I'm not a big fan of the midday post. Even when I don't have better, or at least more important, things to do, I try to give the impression that I do. But I was just too damn tired, and quite frankly a bit angry, so I couldn't do this last night. In part I was mad that the Spurs won, and a lot of my anger had to do with the guy who was tailgating me in his minivan for a good 10 miles last night. And I'm not an easy guy to tailgate, as I tend to be somewhere around ten miles over the speed limit at all times.

I find myself wondering as I watch certain commercials (like this recent one from Nike) whether I am the only one out in the wide world with a sense of irony. I thought it when I first saw the old Campbell's Chunky Soup Ads that featured Michael Strahan's grinning maw peering in the window on a NYC subway car, with his face framed above a decal that said "Watch the Gap." And I think it now, watching the We Are All Witnesses spots from Nike which will surely go away now that the NBA Playoffs are finished.

We were witnesses, that much is true, but not necessarily in the sense that Nike commanded us to be. We were supposed to witness LeBron James become the basketball player he had better be for the sake of the NBA's future. And he very nearly did. He submitted what would have been the mother of all transcendent sports moments for this very young century in that ">amazing Game 5 performance against the Pistons. I say would have been because he really needed to submit a couple of 30 point efforts, maybe force the Spurs to a game 6 (or at the very least game 5) to cement that status. Alas, it was not to be.

What we, the basketball watching public, instead witnessed was a shameful display of dreadful basketball with a few brief shining moments where the games aspired, didn't quite reach but aspired nonetheless, to something verging on mediocrity. Now for a regular season game in early January where one or both teams comes into the game on the second leg of back-to-back games, that wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately for us, this wasn't a throwaway game. This was the end-all, be-all. The NBA Finals. These were the last two teams standing slugging it out for the O'Brien Trophy.

Back when I thought it was a good idea to study European History, I remember reading about the Battle of Jutland. The British and the Germans invested ludicrous sums of money in big fleets of massive battleships. The two navies sailed out and met off the coast of Denmark. They fired their big guns at each other for hours, and at the end of the day it was just a big waste of time. The Germans ended up inflicting more damage on the British ships, but they went back to port and never tried their luck again.

That's what this series between the Spurs and Cavs boiled down to in the end. A big, giant multi-million dollar waste of time. I wonder whether some marketing czar at Nike is answering to the CEO as we speak. I wonder whether David Stern is thinking that maybe some rule changes are in order. Maybe Mark Cuban is thinking he really shouldn't have hired Dan Rather, what with the fact that he said CBS is tarting up its evening news with Katie Couric. God forbid we get a younger woman who doesn't look like Methusala's older brother and doesn't have an alleged penchant for broadcasting doctored documents about the President of the US as though they were true. But enough about that.

I think that the easiest way to fix the NBA is to have the officials actually call fouls that are in fact fouls. A foul doesn't cease to be a foul because the player scored, nor does it become a foul when the shot misses. This late whistle nonsense must come to an end. This can never happen, as it would require a miracle and the present NBA regime has apparently outlawed miracles.

If, however, the league office desires to be more proactive about fixing its product than interfering in off-court behavior and imposing a dress code as though this were reform school and not a professional sports endeavor, I have a suggestion I think is constructive (for a change). Get rid of the 24 second clock and replace it with a 14 second clock. Get some positive ball movement back into the game, speed up the tempo and end the trend of the superstar who dribbles at the top of the key until fans decide to surf channels to see if Masterpiece Theater is showing an interesting Miss Marple mystery.

But what do I know? I'm only a rabid sports fan who found himself watching Too Late the Hero last night during the first three quarters of the last game of the NBA Finals. And wouldn't you know, the damn hero was, in fact, too late. And that ending was still more of a surprise than the Cavs losing the game and the series to the Spurs.

But every cloud has a silver lining. This time, to paraphrase the immortal words of MeatLoaf, two out of three is not, in fact, bad, not bad at all. The Red Sox lost the rubber game against the mighty Colorado Rockies. It could not have been better. Josh Beckett was shelled. Francona dug deep into his bag of tricks and ordered JD Drew to bat in the leadoff spot, where he submitted probably the single most impressive 0 for 5 game in the history of Major Leage Baseball.

In case you're keeping score at home, this was the seventh time in the last nine games the mighty BoSox have managed to put two or fewer runs on the board. JD Drew, Coco Crisp and Julio Lugo are all hitting .230 or below and making millions. Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia have a long way to go to hit the seven figure plateau in terms of salary, but are both hitting over .300. Sooner or later the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men are bound to catch up to this team. But at least John Henry has his little foray into professional beach volleyball to console him.

For long time readers familiar with my habit of quoting the Grateful Dead in order to remind everyone that every silver lining has a touch of grey, here it is. The Yankees are seven and 1/2 games back, but they host the Mets (whom I absolutely hate, except for that nice little two week stretch back in October of '86) who enter the game at 36-28 and in first place in the NL East while the Red Sox host the Giants who enter the game at 30-35 and in the cellar in the NL West. It was a nice run while it lasted, now we need the Yanks to stay close through the weekend and then mount another run before the All Star break.

PS - I hate to do this, but it was a nice, empty gesture on the part of the Red Sox to ask that MLB replace David Ortiz with Kevin Youkilis on the All Star ballot.

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.