One of the oldest conversation starters in sports is: as a sports fan, what is your favorite time of the year?
There's no right or wrong answer; everyone has their own personal preference.
Without a doubt, spring is my favorite time of the year for sports.
Spring marks the beginning of golf season (Tiger's back!); spring training means everyone in baseball is still in first place (the Tigers are back!); and with only a month left in the NBA season, the arrival of spring means that the NBA playoffs can't be far behind.
But, as the old saying goes, you have to take the good with the bad.
As far as sports in the spring is concerned, the bad for me is the start of March Madness.
It's no secret that I'm not a fan of the college game, and Thursday night's 6OT "thriller" between Syracuse and Connecticut is a perfect example of why I can't get into college hoops.
The only reason that game went into six overtime periods is because neither team was good enough to score in the final seconds to win the game. Each overtime period ended with a missed shot or a botched possession leading to yet another overtime. Nobody could step up and make a big play.
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my overtime games to be settled by heroes, not goats.
And while John Q. may have been focused on the all important conference tournaments this week, the Rotation never waivers from its undying affection for all things NBA.
In case a week of watching college basketball has skewed what you remember about the game being played at its highest level, this week's Starting Five consists of a few friendly reminders from the NBA world to help you focus on what March basketball is all about: playoff seeding.
Starting Five
1. LeBron is the best player in the world...
It's not as if that statement needs much validation to begin with, but LeBron gave it to us this week anyway.
The Cavs started a three-game West Coast trip on Tuesday night in the Staples Center against the Clippers. A miserable shooting night for the Cavs (they missed their first 17 threes) had them trailing by 17 heading into the fourth, and then LeBron took over. He had 10 points in the quarter, finished with his second straight triple-double, and spearheaded a comeback that few players in the game are capable of leading their team to.
The King followed Tuesday's 32/13/11 clinic with another triple-double Thursday night against the Suns, leading the Cavs from behind in the fourth to rally to a somewhat easy eight-point win, LeBron's first career victory in Phoenix.
A triple-double wasn't in the cards for James the following night in Sacramento; LeBron was too busy dropping 51 on the Kings to worry about padding the assist and rebound totals. He finished with 22 points in the fourth quarter and overtime combined, and once again almost single-handedly erased another double-digit fourth quarter deficit on the road. The win clinched Cleveland's first division title since 1976.
If you're scoring at home, that's two triple-doubles, a 51-point game, and three fourth quarter comeback wins in four days, all roads game mind you, to clinch the Cavs' first division title since before the bicentennial.
Not a bad four day stretch for the world's best player.
2. ...But Dwyane Wade is the MVP (as of now, anyway)
If you've been following the Miami Heat at all this season, you know that there isn't another player in this league who is more valuable to his team than Dwyane Wade.
LeBron puts up ridiculous numbers night in and night out because he can; Wade puts them up because he has to.
As great as he's been, it's LeBron's help that has his team at the top of the Eastern Conference standings. Mo Williams is an all-star, and the Cavs have several players that fill specific roles for them. They are a well-constructed team.
The Heat, on the other hand, offer little to no help to Wade at all. If Wade doesn't have a monster game, the Heat lose. Period. It's just that, more often than not, Wade does deliver with a monster game, and he has the Heat six games above .500 and competing for the four seed and home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs.
The final month of the season will offer plenty of chances for both Wade and LeBron to state their MVP cases (Kobe and CP3, too), but if Wade carries this team for the final month like he has for the first 66 games of the season, I don't see how anyone could be viewed as more valuable to their team.
3. There's no place like home (court)...
With Phoenix pretty much out of the playoff picture, the Western Conference playoff race isn't so much a race of who gets in, but rather a dogfight to see who get home court.
As it stands right now, the number three seed Houston leads the eighth and final seeded Dallas by just two and a half games.
How important is home court advantage in the West? Of the six teams fighting for the two remaining home-court-advantage-in-the-first-round spots (I'll concede at least a top four finish to San Antonio, leaving Houston, Denver, New Orleans, Portland, Utah, and Dallas to finish three through eight in some order), all have a home winning percentage of at least .700.
Of those six teams, only New Orleans at 18-15 has a winning record on the road.
The teams are so evenly matched that any of the six could potentially land a three or a four seed. All of these teams are also so equally tough at home that knocking whoever finishes three or four off in a playoff series could prove to be a daunting task.
4. ...Especially after a fight
After Monday night's blowout loss to the Blazers at the Rose Garden in Portland, the Lakers have now lost 20 of the 26 regular season games they have played against the Blazers in that building.
With the fans already chanting "Beat L.A." before the game even began, the last thing the Lakers needed was to give the Blazer crowd more fuel for the hatred of all things Lakers that already burns in the Pacific Northwest.
Instead, the Lakers left Blazer fans with the lasting image of Rudy Fernandez being carted off on a stretcher after a cheap foul by Trevor Ariza and the intense (at least by NBA standards) shoving match that ensued.
