What? It happened again?

That’s right: I just got home from watching the Denver Nuggets knock out the Charlotte Hornets, live at the Pepsi Center. And (most of) you didn’t.

This was my view in pregame:



That’s right: better seats, far worse view. (That guy’s sign, by the way, was something to the effect of how the Tenacious Nuggets Team D was worse than swine flu or something.) It also didn’t help that while meeting up with a different friend and his wife to go to this game that I broke my glasses and spent the game watching through a pair of specs with no left side to ’em.

Anyway, you (hopefully) caught the game. The first half was tense, with a few great moments, namely Chris Andersen’s ridiculous block on Chris Paul late in the first quarter. Also, there was Nene’s beastly left-handed dunk that was quickly followed by a Chauncey Billups three-pointer. And it blew my mind when Kenyon Martin hit that three. But the Hornets, led by David West, had it tied at the intermission.

The second half, though, the Nuggets pulled away. Carmelo Anthony seized the moment, scoring 24 of his 34 after halftime. He completely took over the way you’d expect a superstar to and I can’t wait to see how he’ll do against the Mavs. And J.R. Smith went a little nuts on the threes, including one he hit with his feet on the “F”s in the NBA Playoffs logo on the court (in other words, from really far out).

I have to say, though, that Chris Paul’s stock has dropped further in this series than any guy I’ve seen since maybe Vince Carter against the Knicks in 2000. Paul did absolutely nothing tonight and showed no sign he was capable of more. Of course, he is capable of more—he obviously has a ton of talent he’s shown other times—but it will be interesting to see what sense of urgency he has next year, because hurt or not, tired or not, he flat out did not get it done.

The night, though, was pretty awesome. You couldn’t hear Chauncey’s postgame interview as player of the game (?) over the crowd even if you’d wanted to. I finally met two of my friends’ wives tonight, and the one I drove down with actually knew how to get around Denver, so I made it home way faster this time. Plus, as you’ll see below, the guy in front of me actually sat down most of the game. It was great.

On to the second round!

Nuggets win a squeaker

Did you catch the Nuggets’ 58-point win tonight over the New Orleans Hornets in Game Four? If you live outside of Denver, the answer is probably not, as the game was broadcast nationally on NBA TV. The only thing lamer than a league starting its own TV network is when that league starts airing playoff games on it.

As I would have anyway, I caught the game on Altitude here in Colorado. Well, except for the parts that were on when I was catching 24…did I mention the Nuggets won by 58 freaking points? 121-63 was the final score, and according to the Altitude crew that tied as the highest margin victory ever in the NBA playoffs.

There’s not much to say about the game, other than that it was everything Game Three should have been. The Nuggets dominated from start to finish, Carmelo was great, and while Chauncey may have started to cool off just a little bit he still badly outplayed Chris Paul, whom Scott Hastings called the best American flopper in the game today. I love that phrase.

Right now in the postgame they’re talking about Carmelo and how well he played tonight. I have to say it’s the best playoff game I’ve seen from him and he really stepped it up. But frankly, so did everyone; just check out the box score. (The plus/minus ratings are particularly hilarious.)

Nothing else to say. 58 friggin’ points!

Do you know Shawn Moreno?

Today, I think, was the first time I appreciated how much pressure there is in making decisions in the NFL draft. For starters, there is the sheer amount of decisions to be made. Do we keep the pick? Do we trade it? Do we draft this guy, that guy, or this other guy? Do we go for offense or defense? Can we afford his likely contract demands? If we trade this for a pick next year, where do we think that pick will fall? Do we draft based on need, or do we take the best player we think is available? (I do not think there is a universal right answer to that last question, by the way.)

More frighteningly, there are so many important factors which are basically unknown. I doubt I could do it. Personally, if I’m making a decision, I analyze it to death, find out everything I possibly can, and then try to avoid making it. But the quite simple fact of the matter is that it’s impossible to know, or even be all that sure about, how any individual decision will work out.

