Let's go to the Polls III: NBA Conference Finals Edition

Question 1: What will be the outcome of the Eastern Conference Finals?

Result:
Magic in 6: 53%
Cavaliers in 7: 25%
Magic in 5: 17%
Magic in 7: 5%

Well it looks like people are pretty polarized on this. It's either over with or LeBron will pull off a "Third period of Team USA vs. Iceland in Mighty Ducks 2" comeback. Personally, I have a hard time seeing LeBron roll over and die in game 5, but when they come back to Orlando I have a hard time seeing the Magic let this one slip away. The odd thing about this is that Cleveland is the better team, but they just match up so poorly against Orlando. It's similar to the Michigan State-UConn debacle in the Final Four that ruined my NCAA pick for the first time in 3 years. They have 6'3 Delonte West guarding 6'9 Hedo Turkoglu, while none of their bigs are really musclers inside. Orlando has won 5 of the last 7 games against Cleveland, and I believe they will win one of the next two.

Verdict:
Good call. Although a Cavs comeback would be pretty sick.


Question 2: What will be the outcome of the Western Conference Finals?

Result:
Nuggets in 7: 35%
Lakers in 7: 35%
Nuggets in 6: 18%
Lakers in 6: 12%

This one is tougher, and the poll results show that. It's 53% to 47% in favor of the Nuggets. One thing is certain though: Denver is trying harder to win this. They outrebounded L.A. 58-40 in game 4, hustled in 20 (!) offensive rebounds and scored 43 points in the 4th quarter. If the world was fair, Denver would win. They deserve it more than the complacent Lakers, but unfortunately, I don't feel like Denver can steal another one in L.A., especially with their habit of making mental errors. Also, it seems like the Lakers do show up to play when they absolutely have to, and in game 7, they absolutely have to show up.

Verdict:
Bad call, but this one is really hard to call.


Question 3: What is most to blame for the Cavaliers' struggles against Orlando?

Result:
James' supporting cast: 58%
Magic are just better: 27%
Mike Brown: 8%
LeBron James: 7%

I really dislike this question, because I don't believe the right answer is a choice. 15% of voters have no clue and blame James or Brown. Don't buy into that crap. It's a mix between the other two options. I would say, "Magic are just better" is the best option, but I don't believe that Orlando is the better team. I just think they are a bad match-up for Cleveland. Orlando's crunchtime go-to-guy is 6 inches taller than the guy guarding him, for Christ's sake!!! But was Golden State really a better team than Dallas when they upset them in 2007? No, they just were a terrible matchup for the Mavs. So, based on that you could argue that it's LeBron's supporting cast, but I think that's unfair, too, since they haven't been playing any worse than they have all season, Orlando just is a nightmare matchup for an undersized Cavs roster.

Verdict:
Bad call. The supporting cast is doing fine, they just weren't born to defend this Magic team.


Question 4: Which player will win more NBA titles in his career?

Result:
LeBron James: 67%
Dwight Howard: 33%

It's LeBron. First of all, Howard isn't the main reason Orlando is beating Cleveland, it's the Cavs inability to match up with Orlando's three-point shooters. So this year, yeah, Orlando's blowing by Cleveland. But let's look farther down the road. Cleveland will look to upgrade at the SG position. They need a guy who is able to spend the vast majority of his energy on defense (see Mickael Pietrus), and those guys aren't that difficult to find. But to answer this question more in-depth, I checked out the salary situaton for both teams. Orlando 's key headache for Cleveland is Hedo Turkoglu, who turns 30 and will want a new contract in the near future. If he gets a deal in the $12-15 million range, Orlando will have all their money locked up in current players. Rashard Lewis also turns 30 and is earning more than $80 million the next four seasons. This means Orlando is married to the current roster for the next four years, when Hedo and 'Shard will be declining slowly. If they don't get it done then (which I don't think they will), Howard will be 28 without a ring. That was just about Iverson desperation age. Cleveland, on the other hand has a ton of expiring contracts next off-season (including Ben Wallace), and even a max deal for LeBron should leave Cleveland with around $35 million to spend freely.

Verdict:
Good call. Think long-term.


Question 5: What do you think of Pau Gasol's complaint that the Lakers are not using their inside game enough?

