Salon: King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Mariner defends his airspace

King Kaufman — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:20:00 PDT

Richie Sexson of the Seattle Mariners sparked a bench-clearing brawl Thursday when he charged Texas Rangers pitcher Kason Gabbard after Gabbard threw a pitch that was ...

High.

Mariners pitcher Felix Hernandez had hit Ian Kinsler with a pitch in the top of the fourth inning following Kinsler's home run in the second. According to baseball's weird unwritten rulebook, that's OK. Guy hits a homer off you, go ahead and plunk him. Kinsler dutifully took his base.

Then, and this makes a little more sense, it became Kinsler's pitcher's duty to hit a guy on the other team. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because if everyone on both teams agrees that it's somehow OK to plunk a guy for hitting a home run, why is it then necessary to retaliate for that plunking? It's either OK or it's not, right?

Or am I trying to make too much sense of lizard-brain stuff?

Anyway, Gabbard threw a pitch to the 6-8 Sexson in the bottom of the fourth that was about eye level, but over the plate. Sexson yanked his head back and immediately charged Gabbard, throwing his helmet. It was an unusually intense baseball fight, but it didn't escalate beyond wrestling and yelling. No punches were thrown.

OK, heat of the moment, but after the game, a 5-0 Rangers win, Sexson was still angry, complaining about the height of the pitch.

"I'm 6-foot-8. He can hit corners at will," he said. "Six-eight and all of a sudden he's up that high? I'm a huge target. How hard is it to hit me? Hit me in the back or thigh. Up near my face is no good."

Even if it's over the plate? In the same breath, Sexson complains that Gabbard has pinpoint control and that he threw the ball at his face, only Gabbard would have missed Sexson's face even if he'd stood still.

He'd have been better off not mentioning the hitting the corners at will thing. There's very little evidence Gabbard has any idea where the ball is going when he throws it. He's walked 70 and struck out 79 in 131 and a third career innings. Sexson could argue -- if he just didn't mention the corners thing -- that Gabbard was throwing at his head and missed over the plate. Then again, Gabbard could argue he was trying to hit him in the butt.

Rangers manager Ron Washington sniffed that Sexson overreacted. "If we wanted to hit him, we would have hit him." Eh, maybe. Sexson was suspended for six games by Major League Baseball Friday. He figures to keep playing while he appeals.

Kind of a weenie move by MLB.com not to have Sexson's charge as one of its "top highlights" Friday morning. I mean, "Byrdak's nice double play" is ... nice. But I think your average fan would rather have a look at the rare honest-to-goodness let's-fight mound charge than a "nice double play."

MLB surely doesn't want to look like it's promoting brawls, hockey-style, but I don't think that's much of an issue given how rare actual fighting is in the major leagues.

At least for the time being, you can watch it on Yahoo or YouTube.

The best part of the highlight is about a minute and a half in when Milton Bradley of the Rangers, trying to get Rangers catcher Gerald Laird to back away from the confrontation, picks his teammate up like a little boy and carries him several feet. Bradley, then a San Diego Padre, blew out his knee last year when his manager at the time, Bud Black, pulled a similar maneuver on him.

Spurs hold Paul to 35, win

King Kaufman — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:00:00 PDT

Those of you who thought the San Antonio Spurs were dead and buried -- and you know who you are, and so do I because you've been sending me e-mails questioning my intelligence, sanity and ancestry for saying they were not -- might want to hold that thought after San Antonio's whiz-bang Game 3 win over the New Orleans Hornets.

The Spurs had looked like yesterday's news in their two losses in New Orleans, but Thursday night at home they withstood yet another spectacular game from Chris Paul and got back in the series with an entertaining 110-99 win. For the first time, the Spurs' Big Three -- Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili -- all had big games, Parker and Ginobili pouring in 31 points each.

Duncan, no longer suffering from the fever that laid him low in Game 2 but still suffering under the Hornets' double-teams, added 16 points and 13 rebounds.

At times the game became a sort of showdown between Paul and Parker, two creative point guards who at their best can't be stopped on the way to the basket. Paul led all scorers with 35 points, many on an assortment of twisting drives that left Spurs defenders flat-footed. One circus shot looked like it was flipped up from directly beneath the basket. Parker added 11 assists, Paul nine.

This postseason is the third-year player's national coming-out party, not that he was an unknown even as a two-year college player at Wake Forest. But Paul seems to be supplanting Dwyane Wade by the minute as the acrobatic, personable guard everybody in America loves. Wade picked the wrong time to play for a 15-67 team, get hurt and start dating Star Jones.

If anybody can make all that look glamorous, it's D-Wade. And he can't.

The Spurs hit their shots -- 48 percent from the field, 44 from behind the 3-point line -- and didn't collapse in the third quarter, and they kept from falling behind 3-0 to a younger, more athletic team. But it still looked like it took everything they had to get the win, and while the Hornets didn't exactly take the night off, they didn't seem to play with the same urgency they had in the first two games. Although a good defense playing well can make a team look like it's not playing with urgency or intensity.

But listen to Parker talking about the impossible task of stopping Paul: "He's going to score," Parker said. "So we decided to put Bruce [Bowen] on Peja [Stojakovic] and at least hold somebody down because Peja was killing us."

At least hold somebody down. Doesn't exactly sound like the defending champs have this series licked, does it? Stojakovic was indeed held down, limited to eight points after going off for 22 and 25 in the first two games. But David West had 23 points and 12 rebounds.

The Spurs might not have done much more than stave off the inevitable Thursday night, but that's something. And they have a way of looking terrible for a while in series they eventually end up winning. So maybe what happened Thursday was that they took the first step down that road. After all, the cliché still stands: The series hasn't really started yet because a home team hasn't lost.

Game 4 is Sunday night. The Spurs might want to put an extra guy on Paul now.

NCAA academic penalties flunk sniff test

King Kaufman — Thu, 08 May 2008 03:30:00 PDT

The NCAA this week handed out penalties to more than 200 sports teams that have fallen short of the required standard on the association's Academic Progress Report. The punishments include loss of scholarships and practice time, and chronic underachievers face postseason bans beginning next year.

The APR program tracks each team's performance at keeping athletes in school and academically eligible as well as its graduation rate. The idea is that if you're going to field a team of jocks who never go near a classroom, you're going to get dinged by the APR, whose penalties are ultimately as serious as those for NCAA rules violations.

And that's serious. NCAA rules violations usually involve athletes getting a little piece of the profits, which is the highest crime in the very strange land of big-time college sports.

The offenders list is an odd one. The problem the NCAA is trying to attack is the professionalization of college athletics, the exaggerated emphasis on sports at the expense of academics.

So, given everything you know about how the world works, not to mention how college sports work, wouldn't you think that powerhouses in the big revenue-producing sports would be heavily represented among those who are cutting corners in the classroom?

The more time you spend studying, the less you have for practicing or working out. The more road trips and tournaments and nationally televised midweek games you have, the less time you have to go to class. The more a school requires its athletes to be good students, the more good athletes it loses out on.

That's not a knock on athletics, by the way. It's just a product of the fact that the subset of students and athletes who are good at those two different things is pretty small. It would work the other way too. A school that required its students to be good athletes would miss out on a lot of elite brains.

The point is, shortchanging academics is an obvious, tried-and-true method for increasing a school's chances for success on the field of play.

Of the 37 football teams sanctioned this week, two of them play in BCS, which is to say major, conferences. Those two are Kansas and Washington State, not exactly traditional powers, though Kansas is in an up period.

The big sports money is in the big conferences. That means the big incentive to cut academic corners is in the big conferences.

And it's just Kansas and Hawaii. In basketball, which the NCAA says has the biggest academic problems, the only teams in the six major conferences that were sanctioned were Seton Hall, Purdue, Colorado, Kansas State, USC, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Doesn't pass the sniff test, does it? It's always wise, and especially so when the NCAA is involved, to follow the money. The bigger athletic programs have more money to spend on academic support services -- and, possibly, more characters hanging around who might want to earn, at least, a little reflected glory by writing the odd paper or take-home final.

