Out West the first match-up is OKC vs. Houston in the 1-8 match-up.  OKC will take out Houston but it will be a fun series.  The exciting part of this series will be to see how James Harden plays.  He’s going to play well this entire series, but whether or not he goes into F-U mode will determine how many games they win.  I think OKC wins the series 4-1.

The next match-up is the Spurs vs. Lakers.  This match-up was solidified on Wednesday as L.A. won in overtime.  It was saddening as the Lakers avoided being the most over-hyped team to not make the playoffs in history.  And fortunately for them, they got one of the struggling top tier teams in the west.  The Lakers will be able to play with the Spurs down low, but the Lakers play terrible defense, which as we know, doesn’t win championships.  Oh yeah, and Kobe doesn’t appear to be playing anytime soon.  Spurs take the series 4-2.

The 3-6 match-up belongs to the Nuggets vs. Golden State.  Golden State made huge leaps and bounds over the last year with Mark Jackson finally pulling everything together.  I think this will be a surprisingly close series because of the home court advantages for both teams.  We all remember when Golden State was the 8^th seed a few years ago and put together a crazy run.  Denver has only lost 3 home games this entire year, and at altitude is one of the fastest teams in the league.  No one will win a road game and Denver advances 4-3.

The 4-5 match-up to round out the West is the Clippers vs. Grizzlies.  This proved to be the best series of the first round last year going to 7 and I expect to see some of the same this year.  The storyline of this series will be to see who can win more road games and how many times Vinny Del Negro will destroy the Clippers chances.  I give this one to the Grizzlies 4-3.

We move out East where things look to be predictable as the greatest team in the league looks to lose as few games as possible throughout their entire run of the East.  Miami starts out playing Milwaukee in the 1-8 match-up.  I believe, barring injuries, Miami will sweep the Bucks convincingly proving that regular season match-ups are irrelevant when LeBron is involved.

The next match-up is the 2-7 between the Knicks and the Celtics.  This is going to be the most interesting playoff match-up out east with the Celtics being the dark horse team for seemingly the whole season.  I have never trusted the Knicks, and history shows that the playoffs have not been kind to them.  1 playoff win in 10 years is not on their side.  I think they win a few this year, but Boston is reeling through tragedy with the marathon bombing.  Boston rallies around their fans and situation, wins all their home games and steals one in the garden.  The Celtics take it 4-2.

The 3-6 match-up is Indiana vs. Atlanta, in what is the saddest match-up out east.  Atlanta can’t do anything right in the playoffs and that alone will prevent them from advancing to the next round.  Indiana is by far the better team, and Atlanta more or less made the playoffs because of circumstances.  The East was weak, and Boston lost Rondo.  Indiana takes it 4-1.

The 4-5 match-up is my personal favorite as a Bulls fan.  The Nets will take on the Bulls for a shot at not being humiliated by Miami in the next round.  I think the Bulls come out on top, because we played the Nets well in the regular season.  Brook Lopez won’t reach 10 rebounds once throughout the series, Joe Johnson won’t have any 30 point games, and Deron Williams will be the biggest problem for the Bulls elite defense.  Bulls win the series 4-2.

This takes us to Round 2!

West:

OKC vs. Grizzlies:  OKC 4-2.

Spurs vs. Nuggets:  Nuggets 4-2

East:

Miami vs. Bulls:  Miami 4-1.

Indiana vs. Celtics:  Celtics 4-3.

Round 3!

West:

OKC vs. Nuggets:  Nuggets 4-3.

East:

Miami vs. Celtics:  Miami 4-2.

THE NBA FINALS!!!

Miami vs. Nuggets:  Miami 4-3.

Miami is going to repeat as NBA champions and solidify themselves as a borderline dynasty force to be wrecking with.  The Nuggets make the finals over OKC who falters in 7 because of the altitude and the fact that Denver will always be fresh late in the playoffs.  No need to watch the playoffs anymore.  This is 100% accurate.

