The Miami Heat’s strength all year has been lockdown defense. The Boston Celtics’ bugaboo all year has been rebounding. A combination of the two delivered Miami a decisive 93-79 win Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals last night in South Beach.
The San Diego Padres visit the Chicago Cubs in a series that starts today and when you look at the teams’ position in the standings you wonder if the sports world wouldn’t be better served by just giving everyone DVD copies of the 1984 National League Championship Series when the teams played all the way to a decisive fifth game (’84 was the last year the LCS was best-of-five). Of course that would require Cubs fans to relive Leon Durham letting a crucial groundball go through the wickets in the finale, but Padres fans would surely enjoy re-living one of their two National League pennants (they would again win in 1998). At 17-32, the Pads are in last in the NL West. Are things really that hopeless?
If Sunday night is any indication, we’re in for an exciting Western Conference Finals in the NBA playoffs, because top-seeded San Antonio was pushed to the wire and then some, before finally beating Oklahoma City 101-98 to grab a 1-0 lead in the series.
Rebounding was key to the Spurs’ efforts, as they held a 50-43 edge on the glass, the one key statistical difference on a team-wise basis.
Are you ready for some football? Las Vegas is, and here on Memorial Day we’ve got the Over/Unders on win totals released at a couple of the major sportsbooks. TheSportsNotebook takes a run through the opening expectations of the betting markets on all 32 NFL teams and offers some comments…
Moneyball has been a huge success. The movie, that is.
On second thought, the movie’s performance actually mirrored its on-field counterpart fairly closely, if you consider that it smartly exceeded expectations, charmed fans, and yet still didn’t win anything of consequence.
When the NBA playoffs started the prospect of a Boston-Miami battle in the Eastern Conference Finals seemed appealing, and when Chicago’s Derrick Rose got hurt one day in, it became the matchup fans began waiting for. When each team was three games into their second-round series, the Celts had just demolished Philly on the road and the Heat were in a 1-2 hole against Indiana. The talk was that the veteran C’s had one more run left in them. Now that the anticipated Boston-Miami matchup is set to tip Monday, the thinking has changed. If you want to bet the Heat to win, you’re giving up odds of 1-5. You can take the Celts at 4-1. Is this really that big a mismatch? TheSportsNotebook previews the Eastern Conference Finals…
The series between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers is finally over and the state of basketball is better for it. An ugly, albeit competitive series, had an appropriate ending last night with Game 7 in the Garden. The Celtics won the finale 85-75 in a game every bit as poorly played as the score makes it sound.
The NBA’s Western Conference Finals start on Sunday night when Oklahoma City goes to San Antonio. It’s a battle between not just the top two seeds in the West, but the teams with the best remaining records in the NBA and teams that have rolled through the first two rounds of the postseason at a combined record of 16-1. TheSportsNotebook previews the series…
The Houston Astros are one game under .500 coming into Saturday’s games, and while some of that can be attributed to the benefit of just playing the hapless Chicago Cubs this week and sweeping them three in a row, let’s remember this—at the start of the season it was supposed to be the Astros who were the hapless team that everyone fattened up on. Not only are they better than that, the ‘Stros are just three games out of first place in the NL Central as we approach Memorial Day. And if that weren’t surprise enough, it’s pitching that’s getting it done.
The New Jersey Devils didn’t make it easy on themselves and they undoubtedly gave some of their fans heart failure these past two games, but with a 3-2 overtime win on Friday night, they clinched the Eastern Conference title, beating the New York Rangers in six games.
Dwayne Wade was amazing last night in Game 6 of the Miami-Indiana series in the Eastern Conference semi-finals. LeBron James was good, while Danny Granger and Roy Hibbert were so-so. These themes, commonly struck in TheSportsNotebook’s playoff commentary on this series, were very much in evidence last night. But they aren’t the reason Miami won 103-95 and clinched a spot in the conference finals. Miami’s advancing because they took care of the ball and Indiana didn’t, with the final turnover numbers being 20 for the Pacers and 9 for the Heat. Offensive execution like that ends seasons and that’s what happened to Indiana last night.
The AL West race is gradually tightening up, not so much at the top, where Texas still holds a five-game lead on Oakland, but at the bottom, as the LA Angels and Seattle nudge to within manageable distances of the leader. No team’s move has been sharper over the past several days than the Mariners.