Random acts of basketball

Folks who read the NBA playoff game diaries -- and yes, I know, that's really not all of you, seeing how raw the diaries are, and so be it -- caught a little of this, so apologies for recycling. Fie on me for not just saving it. Anywhere, here goes.

In the next 10 weeks, I'll grind away on the MLB season, cover any peccadillo that comes down the path, and prep for the NFL fantasy and regular season. I'll posit on the travels of LeBron James, the NBA draft, and probably some World Cup. The blog will more or less keep the same hours it always has. I've been doing this gig for 3.5 years and several thousand posts; it never really ends. That's simultaneously the good and bad things about it.

But in other ways, the year is just plain over, and seeing how no one in this society is really dependent on the calendar to determine whether they live in light and satiety, rather than darkness and hunger... well, the "end of the year" is really whenever you want it to be. There's more momentum for it to be now than December, in my opinion.

And when things end, there's always this tendency to try to sum up What It All Means. We just had a seven game NBA Finals in which the winning team's best player was a guy who never won anything before, who sparked a riot with some of the worst judgment seen outside of criminal proceedings. And now, he's got one more ring than Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Allen Iverson and dozens more truly great players. And, of course, one less than Adam Morrison.

See, that's the real lesson from the last two months of the playoffs; there is no lesson. Because NBA Finals teams nearly always show their pedigree in the regular season, and this Celtic team just slept through the regular season, then flicked the switch. NBA champions don't have third and fourth best players who are wildly erratic and/or don't show up for road games. They also don't have benches that get roasted for most of the playoff season, and past MVPs that go 6 for 24 in Game Seven... and win, and win the MVP.

It makes no sense. It's random. If the best team won, it's only because there isn't really such a thing now as best teams; there are just the ones that win, or match up best in the games that matter.

If I want to believe that there are reasons behind what we've seen, credit the Laker bigs for winning Game Seven, and for bringing the wood in more of the games. But that neglects the point that the Laker rebounding edge was mostly from the guards (Kobe Bryant, especially, was big in the deciding minutes on the glass, and Rajon Rondo wasn't), and that while injuries are a part of the game, losing a starter (Kendrick Perkins) for the last six quarters of the season is kind of rare.

You can also credit the coaching of Phil Jackson, seeing how he's got 11 of these rings and must just exude confidence, even to a team facing a 3-2 deficit. But it's hard to give him too much of a knob slob when he spent most of the series getting tortured by Nate Robinson without ever finding a way to exploit the little man on defense, or how the Laker defense would have collapsed like a house of cards if the Rondo that played Cleveland showed up. And it's not as if Doc Rivers really hurt his team at all during their run; his use of the bench players was inspired, and he got more out of Rasheed Wallace than any man could have this year.

So what we are left with, really, is where the NHL has been for decades. A playoff season that doesn't have much in common with the regular season. A sense of randomness, and exceptional unpredictability in the playoffs. The feeling that the rules, if there ever were any, for who wins and who loses and why have taken a break. Or maybe that the only teams who really get to play and win these things are the ones in the Laker and Celtic laundry, no matter how bad the play is, or ugly the flow. The ratings for this thing were immense. No one cares that the play was ugly and ragged. Kobe Bryant was the MVP after one of the worst games of his life. The Celtics could blow up overnight; Doc Rivers might be gone, Sheed may retire, Perkins may have a very serious injury, Ray Allen was close to being traded for a rack of balls in February, Robinson's a free agent and might get paid to put up numbers on a bad team again, and so on, and so on. Where LeBron James signs, and if he engineers a bunch of good free agents to come with him, could change everything, and probably will.

But for the most part, it sure feels like just some games that happened, and if the series was a best of 15, that it would have gone 15. Also, that there's no reason to think that anyone, besides the Celtic and Laker fans that seem to make up all of the fans that the Association has, will remember this thing for more than Artest thanking his psychiatrist. Very, very random.