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With the actual NBA trade deadline passing us without any huge noise, my fantasy league proved to be the opposite as big names got moved and tempers flared.  And lucky for you, dear readers, you will get to relive the drama with me that the real NBA couldn’t provide.

As consistent in most fantasy leagues, there are owners that infuriate the league, commissioners making shady deals, and a few hardcore fans that whine about the previous two points.  I find myself in the last category and the trade deadline saw all of these players enter the equation.  There were three trades accepted at the deadline, with my team being involved in two of them.  After missing the draft and being stuck with a bunch of scrubs (minus Durant with the overall first pick).

After piecing a team together while carefully watching the waiver wire (picking up Carlos Boozer among others) and making a few trades (Andrei Kirilenko for Evan Turner), I find myself now at 6-11.  This is a huge victory in a league that weights rebounds more than any other stat and my team featuring DeMarcus Cousins as my primary rebounder.  I needed some help.

The first trade of the week set off a domino of trades and angry sputtering.  The commissioner of our league approached the owner in last place, who hasn’t checked his team or set his lineup in months, and managed to get him to trade Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka for J.R. Smith and Kenneth Faried.  I will pause while you pick you jaws off the floor.

Assuming the Ibaka/Faried pair cancels out, the commissioner basically traded J.R. Smith, a bench player who had a great start to the year and fizzled for Russell Westbrook, who is one of the top 5 point guards in the league.  The league’s outcry was deafening.  It was one veto away from not going through, and that is because two guys don’t check their teams, and one of them was involved in the trade.

I got a text later in the day and low and behold it was the commissioner.  He wants a trade.  He offers me Deron Williams.  Now at this point, I have Kyrie Irving and had no intentions of picking up another guard in a league that values its big men.  But I reach out to the friend I made the AK47/Turner swap with.  He’s interested in an Irving/Omer Asik swap.

Now if you’re thinking this is a stupid trade, hold that thought.  I get back to the commissioner and offer him Ryan Anderson for Deron Williams, another trade that in real life would be highly frowned upon.  He looks it over and after a little bit of fudging Anderson’s stats, he agrees.  I quickly put the Asik/Irving trade through and the deadline passes.

Now looking at these trades, you might think that our league is full of insane people.  Irving for Asik?  On what planet would that work?  Well, in our league, rebounds are worth a lot and you get points for double doubles.  Asik averages a double double and gets almost 12 boards a night.  Irving, while scoring at a high clip, doesn’t get as many double doubles, doesn’t rebound as much, and has a little history of getting hurt.  My chances with Asik are better, giving me a solid center, and makes Cousins my second best rebounder at 10 a game.  If you have two 10 rebounders a night, you are sitting pretty.

And on top of that, I knew I was going to get back Deron Williams.  Anderson is really only good for three pointers.  He’s the sixth man on a bad team, doesn’t play a lot of minutes, and doesn’t benefit me rebounding the ball.  Deron Williams gives me a number one point guard again, even if I don’t have the scoring that Irving gives me.  He’s finally healthy and will make a serious push for a playoff spot.  A motivating Williams may weigh out more than Irving.

My team got marginally better at the deadline, which is what I wanted and I’m pretty much a lock to make the playoffs now.  In fantasy, these types of trades make sense, even if in the NBA these things would never happen.  You don’t have to make salaries work, you don’t have to factor in draft picks, and most importantly, you don’t have to worry about factoring team chemistry because it’s so individually based.  It’s beautiful.  My GM skills worked out for the best, and I made a trade deadline exciting when the NBA’s deadline was far from momentous.

The post The Trade Deadline: The Dichotomy Between Reality and Fantasy appeared first on KRUI Radio.