Result:
Legitimate Point: 68%
Sour Grapes: 32%

Well other than Gasol, nobody is putting up in the Lakers frontcourt. Odom has been disgracefully bad and Bynum is a head case. So, what he's saying is: Give ME the ball. Well, Pau has taken 3 less shots per game in this series compared to the regular season, but has been shooting 62.5%, so he has a point. Plus, Gasol voiced his concern like an intelligent, level-headed frontcourt player:

"I wish we would take more advantage of our height and the inside game, because it's pretty effective. It's unfortunate that we don't recognize it enough."

You're right Pau, but you have to be more assertive, because I can't even tell that you're playing that well.

Verdict:
Good call. Give him the ball.

Why is Van Gundy apologizing?

Van Gundy blames himself for defense on final play.

My reaction: why?

When Mo Williams was set to inbound the ball to LeBron James at the end of Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, color analyst Doug Collins said "anything away from the basket, make them hit a tough shot fading away from the basket."

What happened? Hedo Turkoglu followed James away from the basket, got right up in his face, contested the shot as well as he could and the King hit an MVP-caliber shot.

Why is Van Gundy turning this into a negative? James hit a miracle shot just to stay alive in a series with Orlando owning the momentum going back home for two games. Obviously, Van Gundy doesn't want to throw any player under the bus, but any logical NBA fan could see that Turkoglu played perfect defense on the play.

One argument is: why wasn't Mickael Pietrus on James? After all Pietrus was pestering James all quarter.

Well, with one second left, James doesn't have the option to drive; it's a catch-and-shoot situation. Pietrus is great at stopping penetration, but the longer, taller Hedo Turkoglu is clearly the better option to defend the catch-and-shoot.

Truthfully, if we were to blame any player for the shot, it would be either Pietrus or Rashard Lewis. Pietrus foolishly followed Pavlovic out to the mid-court line, where he was no threat to score instead of doubling James. Meanwhile, Lewis played way too far off of Williams on the inbound, so that Williams had an easy pass to James.

But instead of applauding the play, Van Gundy gave everyone one more reason to doubt him. Honesty, Van Gundy immediately improves every team he takes hold of, (Remember Miami was a #1 seed in 2005 before Pat Riley stole the team away) but come playoff time he just doesn't seem like somebody I would trust to lead my team.

Hedo Turkoglu had the perfect response to the shot and the celebration:

"The way they were celebrating, it was good, man. They win and they celebrate, and it means we're in their heads. So it's all on us now, and how we play in front of our fans,"

This is exactly why Turkoglu repeatedly nails huge shot, while Van Gundy can't shake the "Master of Panic" label.

Calm down Stan. LeBron hit a ridiculous shot. You played it fine. You're in great position to take a 3-1 lead against Cleveland. Just don't mess it up.

Favorite Players: The Memoirs

As I continue to grow into the age of reason and, above all, objectivity, I realized that I am slowly but surely losing my allegiances to certain players; my favorite players.

It's a childhood thing, I guess. You just absolutely idolize that one player in every sport. You want to be like him and you want to play like him. Naturally, you lose this sense of idolization the older you get. I'm reaching a point now where my childhood is almost over. (I consider college childhood.) So I feel like I need to document a chronology of my favorite players sport-by-sport before I forget what having a favorite player even feels like.

In the beginning, there was the 1994 World Cup. I was 5. So we'll start with soccer. (Remember, I grew up in Europe, so soccer was naturally the first sport I was drawn to.)