NCAA president Myles Brand acknowledged this week that money can be a factor, but said the most important question isn't how much money a school has, but how it spends that money.

"It makes more sense to put the resources in the development of academic enhancement than it does into new suites," he said.

Right. That must be the problem at places like Gardner-Webb and Central Connecticut State. Too many new luxury suites. The University of Toledo must have built a deluxe dorm for its cross-country team. Maybe Alabama State should have invested in some tutors instead of that four-star dining room for the women's volleyball squad.

The APR has resulted in an uptick in graduation rates among athletes. The system is a big stick the NCAA is waving around to make member schools graduate a few more players, and generally speaking when you wave a big stick around, people do what you ask them to do. But the stick -- like the organization that waves it -- is not terribly concerned with how the desired result is achieved.

Schools have always pushed their athletes into taking easy classes and avoiding challenging majors. The APR creates more incentive to push more of them that way. More kids graduating doesn't necessarily mean more kids are getting more education. But that's OK, the NCAA isn't about education. It's about profits from a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry with a mostly unpaid labor force.

Low graduation rates were generating complaints about the product. That's bad for business. Getting graduation rates up pipes down those complaints and makes people feel better about the product. That's good for business.

There are people in the NCAA, lots of them, and certainly including Myles Brand, who really believe in the educational mission, that student-athletes are students first and athletes second and all that. And not one of their ideas about how to get graduation rates up would fog a mirror if getting graduation rates up, by hook or by crook, weren't good for business.

NBA coach caught coaching

King Kaufman — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:30:00 PDT

TNT actually used its "Inside Trax" miked-up coaches feature Tuesday night to give viewers something more than NBA coaches saying things like, "Keep rebounding!"

In the first quarter of the Boston Celtics' hideous 76-72 Game 1 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers, TNT presented a nicely edited sequence that showed Boston coach Doc Rivers actually coaching.

First we saw Rajon Rondo coming off a screen and missing a 20-foot jumper. Then there was Rivers on the sideline. "Hey, Rondo," he said, gesturing for the guard to come over. "Nobody's trying to turn the corner. Everybody's coming off to shoot jumpers. All right?"

In the next shot, Rondo came around a screen, turned the corner and drove to the basket for a layup. Cut to Rivers, nodding with approval: "Yes."

The next time "Inside Trax" appeared, Rivers was caught saying, "We've all got to get back on every possession," among other tidbits of coaching genius such as "Let's finish this quarter, guys."

Right, coach. Got it.

Who jinxed Gavin Floyd?

King Kaufman — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:15:00 PDT

Were you the one who jinxed Gavin Floyd's no-hitter? My friend and self-proclaimed no-hitter alert-bot Mike sent me an instant message around the sixth inning, I think. I didn't see it till the eighth. Did you mention it earlier than that? How dare you!

The Chicago White Sox right-hander lost the no-no with one out in the ninth Tuesday when Joe Mauer of the Minnesota Twins hit a fly-ball double beyond the reach of diving center fielder Nick Swisher in left-center.

Just eyeballing it on the TV, it looked like the distance between the ball and the outstretched glove of Swisher was exactly the difference between a real center fielder and a good corner outfielder playing center, which is what Swisher is.

The Sox had a six-run lead, so it wouldn't have made sense for manager Ozzie Guillen to put in a defensive replacement for Swisher even if Chicago had a player with true center-field range, and it's not clear to this column that backup Bryan Anderson is that player.

But that was a pretty good illustration of what happens when you put a corner outfielder in center. Now and again, that play will cost the White Sox a ballgame, but the difference between Swisher's bat and the bat of the next-best fielding option in center, whether that's Anderson or Jerry Owens, at the moment toiling for the Triple-A Charlotte Knights, more than makes up for the defensive deficit.

The Knights faced freshly demoted New York Yankees starter Ian Kennedy and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees Tuesday night. Kennedy had a no-hitter through five and two-thirds innings before he gave up a double. To Jerry Owens.

There's been some chatter in the last week that Owens would get a call-up. If that had happened, there might have been two no-hitters Tuesday night.

Or did you mention Kennedy's no-no too?

NBA refs: One Mississippi, two Mississippi ...

King Kaufman — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:20:00 PDT

It really ought to go without saying that if you're going to have an instant replay rule, it ought to say something like, "If there's a problem that can easily be solved by consulting replay, and cannot be solved at all without it, then go ahead and check the replay."

The NBA's replay rule clearly doesn't include such a statement, as evidenced by the ridiculous spectacle in Detroit during the Pistons' win over the Orlando Magic Monday night. Three referees huddled up and decided, using all manner of hand gestures and serious expressions, that a play by the Pistons had taken 4.6 seconds, not 5.3 or 4.5 or the amount of time every single person watching TNT's broadcast of the game knew the play actually took, 5.2 seconds.

The NBA later said the play took 5.7 seconds and should not have counted.

It happened at the end of the third quarter. The Pistons inbounded with 5.1 seconds left after a made free throw. Chauncey Billups dribbled upcourt and passed to Rodney Stuckey near the eight-second line. Stuckey dribbled to the right elbow, jumped as if to shoot, but dropped it back to Billups for a long three, which Billups made.

The clock read 4.1. Orlando inbounded, but the officials stopped everything. Clearly, something was wrong. The clock had stuck at 4.8. It restarted just as Billups' shot went through the net, then stopped again at 4.1 when an official blew his whistle.

The refs, Derrick Stafford, Joe Forte and Steve Javie, called a meeting. The rules allow them to check the video record only if the clock reads 0:00. They can use video to determine if a buzzer-beater really beat the buzzer. It seems obvious that the rule should have included a clause giving them the same power in similar situations, such as, just off the top of my head, if the clock malfunctions without ending up at 0:00.

Not exactly an unimaginable scenario. It happens from time to time. We're not exactly talking Fan Man here, something no one could have envisioned.

So Stafford, Forte and Javie pointed. They nodded. They held their elbow in one hand and their chin in the other, contemplation style.

At one point Forte made four swooping hand gestures, three from left to right, then the fourth from right to left, and seemed to be trying to count along as he pictured Billups' initial drive, his pass to Stuckey, Stuckey's drive and Stuckey's pass back to Billups. Three Mississippi ...

I mean, come on.

That thing you did, whatever it was, about five minutes ago. Was it really five minutes, or was it three? Or was it eight? We humans can't even nail down that sort of thing with much success, and these guys were supposed to know, from memory, without thinking beforehand that they were going to have to know this, whether something that took about five seconds took more or less than precisely 5.1 seconds?

With the answer sitting on a video monitor three steps away from them. TNT put a digital counter on the replay and showed that the ball left Billups' hand 5.2 seconds after the clock should have started, or one-tenth of a second too late.

You really can't feel a tenth of a second, which by the way is what makes the Winter Olympics kind of boring, with first and last place in various races often separated by a lot less than a tenth of a second, but here's the funny thing about that tenth of a second Monday night: Just watching in real time, without knowing I was going to want to know this, I thought the play took longer than 5.1 seconds. And I was right. By a tenth of a second.

When Stuckey turned and dumped that pass off to Billups instead of shooting, I said, "Ah, no way," in that way I do. I meant they wouldn't get the shot off. I had that weird, something's off feeling -- the one you get when you step on an escalator that isn't moving -- when the horn didn't go off before Billups let his shot go, and then still didn't go off, at all. It still hasn't gone off.

After watching enough games, I guess I have a kind of internal clock that's reasonably accurate. You probably do too. But then, you and I weren't running upcourt and trying to figure out if any of 10 giants moving at full speed around us were fouling each other. I'm assuming here that "you" are not Joe Forte, Steve Javie or Derrick Stafford. And I couldn't have re-created the scene in my mind a minute later, as Forte and Co. were forced to do.