The first reason is maybe the most practical.  I hate the speed of the game.  It has gotten too slow for me.  The games are typically about 3 hours long with more commercials than the average sport that is shown on TV.  Football is starting to get this bad too, because they take commercial breaks between kickoffs and the offense taking the field, but baseball is especially slow, because of the half inning commercial and the pitching change commercial, which gets especially frustrating around the 7^th or 8^th inning.  The pitchers love taking their time as well.  They are starting to get a little bit better, but then the batter decided to step out of the box after every pitch, and suddenly we have a 4 hour game on our hands.  If the Yankees and Red Sox are playing, it’s almost guaranteed a 3 and a half hour game or longer.  It’s too much.  They used to be able to play double headers in an afternoon back in the days of Ruth.  Why can’t we go back to that?

Secondly, the steroids scandal has finally broken me down.  For the longest time, I have just let the scandal happen, and allowed it to not affect me watching the games.  That time is over.  I don’t know who to trust anymore.  I’m just assuming that everyone is taking PEDs, and the sportsman in me keeps saying that cheating is immoral.  That begs the question, “If everyone is doing it, is it cheating?”  And my answer is “Yes.”  It’s a disadvantage.  And for the record, I’m sick of everyone saying that PEDs saved the sport because homeruns began flying out of the park more frequently.  Or you could just move the outfield fence closer.  Jam even more fans in the stadiums with more seats.  It’s either that or have the endless debate about who’s going to the Hall of Fame.  Which leads me to my third point.

The Hall of Fame voting process has been completely destroyed.  There is no way to distinguish the weight of steroids on someone’s HOF resume.  Barry Bonds had HOF numbers before he became the Hulk but we remember him as the Hulk in San Francisco, rather than the overall great player he was in Pittsburgh.  The HOF process is always going to be talked about.  Just the fact that no one got in this year is a travesty, and do you think Joe Buck is going to stop talking about it?  Absolutely not.  So all of these things have added up to the frustrations that have culminated into my personal baseball strike.  You don’t have to join me, but answer this:  Can you live with yourself for cheering on cheaters?  I can’t.  That’s why I’ve stopped.  I hope there is a day that I can watch baseball guilt free again.  But until then, I’ll stick to the sports that I can trust.

The post Why I Have Fallen Out of Favor with America’s Game appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I repeat.  The Golden State Warriors are a legitimate threat in the Western Conference.  The fans of the Bay Area cannot believe their eyes.  Historically they are one of the most doomed teams in NBA history and haven’t had much to cheer about, as documented by a great article written by Bill Simmons.  This year, things are different.  They aren’t playing the bottom feeder role that they are accustomed to playing.  They have a lot of youth as well as a decent mix of veterans.  They have a coach who seems interested in playing defense.  They aren’t quite the team they want to be on defense, but they have made huge strides over the teams that Monte Ellis was familiar with.  David Lee and Stephen Curry have been playing great basketball and David Lee was rewarded with an All-Star appearance, while Curry was awarded with grumblings from basketball nerds as to why he got snubbed from the All-Star game.

You may be wondering just how well they are playing.  The record of 27-17 is one thing, but what does their resume look like?  They’ve beaten the L.A. Clippers 3 of 4 games, Minnesota twice, Atlanta twice, and the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder once each.  That’s not too shabby.  They are 9^th in points per game, 9^th in assists per game, and 4^th in rebounds per game and have done all of this without one of their biggest assets down low in Andrew Bogut.  Bogut played for the first time tonight since November 7^th and hasn’t really missed a beat.  We have seen such a good team that we forget they aren’t at their full capacity.  We all forget that Brandon Rush went down at the beginning of the season, and he was supposed to be the sixth or seventh man depending on how you use Carl Landry.  Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green have been everything the Warriors have wanted and then some and are playing like veterans.  Klay Thompson has had a solid sophomore campaign, and Jarrett Jack and Richard Jefferson have been great influences on this team that has traditionally had a lot of off the court problems.

I quietly picked the Warriors to make the playoffs and go as high as a 5 seed and no one else took me seriously.  We think of the Warriors like we used to think of the Clippers pre “Lob City.”  They are the team that is going to get hammered and is an easy victory for the beasts of the Western Conference.  But right now they sit in the 5^th position out west and no one has taken a good look at how good these guys are.  This isn’t the “We Believe Team” of 2009, but I’m a believer.

