Thursday Night

Before

Not the best of doubleheaders tonight. Cleveland goes to Dallas in a game where people will be sure to point out just how bad Cleveland is and make the false statement that the Mavericks are championship contenders. I almost guarantee it. Second game is the Celtics travelling to Seattle. This is going to be ugly…Ray Allen might drop 40. Boston has too much defense for a team that is depending on Kevin Durant and Wally’s World for their outside scoring. And lastly in a non nationally televised game Phoenix travels to LA to face the Clippers. The Clippers are very depleted but then again they have a beast in Chris Kaman who should be licking his chops to face Phoenix’s D. Reactions coming later.

After

Well…I was wrong.

Cleveland/Dallas: At least Dallas proved that they werent championship contenders on their own. Sheesh. I find this to be a very disappointing loss for the Mavs. It’s easy to see why the lost. For one you can’t let Hughes and Ilgauskas both score over 15, LeBron is too good. Also none of their offensive players could get anything going. Dirk was 6/17 (20 pts), Howard was 9/18 (19) and the firepower off the bench misfired. Stackhouse and Terry combined to shoot 6-for-20. Yikes. Also Jerry Stackhouse should have his knees taken away for a day for trying to jump with LeBron? Maybe in 1993 when LeBron was like 7. The sad fact on that dunk is that Stackouse and LeBron jumped at the same time. LeBron hung in the air so long before dunking it that by the time he actually did Stackhouse was already back down on the ground.

Seattle/Boston: I said Ray Allen might drop 40..of course he scored 10 points. Paul Pierce again proved that he is the wildcard of the Big 3. Some nights he is going to carry them to victories like he was the past two games. Other nights his jacking is going to cost them (see Pistons, Detroit). But you can’t have your cake and eat it too as the man was going off tonight. He made poor Durant look like a little boy a couple times. Lightweight cause for concern for the C’s: Rajon Rondo’s defense. He got outplayed by Delonte West for the majority of this game. Perhaps he was sleepwalking but we saw what happened against Chauncey. People let him slide because of his gaudy steal numbers but I had to throw it out there. For Seattle..I can tell you a Kevin Durant box score without even seeing it. 20 points, 20ish field goals attempted, a handful of free throws, couple rebounds, couple turnovers with maybe an assist or a steal.

Phoenix/Clippers: Amare reads the blog. He has too after the effort he put out tonight. Not only did he had 30 and 15 but he held Chris Kaman in check. Kaman had 9 and 9 and shot 4-for-17 on the night. That is what we call getting locked down. I of course could take credit for this but its only one game, if Amare could do that somewhat consistently the Suns transform into a completely different team. Amare even made me smile with his postgame quote:

“I was more proud of my defense than my offense. Scoring is easy for me, but defense is where we’re tying to get better as a team,” he said.

Well done Amare you might be getting….oh crap there was more…

“I also think I did a great job against the Lakers, but Bynum just got a lot of over-the-top lobs and a lot of easy baskets around the bucket.”

You had me at ‘I was more proud of my defense’ Amare…why you gotta go and do that and do that? No you did not do anywhere near a great job against the Lakers….Bynum killed you. You need to know this. Also, its not like a video game where guys get lobs out of nowhere or make crazy layups. He got easy baskets because you didn’t do a good job guarding him. The lobs…because you were out of position. He beasted you Amare, I’m sorry.