So there they were, talking and pointing and holding their chins in their hands and finally figuring out that if Billups weighed the same as a duck, he must be made out of wood. No, wait. They figured out that Billups to Stuckey to Billups took precisely 4.6 seconds. The shot counted and they put 0.5 on the clock.

And the Pistons ended up winning by seven. So no direct blaming of this nonsense for the loss that put the Magic down 2-0 in the series. But of course one never knows how things might have been different had Billups' basket not counted, had Detroit entered the fourth quarter down by one instead of up by two.

But even as Magic coach Stan Van Gundy made "What the hell are you going to do with this mishegass" kinds of faces, he and his players rightly made a point in postgame interviews not to blame the loss on the clock snafu. "Nineteen turnovers killed us," Van Gundy said.

It must have seemed pretty straightforward at NBA HQ when it was decided that refs could check the video, but only if the clock read zeroes. That does seem like a good way to prevent the excess monitor checking that plagues college basketball. But the league has to fix the rule now. The officials' inability to go to the video violated the spirit of the very rule they were following.

This column is on the record against instant replay. I'm a big believer in human error being a wonderful part of any sport, though in the wake of the Tim Donaghy scandal I'm more open than I used to be to the idea of taking decisions out of the hands of the humans.

But once the decision is made to use instant replay, there should be as few rules as possible that prevent officials from getting the call right. If the NBA wants to use replay to resolve questions about the clock at the end of a quarter, why not just have a rule allowing officials to use video to resolve questions about the clock at the end of the quarter?

I bet I could write a rule like that in 5.1 seconds. Give or take.

This column has been corrected since publication.

Are the Spurs over?

King Kaufman — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:35:00 PDT

The New Orleans Hornets have dominated the San Antonio Spurs at home on the way to a 2-0 series lead in the Western Conference semifinals, but am I the only one who has the feeling the Spurs have the Hornets right where they want them?

Yes? Force of habit? I have a feeling I wouldn't feel this way if the exact same teams traded uniforms, but as much as the Hornets have had an answer for everything the Spurs have done, and as much as they've managed to make Tim Duncan look like an ordinary player, I can't help thinking you don't just blitz the Spurs, even if you're Chris Paul.

The Spurs shut down David West in Game 2 after he went off for 30 points in Game 1, but they don't seem to have an answer for Paul. Their best defender, Bruce Bowen, simply can't keep up with him. Then again, they get up to five more cracks at him, and Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is better at figuring out how to stop a guy than I am.

On the other hand, it looks like he's been out-thought in this series so far by Byron Scott of the Hornets. Scott doesn't have any questions to answer along the lines of this one for Popovich: Why has Peja Stojakovic been so wide open so often? He's been torching the Spurs.

The main reason Duncan has had so little effect on offense for San Antonio is that New Orleans has been double-teaming the snot out of him. Fine, Duncan says in that situation, and he feeds his wide-open shooters. And then two things have been happening: They haven't stayed open because the Hornets are so quick to close on them, and they've been missing. Tony Parker, Michael Finley, Bruce Bowen and Manu Ginobili combined to go 12-for-38 Monday night, including 3-of-15 from beyond the arc.

The Spurs' shooting figures to improve in their own gym, and that of the Hornets, who were an unconscious 10-for-17 on 3-pointers Monday, including 4-of-6 in the decisive third quarter, figures to cool off.

Will that be enough? Or have the Spurs suddenly gotten old? It looks that way for Ginobili, who added seven turnovers to his poor shooting Monday. It doesn't look that way yet for Duncan, but who knows. The situation may be calling for him to reach for an extra gear to fight off those double-teams and take over games, and maybe it's that gear that's not there anymore. Are Tyson Chandler and a double-team enough to neutralize Tim Duncan? That hasn't always been true.

Does this series represent a changing of the guard in the West or is this an appropriate time to haul out that cliché about a series not really starting till a home team loses, which hasn't happened yet? We'll go a long way toward finding out the answer to that Thursday night. My guess: Even if the guard is changing, the cliché's still going to fit on Friday morning.

Where's the girl horse?

King Kaufman — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:40:00 PDT

The Kentucky Derby Saturday was the first sporting event my 2-year-old daughter ever showed an interest in, and what she was interested in was the girl horse.

Daisy and her big brother were whacking each other around a little bit so I asked her if she wanted to come sit with me and watch the horse race. Horses? She's a little girl. You bet, pop. Buster joined us a few seconds later. He was not going to be left alone to play with that toy that, moments earlier, he'd been trying to brain his sister to win exclusive rights to.

Living on TiVo time, we fast-forwarded through most of the long, long, holy smokes is it still going on long pre-race show on NBC until we got to some actual non-celebrity equine content, the horses being saddled and the riders going up in the paddock, then the post parade.

The first time Eight Belles appeared on-screen, I said, "That's a girl horse." I explained that female horses don't run in the Derby very often and why, and that there have only been a few fillies -- Buster: What's a filly -- who have won the Kentucky Derby. What's a derby.

Daisy was suddenly interested, Buster too but less so. Every time a new picture of a horse came up, Daisy said, "Is that a girl horse?" No. No, and 19 times no. There she is. There's the girl horse, with the green blanket.

We skipped some more. That post parade does take a little time, seen through the eyes of a 2- and a 5-year-old. We stopped to listen to "My Old Kentucky Home," and what's the deal with me getting choked up at that moment every year? I'm not a horse racing guy, not from Kentucky, don't like the song, am never affected by it if I happen to hear it the other 364. But on Derby Day, it always gives me a little catch.

And they're off. Daisy kept asking where the girl horse was. Is that the girl horse? We looked for her in the crowd, and then she was among the leaders. Is that the girl horse in front? Is the girl horse going to win? Where's the girl horse?

I don't know, I don't know and I don't know. We were watching on a small TV. Wait, OK, no. She's not going to win. Big Brown roared down the home stretch. But she finished second. Not bad. Hey, kids, they went boy-girl-boy. Well boy-girl-boy-boy-boy 14 more boys.

Where's the girl horse?

Daisy was still looking for her. Buster had fortunately been distracted by something, because he's old enough to follow the reports. Eight Belles had broken down after the race and there she was, at a distance, lying on the track. NBC's Donna Barton Brothers, aboard a horse, interviewed Kent Desormeaux aboard Big Brown. Is that the girl horse?

No. Let's go make dinner.

My little girl's first experience with sports, her first identification with someone or something in the world that means so much to me, and it's with a horse that breaks down and dies minutes after she first lays eyes on her. I suppose there are lessons to be taught and learned here, about impermanence and loss, death, mourning, maybe about putting too much emotional stock in the actions of others, which are beyond our control.

There are conversations to be had about the exploitation of animals for our entertainment, too. Those are good conversations to have, but maybe not with someone who talks to a six-inch hunk of synthetic fabric in the shape of a pig like it's a real person.

I'm not ready to try to explain life and death to my 2-year-old until I have to, and I don't have to over the girl horse. I'd just end up making her sad about something she doesn't even understand -- not that I do either.

I'm waiting for her now to ask me if she can see the girl horse again. Through the wonder of DVR technology, the answer will be yes. We'll watch the girl horse again, watch her saddle up and parade, watch her settle into the first pack of horses around the first turn, disappear for a while, appear again among the leaders just as Big Brown makes his move and pull away in second behind Big Brown at the top of the stretch.

We'll watch for a good couple of minutes before announcer Tom Hammond mentions that Eight Belles is injured. I'll hit stop before then. There'll be plenty of time for Daisy to be sad about things she doesn't understand, to get a little misty over some random song and not know why.

Stars, Sharks put the time in overtime

King Kaufman — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:50:00 PDT

I had to sleep in Monday after that four-overtime playoff clincher Sunday night, which Brenden Morrow of the Dallas Stars finally ended at 9:03 of the seventh period by deflecting a shot past Evgeni Nabokov of the San Jose Sharks for a 2-1 win.

