After a certain point, I don't really know why I bother with this blog anymore. If I'm going to update it once every two weeks, it's obviously not going to develop into anything, not that it ever was going to become something in the first place. But anyway, the Lakers have survived to play another day.

After watching this evening's travesty, and seeing the Lakers do everything they could to try to put up one more epic collapse, I have several things on my mind. And I'd like to start with this:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If all those things can be applied to you, then you probably don't play for the Lakers. I'm reasonably sure that Kipling (the author of those lines, in case you didn't know already) never saw a basketball game. It's possible that he may have, since he lived in Vermont for a short time and married an American woman. But that is neither here nor there.

What matters is that the Lakers can't defend the pick and roll, even though KG's screens tend to stretch the limit of what is acceptable even though the refs don't call it. They seem to look around for another person to step up and make a big defensive play, and even to take a big shot. And they don't help Kobe when he needs to get free on the offensive end.

And the Celtics don't really deserve to win, either. I'm hardly the first person to notice this, but Doc Rivers has some serious issues. With the way he juggles his lineup, he's either responding to some sort of insult or slight with all the petulance of a spoiled child or he has serious short term memory lapses. There is no rhyme or reason to the way players not named Pierce, Garnett or Allen (Ray) get minutes on this team.

Davis played really well against Detroit and is MIA in this series. Powe has shown flashes in big minutes against the Lakers but was MIA in the Detroit series. Sam Cassel is old, overrated and, to be quite frank, not quite ready for primetime in HD. Not only that, but he's a chucker. And a championship caliber point guard isn't supposed to be a chucker.

To make a long story short, since it's late and even I have things to do tomorrow, the NBA blows. And it sickens me to see people walking around the city in flaunting their newfound Celtic pride. The same dbags who bailed on the team in the 90s and bailed on the team in the early Ainge years are back in force, and it's like they never left. It doesn't sit well with me.

To show that I'm not all bitterness and cynicism, I will be rooting for Rocco Mediate in the US Open playoff. Real, genuine, honest underdog stories like this hardly ever come along. And while I have no problem rooting for Goliath under most circumstances, I cannot root for a whining, pouting Goliath like Tiger Woods.

I'm sorry I haven't posted in a few days. But there has been so little joy in the sports world for me, and this is the 300th post in the history of Sedition in Red Sox Nation. Maybe I'm just getting too sentimental in my old age, but I wanted this to be a special one.

So while we have the Celtics and Lakers squaring off to see which team's bogus trades will trump the other's, I haven't been doing much smiling. As is my regrettable habit, I went on a nice mini-bender following the Celtics victory in Game 6 in Detroit. Recently, though, I have managed to confine my dangerously bitter and incoherent drunken rants to my personal life and kept them away from this space.

If it's any consolation, I may have put an old friend from high school whom I hadn't seen in five years and his wife into probate court. After last call at a local night spot, the guy offered (or, more likely, I managed to invite myself) to provide a couple of Bud Lights as a night cap. His wife, whom I had never met before (and technically, I suppose, I still haven't met her in the formal sense) had come home from some sort of party where she was designated driver, and was somewhat less than thrilled to come home and find a large drunken moron cadging Bud Lights at 3 AM. I guess it goes to show you that no good deed goes unpunished.

I felt bad about it, and the massive hangover that crippled me on Sunday. After all, this guy, despite being a BC grad, had the first good answer I've ever received when I explained my new rationale for drinking screwdrivers and forsaking White Russians and rum and cokes (just too many calories in white russians). The rum and cokes went because I am not ordering a mixed drink with diet coke, I might as well just grab a sign that says WUSS and rock that, no offense to those who do go that route is intended.

To make a long story short, I told the guys I was with at the bar that I switched to screwdrivers instead of beer because I was trying to cut down on my carbs. This is probably the fifth time I've mentioned that. Generally, people have just let it slide. But this cat, whom I inadvertently sent to divorce court, came up with a gem of a response, elegant in its simplicity. His answer: "So you're drinking effin' orange juice???" No one else had made that connection about the volume of carbs from sugar in the orange juice. Too bad I ruined his life...

