Your Thoughts Exactly

Hello boys and girls, and let me extend a heartfelt welcome from the Southeastern Hemisphere to all you yokels out in cyberspace, wherever you might find yourself. Let me just say I am pumped for this new space to share all the thoughts that go through my quite large mind, and you should be pumped too.

What will this blog contain? Well it could be anything to tell you the truth, thats the beauty of a blog isnt it? I will be giving you my thoughts on politics, the war, and that stuff. I'll be giving you my insights on the beautiful island of Australia, where I am spending the next 18 months. I'll be giving you insights on stuff like Australian TV, and the big summer movies. But to start, I want to give brief summaries over summer (or in ym case this year, winter) traditions which I find myeslf in the middle of: the plight of the Boston Red Sox, and the NBA playoffs.

I'll keep it short with the Sox. Its still May, and I can summarize this in about three sentences. 1) We need Trot and Nomar back to play instead of Cesar Crespo. 2) Going into what is supposed to be your most important season and best chance for a World Series in 80 years with half of your ten best players unsigned for next year, and then lowballing them in negotiations so they air their greivences in the press wasnt the savviest PR move. 3) And finally, with the talent on this team, if we can remain healthy for the rest of the year (something we have yet to be able to do.) there is no way we should miss the playoffs.

Oh and one more: if you dont make it to the World Series specifically because of a bonehead manager the year before and fire him, hiring another bonehead to manage doesnt fix the problem.


So lets talk playoffs. I havent been able to see many of the games because: they are at ten in the morning, I dont have cable and thus have to go to a sports bar to watch them and drink 10 AM beers or eat their terrible food to patronize the 24 hour bars I frequent, and they only show like 4 games a week anyways. But I've seen some games, and followed the playoffs pretty closely online. So what do I think?

Well as usual, the Fun Teams From the Regular Season who I would actually like to see do well, (Mavs, Grizz, Nuggets,) all got embarressed early. My Celtics got swept, succeeding in their attempt to be as bad as possible without making the lottery, which made me happy since it made Danny Ainge sad. Evidently Miami was a fun team as well, and they are still around, but I missed the part of the year they played well and came into their own, and thus still think of them from their Pat Riley days.

The Second Round has left us with the predictable, evil Spurs, Lakers, Nets, and Pistons contending for the title, as well as younger, less evil teams like the T-Wolves, Kings, Heat, and Pacers. In a strange twist, we had two all evil conference semi-finals, and two non-evil semi-finals.

Pacers-Heat is a series I havent been able to see, but probably would have liked to watch. Both teams are very young and cant seem to figure out how to play competively on the road against competent team. So it looks like the Pacers should hold. New Jersey vs. Detroit I would have refused to watch even if I was in the States. Hopefully the Pistons will sack up and hold them off at home.

Which leaves us with the more interesting series: Spurs-Lakers and T Wolves-Kings. The Spurs lost this series in the third quarter of game 4. They were up ten at half, and had played a great first half in game 4 in LA. They had 51 points, and were getting contributions from everyone, especially Parker and Manu taking it to the hoop. In the third, they got away from that. Duncan, as he is prone to do, started looking like he was going to cry, which caused the rest of the team to become concerned with his emotional well being, distracting them from taking it the hole with the same vigor. There was also some terrible refereeing. There was also alot of Rasho Nestorvic throwing up 20-footers. By the time Kobe took over in the fourth, the Lakers were up 6 anyways.

Which goes to show, that Kobe is a front-running ho who deserves to get convicted, and is the most overrated player in the game today. Wait a minute, thats not what I meant to say. What that game actually goes to show, as did Game 5, is that these teams are very close in terms of overall skill level. A miss or make at the end of game 5, in both these playoffs and last, determined the winner. The Spurs SHOULD be better, if just for their youth. But they, like every team in the NBA nowadays, cant keep up their offensive execution for four quarters.

Now the most popular thing to do today in sportswriting, and I mean today as in this 24 hour period, since it will certainly change by this time tomorrow, is to bash KG for not retaliating against Anthony Peeler's elbow. Supposedly, he took two steps back, rather than hitting him back. See this is exactly the kind of hypocritical crap that pisses me off. They wanted him to fight back because he did nothing. But if he had punched Peeler in the face and been suspended for game 7, the same sportswriters would have been all over his ass for costing his team the championship. Typical bullshit.

So this goes out to KG. Dont worry about people questioning your manhood. Most basketball players are giant wusses anyways. I know this. What you need to do is go drop 35 on injured, old, C-Webb. Especially since I am going to go throw money down on you. So there's a first Marmaniac prediction:

Wolves over Kings (and to cover)
Pistons over Nets
Pacers over Heat (in 7)

So that gets you up-to-date. For those of you who dont care about sports, dont worry, I will be delving outside the realm of athletic competition quite often. I'll try to keep the blog on current events in general, but I am sure I will find the need to give you stoned ramblings on why rap music has fallen off since 1998. Until then, enjoy this primary offerring.


Marmaniac