That means I didn't get up till 7.

The Stars staved off the biggest playoff collapse since the 2004 New York Yankees with that goal, winning the second-round series 4-2 after winning the first three games, then losing the next two.

The Stars meet the Detroit Red Wings in the Western Conference finals starting Thursday in Detroit. The Pittsburgh Penguins and the Philadelphia Flyers begin the Eastern Conference finals Friday in Pittsburgh.

A 129-minute hockey game is the equivalent of a 19-inning baseball game, the likes of which cause oohing and ahing for decades if it happens in the postseason. That is, it would cause oohing ahing. The longest postseason game in baseball history went 18 innings.

And let's face it, players spend most of overtime in an extra-inning baseball game standing around trying to keep their feet from falling asleep. That and refueling. With hot dogs. New pitchers come in every few innings. The catchers have it tough. Everybody else is pretty much playing baseball, but kind of a hunkered-down version.

Hockey overtime is hockey -- only more so. Six and a half periods they played Sunday, each more intense than the last. The game was notable for having two penalties called in 69 minutes of overtime, which is a lot of penalties for overtime. Overtime is rough duty.

The football equivalent to Sunday's game would have been a game that ended nine minutes into the fifth overtime. If an NFL playoff game lasted that long, there would be six cable channels dedicated full-time to slow-motion highlights of it for the next 50 years. Congress would approve a trillion dollars in research spending on reanimation technology so that John Facenda could be brought back to narrate it. There would be a museum.

The longest game in NFL history lasted 82 minutes, 40 seconds. Double overtime. Football fans still genuflect to it 36 years later.

Let's not even talk basketball. An NBA game of equivalent length would have had about 11 overtimes.

Sunday's Stars victory was the eighth longest NHL game ever. It was a fabulous game. Both goalies, Nabokov and traditional playoff underachiever Marty Turco, stood on their heads, with Nabokov making a snatching glove stop in the first overtime that, considering the circumstances, with his team a goal away from elimination after having rallied from 3-0 to 3-2 in the series, was probably the save of the year.

That the contest probably won't be enshrined on the short list of all-time greatest NHL games is a testament to how good NHL playoff hockey can be, especially in elimination games.

Housekeeping note: RSS feed

King Kaufman — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:50:00 PDT

Good news, RSS feedsters. This column has produced a rapid response to complaints that the RSS feed contained only the headline, not the full text.

That response: Huh? RSS feed?

However, the smart people who herd the hamsters that power the Salon computers know what you're talking about, and have created a full-length RSS feed. It's linked over to the left there, and also right here: http://feeds.salon.com/salon/kaufman.

Feed away. Or be fed. I don't know the lingo. I still answer the phone with "Ahoy!"

The unbeatable Celtics

King Kaufman — Mon, 05 May 2008 02:15:00 PDT

If you only watched Game 7 of the Boston Celtics-Atlanta Hawks series, you'd have to conclude that the Celtics are a spectacularly great basketball team, even if you knew that the Hawks are a 37-win bunch that really didn't have much business in the playoffs.

You could even have that idea if you'd seen Games 1, 2 and 5 as well.

The Celtics won that final game Sunday 99-65, and the old joke here would be that the game wasn't as close as that score would indicate, but this is one of those times it wouldn't fit because the Celtics never coasted. They poured it on, playing as though it were a tie game long after the Hawks spit the bit, which they did early in the third quarter when Marvin Williams tackled Rajon Rondo on a breakaway and was ejected.

It was almost as if the best team in the league, the 66-game winners, had something to prove.

Maybe that had something to do with the three losses the Hawks handed them in Games 3, 4 and 6, the three in Atlanta. Those games earned Boston entry in the exclusive club of teams that have been beaten three times this year by the Hawks. The other members are the Miami Heat, the New York Knicks and the Philadelphia 76ers.

The Sixers made a little Hawklike noise of their own against the No. 2 seed in the East, the Detroit Pistons, winning Games 1 and 3 of that series and leading at halftime of Game 4 before the Pistons woke up and notched three straight wins.

So what's going on here? Is it that the Eastern Conference powers aren't all that powerful, that reports of the closing of the gap between the conferences were premature?

Yes and no on the latter. Eastern Conference teams went 192-258 against the West this year, one game worse than last year, but the Celtics went 25-5 and the Pistons 22-8, both way better than the most successful team in the conference against the West last year, the Cleveland Cavaliers, who went 19-11. So while you can still say that Boston and Detroit's regular-season record was padded a bit by playing in the weak conference, you can't say they wouldn't have been powers if they played in the West.

But that leaves the first question. Did the Hawks show up the Celtics as 66-win frauds?

Eh, probably not. The Celtics can be beaten. They're still a team centered on three stars in their 30s, and if the shots aren't falling for Ray Allen and Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett isn't as aggressive as he should be, they can get into trouble. But those things don't often happen on the same night, and even when they do, the Celtics have depth and play excellent defense. There's a lot to beat there.

I've been thinking all along that the Pistons, who beat the Orlando Magic in Game 1 of their second-round series, are going to beat them. They'd meet in the conference finals if they meet. But, closing of the gap be damned, I'd take any of the four living teams in the West -- the Los Angeles Lakers lead the Utah Jazz and the New Orleans Hornets lead the San Antonio Spurs, both 1-0 -- over anybody in the East.

Even after the Celtics' utter destruction of the 37-win Hawks.

The new format

King Kaufman — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:15:00 PDT

Astute readers -- and that's all we have around here -- will have noticed by now that the ol' column has a new look. It can't be lost on the most astute of you -- that's you. Yes, you -- that the column has taken on a blog-like format one day after hammering Buzz Bissinger for his intelligence-free attack on blogs.

It would be funny if we made the change just to thumb our noses at Buzz, but it's been in the works for several months. The idea at Salon, as I understand it, not that anybody ever tells me anything, like when there are cookies in the kitchen, is to have the various features and columns appear under a similar design.

The design of the moment is the three-column blog you now hold on your screen. My cartoony mug has moved from right to left -- here I am, up here! There are favorite links to the right, recent posts and video to the left and, my favorite thing -- and I just can't emphasize enough how much I love this -- I now get a pull quote.

Don't tell Salon, but I'd have written this column for free for the last six years if they'd have given me a pull quote to play with. I plan to get all postmodern with it, maybe stick the punch line of a nonexistent joke in there one day.

So: What's it mean. Is this column now a blog?

Sure, if you like. I still plan to call it a column. I get that there's always some medium-is-message aspect to the method of delivery, but I don't think my job is changing because of the way the words are laid out on the screen.

There are obvious and some not-so-obvious differences between writing for a newspaper, which I cut my teeth doing, and writing online, which I've been doing for a dozen years now, but the guts of it are the same. You got your words, your punctuation, your sentences and paragraphs.

Not that I pay attention to paragraphs.

And so it is with a column vs. a blog. Publishing whenever I want, several times a day, long posts and short, as opposed to one column each night, will create opportunities and impose limits in various ways, I'm sure. But the guts of the thing will be the same. King Kaufman, and sports, and daily.

For various technical and deadline-related reasons, the new format will, I think, make it easier for me to offer up a better product. It's going to come in very handy when the Olympics come around, for example, because this format is much better suited, from both my side and yours, to frequent updates.

I've resisted the word "blog" as we've planned this change, and frankly it's because of the backward attitude Bissinger so eloquently spewed forth on HBO the other night. He's not alone. There is still an unfortunately pervasive view abroad that blogger equals loser in mother's basement, as opposed to professional writer with training and experience and editorial oversight.

It's as silly as it is pervasive. Putting aside that my mother doesn't even have a basement, Rob Neyer and Alex Belth and J.C. Bradbury and Jeff Angus, just to name four off the top of my head, are all bloggers. They're also book authors, and they're really smart and really good.