There were a couple of things I should have complained about as they happened on this mini-bender, but just didn't get around to them. First, there was the goddamn spelling bee. In case you're keeping score at home, the finals of the National Spelling Bee was on ABC and the sixth (and final) game of the NBA's Eastern Conference Finals was on cable.

A bunch of prepubescent mutants with a super pointless gift and nascent psychoses played prime time network TV and world-class athletes in the prime of their careers playing in one of the four major North American professional sports was banished to cable. So what if the kid can spell the hell out of guerdon. Can he dunk? Can he handle the rock? Can he flash gang signs like the Truth or disappoint anyone who made the joke "I think Spike Lee's planning a sequel called He Had Game" like Ray Allen?

No. The kid can't do a damn thing but spell, and just because that is a rare gift, doesn't mean it's TV worthy. I'm so sick of this damn country and its juvenile obsession with novelty. Another three years from now and we'll be remembering the day middle school spelling outgrew its brand and falls back to ESPN2's midday coverage like the X games. Hopefully none of these homeschooled creepshows end up too depressed not to commit mass murder ten years from now on that account.

Another thing I must complain about is the ongoing effort on the part of Elvis Presley Enterprises to tarnish the King's legacy at every twist and turn. The particular aspect of their profiteering that is pissing me off at the moment is the latest addition to the wave of worse remixes of bad songs they allow to come into existence.

A Little Less Conversation sucked ass when it was released. It didn't get any better, even though it was a hit. Just because nitwits bought it didn't lend it artistic merit. Ruberneckin' wasn't completely awful in the original, but it's remix was entirely beat. And now, the mental giants at EPE have allowed Baby Let's Play House to be remixed, by an Italian DJ to boot. If I might borrow a line from a song Elvis covered (Welcome to My World), "miracles, I guess, still happen now and then." But I'm not getting my hopes up, in fact, said hopes are probably as low as they can go.

I have more complaints about more things that transpired in my recent silence, but they must wait for tomorrow. I am tired, and I have two items that actually made me smile recently to share with you. First, the fabled Metropolitan Opera House in New York City is infested with mice. Good. Serves people right for going to see the damn operas in the first place. People only go to operas to appear pretentious and pedantic and impress the hell out of their snooty neighbors.

But the main thing that has me smiling right now is that the Cowboys brass got its act together and signed Terrell Owens to a four year deal worth $34 million (with $13million guaranteed). I am glad to see that he'll be taken care of (for the moment) and once again hopeful that he can keep putting his past issues behind him. Considering the Patriots will take at least one step back, and the Giants won't have another magical run in them (consider how closely their playoff run mirrored the 1980 Oakland Raiders wildcard championship team, right down to preceding a year of labor disputes, and those Raiders took two seasons and a venue change to get back to the Super Bowl), that makes Dallas a very strong contender in the upcoming season.

Sadly, one can only wonder what TO would be worth if he had the NFL chops of say Matt Ryan. Imagine that a proven workout warrior who ought to be able to withstand the ravages of age better than any other human on the planet and who ranks in the top ten of all time in the three most important statistical categories (9th in career catches, 10th in yards and 3rd in TDs) for his position is only worth $13 million in guaranteed money while a rookie who played against glorified 1-AA teams and a diminished ND squad in his "breakout" year is guaranteed to make $34.75 million (more than Owens' entire deal).

I enjoyed this blogger's take on Ryan, comparing him favorably against Tim Tebow of Florida. First, Tebow is massively overrated. But Ryan's massively overrated in his own right. When Notre Dame threw caution to the wind and sent the speedy freshman OLBs every time Ryan dropped back, all of a sudden, his mystical ability to see the whole field and find every open receiver took a big step back. Now imagine that's an NFL pass rusher with Mario Williams' size and speed coming in. Ryan isn't ready for it now, nor will he be. He has bust written all over him in capital letters.

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.

It was good that the Red Sox didn't have to play a game today. That way they had plenty of down time to wrestle with the fact that Scott Kazmir seems to be able to humiliate them at will. And they don't have to think too hard about the back-to-back home runs the invincible closer allowed to the lowly Devil Rays on Saturday.