Take, for instance, a simple move the Broncos made today. They started today holding the Chicago Bears’ first-round pick in next year’s draft from the Jay Cutler trade. They moved it to Seattle for the fifth pick of this year’s draft, no. 37 overall. Now on the face of it, moving a pick down just five spots to get it a year early is a pretty stellar move. But if Alphonso Smith, a 5-9 cornerback from Wake Forest, gets hurt, or is too slow, or is lazy, or receives poor coaching (on this team? Ha!), or otherwise doesn’t pan out, then the move was the wrong move, and the team is that much closer to getting literally nothing, rather than a more figurative nothing, for Cutler. If he’s the next Champ Bailey, then it was a brilliant move. If he’s the next Terrell Buckley, then he’ll play for fifteen teams, and even play well for some of them, but maybe not for us so we didn’t really get “value” for the pick. The point is, you just can’t know.

However, you CAN know that drafting a running back with the no. 12 pick, on a team with a horrific defense, a new pass-minded head coach, and frankly the best RBs coach in the business, a guy who can make diamonds out of anything, is probably not that savvy of a move. Even if Moreno turns out all right, would we have really needed him to?

Let’s check in with the Boy Wonder:

‘We went through a lot of backs last year,’ McDaniels said. ‘We only had three healthy backs at the minicamp last weekend. Again, we still got the defensive football player at 18 that we were hoping to get at 18, and we got them.’

Did he really just suggest we spent a first-round pick on a position because we need more bodies for camps? And while I think you can never be too sure of your haul on draft day, coach seems pretty confident.

The Broncos could have taken Ayers or another coveted defensive end/outside linebacker, Brian Orakpo, at No. 12 and hoped Moreno would have been around at No. 18. But McDaniels said he was hearing too much inside information about teams picking between them — perhaps New Orleans at No. 14 or San Diego at No. 16 — who were considering Moreno.

‘The way that it fell it just made all the sense in the world for us to go ahead and take him at 12 and not deal with: ‘Well we'll hold our breath or try to move up from 18 into the middle, between 12 and 18 to get him,' ’ McDaniels said. ‘The two players we really valued right there at that spot were Ayers and Knowshon.’

Hornets take Game Three

The Denver Nuggets made a valiant effort at the end of Game Three of their best-of-seven series with the New Orleans Hornets yesterday, but it wasn’t enough to keep their series lead from being cut in half.

Chauncey Billups, Denver’s biggest threat over the first two games, was held to 16 points on 3-of-10 shooting, though he added six assists and seven defensive rebounds. Carmelo Anthony, the team’s star for several seasons, scored 25, had eight rebounds and passed out five assists.

But neither player really seemed cold or especially shaken by the Hornets’ defense. The only real change was that the Hornets seemed to key a little less on Anthony, while being determined to give Billups fewer uncontested shots. Anthony, though he wasn’t red-hot, didn’t shrink from the role of go-to guy, and almost pulled it out at the end. I think if he had been the focus of the offense a little more in the fourth quarter we could have gotten our run started sooner.

All in all, it’s tough to be too discouraged by a tight road loss in a game the Nuggets had no business being in. The keys for Game Four (Monday night, 6:30 Mountain):

1. Make free throws. Yeah, it’s obvious, but the team made only 24 of 35 Saturday.

2. Keep going to Chauncey or Carmelo, and if the defense is like Game Two, look for Carmelo more. In past seasons, if Carmelo gave up the ball during a possession, he still frequently got it back. Not so on Saturday. It’s a good thing that the team spreads the ball around and doesn’t rely on Carmelo alone, because we’ve seen what happens when that’s the entire gameplan. But…teams that go deep in the playoffs have a go-to guy, especially at the end of games, and Carmelo is the Nugget best-suited to it. And he definitely needs the ball every single time Peja Stojakovic is on him, because when Anthony puts the ball on the floor, Peja is exposed as an hilariously incompetent defender. If they triple Carmelo at any time, Billups is the obvious alternative, but I felt there were a few too many times in the game when J.R. Smith or Kenyon Martin were relied on.

