Friday, April 20, 2007

Warriors are in. - NBA notes - 04/18/2007

An amazing thing happened today in the NBA. The Golden State Warriors made the playoffs after 13 years. Thats s long time in the NBA. It's almost harder to miss 12 straight playoffs than to make it 12 straight years. The fans in Oakland are ecstatic. They don't even know what to do since this is a brand new experience. There are probably teenage kids who have never seen the Warriors in the playoffs. There's true excitement in the Bay Area for this team. The W's blew Portland out with another 40 point first quarter. W's won behind a triple double for Boom-Dizzle who had 12-10-14 and Stephen Jacko who had 31. This game started 30 minutes ahead of the Clippers game and the Clip-joint probably knew that the W's are in as they floundered against the Hornets at home. The game was up and down, but the Hornets finally won at the end. David West had 32 for the Hornets.

Cleveland won against Milwaukee and the Bulls lost at New Jersey as the Cavs clinched the 2-Nd spot. Thats just great news for the Cavs. They don't have to face Miami in the first round and they now face the Wizards, the team everybody wants to play in the L-East. Vinsanity had a near triple double to beat the Bulls. The Denver-San Antonio and Houston-Utah games featured no big names and a lot of bench players.

In Sacramento, Lakers won to hold on to the 7-Th spot. Kobe had 34-7-6 on a good shooting night. This is probably how they want to go into the playoffs. There was a Luke Johnson sighting in Toronto as he started and scored 30. We have not seen this Oregon Duck in a long time. Andrea Bargnani played and played well for the Raptors and thats great news for them. But the real story of this game was Willie Green dropping in 37 for the Sixers who were without AI- junior and Kyle Korver.

The NBA season is finally over. It was a fun season though the end seemed a little anti-climatic with a lot of teams both at the top and the bottom having nothing to play for and resting all their stars. There was more talk than usual about the bottom teams throwing games away to get the top picks. There was also some talk about Minnesota shutting KG down and not competing hard because they want to get in the top 10 picks. The Clippers own that top-10 protected pick from the Sam Cassell-Marko Jaric trade. Too much chatter like this at the end plus the whole Joey Crawford suspension thing. The Commish brought down the hammer on Joey for Tim Duncan's ejection and it looks like Joey's career is done. He is refusing to talk to the NBA about the incident and says he would do the same thing again. Yeah, thats what the Commish wants to hear. Timmy did accept that he called him a "piece of s**t", but still the second T for his laughter on the bench was ridiculous.

LA Lakers @ Sacramento - 117-106
Golden State @ Portland - 120-98
NO/OK Hornets @ LA Clippers - 86-83
Denver @ San Antonio - 100-77
Houston @ Utah - 91-101

Interesting games on the board for Apr 19-Th (Thursday)

None ... Nada ... the season is over. Ready for the playoffs.

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