Final Thoughts on 2011-12 NBA Season: Obligatory Post No. 2

Alas, the long national nightmare is over and a member of Michigan University's famed "Fab Five" has finally won an NBA Championship. So congratulations are in order to you, Mr. Juwan Howard. You finally did it and this is truly your moment. Good show.

Oh, and maybe some other guys. Total team effort, of course.

***DEEP BREATH***

Look, this year could be a difficult one for a lot of Bulls fans to accept because for so long throughout this season, there were moments when many fans wanted to believe Chicago could win a seven-game series against Miami in this year's playoffs. And we waited and we waited all year long before every hope was disintegrated in the closing moments of the very first game of the playoffs. Brutal. Championship window closed significantly, if not entirely.

The playoffs continued nonetheless, and while many of us once again were seduced by the seeming superiority of the basketball being played in the Western Conference, the Oklahoma City followed up their Game 1 Finals win with absolutely no answer for LeBron or any other Heat role player for the next four games. Oh, Miami-OKC sure could be a marvelously entertaining conclusion to future postseasons too in the tradition of Lakers-Celtics, but this year ended up being a little too one-sided. Despite the laughable-in-retrospect scares from Indiana and Boston, Miami took charge in this year's NBA Finals and let the Thunder play the part of the heartbroken.

Again, this was the Finals most people had at the beginning of this year, and I resisted ... probably in part to hold out hope for the beloved Bulls. Going forward, however, I assume Heat-Thunder now becomes not just the Finals I will more than likely join in predicting, but maybe also wanting to see in the sense that there's two legitimate superstars now competing on the highest level in LeBron and Kevin Durant. Derrick Rose, bless his knee, will need some help to enter that conversation.

Ultimately, when you consider that we weren't entirely certain that the season was ever going to even tip off, the Heat-Thunder Finals provided all the more reason to believe that the future for the league is probably going to continue to get brighter and brighter.

Final Thoughts on 2011-12 NHL Season: Obligatory Post No. 1

Seeing as it's July, I should probably go ahead and bang out these two usual footnotes to the conclusions of the winter sports seasons. I'll start off with the Los Angeles Kings, since they wrapped up their title first.

The picture to the right there is probably one of the most wonderful little reasons to feel genuinely happy for this team. The other, however, is simply the fact that they went out there and flat-out fucking earned it. Seriously. New Jersey deserves some credit for winning as many games as the entire Western Conference did against L.A. in the previous three rounds, but the Kings seriously just went out there and took the damn thing.

Ordinarily, yes, I generally loathe pretty much any sports championship team that comes out of Hell-A. The Kings, however, are not the Dodgers nor the Lakers. As demonstrated by the local media's screwing up such basic concepts as the team's logo to how to pronounce a star's name to forgetting the last time the team made it this far, there is some temptation to think "they don't really deserve it." The "they" being the residents that were just now getting word of the bandwagon. No, Chicago never had any of those.

In the end, however, how can a Hawks fan not be happy for Daryl Sutter? And how can you not appreciate the way the entire club played right from the beginning of every game. The Kings took the first three games of each best-of-seven series in all four rounds. There was rarely a moment they didn't seem to be completely controlling the puck. And during those moments that they were on the defense, then how can you not look at Jonathan Quick's play and want a goalie like that playing for your favorite team?

There is no denying that for the longest time, I've wanted an eight-seed to win it all. It reinforces that belief that anything's possible in the NHL playoffs, but I never would have expected an eight-seed to do it quite like the Kings just did. That was a level of dominance that you would normally expect from the top teams.

Moreover, the Kings winning the Cup might also send a message to certain general managers about taking gambles during the season. Kings GM Dean Lombardi called his trade deadline acquisition of Jeff Carter a "Hail Mary," and it won him the Cup. 

As for the prediction records, James Murphy and John Buccigross, both from ESPN, finished with records of 10-5, although Murphy had four series this postseason predicted in the exact number of games while Buccigross only did that once. I, meanwhile, had pretty much the opposite score, going 5-10 with only one "exacta" for another year of really awful predicting on my part.

The Braves' Second Quarter: Hanging Around

It looks as though I have some catching up to do here, so I'll quickly touch on how things are going for the Bravos. While I had predicted this would be a third-place ball club at the beginning of the year, the teams they're chasing are completely different from what I had originally anticipated. And seeing as we're at the halfway point now, the usual looming trade deadline moves are being considered by multiple teams around the league. The Braves are certainly in contention for one of those playoff spots, so where might Atlanta be looking to improve?

With Brandon Beachy now being shut down for the year to undergo Tommy John surgery, that more or less nullifies the currently division-leading Nationals (!) having to ultimately sit down Steven Strasburg. With Miami dealing for Carlos Lee, that fourth place team's dealing shows that there's still some fighting expected in the East.

The second quarter for the Braves was a pretty tough one, as the team fell behind Washington and New York. Atlanta remains within shouting distance, but has really been struggling to get back atop the division. While Dan Uggla will be starting at second base for the National League in the All-Star Game (and has been widely considered to be undeserving of the selection), Brian McCann is missing out for the first time since he came into the league and both Chipper Jones and Michael Bourn (both of whom seemed to be worthier than Uggla) lost out on the fan vote for the extra spot (eventually given to the Cardinals' David Freese).

The team retired John Smoltz's jersey number in what will probably be the second-to-last ceremony of this type for a couple years (I'm thinking Chipper will get honored at some point next season), but the question that remains is whether fans are going to be getting something that has unfortunately become a lot less frequent than it used to be: postseason baseball.