3. Give K-Mart the ball less. I was being polite after Game Two, and I’m not sure why. The fact is I’ve never been crazy about K-Mart and especially not his contract. But man alive, he is a madman on offense, and not in the good way. Usually he just takes a lot of 20-footers, which is weird enough, but in Game Three he was making enough odd decisions that I was just openly rooting for him not to get the ball. The box score credits him with five-of-eight from the floor, which is better than I’d thought, but he also had half a dozen turnovers.

4. Knock Chris Paul to the floor. Game Three got pretty chippy, which I think for the most part worked in the Nuggets’ favor. Carmelo got fired up by it in the third, and there are a few Hornets, led by Tyson Chandler, who don’t seem to respond well to that kind of game. That said, what kind of physical game seems to deliberately avoid the other team’s star player, especially when he’s a whiner and takes cheap shots on the Birdman? Paul, the Vlade Divac of point guards, deserves an opportunity to show us all what a real foul actually looks like.

I went to Game 2 last night, and you didn’t

I’ve never been to an NBA playoff game before, so when the opportunity arose to attend Game 2 of the Nuggets-Hornets series, I jumped. I have to say, getting tickets to an NBA playoff game was way easier than I’d expected. My secret? Have someone else buy them for you.

I arrived at the Pepsi Center around 7:15 for the 8:30 tipoff and started the walk in. Do you know what the arena looks like an hour-fifteen before tipoff? I don’t; apparently they don’t let you in that early. Instead, I met up with a friend of mine, his dad and his wife, and waited in line until the doors were to open, at 7:30. Or at least I thought I was going to. But then the greatest mascot in the history of professional sports showed up and started chucking things off the roof at us: mini-balls, headbands, shirts, and more.


I don’t know if it was the wind or what, but almost everything he threw seemed to go to the same spot in line, which happened to be not my spot. One headband started drifting in my general direction, and I stepped forward until I hit the guy right in front of me. Kind of annoying; you want to start boxing out people in the most aggressive way possible, but of course people would freak if you started to do that. Society sucks sometimes.

In terms of the “outside the arena before an NBA playoff game” experiences I’ve had I would have rated this Nuggets game have far behind the entertainment the Utah Jazz had set up outside of Game One of the 1998 Finals had it not been for the sudden appearance of Rocky. The Nuggets cheerleaders had been holding each other up in the air (which near the sidewalk didn’t seem too bright) and some dancers or something were really halfheartedly trying to give away T-shirts or something, which had made the wait outside a touch depressing. The Jazz, on the other hand, had like little hoops and other events, mostly for a younger crowd, but then again you also had to be in Utah, so give Denver the edge.

After Rocky had run out of cheap promotional trinkets, which go pretty quickly, we entered the Pepsi Center and made an immediate left to the main store. Earlier we’d stopped by some local businesses in an attempt to get some Nuggets shirts for the game but found pretty sad stock on hand. So we were resigned to pay more inside the arena, which turned out to be wrong. Of course the stuff was cool, but a lot of it was on sale, too, which made no sense whatsoever to me, but there you go. I got an awesome blue T-shirt with a retro Nuggets logo on it for $12. (Also, you may recall that I was somewhat sheepish at the ol’ NLCS about loading up on Rockies gear out of the blue. I have no such shame with the Nuggets. First of all I’ve owned a ton of Nuggets stuff over the years, and I bet I could have found a threadbare team T-shirt without much difficulty, but it was time to step it up. Second, I started rooting for the Nuggets in the late-90s, so anyone who wants to call me fair weather is just a freaking idiot.)

On the way out, we saw what was going on on the right side of the entrance: an autograph table seating what appeared to be several Nuggets dancers. I elected not to distract them from the night’s duties with my charm. Instead our group headed to our seats, which were basically behind the basket, though I don’t mean the row behind. The Nuggets’ offense ran towards us in the first half. As we settle in and slip on our Nuggets shirts, the blimps make their first appearance:


I hate those things. The worst part came, well, I don’t know when, but the Coors can was dropping gift cards. It dropped a whole bunch in one section. Then the complete jerk piloting it decided to make a few more rounds, floating around sort of like it would consider heading towards our seats, but the can clearly had just one giftcard left. I could literally feel the dignity leaving my body as I tracked it across the night sky. Of course, he lowered the blimp over the same spot he’d just dropped a cluster of cards over to let go of the last one.