It also enables me to talk about Danny Ainge and the no good, terrible, horrible, very bad trade rumors circulating about the Celtics. Perhaps some kind soul in contact with the brains that run Banner 17 can tell them they could save money by not even having a general manager. If Paul Pierce is running this team, why pay Ainge?

Admittedly, I don't think he should be paid a salary at all, based on his performance to date. But the Cs could cut some fat from the payroll at his expense, nevertheless. And it looks like they just might need that cash to pay Garnett, Pierce and Allen to play for the brand new contender in the Eastern Conference.

If this deal goes through, it will bother me on a number of levels. First, it will generate enough interest and ticket sales to preserve the current reign of terror for at least one more season. All the Whos here in Whoville will like Kevin Garnett a lot, at first. By the time the fans grasp the significance of this deal in the long term, he'll probably have moved on or retired. But the team will make some dough for a month, a year or two.

Another reason it will bother me is that the current management team will have changed horses in midstream once again. When they took over, the team was aging too fast, they said. Its window was closing, so they slammed it shut. So the team got younger and then younger and still younger. The losses mounted, but the region was told that this process takes time. But of course, the affront against the sport that was last season alerted the powers that be that the wheels had come of the youth movement.

So the natural move is to send all of your young players to teams in the Western Conference and import players of a certain age and experience. Because we all know that basketball players get better with age. Running up and down a wooden floor at top speed for 30-40 minutes a night strengthens joints, right? It doesn't wear on cartilage, ligaments and tendons, does it?

Sticking with Bird, McHale and Parrish for as long as the Cs did put the team in jail in the mid 90s. I know why they did it, and I stuck with the team because those three guys gave the team everything they had. Yeah, they won titles, but the Bird and McHale killed the last few productive seasons they may have had by playing hurt. Granted, Len Bias and Reggie Lewis dying tragically didn't help and the team should have drafted better players than Lohaus, Michael Smith and the rest but life is often cruel.

This time, the team went out and imported guys who may have a few good seasons left in them, but could also fall apart in an awful hurry. But this is smart basketball, right? It's not like Red Auerbach kept his teams going through blending young players in with his aging stars, right?

But this trade will really bother me because the Celtics have now reverted back to being essentially what they were when Ainge blew up the team in the first place. They have more star power, but they're older and probably (I don't have the time or desire to do the math myself, so if I'm wrong on this I'll apologize) even further over the cap than they were. Four years of this nonsense and we're back to square one.

With Allen, Garnett and Pierce, this team should contend in the East. It's not very likely that they could beat one of the better Western Conference teams in a seven game series, however. When Ainge made his moves to get rid of Walker, Delk and the rest, his rationale was that contending in the conference wasn't enough. The Celtics needed to contend for the NBA championship.

As you may have noticed, the Celtics have come no closer to contending for an NBA championship in the Ainge era than I have to travelling through time. But now that the team may have collected three stars who might be reaching the point of no return in their careers but have not managed to show any signs of pushing a team to the next level, every little thing will be just fine.

On the plus side, since this is the NBA, it's likely that this trade will help neither team in the long run. The Celitcs now have a 3 man rotation in a five man sport. Rondo doesn't look like he's the answer, unless the question is: "The Celtics gave up a pick that could have been Randy Foye or Brandon Roy to draft whom?" Kendrick Perkins could be this generation's Stanley Roberts only without the potential. But there's always Leon Powe. And I think Oliwikandi is still on the roster...

But the Timberwolves could get Al Jefferson at the absolute apex of his value. Too bad he's destined to be the best player on a bad team for the rest of his career. I suppose that there's a chance that he could progress into a 20 point a night guy since there's no one else to score in Minnesota now. But I just don't see him making that team anything but a blip on the radar in the West.

With any luck, Gerald Green will be gone as well. He can play above the rim, provided that he's in a dunk contest. Too bad that he's looking like the second coming of Kenny "Sky" Walker. If only he had more skills that translated into effective play on the court, maybe Cs fans would miss him. As for Sebastian Telfair, at least Fabulus can sleep nights knowing that Bassy's 1200 miles away now.

But Cs fans, take comfort in the fact that Tony Allen will be coming back. At least until the next time he gets fouled 25 feet from the basket.

