06 May 2008

Playoffs thoughts


The Hornets are for real. I've picked against them in both rounds of the playoffs so far, and they're two wins away from making it to the Western Conference Finals.

Again, I will never bet on sports.

But I've never been more happy about a prediction of mine going down in flames. A healthy Spurs team getting knocked out in the second round? It's like Christmas!

And David West is cementing himself as one of the up-and-coming stars in the league. He's quick, strong, and has a very reliable 16-17-foot jumper. I'd take him over Boozer any day, and to those who believe West is nothing without Paul, I say that's ridiculous.

In other news, Orlando is a talented, but stupid, team. Howard, Turkoglu, Rashard and Nelson (somewhat surprisingly) are great players and have a bright future as a team.

That said, I've never seen more botched possessions late in one game than last night when they played the Pistons on Game 2 of their series. Bad passes, tough shots, dumb decisions... the Magic had a very, very good shot at winning that game and apparently had no desire to.

Down 2 with around two minutes left, over 15 seconds on the shot clock, Magic have the ball. What do they get out of the possession? Hedo jacks up a long three with a defender right in his face. Shot misses terribly.

Another possession later on, Rashard drives in and attempts a corkscrew up-and-under layup around two Pistons players. No good.

I could list at least three other horrible plays the Magic ended up with in the last five minutes.

Orlando coach Stan Van Gundy was beside himself with frustration. Can't say I blame him.

7 comments:

Josh said...

hooray! The Spurs are close to getting knocked out!!!

Nicholas G. James said...

Yeah David West is pretty cool. He can shoot the three sometimes, too.

But the Magic need a better PF. Then they could have C Dwight Howard, PF {Someone better}, SF Rashard Lewis, SG Hedo Turkoglu, PG Jameer Nelson.

Matt Gibb said...

Hey B, can you think of any reason why the NBA would forbid the refs from using a stopwatch to look at replay, like they needed to in the DET-ORL game the other night? What could the reasoning possibly be?

Brandon said...

G,

The stated reason is that replay would slow the flow of the game.

But this makes no sense, as Steve Javie took about 10 minutes to figure out what had happened.

The stupid thing is that not one of the refs noticed the clock had stopped running almost immediately after the Pistons inbounded the ball. That's just incompetent.

Nicholas G. James said...

That was a weird game

Josh said...

I think the refs still are betting. They seem to be RIGHT THERE! When a " foul" happens and it is like they intentionally don't call it. It's gay

Nicholas G. James said...

I know! They probably are betting