Anyway, having skipped dinner, we decided to head out for food. I went with the pizza, which I think I’ve had before. Somehow the Pepsi Center managed to make stadium pizza look unappealing:


(If you know me, you know that was no joke.)

Pretty soon after that, the Char Hornets came out and started warming up. Of course, I almost cheered, seeing as they had blue-and-yellow warmups on. I then elected to throw away my pizza box and Sierra Mist cup, seeing as I already had a bag of Nuggets clothes under me and space was of course at a premium. I tell Jonesy I’m a dork as I head out, then really feel it when I miss the Nuggets running in. But hey, I could hear the cheering. During warmups I’m asked whether professional basketball players shouldn’t be hitting basically every shot, since there’s no defense. I call my friend’s attention to Peja Stojakovic at the far end of the court. Peja, who was one of my very favorite players a few years ago when he was a King, was predictably sinking just about everything.

Eventually, of course, there was a game to play. The first quarter, the Nuggets jumped out to a huge lead…or seemed to. Carmelo Anthony was hitting everything, and the team just kept pouring in the points. Somehow, the Hornets were getting enough garbage baskets to make it a close/tie game. Seriously, I began to worry, but I didn’t need to. First off, the boisterous drunk fellows behind me were clearly getting in Chris Paul’s head. (Oh, wait, from where we were sitting, that makes no sense. Huh.) Second, Chauncey Billups was basically in complete control of the game.
As the second quarter went on, the Nuggets started to slowly pull away. Momentum was building. Then Chauncey broke away with the ball, with about five and a half minutes left in the period, and pulled up for a quick three. He missed softly off the far side, but the Birdman—who is an absolute rockstar at the arena, and carries himself like it—grabbed the rebound, slammed it home, and swung wildly on the rim. The place went nuts. A few minutes later, during a timeout, Rocky hit one of those halfcourt shots backwards over his head to keep the crowd ablaze.

Quite frankly, though the second half was a blast to watch, there wasn’t much drama left in the game. Early in the third, Peja hit back-to-back-to-back three-pointers to start cutting down the lead, but it was the only remotely scary moment in the game. So here are some more unorganized thoughts:

Chauncey Billups is just incredible in person, and of course he’s on a heck of a hot streak. I remember watching him live during his first tour with the Nuggets, once when he drained a good 30-foot three, but hadn’t figured out yet how to maker the best use of his talent. Tonight, though, he stood in direct contrast to Chris Paul, who I probably just saw on an off night but who was remarkably less intimidating than his reputation. Basically his game was almost one-dimensional…he just drives and dishes. Chauncey will drain threes, but he’ll also post up and run all kinds of plays. Paul will drive the lane, usually pass, but sometimes shoot himself, or, in one memorable instance, he’ll make dramatic ballfakes with no one near him, then biff an open lay-up. Also, he does that hurt “I’ve just been shot” face whenever anyone touches him and that turns a crowd on him real quickly.

Carmelo was fantastic, and was named the player of the game, though I would have expected Billups to get the honor. Anthony was streaky, going a little cold in the second quarter, but he was finding the open man, too. I loved how he played tonight: he forced his offense just a little bit at times, but mostly just played into the team scheme that Billups orchestrates so brilliantly.

Chris Andersen is awesome. It’s worth mentioning again how excited everyone gets whenever he does anything.

I’ve always liked J.R. Smith’s talent, but I loved the way he bounced up immediately after taking a hard shot tonight. None of this, “Let me try to remember how to stand up” crap. And he’s a great guy to have on the floor late in a blowout because he can carry an offense for stretches; he’s one of the few backups in the league you can really say that about. The starter, Dahntay Jones, was fun to watch tonight, too.