Right up until the moment the Celtics drafted "Big Baby" Davis, I was quite happy with the way the draft process shook out this year. Landing Ray Allen should turn out to be an unmitigated disaster for a team that already had an aging, overrated swing player wearing number 34. Not only that, but Ray Allen gets paid quite a bit of money, and the salary cap situation in Boston is dreadful.

I would, I must confess, rather have seen them draft Joakim Noah. I think Noah is going to be terrible. He can't shoot, he was worse than useless against bigger, more athletic players in college and he was compared to a baby wildebeest on ice in this space not entirely unfairly. He got by in college because there were very few players who were bigger and more athletic than him. But this is the NBA. Here's looking at you Chicago. The new Bulls run is ending before it began.

On one peripheral level the Ray Allen move makes sense because the last thing the Celtics need at this point is another young player. However, that is the only thing about this deal that makes sense at this moment. Paul Pierce is more of a slasher (or was before he left his speed somewhere back in 2004), and Allen is a jump shooter. But that doesn't mean they can play together. Both guys have egos, after all.

Even if the intention is to turn around and package Pierce with some young players and try to chase a big man like Garnett or Jermaine O'Neal, where is the logic in trading for a guy who makes fantastical sums of money despite the notable handicap of never having won a title, or a finals game, or a conference finals? Even better, why pair him with Pierce when all those things apply to the "Truth" as well?

Unless I miss my guess (and I'm always ready to admit that my predictions go wrong in spectacular fashion far more than they hit the mark), the Celtics have just taken the first step in the process that will lead them to the inevitable conclusion that they should have traded Al Jefferson this season. With Pierce and Allen squabbling over shots and touches, what will be left for Big Al? Or Ryan Gomes? Or Rajon Rondo? Or Tony Allen if he comes back? Or Gerald Green if he has another discernible skill beyond dunking?

Maybe I am of a one track mind when it comes to the Celtics current management team, but I think that this trade is just one more attempt to get out from under the mill stone that was, is and ever shall be the Walker trade. Since that day, Ainge has been trying to find a player to complement Paul Pierce. Ricky Davis didn't work, and Wally might have worked if he'd stayed healthy for more than 8 seconds. If this were the damn rodeo, he might have had something, but it's basketball. Obviously, Antoine did something right, but Ainge didn't like his game. Ainge must like Allen's game, but he hasn't been right yet.

I say this to avert what I fear could be a series of tragic scuffles, tramplings and scattered outbreaks of hooliganism when Celtics fans flock to their local video rental professionals to clamor for the few remaining copies of He Got Game. Don't get your hopes up, Celtics fans. Or do, so that I can laugh at you and say I told you so over and over again.

The rest of the draft was disappointing. I'm not very familiar with Gabe Pruitt, since I never got a chance to see USC play this season. I do remember Big Baby from the NCAA tournament run LSU put together in 2006. I was favorably impressed, and I felt he should have come out right away. Injuries and the fact that LSU was no longer a surprise team hurt him this year. But I think he was a steal in the second round. I think he is immediately the best option the Cs have at center.

I was hoping for the Cs to draft Josh McRoberts. I even had a nice little seed for a paragraph where I could compare McRoberts to Joe Klein, minus (of course) the athletic ability and the mean streak. Too bad I'm one of about 12 people in the area who remember Klein. But trust me when I tell you, it's an insult. Plus, since the Davis pick seems to work, it doesn't help my School for Scoundrels reference from yesterday, because even though Ainge's self sucks, he did help himself tonight.

So without Noah and without McRoberts coming to Boston, I can only be so happy with the terrible trade that will haunt the Celtics. Although it might be possible that Allen could be insulted and awakened by the fact that he was traded for Jeff Green, Delonte West and the aforementioned Wally, I'm not losing any sleep over that possibility. I suppose I wouldn't be a very good Catholic if I didn't believe in miracles, but I don't expect to see them where the Celtics are concerned.

I was, however, so bummed that the Cs could have had a worse draft that I had to include this mugshot of Larry King.

He is one intense, creepy dude today. But back in the 70s, he was worse. I always assumed that you got more creepy as you aged, but this seems to contradict that notion. Hell, I bet if I'd said that was the Green River Killer, you'd have bought it. Yikes.