I could now list a whole bunch of columnists who I think are dumber than plankton. Worse writers too. But I'm sure you have your own list.

Joe Posnanski -- ooh, I should have had a transition sentence there -- is both a columnist for the Kansas City star and a blogger on his own time. I like his column, which is centered on K.C. teams, but I'd sooner miss lunch than one of his blog posts.

It's just a format. We noted yesterday that William Shakespeare's stuff translated just fine to the Web. It's still Shakespeare, even with hyperlinks.

And yes, I just compared myself to Shakespeare. He has me on the writing thing, but I'd destroy him in a parallel parking contest.

That attitude will go away. I'm old enough to remember when some people thought writing on a computer, as opposed to a typewriter, was somehow illegitimate. But until it does I'm a little sensitive about being called a blogger. So let me be fogyish and keep calling this thing a column. But you can call it anything you want.

Just please call me when there are cookies in the kitchen.

And since no change to a daily habit is ever all that popular, I'm sure you'll all have plenty to say about it in the comments. Fire away.

Gone in 100 seconds

King Kaufman — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:15:00 PDT

Is it possible to lose a game in the first 100 seconds? That might have happened to the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 6 of their series against the Detroit Pistons Thursday night.

Their first possession ended with a steal, then a layup-and-foul three-point play by Rip Hamilton. The second ended on a travel by Samuel Dalembert, followed by a made jumper by Hamilton. On Philly's third possession Andre Iguodala threw away a pass. Hamilton hit another jumper on the other end.

A minute-40 gone, 7-0 Detroit, the Wachovia Center no louder than a library and the Sixers looking hangdog. Philly looked cooked.

Now, no game is over 100 seconds in, and the 76ers looked mighty toasty early in Game 1, which they came back to win. Shoot, the worst team in the NBA can make up a seven-point deficit against the best, and the 76ers are far from the worst team in the league.

But with the Pistons leading the series 3-2 and having appeared to flip the playoff switch to "on" in the second half of Game 4 and dominated ever since, the Sixers looked like a team with 46 minutes and 20 seconds of playing out the string in its immediate future. Soon it was 10-0, then 16-2. Philadelphia never got back in the game.

At least I hope not. I stopped watching. [Checks box score] OK, good!

Just kidding. The Pistons scarcely broke a sweat on the way to a 100-77 win and a 4-2 series win. They might not be the best team in the league, but they can look like it when they have a mind to. The trick -- and this seems to be a trick for any NBA team that's been good for a while and isn't the San Antonio Spurs -- is to have a mind to often enough.

The Pistons are saying the two losses to the 76ers, a team that went 40-42 in the regular season and had lost four straight to close out the year, were a wake-up call. Oh, also that first half of Game 4. Wake-up call.

This team rides the snooze button like I did when I worked the 5 a.m. shift and had to put a second alarm clock in the bathroom to keep from sleeping through my whole workday in nine-minute increments.

The Boston Celtics, the favorite to meet Detroit in the Eastern Conference finals, will be saying much the same thing about their two losses to the Atlanta Hawks in a series that, so far, the Celtics have won three games by an average of more than 22 points per win. Wake-up call, those two road losses.

Do teams, even teams like the Pistons that are all jaded and world-weary and tragically bored with the first round after making the playoffs seven years in a row without ever losing an opening series, do teams like that really need a wake-up call? Shouldn't the wake-up call have been someone saying, "It's the playoffs"?

The fact that the Pistons lost Games 1 and 3 to the Sixers, rather than Games 1 and 2, leads me to believe that the Pistons weren't so much a team in need of a wake-up call as an aging team that just doesn't have it some nights. They reach for that highest gear and it's not there.

Not the best way to get to the Finals, though I'll stand by my prediction that that's exactly where the Pistons are going. They're going to have their hands full with Dwight Howard in the second round as they play the Orlando Magic. He's a different kettle of fish from Dalembert.

I don't think it'll happen, but it wouldn't surprise me if the Pistons find themselves groping around for the old alarm clock in the Orlando series and not finding it.

Roger Clemens and his planeloads of women

King Kaufman — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:00 PDT

In "The Portable Curmudgeon," author Jon Winokur tells a story about the playwright, New York Times drama critic and non-relative of this column George S. Kaufman appearing on a TV show in the early 1950s called "This Is Show Business."

The format of the show was to have some performer come on and tell a panel of four showbiz insiders about some minor problem he or she was supposedly having. The guest would then perform before returning to the panel for its sage advice.

One week the guest was Eddie Fisher, at the time a teen-idol singer who complained that despite his popularity with the girls, he was having trouble finding dates. His fans were all too young, was the purported problem. Kaufman's answer:

Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to 24 times the magnification of any telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the construction of the Mount Palomar telescope, an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification of the Mount Wilson telescope.
Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn't be able to detect my interest in your problem.

I bring this up by way of saying that if you could somehow put Kaufman's mythical combined Wilson-Palomar telescope inside the Hubble telescope, and then mash the whole thing up into the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, you still wouldn't be able to detect my interest in the reports that Roger Clemens, in the poetic words of the New York Daily News, "had several women, flew them on private jet."

Had several women
Flew them on private jet
Tried to forget 'em
But just can't yet

What? Sorry. Just felt a country song coming on there. I left out the "I" in the last line to match the missing "a" before private jet. Also, there's a really complicated B-flat minor diminished 13th that you can only play if you're double-jointed. And have a theremin. And insurance.

But we were talking about Roger Clemens and his battery mates. Big-league ballplayers in any major sport are filthy rich, by definition young and athletic, often good-looking and spend precisely half of their season away from home, not counting training camp. Their extramarital affairs are a lot like corruption in major college sports.

Except a lot more photogenic.

What I mean is, anywhere you shine the spotlight, you've got a good chance to find a lot of activity.

The spotlight's shining on Clemens and it's turning up jetloads of babes. Makes it seem like he's somehow unusual in this area. I suspect not, except maybe for the private jet part.

And what this has to do with the price of tea in China, not to mention the price of Stanazol at East 161st Street and River Avenue, is beyond me.

Now, if the singer in the bunch had been Kenny Chesney ...

Shocking news: NFL draft "Experts" aren't

King Kaufman — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:30:00 PDT

If you haven't got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me.

The excellent, if cold and hard, site Cold, Hard Football Facts did a number this week on the various NFL draft "experts," especially ESPN's Mel Kiper Jr., ÃÂ who clutter up the airwaves and columns at this time of year by going on and on about a subject they don't know much about.ÃÂ

Working this column's "so-called experts usually aren't any smarter than you or me or that doofus down the bar" street, Cold, Hard Football Facts looked at the mock first round published by six "experts" -- the scare quotes are CHFF's -- and found that those worthies guessed right on ÃÂ a combined 37 of 186 picks. And, as CHFF notes, they had a lot of help.ÃÂ

Jake Long's name was already written on the card after the Miami Dolphins signed him the week before the draft, and CHFF says just about everybody knew from news reports that the St. Louis Rams would take Chris Long with the second pick, the Oakland Raiders would take Darren McFadden with the No. 4 and the Dallas Cowboys were hoping to get Felix Long at No. 22, all of which happened.

"So, the two Longs and the two Arkansas running backs combined to provide 21 of the combined 37 picks our six mock-draft 'experts' got correct," Cold Hard Football Facts writes. "Other than those four players, they were just 16 of 162 (9.9 percent) through the rest of the first round."

CHFF notes that while it's painfully obvious the Atlanta Falcons need a franchise quarterback, none of the experts predicted the club would take, hey, here's an idea, the top quarterback on the board, Matt Ryan.ÃÂ Atlanta's pick: Matt Ryan.

"Bottom line: mock drafts are useless," CHFF writes. "Do not waste another second of your life on the mock draft."

OK, I won't. But I'll gladly waste about 180 seconds to enjoy Cold, Hard Football Facts putting the wood to the experts after the 2009 draft.