For a team that has a hard enough time winning at the Rose Garden, the Lake Show didn't do themselves any favors by all but ensuring that on their next trip to the Rose Garden (April 10th), hostility from the fans will be at an all-time high.
5. Don't play mind games with Kobe
There's plenty more on this later in the landmark case of Artest V. Sanity, but we'll fast-forward a day to the end of the Lakers and Spurs game for right now.
After the Spurs made a furious comeback in the fourth quarter to trim a 14-point deficit to just two with under two minutes to play, the Spurs chose rookie George Hill over grizzled, old vet Bruce Bowen to defend Kobe down the stretch.
According to Kobe after the game, his initial thought when seeing that he had the rookie guarding him: "Bake him."
Thirteen seconds after Hill entered the game, Kobe buried a Big Cajones Three over him; ball game over.
Hill's comment on the play, "I thought it was good defense."
Maybe it was some sort of reverse psychology by Gregg Popovich to put in the rookie as opposed to his defensive specialist, trying to bait Kobe into forcing a bad shot. It didn't work.
Conventional wisdom might not always work against Bryant; some nights he's going to beat you no matter what and that's just the way it is, but why encourage him to dominate by putting the rookie on him?
Gregg Popovich is one of very few NBA coaches that I'll give a pass to just about anything he does because he's proven in the past that nearly every button he pushes is the right one, but after Thursday's puzzling personnel move, I'll be gentle and say that the decision to go with Hill over Bowen was "curious at best."
(That, or Pop knows that the Spurs can't catch the Lakers for the top spot out West anyway, so he inserted Hill knowing that Kobe would torch him, but that Hill would learn a valuable lesson in the process that will carry over into the postseason. Actually, the more I think about it, that scenario seems about five times more likely than that possibly that Pop just mismanaged his rotation late in the game.)
In the Rotation: R.I.P. Bill Davidson
For the second time in less than a month, the NBA has lost one of the true great owners in league history.
Growing up in Detroit and getting to see Mr. D's impact on Detroit basketball firsthand, I can truly say that there isn't an owner in the league that I would have rather had at the controls of my favorite team over the past 35 years.
In a lot of ways, Davidson was the pioneer to the modern style of owning a professional sports franchise. He was the first owner in all of sports to buy his team their own private plane, and he footed the entire $70 million bill for the Palace of Auburn Hills, the NBA's first completely privately funded arena. Twenty years after opening its doors, the Palace remains one of the top venues in the NBA.
Davidson may not have been as recognizable or flamboyant (he rarely did interviews) as the other owners around the league, but the impact he had on his team and his community speaks for itself.
Out of the Rotation: Sacramento Kings
The Kings are threatening a record of futility that I never could have imagined: they are winless against the Eastern Conference this year. No team has ever gone 0-30 against the opposing conference in a season. In fact, the Kings 0-26 start marks the longest inter-conference losing streak in NBA history.
The Kings blew a golden opportunity on Sunday to get their first win against an Eastern Conference opponent this season when they lost to the East's worst team, the Washington Wizards, despite the fact that the Wizards didn't make a field goal in the final eight minutes of the game.
With their next four games against Eastern Conference teams, including three road games in four days, the Wizards may have very well squandered their last chance at beating an Eastern conference team this season.
Inactive List: Ron Artest
The George Hill guarding Kobe Bryant potential mind game that took place on Thursday night was nothing compared to the backfiring mind game that Ron Artest tried to play with Bryant the night before.
With just under seven minutes left to play in the game and the Rockets trailing by two, Artest was whistled for a foul after elbowing Kobe Bryant as the two made their way down the floor. After a brief scrum, the players were each assessed technical fouls and the battle was on.
Artest and Bryant grabbed, shoved, and talked trash to each other for the rest of the game. Kobe, as anyone who's watched a basketball game in the past decade knows, lives for these sort of one-on-one games within the game, and was more than happy to demonstrate this to the Secretary of Defense.
Bryant scored 18 points in the final four minutes and 13 seconds as the Lakers coasted to an eight-point victory.
Artest, who finished the game with 11 points on 4-of-16 shooting (including 0-8 on threes), continued to jaw with Kobe down to the final seconds, as Kobe laughed at him and knocked down free throws to seal the fate of the Rockets.
The Spurs were probably in the wrong for thinking that they could put a rookie on Kobe in the final minutes and still win the game. But Ron Artest's mental mistake of rattling the cage of the fiercest competitor in the game, who also doubles as the NBA's most deadly scorer in clutch situations, is just plain dumb, even by Artest's standards.
There's no place in the Rotation for bonehead mistakes like that, so Artest can take a week on the Inactive List to formulate a new plan on how to stop Kobe. You know, in the off chance that the Rockets get past their fear of advancing out of the first round and meet up with Bryant and the Lakers deep in the playoffs.
Be sure to check back at Sports Central every Monday to see who cracks Scott Shepherd's Rotation as he breaks down what is going on around the NBA.
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