The End of A Season

It's the end of a season. The NBA season crowned it's champion on Tuesday night and with that ended the 2005-06 campaign. It was a good one though. A ton of good ball was played during the 82 game season and it was all topped off with fantastic playoff games. Very unpredictable and very good. Here are some questions and thoughts as we go into the off-season.

Still can't find Dirk. Where did he go? Did Shaq eat him? Did Hasselhoff chain him to a bed at a Motel 6 in Dallas? DIRK!! WHERE ARE YOU?? For all the complaining about the refs this past series it strikes me as odd that what was not mentioned in the lopsided free throw talk was the fact that the Mavs did not drive the ball to the hoop. You not going to draw fouls or contact when your hoisting bricks up from 20-30 feet away from the rim. Crafty Veteran said it best with his "Hesitation Kills" line in yesterday's post (he's linked to the right). It does. On the other hand the Heat drove the ball just about every possession.

I don't know what the Finals did number wise but I thoroughly enjoyed them. We had two 7 foot stars that are totally different from each other. We had Wade, who just proved to the world that he will be a hall of fame type player. We had Riley who not only is a Hall of Fame coach right now but is probably the best qouteable coach in the league. Avery Johnson may be second and we had him. We had aging stars on both sides. Guys like Payton and Mourning who now can both be called champions. While Darrell Armstrong and Jerry Stackhouse have to wait yet another year for Cristal showers. And finally we had good basketball. Forget the refs and how many calls they blew. We still had a rhythm to each game, we had runs, lead changes, steals, blocks, dunks, three's, technicals, free throws, crashing into stands, loose balls, jump balls, clutch performances and choke jobs. Who could ask for anything more?

Can we stop comparing today's stars with yesterday's hero's? Wade is not Jordan. And even after that tremendous performance he put on for the world on NBA's biggest stage....he still couldn't hold Jordan's jock. First is was Kobe, then it was LeBron and now Wade. Please stop. Media folk love this angle. But it's so annoying and so stupid. Jordan was so great that it would take alot more than one outstanding playoff run like Wade had to even sniff the jock of his Airness. Other comparisons have been Kidd being known as the "white Magic". Morrison being compared to Larry Bird. It's just dumb. And it's not fair to these kids coming out of school. The pressure of succeeding at the pro level is great enough.

As I type this I just learned that the Knicks have fired Larry Brown and replaced him with Isiah Thomas which I said was going to happen here:
http://anthony-padrino.blogspot.com/2006/05/isiah-king.html
Well, let's see what you got Zeke. Let's see if you fail at this. This is your last shot. You were a failure at owning a league. You were a failure as a GM/President (twice) and you failed at coaching (according to some he did ok) at Indiana. This is going to be interesting. I just want my Knicks to play like they care, like they are proud of wearing the blue and orange.
Alot of interesting off season topics are on the menu. Iverson, Kobe, Garnett and so on. I'll post something on this after the draft. The Brown thing just took some wind out of my sails.....
I love this game. I think.