Playoff changes would make for intresting ball

Some random basketball thoughts...

-With two games having been played in both the Eastern and Western Conference NBA playoffs, there is surprisingly little to say. San Antonio and Detroit are on a seven game collision course in an NBA Finals filled with 80-point games, ridiculously good team defense and about a two percent chance of excitement. Utah and Cleveland are nice squads, and a lineup of Deron Williams, Larry Hughes, LeBron James, Carlos Boozer, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas would be an instant title contender. Unfortunately for basketball fans, teams cannot mix and match their rosters in order to make the games more competitive. After last season’s thrilling playoffs, I guess the NBA was due for a boring Final Four. The Finals still have a shot to be classic, but it will not be the exciting basketball that fans love to see.

-There is no way that David Stern can honestly stare into a camera and say that the current NBA playoff format, where teams are not re-seeded every round (like the NFL does), works well. There is no way that San Antonio (the three seed in the West) and the Jazz (the five seed) should be facing off in the conference finals. No disrespect to either squad, because they both beat a couple of good teams to get this far. But if the league had re-seeded after round one, the two teams would have faced off in the semi-finals while Phoenix and Golden State played in the other matchup. That would have given basketball fans a buildup of excitement for the potential Suns-Spurs series. That matchup happened one round too early, and now we have a boring conference finals. Out East, if the re-seeding had taken place, the Bulls would have gone up against Cleveland, not Detroit, in the semi-finals. Maybe this argument is a bit selfish, but the Bulls would have had a much better chance of advancing against the Cavs then they did against the Pistons.

-My first reaction of the NBA Draft Lottery on Tuesday night…shock. Two teams that the NBA public had heard nothing about all season, the Trail Blazers and Super Sonics, get the two best players coming out of college in twenty years. My second reaction…pleasure. While I was a bit disappointed that the Bulls didn’t jump up and have the chance to draft Greg Oden or Kevin Durant, I can’t be mad that these two will join an already loaded Western Conference. I believe that these two guys will make both Portland and Seattle instant contenders, making the only teams in the West with a zero percent shot of making the playoffs Memphis and Minnesota (the Clippers are close too). The East on the other hand, still has squads like Boston, New York, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Charlotte, teams that may actually make the playoffs but are not really talented enough to do any damage. Add that on to aging Detroit and Miami teams and a rebuilt New Jersey, and I like the Bulls’ chances to go to the Finals in ’08.

-Finally, we are quickly approaching the ten-year anniversary of the greatest NBA Finals of all time, the 1997 Bulls-Jazz six game classic. During the sixty years of the National Basketball Association, nothing has been as dramatic as the ’97 Finals. Out of the six games, four of them were classics.

Game one had Karl Malone missing two free throws with seven seconds left in a tie game, followed by a Michael Jordan 20-footer as time expired to give the Bulls an 84-82 win. The famous line from this game is Scottie Pippen leaning over to Malone as he was about to shoot the shots and mentioning, “The Mailman doesn’t deliver on Sundays.”

Games two and three were split, making game four in Salt Lake City a very important one. The Bulls led in the fourth quarter, but a 12-2 Jazz run, capped by a full court pass from John Stockton to Malone for a dunk, gave Utah the victory and a series split.

Game five, forever known in the Windy City as “The Flu Game”, was maybe the greatest individual basketball performance of all time. Bed ridden all day with the stomach flu, Jordan ended up scoring 38 points in 44 minutes, including the game winning three with under a minute left to give the Bulls a 90-88 win.

Game six had a game winning shot, but to every bodies shock, it wasn’t Michael Jordan who nailed the bucket. With five seconds left and the game tied at 86, Jordan passed off to a wide-open Steve Kerr about 15 feet out to give the Bulls the lead. The Jazz had one more shot, but Pippen stole the ball and passed to Toni Kukoc for a series ending slam dunk, giving the Bulls title number five with a 90-86 victory.