull piece in Red Sox Times on how to socialize with other Sox fans down in New York. And best of all, Steven Jackson and the Golden State Warriors routed the mighty Dallas Mavericks out of the playoffs.

First, Red Sox Nation is in moral crisis because their football hero Tom Brady is wearing a Yankee cap to conceal his receding hairline while he's out gallivanting his Brazilian supermodel companion. And he's spending his time in New York City when he could be in Boston cheering on the Sox. Maybe he could have been seen in green Sox regalia, after all, isn't it his duty to make sure that he spend every waking moment figuring out new ways to do everything New England fans want him to do?

That's just one more reason to love Red Sox fans. This is a huge non-story. After all, Brady came from California and went to school in Michigan. His ties to anything remotely connected to Red Sox Nation didn't even begin until the Pats drafted him. So why is it incumbent upon him not to wear a Yankees hat?

If Brady does in fact, as I fear, harbor political aspirations for his future after football, doesn't it make sense for him to curry favor in New York? It's a bigger, richer market than New England. And he already has Patriot fans in his corner. Hell, he'd have to start breaking in to season ticket holders' houses at night to smash their possessions and kick their children to alienate them.

Then there is our old friend Bob Halloran, who is not convinced that the NFL pays enough attention to on-field performance in the rush to draft workout warriors who put up impressive numbers at the combine. The vertical leap in particular concerns Halloran. I'm sure it never occurred to him, but the vertical leap is one of the better ways to measure a player's explosiveness from a standing start.

And as for the question of whether the teams don't watch enough game film, that is ridiculous. In the process of media build-up, individual workouts and interview sessions, teams seem like they do more and study more than they should as opposed to less. It's hard sometimes to tell everything you need to know about a player from the game tape. There is a very fine line between the player with a great head for the game and a guy who was in the right place at the right time against inferior competition.

If you are a Red Sox fan and you want to network with other colossal tools, there are a number of places in New York City in the heart of Yankee Country where you can meet fellow travellers. Read this Fist Magnet's Guide To Rooting For The Sox In New York to find out where to go. Use extreme caution, however, and do not operate a motor vehicle or heavy machinery after reading it. The boredom it inflicts could be lethal in large doses.

I particularly enjoyed the story of the author's meeting with Jonathan Papelbon's mother. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that encounter which I'm sure must have been painfully awkward. Not having a child who pitches for a professional team, I can't say for certain how uncomfortable it would be to meet a random stranger who just happens to root for said team and wants to have a nice chat about my son. But I'm willing to be that it would call to mind visions of Ted Bundy, or at the very least the Robert DeNiro character from the terrible movie The Fan.

And in case you're wondering in Red Sox Nation, there is a touch of grey to the silver lining of tonight's impressive come-from-behind win over the Mariners. First, the Mariners starter should have been pitching to Artie Lange in Beer League. And Matsuzaka walked the bases loaded in the opening frame before he recorded an out. Yeah, JC Romero recorded his first save in a long, long, long time, but lost in all of that is that Jonathan Papelbon might have overstressed his arm throwing those thirty five pitches while blowing the save the other night. That won't be good for the Nation.

Finally, the real story of the night is that the NBA, the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission and the Rand Corporation can rest easy for another year. Mark Cuban and his Dallas Mavericks have just been eliminated from the playoffs by the Golden State Warriors. For the first time under the current playoff format and just the third time ever, an eight seed has eliminated the one seed. It's only the second time a team which had won 65 games in the regular season failed to win the championship, and the first time a team with many wins didn't reach the conference finals.

Google and YouTube are in the process of retreating to the hills. Since the NBA has eviscerated the lone voice of reason on basketball issues by fining Cuban hundreds of thousands of dollars for his crying out in the basketball wilderness in blogMaverick, the Benefactor can but vent his spleen on media conglomerates. With any luck, Cuban will be too depressed to buy the Chicago Cubs in the wake of this catastrophe.

Dirk Nowitzki's performance, especially in the second half, was abysmal at best. I remember a quote attributed to Napoleon that said "scratch a Russian and you will wound a Tartar." Nowitzki has inspired me to offer this version: "hit a German in the mouth and you will make a gutless bully cry." I'm sure Angela Merkel will give Dirk a national holiday to console him, as rolling over in a playoff game is still the most tangible achievement of any German since a ghost in the machine ruthlessly shanghaied a four week old child into the German army.

Even better, Don Nelson led his team past the owner who fired him. Steven Jackson who did his best to take the mantle of worst citizen in the NBA (based on the way the media covers him) or guy who really needs some help with his decision making off the court from Ron Artest as long as Jackson stayed in Indiana is now somewhat vindicated. At the end of the day, Dallas was outplayed and outcoached, they were beaten as an organization. And it put a smile on my face, if it's any consolation to the Benefactor.

All I have to say on the Western Conference playoffs as they progress is this...

Be looking good Warriors. Be looking real good.

And good luck with that, as Baron Davis reminds us that a guy really shouldn't have a beard that's longer than the hair on his head.