Kenyon Martin still seems to take a few too many jumpers, but the way he makes and misses shots is just weird. Like he’ll miss a couple of 20-footers, but then he’ll make these bizarre-looking runners and you’re like, where did that come from? He’s the closest anyone on the team comes to not accepting their role, and frankly for a former No. 1 overall pick he’s doing pretty well as a complimentary guy. The team overall is just playing great.

Anyway, the final score


was wonderful for any long-suffering Nuggets fan. It’s too early to make plans for the second round, but it’s never too early to celebrate.

Revisionist history

It's only been one game of the playoffs, but the Nuggets friggin' won, and in any event it appears the world was right and I was wrong about the Allen Iverson for Chauncey Billups trade. (It takes a very dumb man to admit this, as I apparently never wrote about said trade on this blog.) I was upset when the Nuggets lost Iverson; I loved his scoring and entertainment value, and he made the team interesting and prominent in a way Billups never could. That said, I think deep down I sort of knew everyone was right: Iverson was fading fast, and Billups was a terrifically reliable team player, known for his big shots in the clutch. (Not that Iverson hasn't had great playoff moments: Billups has a Finals MVP to his credit, but I'm more impressed with the way Iverson carried an inferior squad to the Finals in his MVP season.) Regardless, with a second-seed (though only in a tightly-packed West) and a 1-0 series lead, clearly the Nuggets didn't lose anything in the trade.

Billups was huge in last night's Game One win over the New Orleans Hornets, whose road jerseys made the game look like an intrasquad scrimmage, but I'm not ready to make plans for the second round yet. (By the way, having Chris Andersen back is awesome, though I couldn't find Skita or the Earl of Boykins anywhere.)

Anyway, my biggest concern remains Carmelo Anthony. I love him as a player, but once again he got off to a bad start in the playoffs. As he said in the recap, he's not concerned. Should we be?

The second is never as sweet

Congratulations to the North Carolina Tar Heels, my favorite college basketball team and the winners of tonight's national championship game.

I don't have much to say about the suspenseless game, other than that Ty Lawson is awesome. People often say that college basketball is better than pro basketball, and those people are morons, but I do think it's cool the impact a great college point guard can have on a game, and how many good points with different playing styles I've seen in the tournament over the years. (Incidentally, I say "morons" because the overall level of play is obviously so much higher in the pros than college, and because many college fans claim the teamwork is so much higher in than sport—all the while ignoring how there are often several players on the floor who couldn't even get a shot off without a well-designed play.)

Anyway, it's weird to say this on a night when one of my teams won a championship (which you should never take for granted, because you never know when it will happen again), but the second championship is never as sweet as the first. The Denver Broncos defeating the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XXXII made January 25, 1998 literally one of my favorite days of my life. But their whooping the Falcons a year later? Awesome, fun, entertaining to watch, a great capstone to a dream season, and a glorious sendoff for No. 7—but not nearly as sweet as the first. It would have meant so much more to Falcons fans to win that game than it did to Denver fans.

I couldn't help but think of this even before tonight's game. I felt spoiled when the Tar Heels made the championship this year because they'd just won a championship a few years ago, in 2005. It's great to have them back in it, and it saved my brackets from total humiliation (seriously, as of last week I'd basically resolved never to fill one out again), but it didn't move me in the same way. That's because what really makes a championship win special for a sports fan is not the win itself, but the vindication of the journey that came before…especially when that journey includes years of suffering or a really heartbreaking loss or six.

Denver's first Super Bowl win was so sweet because all of the factors aligned so brilliantly. Everyone in Denver loved our star quarterback, John Elway, who had that glorious match of talent and determination. In Colorado we knew him as the guy who carried several good-but-nowhere-near-great teams to the Super Bowl. To non-Broncos partisans, though, he was known as the guy who couldn't win a Super Bowl, and so Broncos fans around my age bracket took crap for supporting him their whole lives. The year before we won, however, we'd been blessed with a fantastic regular season, when the team started 12-1 and clinched home field advantage with ease. Denver's new coach, Mike Shanahan, who'd been a household name at my place even in the '80s, was just then earning his reputation as The Mastermind, but it finally felt like our year. But then Jacksonville pulled off one of the great playoff upsets I've ever had the displeasure of seeing, sending us home with an ignominious 30-27 defeat. Considering Elway's age, many of us thought we'd never see him make it so close again. That's what made the next year's victory so sweet.

