Notes And Errata For The Weekend

Hey folks, just some things to chew on for the weekend to fill in this 3-day gap in between games:

I can’t really sum up any righteous anger over Ray Allen getting the injury-replacement all-star spot over Mo Williams, mostly because Allen was a huge snub the first time around; he’s been Boston’s best offensive player, he’s shooting a career-high 63.2% TS to lead all guards while scoring 18 a game. I’d actually put him in there instead of Pierce. I think Rashard Lewis was an EXTREMELY questionable choice over Mo, and there’s certainly a strong case for Mo over Devin Harris, but this actually wasn’t all that bad.

My feeling is that Zydrunas was going to be a shoo-in for an all-star spot until he got hurt, so Mo would have been the 3rd All-Star instead of the 2nd, which makes the snubbing a little easier to take. Also, I don’t want    the first non-LBJ all-star in the Cavs era to be an injury replacement.

I do have some righteous anger stored up over this crap with taking away the triple-double. WHAT IS THAT NOISE.

-The call was not clear. It was borderline. Ben has about a million back-taps per game that get awarded as rebounds to the player who caught them. Possession was far from clear.

-Even so, when was the last time the league went to the trouble of looking at and overruling a completely meaningless rebound and changing the stat sheet? This is something that would have dried up in two days if they’d let it be. This is some stick-up-the you-know stuff.

-The annoying thing is that this has no effect on how impressive the game actually was except for the meeting of a completely arbitrary milestone-rebounds are the easiest part of that line.

-I mentioned this in the original recap, but it’s double-annoying since LeBron was hoovering down rebounds early and could have finished with easily 13 or 14, but then started “sticking” to Al Harrington and giving up on rebounds until the very end of the game. And his last-second dive into the crowd while fighting off a teammate to grab a meaningless rebound was not exactly the high point of LBJ’s game.

-And now people have something else to “knock” LeBron with that has no bearing on his actual ability as a basketball player. It’s a meaningless thing that the league absolutely made into a story where there didn’t need to be one, and is absolutely a way for the always-savvy Stern to keep LeBron in the news for the weekend to build intrigue for the LeBron-Kobe game on Sunday. This is something that should have been let go, especially without definite video evidence. It’s a brutal microscope he’s under.

-Anyways, hopefully all this stuff will get simpler on Sunday. I’m excited.

-Grammies: Rooting for ‘Lil Wayne and M.I.A, completely fine with Robert Plant and Alison Krause or Radiohead winning, am completely ambivalent towards “chasing pavement,” and for some reason am vehemently rooting against Coldplay even though I like this album. And for the love of god, no Jonas Brothers.

Now, for the weekend, enjoy link to a clip (damn you, disabled embedding) of adorable Latin babies set to the music of Tito Puente. Actually, it’s a song from “Real World” by a fairly decent band who is kind of exactly the same as Paramore, but with a lead singer who’s legitimately attractive and a lead singer in a rock band instead of a chick who’s attractive because she’s the lead singer in a rock band. Also, it’s important that I experience this band without Chet from the Real World, who I hate more than any Real World character of all time, ever. He is an unforgiveable human being. I more or less put that link there to explain how much I hate Chet. I think Chet was responsible for overturning that rebound.