• The first time I really watch soccer, Brazil won the '94 World Cup. Best player was a young striker by the name of Ronaldo.
• Ronaldo played in Italy, however, and he didn't get the in-your-face, all-over-your-TV exposure where I lived. Instead, the German Bundesliga was the most prevalent league around. On my soccer team, you were either a Bayern Munich fan or a Borussia Dortmund fan. Dortmund was less flashy and had more likeable players, in my opinion, so I became a dortmund fan. Their best player was Andreas Moeller.
• Moeller was pretty old, though, and by the time Euro 2000 came around, he no longer was that great of a player. This was around the time I entered the realm of sports-dorkdome. I took stats on essentially every game and I really liked the Dutch National Team for some reason. They had a striker who, at the time, played for my favorite Spanish team (Barcelona). His name was Patrick Kluivert.
• Kluivert fell off a little after that and had a few injuries, but his teammate Edgar Davids was on the rise. Davids was a little pitbull who had a ridiculously hard shot. I loved watching him take deep free kicks just to see him power the ball into the box. Davids also was the original Ronaldinho. He was the first guy to show off his ability in commercials and online videos. He has been dubbed "The Godfather of Street Soccer". Everybody was trying to do Davids' tricks.
• In 2002, though, the Netherlands choked in qualification and didn't make the World Cup. I was drawn to the African playing style, the Nigerian team in particular. My family also happened to be friends with a Nigerian family at the time, so it worked out. Nigeria had a player who played similarly to Davids. His name was Augustine "Jay-Jay" Okocha.
• I always supported Dortmund, but around this time I became die-heart about them. Their rising star was a young midfielder from the Czech Republic: Tomas Rosicky.
• Rosicky got bought by Arsenal for a ton of money and when we got English satellite TV in 2005, I followed FC Liverpool more often. Their star midfielder was (and still is) Steven Gerrard.

Gerrard was my last favorite player. I graduated High School, enrolled at Penn State and stopped following soccer as closely.

So I'll move on to Baseball, where the history is much simpler.

• I got a pack of baseball cards in 1995 from an uncle. The first card in the deck: a Mike Piazza rookie card with the Dodgers. There were plenty of awesome players in that deck: Tony Gwynn, Kirby Puckett, Frank Thomas... but Piazza's card had the words "Rookie Star" plastered across of it. I was 6, so I didn't know what a Batting Average was or what "HR" stood for, but I knew what Star meant, so Piazza seemed like a good choice to be my favorite player.
• I really didn't follow Baseball very closely until 1998. That was when Piazza was traded to the Mets. I spent summers in the Poconos, where the Mets are a really popular team and all their games were broadcasted on the WB11, Fox5 and MSG. Eventually, Piazza got old and in 2005, there wasn't any reason to resign him, so I turned to the next rising star, a SS who could swipe 50 bags a season: Jose Reyes.

I still consider myself a Mets fan, but I have a real love-hate relationship with them. I just find them excruciatingly frustrating to follow.

This brings me to my next sport: football, where I also have been a fan of a frustrating franchise.

• It didn't start out that way, though. The first NFL game I watched was in the 1996 season. I forget who they were playing against, but Brett Favre and Antonio Freeman were torching them for 4 TDs. I was so impressed I wrote Mike Holmgren a letter at the time. (and got a framed response. I was a G!). Anyway, I bought a cheap Favre jersey and loved it when I saw them beat Parcell's Patriots in the Superbowl.
• The next year they lost to Elway's Broncos in the Superbowl and Green Bay started struggling after that. I was 9-years old, so I think I can be forgiven for ditching Favre. Plus, I was simply amazed by a player in the same division: Barry Sanders.
• Right around this time, my grandfathers started taking notice in me and my brother's interest in the NFL. My parents didn't really care (they're not huge sports fans), but my Texan grandfather and my Philadelphian grandfather sure did. We got Cowboys jerseys for Christmas, Eagles hats and jerseys for birthdays, but when push came to shove, Philly won, because my grandfather took me to Lehigh for Training Camp, where I could actually watch the Eagles in person. In 2000, a young QB that Pop-Pop was always talking about had a great year. Donovan McNabb became my new favorite player.
• Now I loved McNabb because he was one of very few players I actually knew. By 2003, I knew the team like the back of my hand and on fan appreciation day at Lehigh, one player stood out as the most generous and engaging player on the team. He signed autographs for players who arrived too late to get in line and he was the only player to take pictures with fans. To this day, there's a picture of me and Troy Vincent hanging in my old bedroom.
• Unfortunately, Vincent left after that season, so I needed a new favorite Eagle. The 2004 season was probably the greatest season to watch. T.O. and McNabb were lighting it up on offense while Lito Sheppard, Brian Dawkins and Michael Lewis ruled the secondary. But the team had one glaring weakness: run defense. They might not have made the Super Bowl that year if they hadn't made one enormous change on defense: The re-insertion and comeback of Jeremiah Trotter. All of a sudden, nobody could run on Philly, and I truly believe that Trotter was the difference maker. He made the Pro Bowl that year, despite only starting half a season.
• Trotter's knees had been surgically repared, though and he aged really quickly the next two seasons. Because he no longer had the lateral quickness to follow plays, Trotter would just shoot gaps as hard as he could and hope that was where the play was going. He had always done that, but in 2006 he was wrong a lot more than in the past, plus his ability to play coverage had dropped to practically non-existant. He was released before the 2007 season. I was forced to go to my number 2 guy. A guy that hit harder than anyone in the league, the greatest leader and safety of the decade (in my completely non-biased opinion): Brian Dawkins.
  