Police blotter: Catcher apologizes

King Kaufman — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:15:00 PDT

San Francisco Giants catcher Eliezer Alfonzo has apologized to everyone in the world for getting caught using performance-enhancing substances.

Alfonzo, 29, tested positive under Major League Baseball's program. He was demoted to the Giants' Triple-A team in Fresno on Opening Day but remains on the 40-man roster and thus subject to MLB law and order. His 50-game suspension began Thursday.

That's it: I'm going to go ahead and say the Giants aren't going to win the National League West.

King Kaufman's Sports Daily

King Kaufman — Thu, 01 May 2008 03:00:00 PDT

I missed that pompous ass Buzz Bissinger's ridiculous performance on "Costas Now" Tuesday night because I was busy watching galumpteen million playoff games, and all on boss-car-washing night too.

Bissinger appeared in a "round-table" discussion with Costas, Deadspin founder Will Leitch and Cleveland Browns receiver Braylon Edwards, who represented the people being covered.

They discussed the sports blogosphere, that nasty, wasty netherworld where people post pictures of NFL quarterbacks drinking from beer bongs and otherwise lower the sports discourse from the lofty heights of T.J. Simers and Jay Mariotti.

I know this because Deadspin posted a video of the segment. Bad, bad Interbloggy thing! How dare you make Buzz Bissinger, man of letters, look bad by showing a video of him saying the asinine things he thinks! A little respect please.

Bissinger launched a profanity-laced, idiotic assault on the Internet, which he doesn't like because it's profane and filled with idiots. How meta.

The segment opened with a packaged piece in which Leitch gave a boilerplate defense of his site's existence, then more of the same between Costas and Leitch live at the round table. Costas, who has recently taken some get-off-my-lawnish potshots at the blogosphere, joked, "To my surprise, I find you very palatable in person."

After a few moments, Bissinger could take no more. Perched sideways on his chair as though the very act of sharing a planetary atmosphere with Leitch was painful to him, he said, "I'm just going to interject because I feel very strongly about this: I really think you're full of shit."

Thus spake the man who says he has "spent 40 years of my life trying to perfect the craft" of writing -- which those punk kids on the Internet would never do -- and who is offended by the profane tone of the blogs.

That is, in the comment he printed out and brought to the show and read on "Costas Now," which to Bissinger apparently represents the entire Internet. This routine was very much like holding up a gummy worm and saying, "Food is terrible. I mean, look at this thing."

What a yutz.

Things went on in this vein for about 15 minutes before Bissinger revealed himself to be not just a pompous jerk but also a hypocrite.

Interrupting as usual -- because as the defender of literature and higher learning whatever he had to say was, like, way more important than what anybody else had to say -- he told Leitch, "You say you don't want to be in the press box because the facts get in the way," which isn't even close to what Leitch had said. What Leitch had said was that he declined to apply for press access because "the minute I start doing that, I start writing for the other people in the press box ... I get a lot of benefit from having that distance."

But let's not let facts get in the way, right, Buzz?

"It seems to me," Bissinger continued, "what you're saying is, 'I don't want facts to inhibit me. Facts get in my way, so I'm going to sit in my little room and I'm going to give this nebulous fan's voice.'"

Pretty rich coming from a guy who sometimes -- for instance, in this very comment -- takes only a nodding interest in facts. Here, courtesy of FireJoeMorgan.com, are links to a bunch of smart people finding fundamental errors in a piece Bissinger wrote for the New York Times magazine Play last year about Kerry Wood.

He'd have found them himself if he'd bothered to do a little research instead of just transcribing the thoughts of Tony La Russa and other baseball men, as he'd done for his book "Three Nights in August" two years earlier.

And here he is acting like a slime bucket toward the excellent radio interviewer Boog Sciambi after Sciambi challenged the underlying thesis of the Wood piece -- that pitchers today are brought to the majors younger and with less minor league experience than in the past -- by asking Bissinger if he'd done any research to back it up.

The answer was no. The research that other smart people did -- see links above -- showed Bissinger's thesis to be exactly wrong. But that was long after Bissinger responded to Sciambi's impertinent question by randomly attacking one of Sciambi's co-workers. Sciambi hung up on him.

Bissinger is big on boneheaded generalizations about people who are younger than he is, which is 53. In "Three Nights in August," he wrote that the sabermetric movement had populated baseball front offices with "thirtysomethings whose most salient qualifications are MBA degrees."

"It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn't care about baseball," he wrote. "But it's not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly love it, and so much of baseball is about love. They don't have the sense of history, which to the thirtysomethings is largely bunk."

If by "it's not wrong," he meant "it's absolutely 100 percent gold-plated wrong," then I'd agree.

Bissinger's generalization about the Interblogthingy came late in the "Costas Now" segment, as he lamented, I don't know, the death of the printed word, for which he, writer of books, reader of newspapers, which are printed on paper, you know, is evidently some kind of guardian.

"I just don't know where you're coming from," he said to Leitch, "except I think you are perpetuating the future, and I think the future in the hands of guys like you is really, really going to dumb us down to a degree that I don't know we can recover from."

He went on: "I have a son who's 16, who's going to grow up, he's going to read much more what's on the Internet, and much more on blogs than he is reading what's in a newspaper or what's in a book."

Hey, Buzz: Here's something to read on the Internet. It's the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Here's something you can read in a newspaper. It's Ann Coulter's latest column.

Here's a book. It's called "How to Be a Super Hot Woman: 339 Tips to Make Every Man Fall in Love With You and Every Woman Envy You."

Books and newspapers are so much better than that appalling dump heap called the Interwhatsit, eh, Buzz?

Here's one more thing to read on the Webberlogthing. It's Leitch's funny, compassionate, frankly pitying assessment of Bissinger's performance, in which he explains why he sat calmly and let Bissinger rain spittle on him rather than, say, punch him in the nose.

"We cannot imagine any reasonable human being watching that display and saying, 'doggone it, that raving man has a point!'" he writes. "We are not mad at Bissinger, or Costas. We just watched a man immolate on national television. To have piled on the carnage would have been discourteous."

So I'm discourteous. That's how we roll on the series of tubes, dad.

Previous column: Suns, Mavs eliminated

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King Kaufman's Sports Daily

King Kaufman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:00:00 PDT

Shaquille O'Neal to the Phoenix Suns and Jason Kidd to the Dallas Mavericks. Two blockbuster answer trades after the Los Angeles Lakers shook up the Western Conference by dealing for Pau Gasol. Two failures. Both teams drummed out in five games on the same night.

The Suns got bounced by the San Antonio Spurs for the third time in four years, the Spurs holding off a late rally to win Game 5 Monday at home, 92-87.

The Mavericks were embarrassed in the first round last year as the No. 1 seed by the Golden State Warriors. This time around they went quietly as the No. 7, simply losing to a superior team. The Hornets never trailed in Game 5 and led big for most of the night before Dallas got close late, ultimately falling 99-94.

The Suns got more quality minutes from O'Neal than they had any right to expect, but they never successfully transformed from a highflying offensive team to a slower one built around Shaq's low-post game. They went 37-16 before O'Neal arrived, 17-11 when he was in the lineup. Not that that mattered. Shaq wasn't brought in to win regular-season games. He was brought in to match up with Tim Duncan in a playoff series against the Spurs.

But what the Suns lost in the trade -- Shawn Marion's all-around game, space for Steve Nash to work his improvisational magic and the ability to overwhelm opponents with tempo -- was greater than what they gained.

It had become clear that up-tempo formula wasn't going to get them past San Antonio, and it was at least likely that it wasn't going to get them past the upgraded Lakers, so they took a shot. It most decidedly didn't work, and now they're stuck with two more years of a fading Shaq owed $20 million per while Nash, 34, likely enters his decline phase.

In the past three years the Suns have been eliminated in the conference finals, conference semifinals and conference quarterfinals, in that order. Detect a pattern there? Me neither, but it looks like things are likely to go down before they go back up.