The post This One’s For the Warriors appeared first on KRUI Radio.

But I think the biggest faux pas the NBA has made this year were the Christmas Day jerseys.  Now I like the concept behind it, making special jerseys for the holiday and only wearing them once.  Just from a business standpoint, the league makes a lot of money.  But couldn’t we have come up with something a little bit better?  For the readers who didn’t see them, they took the team’s secondary color and matched it with the third color.  The third color outlined numbers, names, and team name while the secondary color was the entire color of the jersey.  Needless to say, you couldn’t read anything on the jersey.  This hurt only because the fair weather fan watching at home has no idea who is who on the court and causes mass confusion and frustration.  And for the visually impaired (i.e. my aging parents) they weren’t about to sit and watch a game trying to figure out who was on the court.  While watching the Bulls/Rockets game, Boozer and Gibson took the court at the same time, and I actually couldn’t tell them apart because they wear one arm sleeve, have the knee pads, and shave their heads.

While the stars of the league shined in their games (with the exception of the Bulls because they don’t have a star and got destroyed) the Christmas Day “break” solidified the fact that the NBA is right back to where it should be exactly a year after the lockout ended.  The Christmas Day games have always been a favorite of mine, not just because I’m an avid basketball fan, but because every major holiday needs a sporting event and the best holiday just happened to receive the best sport (in my opinion).  As we have reached the unofficial one-third point of the season, I can only hope the league sees less fantasy tears shed by yours truly and more drama for the upcoming New Year.

The post Christmas Time for NBA Fans appeared first on KRUI Radio.

As any college-aged male, I have become obsessed with my fantasy teams and sports betting at 겜블시티, and with the basketball season starting to hit its stride, my fantasy basketball team is becoming my main focus in a slot online machine.  I missed the draft, and I had to recover as fast as I could, but not before falling to a 0-3 start (which may quickly fall to 0-4 depending on certain performances, but that is neither here nor there).  We have seen that athletes take a hold of Twitter and other social media, but do they play fantasy?  And if they do, how long will it be before players are throwing games in high stakes fantasy leagues?  The internal conflict that would plague an athlete who is guarding someone on his fantasy team would be almost unbearable.  As any participant of fantasy sports would tell you, “I will do anything to win.”  Even I have taken part in some questionable fantasy scandals within leagues where no money was on the line.  The waiver list is always controversial, as is scheming with the commissioner.  Even this week, I have requested the commissioner to make an extra small forward position so I could pick up a player that someone else dropped, which caused quite a stir amongst the league.

To top it all off, fantasy sports has become such an integral part of sports culture that we now have a TV show dedicated to the shenanigans that go on amongst a fantasy league.  Athletes, now more than ever, are the trend setters of social media and I would be shocked if athletes didn’t have some sort of a fantasy team.  These guys live and breathe the sports they play.  And if they are like me, they would be willing to put money on their teams being the best. It’s only a matter of time before someone in the media finds out about it.  Proving that players were under-performing to help a fantasy team would be awfully difficult, and up until a few days ago I would have thought it to be absolutely ridiculous as well as utterly disgusting on the part of an athlete.  Then again though, we have seen some disgusting scandals in sports.

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Two years ago, Kirk Hinrich stood in front of the United Center with a suitcase in hand and a tear in his eye. After being with the team through the thick and thin (mostly thin) since 2003, he was sent off to Washington to clear way for Derrick Rose. However, he couldn’t help but think that he deserved a statue next to His Airness. Just picture a statue of Hinrich locking someone down on defense next to the majesty that is MJ’s flight. Only Hinrich himself had the ego to truly believe this could be the case. Nevertheless, two years passed, as Hinrich played with Washington and Atlanta, where he didn’t get nearly the same amount of love as he did in Chicago and consequently, Hinrich was driven into a deep depression. As he sat at a bar with a five o’clock shadow that could only be rivaled by the ensuing six o’clock, the phone rang, and low and behold it was Bulls GM Gar Forman. Hinrich held back tears of joy as the Gar requested his never wavering point guard services. “Play it cool, don’t sound too eager,” Hinrich thought to himself but he couldn’t contain his excitement any longer and blurted out a “Yes, I’ll do it! All I ask is a statue!” Gar started to question Kirk, but thought better of it and drew up the paperwork.