But he's in Denver now and almost all of my jerseys are outdated. To tell you the truth, I might just stick with the ones I have: Vincent, Trotter, Sheppard, Dawkins. Those were my boys and always will be.

Finally, the sport I intially loved the most, fell out-of-love with, and have rediscovered recently: the NBA.

• In 1995-96, Michael Jordan made his comeback and my dad (of all people) got me hooked. (Although he was going through a mid-life crisis at the time and was rooting for Stockton and Malone).
• The next season, I went with my family to Florida for Spring Break. The first night, I watched the Miami Heat absolutely destroy some team (don't remember who) and the player that stood out was a Point Guard with a sick crossover and a nasty long range shot. The player: Tim Hardaway.
• Miami was really good for a number of years after that. '99 was probably their best chance, but they blew it to the #8 seed Knicks in the first round. Eventually, Alonzo Mourning could no longer stay healthy, Hardaway got old and a trade for Anthony Mason and Eddie Jones didn't work out as well as hoped. They eventually wound up towards the bottom of the league in 2002 and drafted Caron Butler with the #6 overall pick.
• Butler was really fun to watch for two years, but when the whole Shaq/Kobe drama was going down, it became clear that Shaq O'Neal was going to be available. The best young player at the time for Miami was Dwyane Wade, coming off of a really solid season, so he wasn't going anywhere. The best bargaining piece was Butler. After he was shipped off to L.A., Wade really came into his own at the Athens Olympics and broke out in the 2004-2005 season. Watching Wade, I couldn't have any other favorite player.

When it comes to the NBA, I for some reason am no longer a Heat fan. My family stopped going to Florida in the spring, I couldn't stand Jason Williams and Antoine Walker and stopped supporting them the year they won the NBA Championship (ironic right?). I love basketball, although I don't root for any one team. I find Orlando the easiest team to root for right now, but I'm far from a fan.

So in 15 years, I've had 19 favorite players, 4 favorite teams across 4 sports. I've become a much bigger college sports fan in the past few years, but I'm biased towards players like Navarro Bowman, Mo Evans, Deon Butler, Jared Odrick, Talor Battle and Jamelle Cornley. I don't have the objectivity.

Not to mention, I'm the same age as them. I love watching these guys, but they will never compare to my favorite players that I idolized growing up.

Random Funny/Dumb Things in Sports. Part 1.

• This Cavaliers parody of the Heineken Walk-In Fridge Commercial
• Dikembe Mutombo's full birth name: Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo
• Everything about this picture: From 7-time All-Star Dave Parker smokin' away in the dugout to the Pirates' awesome train-conductor-looking hats, to the unis that look like giant bananas.
  
• This Story from The Associated Press:
  

  "BRUSSELS -- The Belgian bodybuilding championship has been canceled after doping officials showed up and all the competitors fled.

  A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

  "I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again," doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.

  Twenty bodybuilders were entered in the weekend competition."

• Benny Agbayani
• This list of hweird/bizarre high school team names
• Special shout-out to the Grand Rapids (Minn.) High Thunderhawks!
• The Mpumalanga Dangerous Darkies
• The Giant friggin' Dinosaur plastered across the Toronto Raptors old jerseys
  
• Bill Wennington
• This list of Detroit Lions starting QBs
• Brady Anderson's 1996 season
  
• The Mark McGwire Endorsed Vortex Power Bat:

  "The Vortex POWER BAT is the farthest hitting toy bat and baseball set ever. And who would know better than Mark McGwire, the world's new single season home run record holder and POWER BAT spokesperson."

• The fact that Loy Vaught was probably the greatest Los Angeles Clipper of the 1990s.
• Fred McGriff's Hat in the Tom Emanski Baseball Training Videos.
• The fact that Tom Emanski won Back to Back to Back AAU National Championships!
• Koy Detmer's Neckbeard