There's some chatter that coach Mike D'Antoni could be on his way out. It's unclear whether he or general manager Steve Kerr was the one who wanted to make the Shaq trade, but either way, Kerr didn't hire D'Antoni, and you tell me if this post-game comment by Nash sounds like the star player throwing the coach to the wolves, which it sounded like to me:

"I think on paper we have more talent than they [the Spurs] do, but I think their experience, their commitment and understanding of what they're trying to do is greater than ours. And their ability to play together and make small plays on both ends of the floor, do the little things, is unsurpassed. That's why I think a team like them has won as many championships as they have."

In other words: Boy, they're really well coached. Unlike us.

I wouldn't book a trip to visit D'Antoni in Phoenix next fall is all I'm saying. It might be the best thing for him. He'll avoid the downhill ride with the Suns and become a hot commodity on the coaching market. They're looking for someone to head up that D-league team that plays at Madison Square Garden, you know.

The Mavericks got Kidd as a short-term upgrade on Devin Harris at point guard, but more than that they got him to be the veteran go-to warrior guy in the playoffs that Dirk Nowitzki is not. It didn't work. The Mavs were 35-18 before Kidd suited up, 16-13 when he played. And they didn't provide much opposition for the Hornets.

They can try it again next year. Kidd is a year older than Nash and already in decline, but he's a year younger than O'Neal and not declining at nearly the same rate. But it looks like the window is closing for the Mavericks too. Jason Kidd would have been a great guy to have around last year, when the Mavs had the best record in the league, or two years ago, when they went to the Finals.

Next year he figures to be what he was in the second half of this year, and what he spent years being in Jersey: A great player on a good team that's not good enough to seriously contend for the title.

That is, unless a blockbuster trade or three changes everything.

Wanted: Wild, wild West [PERMALINK]

Has anybody seen the Western Conference? Where'd it go? What happened to the wide-open, anyone-can-win-this-thing West, where the difference between the No. 1 seed and the last team in was almost imperceptible?

Three of the four series are over in at most five games, the higher seed winning all three, the average margin of victory more than 11 points. Only the Utah Jazz and Houston Rockets, the 4 and 5 seeds, have turned in a series, thanks to Houston's 95-69 rout in Game 5, which staved off elimination. The Jazz take a 3-2 series lead into Game 6 in Salt Lake City Friday night.

Thank goodness for the East, where the Atlanta Hawks had no chance against the top-seed Boston Celtics -- series score: 2-2 -- and the Philadelphia 76ers, 19 games worse than the Detroit Pistons, figured to get drilled. Score in that series: 3-2 Detroit after the Pistons' 98-81 win Tuesday.

The Pistons took a lot of heat as overfed, unmotivated underachievers when they fell behind the Sixers two games to one, but you dismiss this team at your peril. The Pistons can sleepwalk through games with the best of them, but they have a playoff switch. They flipped it in the first quarter Tuesday and cruised to the win.

Hey, a "Law & Order" rerun [PERMALINK]

So was there anything on TV Tuesday night? Could you find any sports to watch?

Cripes, there were four NBA playoff games, three of them potential elimination games, plus three NHL playoff games. That's aside from whatever baseball games were on where you live, not to mention the various races and fights and whatnot. We're just talking about the big stuff.

The NHL had three series turn into blowouts. All three were at 2-0, and alas the leading teams went 3-for-3. The Pittsburgh Penguins beat the New York Rangers 5-3, the Detroit Red Wings beat the Colorado Avalanche 4-3, both on the road, and the Dallas Stars followed their two road wins by beating the San Jose Sharks at home in overtime, 2-1.

Now some of you may have heard about the Boston Red Sox overcoming a 3-0 deficit and beating the New York Yankees in the 2004 American League playoffs, and maybe that made you question an assumption or two about lopsided series. But hockey was way ahead of the curve on that. It's the only major American sport that's had two teams rebound from being down 3-0 and win a seven-game series.

The Toronto Maple Leafs did it to the Red Wings in 1942 and the New York Islanders did it to the Penguins in 1975. Thirty-three years between those two and 33 years since the latter one. Detect a pattern there?

Me neither. Sure wish one of those trailing teams had gotten a win. It's up to the Montreal Canadiens and Philadelphia Flyers to make the second round interesting. Game 4 is Wednesday in Philly. The underdog Flyers lead 2-1. And there are only two NBA playoff games on opposite: Hawks-Celtics and Washington Wizards-Cleveland Cavaliers, both Game 5.

Three games? It'll be like a TV wasteland.

Previous column: NBA blows call on Kidd

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King Kaufman's Sports Daily

King Kaufman — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:00:00 PDT

How is it that Jason Kidd of the Dallas Mavericks wasn't suspended for his flagrant foul on New Orleans Hornet Jennaro Pargo Sunday night?

With 7:16 to go in Game 4 and the Hornets leading 86-70, Pargo took a pass from Chris Paul on a fast break and went for a layup as Kidd, beaten by a step, defended. Pargo went up, Kidd overran him and, apparently reaching for the ball, instead caught the back of Pargo's neck.

It happened very fast, but Kidd appeared to pull down hard on Pargo's neck, which jack-knifed Pargo's body, sending him to the floor headfirst. Somehow, he got his hands down to break his fall as the top of his head was zooming down toward the hardwood. Pargo was uninjured, tempers flared for a moment but calm was quickly restored without punches being thrown.

Kidd was whistled for a so-called flagrant two foul, which brings automatic ejection. On Monday NBA officials reviewed the play and determined that no further punishment would be handed out, and Kidd is expected to play Tuesday night.

This is the same league office that last year torpedoed the best series in the playoffs by suspending two Phoenix Suns players for taking a couple of steps toward an altercation, then thinking better of it and retreating long before they came anywhere near combat.

Take two halting steps and get hit with a series-altering suspension. Whip an opponent's head down toward the court in the fourth quarter of a 16-point blowout, no problem.

Maybe it has something to do with who Jason Kidd is. He's a grand old man of the game these days, a future Hall of Famer going for the elusive title that would cap his career. Amare Stoudemire, one of the two Suns, along with Boris Diaw, who were suspended last year before Game 5 of their series against the San Antonio Spurs, is a great player, but he doesn't have anything like Kidd's cachet.

Kidd did that shoulder shrugging, hey I wasn't trying to hurt him thing after the game, and even Paul said he didn't think Kidd should be suspended.

Kidd was lying and Paul was wrong. There is simply no other way to look at Kidd's foul than as a dirty play, an intentional act. You don't accidentally push down on someone's neck while they're in the air. The refs got the call right on game night. The NBA blew it on Monday.

Hobbyhorse: That's a turnover, dammit [PERMALINK]

I can't for the life of me figure out why teams that take possession with more than about 30 and less than 48 seconds left in a quarter don't always, always try their level best to get a two-for-one. That is, get a shot off before there are 24 seconds remaining.

If you can get a shot off with more than 24 seconds to go, chances are you're going to get another possession before the quarter ends. If you don't, the other team is going to play for the last shot. Last time I looked, the word for giving away a possession was "turnover."

I can understand not rushing up a bad shot just to get a two-for-one. That would be essentially giving away the earlier possession. And I can understand not going out of your way to get the two-for-one in the regular season. After all, the 1 in humorously large made-up number chance of the point guard pulling a hamstring by running instead of walking the ball upcourt isn't worth taking for a regular-season win.

It probably seems like a small thing. Hey, it's one shot, no big deal. That's probably why coaches don't bother to make an issue of it. But look at the box scores. The 16 playoff teams averaged 13.6 turnovers a game during the regular season. And they're essentially willing to give away up to three more possessions per game -- assuming that any team that would benefit from more possessions in the fourth quarter would be rushing -- for no particular reason.

