I find myself wondering whether Pat Riley wants to win basketball games. Things looked bleak for Miami when Shaq went to the bench with his fifth foul at the 8:35 mark of the 4th quarter. They certainly did not look like they were going to get a whole lot better when D Wade joined him after he was called for his fifth with 8:26 to play. One would have thought that things were going to fall apart for the Heat at that point.

Unfortunately for Scott Skiles and the Bulls, their road to victory was made considerably more difficult by one man. It was Antoine Walker, and the Bulls had no answer for him, as he led the Heat back to within two points with 5:17 to go in the game. Thankfully for Bulls fans, Pat Riley decided that it was time to bring Shaq and D Wade in off the bench at that point. Here is the full game play-by-play, in case you're interested.

I realize that Wade and Shaq absolutely must be on the floor at crunch time. I was looking forward to their return. I just don't think Antoine needed to go to the bench with his twenty when Shaq and Wade had been on the bench for three minutes of game play and three of the Heat (Eddie Jones, Udonis Haslem and Jason Williams) who also played important minutes had managed to combine to score fewer points than Antoine.

By the way, I would pay money to see Eddie Jones do Shakespeare before I paid money to see him play basketball at this point. I understand that Pat Riley has a man-crush on him, but enough is enough. He was done like dinner in the last days of the Clinton administration. Maybe Antoine would have scored more consistently in the regular season if he'd played more minutes. Just a thought. I am also working on the theory that he might have scored more consistently had I watched more of his games. But there was work to be done on the Bears bandwagon, and injuries from which to recover after each time it piled up into a trestle.

Chicago promptly went on a quick 5-0 run, until Shaq picked up his 6th, and Toine returned. Antoine didn't score another point, but finished with 20. His 3 point shooting on the day was pretty good, and he was perfect from the freethrow line for a change. And I would say that his defense did not suck quite as much as the other Miami players' effort on that end of the floor.

Antoine, on the off chance that some one in your entourage reads this and can pass it along, please stop playing hard. You have no right to remind Celtic fans that you were the last person that really wanted to win in a Celtic uniform. Stop showing up Danny Ainge. He does the best he can, and it's not his fault that he cannot run a basketball team. Stop making Bill Simmons look bad for saying that you're moving like Fred Sanford these days. It's not his fault he's a tool, and people seem to prefer his wife's writing to his. He and J Bug or Joe House or Fist Magnet will always have the time they routed Norv Turner from a $10 blackjack table.

And above all, stop playing hard because it encourages the lunatic fringe that wish Ainge had never traded you. Just think, on a day when the Red Sox played the Yankees, I watched the Miami Heat play a basketball game because I like Antoine Walker. If only we lived in a free country, then a grown-ass man could eat what he wanted and watch what he wanted and hope that Charles Barkley runs for President in peace.

You need to see this clip from the Detroit-Calgary game. I know I rarely talk about hockey in this space, and then it's usually college hockey, but this is strange. I am almost speechless. I've never seen a goalie get a game misconduct. I'm sure it's happened before, I just don't want to do the leg work since it's Saturday afternoon and googling hockey was pretty low on my to-do list for today.

It caught me by surprise because I haven't been following that series with much interest. I assumed that Detroit was up 3-1 based on the fact the fact that the score was 5-1 at the time of the incident and the Flames were that frustrated. I didn't realize the series was deadlocked at two wins apiece. There's still a game to play, that ought to be interesting.

I am going to watch the New Jersey game tomorrow afternoon, so I may have a thing or two to say about it. If there are any compelling moments, I may be doing some more writing on hockey as the playoffs progress. I do like the sport, it's just that I have no energy to hate the Bruins with so much devoted to hating the Red Sox and the Danny Ainge era of Celtic basketball.

Here is my conservative prediction for tonight's NASCAR race under the lights in Phoenix: a semi-literate moron will win. Of course since that cruelly insensitive epithet covers the entire spectrum of NASCAR drivers, I have a 100% chance of being right. And let me tell you, it feels good, for a change.

And it looks like the meek are going to inherit the earth today in Fenway, or at the very least a baseball victory. It's not every day that you can defeat a pitcher like Jeff Karstens. Red Sox Nation has a lot to hang its hat on today.

PS - There is a Springsteen reference somewhere in today's post. I wonder if you can spot it and tell me the song from which it came.

I really don't care about auto racing, but I do have to say something about the Montoya-Pruett incident in Mexico City this past weekend. I had a few more pressing concerns to address first, which I why I am so late in addressing this topic. I just don't see what the big deal was.

I really don't think of Montoya as a bad teammate. First off, I don't think of auto racing as a team sport. At the end of each race, only one guy takes the victory lap. And any guy who can say with a straight face that he's glad another driver from his coven of drivers won the race is either lying or has no business in a competitive professional endeavor (I'm not convinced that racing is a sport).

On an unrelated note, in case you're wondering, blackjack isn't a team game. And any one who tells you it is a team game is a tool or a moron, or both. Unless you share equally in a common objective and the results of said objective, you are not a team. Yes, every body at a blackjack table wants to win money from the house. But show me one person at that table that's going to share his/her winnings with another gambler or partake in another's losses. Unless you have an equal stake in the result, you aren't a real team.

So I have no problem with Montoya's tactics. In the replays, and God knows ESPN showed a million of them, it looked like the rubbing didn't have to happen. It seemed from the view from Montoya's car that Pruett tried to cut him off as Montoya tried to pass. If Pruett had allowed him to pass, maybe he could have passed Montoya down the track. By cutting in front, Pruett was just as responsible for spinning out as Montoya was.

As I've said, I know very little about racing. I don't know if there is some sort of unwritten code (a tradition, I'm sure, dating back to the early days of racing when the majority of drivers were illiterate, way back in 1999) that says you can't pass in a turn. Or maybe it says you can't pass a teammate in a turn. I really don't care about the oral traditions of stock car racing.

It's not every day (or ever, if memory serves) that I get to quote Shakespeare in this space, but Pruett's undignified post-race reaction reminded me a of a line from Hamlet. So here it is, with apologies to women everywhere: "The lady doth protest to much, methinks."

If any reader knows Pruett personally, I have a handy gift idea for his birthday or Christmas if you have trouble thinking of something to get him. This shirtt, available at the gawker gift shop, should remind him of the incident in Mexico City and his reaction to it. Outdouched is the perfect word for it. Or at least it would be if it were a word.

As much as it was a douche move for Montoya to pass in a turn, it was a douche move for Pruett to try to cut in front of him. The outdouching came when Montoya spun him out and cut across the dirt and went on to win the race. Unfortunately, it seems that the two have put their animosity behind them. A nice intra-team rivalry might have gotten me to watch a race or two.