Final Thoughts on 2010-11 NBA Season: Where the best TEAM won

This past basketball season essentially began nearly one year ago, right around July 8 of last year. Perhaps you recall what happened that evening and presumably helped the NBA garner terrific television ratings throughout the entire season. The Miami Heat became Public Enemy No. 1, which is probably why their loss in this year's NBA Finals has ended up feeling like a victory for every one of us who is no fan of theirs. The celebratory, mocking memes were cranked out in a hurry. An Associated Press headline rubbed it in—although apparently not from this Miami newspaper. I even offered my own dig.

In the end, however, the credit really must be given to the team that ended up hoisting that trophy last night, a Dallas Mavericks team that had been continually underestimated and written off all year long. The boys from South Beach didn't give the series away so much as the veteran Mavs went out and took it.

I suppose once every great while we get this sort of encouraging result in the NBA where the lower-profile, close-knit group of underdogs ends up knocking off the talent-laden predominant favorite. But enough about that Lakers team and the embarrassment they suffered. Like I said, this year deserves to be remembered primarily as Dallas' accomplishment.

The Arrival: In which just getting here was an adventure

After ™ last flew up to Illinois to spend a long weekend with me between her birthday and my own, I reminded her at the airport that the following three weeks until I saw her again would go by pretty fast. I had been saying it primarily to comfort her that unlike, say, the more than two months before that visit when we'd last been able to see one another, this final step was going to arrive much faster. And sure enough, before I knew it—before I'd even remembered to formally change my address, before I'd been able to land a job to start when I arrived, before I'd finished packing ALL of my belongings—I was at O'Hare on May 18 boarding a one-way flight to Texas.

We first moved ™'s stuff from the Houston area to our new apartment in Austin, and then the following day began the roughly 19-hour drive back to St. Charles. While the original plan was to drive as much as we could on the first day and find a hotel when we got tired, we instead ended up stopping for a bite to eat in Memphis that evening and just staying on the road until we arrived at my parents' house early that Saturday morning. After catching some shuteye, we had some rather lackluster Pizza Hut for dinner that evening with my parents and my aunt and uncle. Later that night, we went out with a couple friends of mine in downtown St. Charles.

Over the course of those three weeks between ™'s visits, I kept waiting for the moment that the relocation was really going to hit me. But even as I reminded myself that certain visits I was making could be my last for quite some time, it still didn't seem real.

What stuck with me that last night in St. Charles had to be a moment outside one of the bars just after last call. ™ was hugging me and a girl I'd never met before but was was apparently a friend of one of my friends looked at us and wondered aloud to us why she couldn't have something like ™ and I had. The girl, probably somewhere in her mid-twenties, had just gotten out of a long-distance relationship.

When other friends and co-workers used words like "jealous" or such in response to learning my relocation plans, I had sort of downplayed it as them just being nice. But on that last night, something in that one girl's eyes finally made me feel lucky. After three or so years of convincing myself nobody else in their right mind would ever want to be in my shoes, I finally experienced a real moment of having somebody else saying they wanted what I had.

Ultimately, I was only beginning to realize how lucky I was.

Final Thoughts on 2010-11 Chicago Bulls: One trophy short

As this year's Bulls team accumulated honor after honor—Tom Thibodeau being named Coach of the Year, Derrick Rose awarded Most Valuable Player, and then Gar Forman having to share Executive of the Year honors with Miami's Pat Riley because (just as I had joked in an earlier BMC piece) three other league honchos apparently forgot that John Paxon slipped out of the role two years ago and voted for the team's executive vice president of basketball operations instead (NOTE TO NBA: You might want to fix the way you determine that)—following a regular season in which the team won more games than any other team in the league, I routinely said, "It won't mean a thing without a ring" (and, yes, somebody else came up with that line).

But truth be told, when I think back to what my own expectations were for this team at the beginning of the year, it's hard to be bitter—even if the season did end at the hands of the much-maligned Miami Heat. Oh sure, I had originally predicted Chicago would be ousted by that same South Beach squad in five games a round earlier, but that was back before the Bulls achieved far more than most any fan dared dream this season. And looking back at how the team only seemed to get better and better with each passing quarterly update this season, I myself had indeed sipped so frequently from the Kool-Aid that I was already beginning to apologize to my girlfriend for what I thought would happen to her Dallas Mavericks if they met Chicago in the Finals.

Instead, I find myself rooting alongside her for the one team remaining that stands in between the Heat and a championship. After all, it helps take my mind off the work that will need to be done in order to help these Bulls play into June next year—assuming there's a 2011-12 season, of course.

NHL Stanley Cup Final Predicitions: A drought's about to end

In just a couple weeks, one of those video game depictions is going to come true and a long-suffering franchise will finally be raising Lord Stanley's Cup. This is the first Bruins team to even reach the Finals in more than two decades, and it's been almost 40 years since the team's last championship in 1972. But at least Beantown's tasted victory before, unlike Vancouver, where the team has never been declared champions ever since entering the league in 1970.

So once again, we'll presumably be presented with some rather spirited and raucous crowds in both cities as these two supposedly long-suffering (last year's beloved Blackhawks had a nearly half-century wait between Cups) franchises compete for one last series win.

The big winner in this, of course, would have to be the NHL. Considering that the alternatives last round included the markets of San Jose and Tampa Bay, the ratings could have been a lot scarier. Instead, an appearance from the Canucks is surely the best shot a Canadian team's had at the Cup in quite some time, and most anything involving Boston is almost always good for television.

NBA Finals Predictions: 2006 Revisited

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. 

NBA Playoff Confrence Finals Predictions: See, I toldja I loved my girlfriend ...

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.

The Braves' First Quarter: Even better than last year! (Technically.)

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.

NHL Stanley Cup Playoff Conference Finals Predictions: Obviously not my year

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.

Final Thoughts on 2010-11 Chicago Blackhawks: Rest in peace, Jimmy

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.

Round Two NBA Playoffs Predictions: At least there's one must-see series

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.