If some coach could figure out a way to reduce turnovers by three per game, he'd be called a genius. Most of them could knock out one or two per game by just saying, "Get a shot off before :24" when the situation arises, which on average ought to be every other first, second and third quarter.

Failing to go for a two-for-one isn't quite like a turnover because a team that goes for it could get an offensive rebound and keep possession for the remainder of the quarter, or it could give up an offensive rebound on the other end and not get the ball back after all. But robbing yourself of a chance at a possession is as close to committing a turnover as it's possible to get before that possession's started. There's no excuse for it.

Chris Webber still taking heat for Steve Fisher [PERMALINK]

Sunday was the first "official" day on the job at TNT for Chris Webber, whatever that means, so in the wee-hours final minutes of that night's "Inside the NBA" studio show, well into the silliness, host Ernie Johnson gave Webber a new-employee orientation quiz, which consisted of five questions.

The first four were easy, along the lines of "What is the name of the show you're on?" and "Who is the only white guy on the set?" The last one was a reference to Webber's famous bonehead play in the 1993 NCAA Championship Game, when he called timeout in the final seconds. Michigan was out of timeouts, so Webber's move cost him a technical foul and the Wolverines their last chance to come from behind against North Carolina.

The question: "In college basketball how many timeouts do you get in a game?"

"You know, it's messed up," a laughing Webber said, "I still don't know the answer to that."

Actually, I bet most college basketball fans don't know the answer to that. Doesn't it seem like you get about six trillion, and then suddenly at the end of the game both teams are down to one or none?

The answer is seven. Usually. For some reason, if there are no media timeouts, teams only get six timeouts each. But we're talking to a Michigan guy here, so the answer is seven. Each team gets six 30-second timeouts, only three of which can be carried over to the second half, plus a 60-second timeout to be used any time.

The reason it seems like each team gets a kazillion is because seven is a whole mess of timeouts. What's amazing is that college teams ever run out of timeouts in a game. What's even more amazing is that coaches don't get lit up for running out of timeouts.

We typists and chatterers roast football coaches for using up their allotment of six timeouts in a 60-minute game, but when basketball coaches use their seven in 40 minutes, we let it go, or we treat it like an act of nature. "Oh well, they were out of timeouts."

Chris Webber made a stupid play in that title game, but he was a 20-year-old kid. The real goat that night was his coach, Steve Fisher. Fifteen years later Webber's still taking crap about it and nobody even mentions Fisher.

College coaches get a media timeout every four minutes, a total of eight of them. Plus halftime. So assuming the other team is going to stupidly use up all of its timeouts, which it is, you get to meet with your team 16 times in a 40-minute game, once every 2:30, even if you don't use any of your own timeouts. And that's only if nobody fouls out. Throw in another 60-second stoppage every time that happens.

Then toss in the three you have to use in the first half or you'll lose them so you might as well, and now the clock is stopping, on average, every 2:06 in a game with nobody fouling out. Isn't that enough? Do coaches really have to stop the clock even more than that, at the cost of not being able to stop it when they need to in the end game? Consider Monday's column carefully before giving your answer, which is: No.

Previous column: Dazzling strategy: "Keep rebounding!"

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King Kaufman's Sports Daily

King Kaufman — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:00:00 PDT

I've been saying for ages that sound is the next frontier in televised sports, and in the last few years the various networks have slowly started to bring viewers into a few of the hundreds of conversations that go on within a given sporting event.

For some reason, TNT calls its "sounds of the game" bit "Inside Trax." For ABC it's "Wired." The main thing both networks do with the sound feature in their NBA coverage is listen in on timeout huddles.

Not so long ago NBA games played out as mostly silent events beyond atmospheric noise, but we've now reached the point where the talk in an NBA huddle is routine television fare. That's a good thing -- more information is always welcome -- but Sunday I found myself sort of pining for the good old days of wondering what pearls of basketball wisdom NBA coaches were dropping on their guys in those meetings.

I mean, I used to really wish I could catch a snippet of what went on in those huddles. NBA coaches are among the best coaches in the world, and NBA players are absolutely the best players in the world. And here you have them meeting in the heat of the action, and the coach is laying it down, sometimes diagramming on a white board.

What could he be saying to the best players in the world that they don't already know? This must be gold-plated hoops genius, dispensed more than a dozen times a game, and for years we missed every last diamond-studded word of it.

Now, for a few years, we've been hearing not every word, but a few highlights per televised game. It's possible we're missing out on some genius-level skull sessions because the TV networks are being extra careful not to broadcast deep-strategy conversations. They've said as much when some coaches objected to a general edict to wear microphones earlier this season.

It doesn't feel that way, though. There's a lot of space between hardcore inside-hoops strategery and "Come on, fellas!" But the needle never moves off "Come on, fellas!"

Here are some of the gems from Sunday's games:

"We've got plenty of time, plenty of time ... Stay solid. Keep rebounding!"
-- Avery Johnson, Dallas Mavericks

"Can't stop playing, guys. You run back, missed a layup, can't stop. Everybody's got to get back."
-- Byron Scott, New Orleans Hornets

"We're just beating ourselves right now. We've just got to slow down, show a little patience."
-- Flip Saunders, Detroit Pistons

"We've had great energy. You guys having fun yet? Hey, listen. It's hustle plays, and it's just playing basketball."
-- Saunders

"Everybody's got to settle down. There's a lot of time left, all right? There's a lot of time left, we don't have to rush. But when we take the ball out of bounds, we've got to get the ball out quick."
-- Maurice Cheeks, Philadelphia 76ers

"A lot of time. We don't have to force shots. Be patient. Be relentless and get to the rim. Be relentless and get to the rim."
-- Eddie Jordan, Washington Wizards

"Game starts over now. They're obviously more aggressive ... We're going to be here all night long, we'll change it now, all right, fellas? ... Don't forget the basic stuff about transition D and everybody on the boards."
-- Gregg Popovich, San Antonio Spurs

"It's going to take sustained effort, it's going to take energy, it's going to take playing the right way every time, every rebound, every loose ball. And that's going to make the champion or not ... Can you stay there, on task?"
-- Mike D'Antoni, Phoenix Suns, halftime locker room with a 22-point lead, but trailing 3-0 in the series

"We've got to outwork them, let's go ... Can't play like we're trying to protect the lead."
-- Scott

At halftime of the Detroit Pistons-Philadelphia 76ers game, TNT studio host Ernie Johnson, noting that Chris Webber had played for Saunders with the Pistons, asked Webber what he thought the mood would be in the locker room with Detroit trailing by 10.

"No disrespect against Flip," Webber said, "but it doesn't matter what Flip says because they take on the personality of Joe Dumars."

Charles Barkley wasn't so sure about that because Dumars, the Pistons president, "was a stud, played hard the whole time," while these Pistons, he said, are coasting on their reputation as an Eastern Conference power. "Joe Dumars has got to be rolling over in his grave," Barkley joked.

But Webber's underlying point was a good one. I heard that point to be that come game-time a coach can yell and scream and flap his arms or sit and look dignified with a rolled-up program and it doesn't matter because the team's personality is already formed. Barkley disagreed with Webber's assessment of the Pistons' personality, but not with Webber's comment that it didn't matter what Saunders said in the halftime locker room.

NBA coaches do all that running up and down the sidelines and yelling and gesticulating and directing traffic as though they're the sole source of know-how and strategy, and then when the chips are on the table and the clock's winding down they gather their charges together and they proclaim:

"Keep rebounding!"

They're in monkey suits, jumping around for our entertainment, so they'll look like coaches. Aside from substitutions -- largely predetermined by the established rotation -- and the odd called play, their work is pretty much done by tip-off.

Johnson reported after the game that what Saunders had said in that halftime locker room was "Relax and have fun."

If TNT really wanted to make something of "Inside Trax," it should have let us hear what was being said when Rasheed Wallace got a technical for complaining about Reggie Evans' flop late in the first half.

We can handle the bleeping. All right, fellas?

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