Meanwhile over in Italy, a man who played some big time minutes with the feeble New Orleans Hornets last year was sitting at a local Italian restaurant where he hadn’t moved since arriving back in April. Marco Belinelli ordered another plate of spaghetti (not realizing he was not in an Olive Garden and this pasta bowl wasn’t “never ending”) when his cell phone rang. It was Garfield the orange cartoon cat asking him to join the Chicago Bulls, but Marco explained he couldn’t talk with his mouth full and he honestly couldn’t communicate back without the use of his hands. So Gar flew him out to the Berto Center and they had a face to face conversation. Belinelli arrived and the front office was excited. The Bulls needed a shooter and that is exactly what Marco was capable of doing. The only thing Gar questioned him about was if he was in good shape. Marco muttered, “Round is a shape,” and went to the weight room where head coach Tom Thibodeau locked him away until the first preseason game, which is my only explanation for his poor shooting this preseason.

Over on the west coast, Golden State was looking to make some moves regarding two of their players who played decent minutes for the Warriors last year. The first was Nate Robinson. Now most people were thinking, “why do the Bulls need the little kid from the movie ‘Role Models’,” but the team had a hole at point guard that desperately needed to be filled. Captain Kirk is a good piece, but with Rose out until at least March, even Kirk couldn’t do it alone and former president James Garfield realized that he wasted his 1st round draft pick on a point guard who won’t be ready for a while. Nate was reading movie scripts when he got the call. Nate was ecstatic that he was actually going to be on a winning team for the first time in his career. “Things are looking up,” he thought. And things are looking up for Nate with a huge game against the Bucks last Tuesday (24 points, 13 assists).

Nate’s teammate Vladimir Radmanovic was back in the motherland during the offseason in a constant battle with shaving his beard. Just when he finished shaving one side of his face, the other side would be completely grown in again. Just as Radmanovic was about to shatter his bathroom mirror with his bare hands, his phone rang with the puppet Garfield Goose clapping his beak on the other side of the line. Vladimir quickly flew back to the states where he met with Tom Thibodeau and they discussed the upcoming season and the woes of the depleted Bench Mob. They discussed their off seasons and they shared similar tales of frustration as Tom Thibodeau’s physical transformation into John Madden is nearing completion. They bonded over the fact that they couldn’t control anything about their appearances and Gar quickly drew up a contract for Vlad.

Unlike the other free agents, Nazr Mohammad was involved in some heavy reading. Most of the heavy reading included Nazr going through the entire Webster’s Dictionary trying to find other words that featured the silent “r”. Much to his chagrin, he couldn’t find any, so to take a break from his research, he went to the Bulls’ workout facilities to shoot some hoops and clear his head. When he entered the building he was immediately offered a contract just for being over 7 feet tall, having the ability to catch a chest pass, and more importantly filling the void at the center position.

Is this a ragtag group? Yes. Is this bench worse than the bench we had last year? Definitely. Is this going to be a long season? Probably. Does Gar Forman really respond to these nicknames? Hopefully. Are there a lot of rhetorical questions in the opening of this paragraph? You bet. But I think that despite all of the doubt people have placed on this team, Thibodeau will coach this team to 50 wins, Luol Deng’s wrist will be questioned at least twice this year, Carlos Boozer will scream “AND ONE!” approximately 12,000 times, Joakim Noah will average 14 points a game, Rose will play this year and make an impact in the playoffs, and the bench will live up to their already low expectations. I cannot wait.

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