The Fix That Wasn't

This weekend in the NBA, two Conference Finals had the opportunity to go to a seventh game. For NBA detractors -- and yes, you are legion -- this was an easy time to bitch about the officiating, to call for a Kobe-LeBron fix, and to cite the presence of Nike puppets as something sinister.

And yet, for both conferences, the simple conspiracy was that the better team won in the minimum number of games necessary, without any officiating moment of consequence. The result is an NBA Finals that will feature Los Angeles and, gasp, Orlando, but not until Thursday night, or in just enough time for the national media to exhaust every man, woman and child on the planet with LeBron James 2010 Free Agency Speculation. (I don't think he goes anywhere, but then again, I thought he was going to force Game 7 tonight. So what do I know?)

A few notes on the vanquished. For all of the early talk in the series as to how Carmelo Anthony was making The Leap and Chauncey Billups was the best thing that had happened to Denver since the discovery that snow could create tourism... well, Occam's Razor is a fine way to keep your head in such matters, and it may be just that once Lamar Odom's back had recovered from the hard foul that he took in the Rockets series, this series was over. Kenyon Martin may look scary with all that ink, Nene is a nice player with active hands, and Birdman Anderson can block you all day from the weak side, but Odom is just a poor man's LeBron with the big man passing, and when he plays well, the Lakers don't lose, mostly because he makes Pau Gasol the most effective offensive center in basketball. The Nugget bigs are good defensively, but they aren't 2008 Kevin Garnett.

For Cleveland... I just had the sense, in watching the game tonight, that they knew they were beaten every step of the way. LeBron James might be the only player in NBA history who can get a near triple double without seeming like he's having anything close to his usual game, and when he takes "only" 8 free free throws in his first 39 minutes, that's just not the same guy that was in that laundry in the first five games. James had just four points in the fourth quarter tonight, 1 before the final minute of garbage time; his tank was long past "E".

Mo Williams is going to wear the goat horns for not showing up early in the series and then making the non-valid guarantee, but if Cleveland desperately needs to upgrade their bigs. Zydrunas Ilgauskas gave them 2 points, 7 boards, 2 steals and 4 fouls in 22 minutes, and if the Cavs allow him to get a year older and a year less mobile while playing meaningful minutes for them, they are absolutely insane. The same goes for Ben Wallace, of course; had the Cavs simply had a Kendrick Perkins / Joel Pryzbilla type to mix in as a true defensive stopper, they might have won this series. Hell, a Brad Miller might have done it for them, and I could easily throw out another dozen low-tier names. A team should not lose in the Conference Finals with home-court advantage because their best defensive play from a center is a Sideshow Vareajo flop.

It was also striking that, when the Cavs season was on the line tonight,for the first time in the series, the best player on the floor wasn't wearing a Cavs jsersey. Instead, it was Dwight Howard, just running wild without early foul trouble, taking advantage of the pick your poison single defender option that Mike Brown threw at him. Every team in the East has been wondering how on earth they could comppete with an unstoppable force, but given his age and power, it's possible that the force is in Florida. The signature play of this game was a lightning-quick spin and spike that made Sideshow Vareajo look like he was bolted to the floor. It's not like NBA history is absent the example of any big man just crushing everything in his path.With the Cavs shooting terribly at the line, and not getting there very often, against the Magic when they were hitting their threes... well, that's just about the living prescription of a game the Magic can't lose.

Lakers-Magic will get similar or better ratings that LA-Cleveland, though probably not up to LA-Boston last year. People forget that James was already in one Finals that no one watched, though the anti-Spurs bias probably had more to do with that. There would have been more interest in watching him this year, since he's a bigger star and on the radar for any number of NBA+ markets that look at him and dream of the future, but not so much.

And as for Cleveland Fan, who doesn't even get a signature play to pin this losing memory on -- really, the lasting memory of this series is still going to be James stealing Game Two at the buzzer... well, I just feel bad for you. Best record in the NBA in the regular season, best player in the world on the roster, two crushing sweeps in the first two rounds, and done. You aren't the only ones surprised by this, really.