I've always felt that Walter Payton-loving Bears supporters were the only NFL fanatics who could really understand what that Super Bowl win felt like. (Of course, the classy Shanahan allowed his long-suffering star to get a rushing touchdown, unlike some other coach I could name.)

So why would a Carolina fan feel so warm about the 2005 national championship team, when they're one of the truly great programs in college basketball and won titles in the '80s and '90s? Well, I didn't start following basketball until the late '90s, and 1998 was the first year I followed the tournament. I absolutely fell in love with the Carolina team, with player of the year Antawn Jamison, insane dunker Vince Carter, and my favorite college player of all time, shooting guard Shammond Williams. Though Jamison and Carter were vastly more talented, Williams was often the guy counted on to make the clutch shot, and he hit big threes throughout the first two weekends. I remember reading in the Denver Post that Williams had had a horrible shooting game in the Final Four a year before, and I felt he was due to make up for it. But then, in Carolina's Final Four game, he shot 2-for-12 in an upset loss to Utah. (I'd forgotten the Utes had been the opponent that night, but that's definitely the night I started hating them. I made no friends the next Monday night rooting loud for the champion Kentucky Wildcats in a household full of Utah fans.) Anyway, while Carolina had their moments over the next few years, specifically their tournament run in 2000 behind freshman Joe Forte, who Mark Kiszla hilariously compared with Michael Jordan in one column, they weren't really Carolina again until 2005, when they won it all.

There's one obvious exception to this from my own experience, and that's the Colorado Avalanche. They won the Stanley Cup in 1996, their first season in Denver. It was cool, and we all pretended to like hockey a lot for a few weeks, but most of us had no history whatsoever with the team. In 1997 I actually followed the team day-to-day, devouring game recaps and the like, but of course they couldn't break through the Red Wings that year. I was never quite so religious about the team, but I always kept tight watch over their playoff runs. In 1998 the Avs were upset in the first round. In 1999 and 2000, the team lost the Western Conference Finals in seven games both times to the Dallas Stars. In those series, they had a combined three chances to win one game and move on to the Stanley Cup Finals, and of course they lost every one. It was absolutely brutal, especially in 2000, when we'd picked up Ray Bourque, and lost Game Seven by one goal. (I'm pretty sure I remember a shot bouncing off Dallas' goalpost in the final minute or so that year…I even think Bourque may have taken it, but it was a long time ago and I'm not sure.) However, the Avalanche rebounded and won the Cup in 2001 behind a fantastic team effort, but especially behind the ferocious play of Patrick Roy in the net.

That's the only exception I can think of, though. Even though tonight's game was anticlimactic, I don't think it had any chance going in of stacking up well against that 2005 victory. In almost all cases, I'd think the second championship is much less special (-Jim Nantz) than the first. I wonder if there isn't a Law of Diminishing Returns with championships, actually. Any Yankees fans care to chime in?

And now that it’s gone, it’s like it wasn’t there at all

I never thought this blog would last longer than Jay Cutler's career with the Denver Broncos. He was a talented young prospect so good that the Broncos, a powerhouse organization only one game removed from the Super Bowl the season before, traded up to get him—or, in other words, a player whose upside was so huge, the team sacrificed its present to get his future. And now? He's gone.

How did it come to this?

* * *

Often I'll play devil's advocate with a move like this; you know, I'll try and explain how it makes sense from the other side of the table. Today, during the most disastrous Broncos offseason in memory—and the draft hasn't even happened yet, so settle in—I just don't have it in me. I don't think move is really defensible from a football standpoint. But what the heck: as the article above says, the Broncos are sending Cutler and a fifth-round draft pick this month to the Chicago Bears for quarterback Kyle Orton, Chicago's first-rounder in the upcoming draft, and the Bears' first-rounder in 2010.

