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Something's slightly amiss when the NBA Finals are beginning before the Stanley Cup, but alas, here we are with the basketball opener tonight while hockey's final series kicks off tomorrow.
Just as was the case five years ago when the Mavericks and Heat met, I had thought the playoffs would be concluding with another rematch of the previous year's seven-game Finals. instead, the Lakers got swept and the Celtics seemingly never really did get it together after losing Kendrick Perkins—even after sweeping the Knicks in the first round. For Miami, this scenario was something of an expectation. But Dallas has been defying the odds and ignoring the pundits in their own journey this year, having dropped only one game ever since allowing Portland to come back and tie their first-round series before the Mavs wrapped up the opening test in six.
While this time around it will be the Heat enjoying home-court advantage, it can't be ignored that Dallas hasn't lost on the road since that Blazers comeback in the Rose Garden. Miami has certainly played to their potential this postseason than they did in the regular season, but the question now is if the Mavericks can defy expectations one last time.
Lakers-Mavericks sounded like a can't miss proposition to some people, I suppose. I hate the Lakers and my girlfriend loves the Mavs. No-brainer, right?
Yeah, well ... of course we know what I ended up going with for last round's picks, but in my defense, nobody had Dallas. I didn't realize how poorly I'd attempted to articulate my logic until ™ posted a screencap of that pick and my drivel to her own blog, a post which she mercifully made "private" (whatever the hell that is), seeing as the Mavericks absolutely kicked the living shit out of the defending champions. In all honesty, I don't think I've ever seen Los Angeles get that embarrassed—and I'm not just talking about that dirty, thuggish thing Andrew Bynum did, although that certainly added to it.
Anyway, just like the second round of the NHL playoffs, the second round of the NBA postseason saw both my Finals teams being eliminated sooner than expected. The usual standings and screencaps of other experts' picks will be added to this post later, but per this blog's policy to attempt to post predictions before events actually occur (novel concept, I know), and seeing as there was this window of a few hours before the official end to the last round and the beginning of the next, I've conveniently already got my mind made up about how this thing's going to turn out.
Indeed, Braves fans (and any other reader). This year's team is a full game better than the start they got off to last year. So certainly this means they should at least be able to force a deciding fifth game in the Division Series this year—
once those Marlins cool off, of course.
While it's hard for me to read too much into how the season has started for some clubs (The Indians are 11 games over .500? Tampa Bay is leading the American League East?), the standings in the National League East look pretty much like what most people expected. There were some who felt the Braves could be surprise contenders for the division this year, and while Atlanta isn't out of the race by any means, the season so far has seen the team hovering around .500 most of the year.
However, the Braves began May by winning the first six games they played to start the month and there's plenty of reason to believe the Fredi Gonzalez era can begin can go into October.
After one round, we were without my hometown defending champs. And now one round later, we're without either of the two clubs I'd had originally picked to be playing for the Cup this year. What we're left with is four teams, not one of which I can find a real rooting interest for. But at least only one can win, so I suppose that whatever silly objections I might have I will still be able to take some comfort in that three will end up being eliminated.
At the rate I'm going, you can probably assume this year's Finals will be the exact opposite of whatever I predict here.
Not that it hasn't been pointed out thousands of times or makes the excuse feel as though it would serve any real purpose, but it's hard to repeat after winning the Stanley Cup. Marian Hossa was coming off three straight years in which he played for teams with seasons that lasted all the way into June, so I can forgive him for missing some time during those regular seasons.
But looking back at this year, it was a struggle all season long just to compete. And while the team went out with an unbelievable bang that was oh-so-close to being an an accomplishment of historic proportions, there won't be any Blackhawks hockey this summer.
I suppose that gives me more time to figure out how I'm going to get the team's radio broadcasts when I'm living in Austin and the puck next drops for the team, but this year was a slowly painful realization that his year's squad just quite simply was nowhere near as good as what we had last year.
I knew this year's run wouldn't be the same when the guy I watched most of last year's playoffs with, Jimmy, passed away from lung cancer on April 20.
There were no perfect scores among any of the "experts" I tracked for the first round of predictions in the NBA playoffs—even though one person did, in fact, have Memphis knocking off the top-seeded Spurs. But nobody had Atlanta beating Orlando either, and that's of course because everybody's picks largely look the same in these early rounds of basketball postseason.
Now technically into the conference semifinals of the tournament, consensus once again sort of rules in three of the four series—the only exception being this round's obvious headliner matchup between the Celtics and the Heat. The opinion among my group tilts about 3:2 in favor of Miami, but it's probably by and large the series most every fan most wants to see as much of as they can.
No offense to the six other cities with teams also playing this round (including my hometown's nearby Bulls), but as the story everybody's most interested in typically involves The Nazgûl.
