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.

At the risk of anticipating too much, I wonder whether the lead-in to tomorrow afternoon's Jim Rome is Burning will sound a little something like this:

Welcome.

What is up?

Here's what I'm burning on...

Memo to the Daddy, just because you've won four titles and a couple of MVPs doesn't mean you have the right to say the last two awards are tainted. You have your hands full trying to keep Miami from melting in the heat since Flash went down with the dislocated shoulder. Until you start playing like Superman, don't go running your mouth about Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki. After all, they know that I, Jim Rome, run the show and that there's never been a man so tough when two or three time zones separate us. So start showing me the proper respect, stop smearing Nash and Nowitzki and remember that Jim Rome is super awesome.

I went a long way to say this. But Shaq came out the other day and said that Steve Nash's two MVP awards are tainted. I think it was a little excessive, but I agree with him in principle. At the end of the day, all that matters in sports is that you've done everything you can to help your team win. I don't know that you can say that about Dirk Nowitzki or Steve Nash. You can say that about Shaq, as he has three rings. And I think you can say it about 2004, when the Lakers lost to the Pistons. Shaq played very well in the series, the rest of the Lakers didn't show up.

There is going to be a hellstorm of anti-Shaq commentary all over the World Wide Leader tomorrow. First, the media has to rally behind the MVP procedure since they vote on the award. Second, what compelling sports stories unfolded this weekend? Ohio State beat Wisconsin, and another Bronco tragically died. But that's only 10 minutes of commentary, tops. So Shaq is going to be hunted into hiding, since Steve Nash deserves more than two MVPs and no titles.

There is one other story of interest to me. If, as the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss then Jonathan Papelbon is most assuredly one of the happiest people on the face of the Earth. With apologies to the eminent historian Edward Gibbon, it would require the pen of Steve Buckley to relate a story like this. I really hope this is a joke.

There is no way that Papelbon is serious. He'd have to be some sort of Frankenmoron built in a lab from a series of garden-variety morons. I don't have as much of a problem with the ca-drillion dollar turn of phrase as I do with most of his business plan. First off, it seems like he's about 10 years late to the party when it comes to investing in the internet.

Second, at what point will the online community market be saturated? Myspace, friendster, facebook and the rest are already in place. I don't see a need for another of these sites. I don't see how they can make any money off an idea like this, but then I can't for the life of me figure out why some idiots pay for dog yoga.

Maybe it's a bigger attraction than I can foresee. I don't really understand myspace and the other sites like it. I am a bad user. I don't have a single myspace friend that wasn't my friend in the real world (as opposed to cyberspace) to begin with. I'm not looking to meet a lot of people on myspace, partly because I'm not entirely sure which of the total strangers that view my page are trustworthy and which are trying to hack my page in some half-assed plot to take over the world through spamming myspace users.

I am not one of those people who hits up famous people on myspace to be my cyber-friend. After all, it's not like I'm going to be going out for a beer with celebrity X. I can't think of any celebrity that needs me to post a comment telling them how awesome they are and thanking them for the add. But I guess that makes some people feel connected, so I suppose I should ease up on them. If people want to join this site to be friends with Papelbon or UnderArmour or the unnamed NFL players from the article. Good luck to them.

I will not be one of the legion who joins this new site. I can see a large number of lemmings from Red Sox Nation flocking to this community in a vain effort to attach themselves to the monster that is Papelbon, until he falls short of expectations in his first season as a starter. I have it on not so reliable authority that he has starter stuff. Whether or not he has starter endurance is another story. So if he's out of gas and on the DL in July after falling short of such lofty expectations, don't say I didn't warn you as you drop him from your friends.

At least Red Sox fans will be able to much their blues away with the products of Wise Foods, Inc - the official Potato Chip and Cheez Curl of the Boston Red Sox. On a lighter note, Matt Kenseth won the Wow, I didn't Realize That There Was A NASCAR Race This Week 500 in some loser town in California. This is significant because it marks the first victory of the stock car season for the newly formed Roush Fenway racing conglomerate. Today this race, tomorrow the world series, three weeks five days and two hours after that ...the world.