Orton's a decent quarterback and certainly belongs in the league; as a rookie in 2005, he was the main starter for Chicago's 11-5 season, and he led the team to a 9-7 record this year despite some hide-the-kids passing statistics. He can play, and maybe on a young team that believed in him, he'd turn out all right. You could—and teams will—do worse. That said, he seems to fill the game manager role decently on a team with a good defense. The Broncos? They gave up 448 points last year, worse than everyone but the Rams and Lions.

Cutler, on the other hand, was just named a Pro Bowler after throwing for just over 4,500 yards and 25 touchdowns for Denver. He'll turn 26 this month. He's got two seasons and change of starting experience, and while he hasn't started his team down the championship path just yet, he's clearly improving all the time. In other words, he's potentially the most valuable piece in the game: a franchise quarterback.

So what are the draft picks worth? The 18^th pick in this year's draft doesn't strike me as anything special, since this draft seems a little thin, though I've yet to hunker down with enough 40 times and hip rotation fluidity observations to be sure. Since Chicago was 9-7, has a recent Coach of the Year, and just picked up a strong-armed young quarterback, it's likely their first-round pick will fall even further down the ladder next year. At that point in the draft, there are still very good players on the board, but they often have question marks and can be kind of a toss-up. Considering the current regime didn't consider Cutler worth holding on to I have little faith in their drafting prowess…but we'll see. I'm not Chicago would have even wanted to make a pick there. I think the Bears made out wonderfully on the deal, and the Broncos have sent a clear signal to the fans that they do not expect a quick turnaround. Funny thing is, Jay Cutler's young enough to have been our star QB in a few years once we got more pieces in place.

* * *

The now-irrelevant but much more entertaining question is, whose fault is it that Cutler's gone? Do we blame ownership, and Pat Bowlen's baffling desire to turn into some combination of Jerry Jones and Al Davis? Do we blame the 15-year-old coach, Josh McDaniels, who just wanted to bring in his buddy QB from last year so he wouldn't feel alone in the new city? Or do we blame Cutler, another young millionaire whose feelings got hurt way too quickly?

Mark Schlereth of ESPN, the beloved left guard on the Greatest O-Line Ever, made a great point this morning in a video I can't find. (I think it had been on this story, which we'll get to in a second.) Anyway, he said Cutler was acting like he was the first player who had ever been lied to. You know, I was 100% in Cutler's corner through most of this, but I thought that was a great point. In the video that's up now, he talks to Hannah Storm with obvious distaste for today's text-messaging age in which people get to avoid confrontation. I loved it, and this morning while pondering the great debate (did the Broncos not call Cutler? Did he not call them?) I felt like Cutler may well be the kind of guy who just doesn't return phone calls.

The problem with the above story that the Broncos couldn't get a hold of Cutler—or that they never called in the first place—is that it's one big smokescreen. A really stupid smokescreen designed to obscure how badly the Broncos screwed this up in the first place. First, they tried to trade Cutler to the Patriots for Matt Cassell, who was oddly available to begin with. (Is Tom Brady less likely to get hurt now that he's older?) Then, though they couldn't get that done, they allowed Cutler to find out about it anyway. Then they bungled their several attempts to reconcile with him in various meetings and phone calls. (Maybe Cutler is a petulant baby. But at this point he hadn't done anything wrong and might have been okay with a sincere apology.) Then McDaniels goes to the press with this ridiculous, "well, you know, we gotta keep our options open" crap that may have sounded to fans like he was speaking hypothetically, but which I'm sure was read-between-the-lines clear to any agent or any young star QB who's inexplicably been on the trading block for a while already. Cutler demands a trade at some point, but then the story goes quiet. You never know: they offer him some money or something, and maybe the two sides can patch things up. But then, right before they make a deal, the Broncos decide to eliminate all leverage in trade talks by announcing publicly their intentions to trade Cutler. And then they do it, and they get a pretty crappy deal.

Is Cutler lying about how much he wanted to stay in Denver? Probably. But he didn't make this mess, and he shouldn't take the blame for it. On the plus side, I'm sure the Broncos will have plenty of time to think about their mistakes when Oakland's kicking our trash next year.