Games Six

Tonight has two awesome Game 6s, and one lame Pacers-Nets game the league has mercifully scheduled on NBA TV.

I saw good chunks of the fifth games of the Heat-Bulls series and Lakers-Suns series, so here are some “thoughts”:

Miami at Chicago: This Bulls team is a lot more fun in theory than in practice. They play together about ten times better than the Heat do, and they hustle like crazy. Admirable virtues. But if Kirk "Zoom zoom" Hinrich and Andres Nocioni's constant whining weren't annoying enough, you've got former Dukie Chris Duhon celebrating on the bench. It's a tossup whether it’s more fun to watch them play or to spend a quiet night at home filing down your nailbeds with sandpaper.

The Heat aren’t much better, a total hodgepodge of random players who, unlike the Bulls, you have in fact heard of. They roll the dice every night with The Glove, Employee No. 8, White Chocolate, and James Posey and hope one comes up as a good outside shooter. For some reason jacking it up your whole career doesn’t make you efficient in the twilight of your playing days, imagine that.

Game 5 was a total deadlock through three quarters, and the Heat-especially Payton and Shaq-looked very frustrated. Miami flipped the switch before the fourth and owned the rest of the game. Payton was guarding Hinrich like it was 1994, Posey finally hit a three, and Wade came back from a hard fall and played very well, but mostly the Bulls self-imploded.

That’s the problem with a team that relies so hard on hustle and guts and whatever else-they don’t have any kind of extra gear. Once Miami turned it up, the Bulls were toast. But the home team has won every game this series, and tonight’s in Chicago, so I can’t give the Heat more than about 60-40 of finishing out the series tonight.

Phoenix at L.A.: I don’t know why this series has turned into a referendum on the MVP award-it’s not like Steve Nash and Kobe were the only worthy candidates this year. But it’s still been fun watching Kobe stick it to Nash. I don’t love Bryant, but he’s so obviously superior to Nash. Why do some try to explain that Nash’s passing to scorers is more valuable than Bryant’s actual shot-making? It’s the same kind of over-thinking, now so prevalent in sports, that leads to Mario Williams going No. 1 overall.

Anyway, it’s been a pretty chippy series, which is fine with me, and Raja Bell will be sitting this one out after laying Kobe out in the open field. Actually, I think tackling another basketball player is retarded, because the other player’s always in a defenseless position. It just makes you look like a tool.

Kobe got up after the hit and had to make a big show of brushing himself off. Man, that guy’s cocky…but you know, I would have been tempted to do the same thing. I don’t like Kobe or Bell, but I almost find myself pulling for L.A.

Another potential factor tonight is the bizarre sexual assault investigation of Kwame Brown-I say bizarre only because the timing is so surprising. (Then again, no one’s ever accused Brown of taking basketball too seriously.)

I don’t know if the investigation will even find anything, but since Kobe had a similar experience a few years ago, he and Phil Jackson ought to be as supportive as Brown can hope for. Kwame’s the team’s third-leading scorer in the playoffs, and it’ll be a huge boost if he can play well.

Can he? I don’t know. Kobe was able to block it out a few years ago, which probably wasn’t as creepy or crazy as everyone made it sound. Basketball games are probably the only time for someone in that position to get any peace. (I'm not saying you have to feel sorry for Brown, especially if he turns out to be guilty, but either way I'm sure he'd like to have his mind on something else.) Then again, Brown has never reacted well to pressure. I think he does nothing special tonight, but Kobe picks up the slack, and the Lakers advance.