You make a point about Billups of course, but I didn't see the "piss and vinegar" except in warmups. The Celtics were the more intense and focused team last night, and I think Rich makes a point about Detroit's offensive approach.

Boston +10.2
LA +7.3
DET. +7.4
SA +4.8

This was the basis on which John Hollinger said the Celtics were "one of the greatest teams of all time" and picked them to crush everyone--before the playoffs.

If you take just the point differential for the Lakers since Gasol joined the team, the Lakers are at a +9.0. (It'd be even higher if you don't include the games Gasol didn't play in because of a tweaked ankle.) The +9 is even more impressive when you consider that it was built in the stronger Western Conference and includes the playoffs.

I'm not trying to downplay what the C's did — I still think they're the best team in the league — but the margin between them and the Lakers, Pistons, and Spurs isn't as great as the regular season point differential would make it seem.

Peng, Bynum became the starting center the ninth game of the season. Brown went down in the eighth against Chicago and only played 3 minutes. Prior to that, Mihm started in two of the first eight.

Criminy, you call yourself a fan? You can't even get your own team's rotation right.

I'm not trying to downplay what the C's did — I still think they're the best team in the league — but the margin between them and the Lakers, Pistons, and Spurs isn't as great as the regular season point differential would make it seem.

OK. Fine. I agree with that.

You make a point about Billups of course, but I didn't see the "piss and vinegar" except in warmups.

You didn't? They were trapping and double teaming up top to beat the band. From about 3 minutes in to the middle of the second quarter, they were playing like it was a 15 minute game. Sheed, Billups and Maxiell all got in foul trouble by being overaggressive defensively.

get us back to topics of more general interest

I blame the holiday-weekend lack-of-a-news-cycle. How about this:

Canada's Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the case of a man who said he lost interest in sex after he found two dead flies in an unopened bottle of drinking water.

Waddah Mustapha sued the bottling company, saying he had suffered psychological damage, including depression, phobia, anxiety and damage to his sex life after the unpleasant 2001 discovery.

He won C$340,000 ($343,000) in damages in a lower court, but the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he had not proved his case.

"Mr Mustapha must show that it was foreseeable that a person of ordinary fortitude would suffer serious injuries from seeing the flies in the bottle of water he was about to install. This he failed to do," the court said.

Mustapha said he vomited after finding the fly and now found it hard to shower. He also said he was afflicted by visions of flies walking over feces.

A liberal would say that the Canadian government should fly Mustapha to his own pristine lake preserve in the Rockies and provide him with round-the-clock sex-surrogate therapy.

A conservative would say that Mustapha should go back to whatever country people with strange names like him come from if he can't take a little bitty ol' fly in his water.

A libertarian would say that the bottling company, as a private individual, should not be compelled to remove flies from its product just because they offend certain other individuals, and that voluntary gravitation of fly-loving and fly-averse water drinkers to different bottlers' products would create a perfectly balanced world.

Most Canadians would say that depression and lost of interest in anything fun are much likelier to be connected to following the Blue Jays.

Feel free to flame someone and get us back to topics of more general interest. ;- Maybe Furtado can make an NBA thread for the basketball guys...

He's still alive and running this place? I could have sworn at one point that it was decreed that the Lounge was a scourge on humanity that had to be removed from the main site, because it detracted from all of the baseball talk.

That this thread has been permitted to meander on for the last 5000+ posts without even pretending to be talking about baseball made me think that Furtado had been killed, or at least threw his hands up in surrender and gave control of the site to someone else.

Feel free to flame someone and get us back to topics of more general interest. ;- Maybe Furtado can make an NBA thread for the basketball guys...

Nice, and, yeah! The nerve of some people to talk about something other than baseball on a baseball site.

He's still alive and running this place?

Perhaps he decided this thread was ghetto enough, sort of like some cities treat their red-light districts. Keep all your troublemakers in one area, the better to keep an eye on them.

He won C$340,000 ($343,000) in damages in a lower court,...

This just seems impossible. Who would take this seriously enough to make an award in this guys favor in the first place? And did defending counsel put this guy's squeeze on the stand? There could have been visibly mitigating circumstances. The sheer dissocation of the original verdict makes me think Scalia must have been moonlighting with the awarding court. (How's that, rr ;)

6006 hit the spot. Well done, Bob.

Name me a team in all of NBA history that didn't have flaws.

1983 76ers. Come on, give us a tougher question.

Well, Malone exaggerated when he said "Fo! Fo! Fo!" They were the '99 Yankees of the NBA playoffs, and the only reason they didn't win more than 65 in the regular season was that they were in a brutal division with every team over .500.

Yeah, that team's in the mix with their own 66-67 team, the 95-96 Bulls, two or three Lakers teams and about half a dozen Celtics teams. They weren't particularly deep compared to some of those other teams. They were more like the other great Sixers team, with a great first six and then a big dropoff after that.

But Moses Malone---the most underrated player in NBA history. Maybe the best personification of the blue collar athlete I've ever seen in any sport.

A libertarian would say that the bottling company, as a private individual, should not be compelled to remove flies from its product just because they offend certain other individuals, and that voluntary gravitation of fly-loving and fly-averse water drinkers to different bottlers' products would create a perfectly balanced world.

I would argue that if they don't list flies or fly-related products as an ingredient on the label, that they can't put flies in the water. The company should reimburse the guy for one bottle of water, one dose of pepto bismol, and one hour of a trip to a shrink that berates him for being a #####.

But Moses Malone---the most underrated player in NBA history. Maybe the best personification of the blue collar athlete I've ever seen in any sport.

Don't feel obliged to reply, Andy, but why underrated, and why blue collar? I've never owned a teevee, so I didn't see Moses play enough to know his game.

Maybe you did have to see Malone play to fully appreciate his game, arky. But I never hear him talked about in the same breath with guys he regularly beat up on in head to head matchups---and I'm not talking about PPG, I'm talking about how he would take them out of their game. He was the best offensive rebounder I've ever seen, especially when it came to the rare skill of getting repeated boards in a row in the same sequence of shots. Ask any old time Bullets fan what he did to Wes Unseld in the 76-77 playoffs, and inch for inch Unseld was possibly the strongest center in NBA history.

I guess the word I'm looking for is tenacity. I've never seen any big man other than (of course) Russell and Bird who could equal Malone in that regard---and (Celtics fan alert) Russell was far more of a thinking man's player than Malone, who was the first non-college NBA star and had blue collar written all over everything except for his paycheck.

Ask any old time Bullets fan what he did to Wes Unseld in the 76-77 playoffs, and inch for inch Unseld was possibly the strongest center in NBA history.

He used to kill Unseld.

Andy, I'm not sure malone is underrated. After all, he did win 3 MVP awards. So he was recognized as a great player in his time. And he dropped off the table after '83, so his run was relatively short. His problem was that 80% of his game centered on his ability to rebound. He couldn't pass. At all. And he was just a good interior defender. Not great. You could go over the top on him.

You are right about his offensive glass work, though. He was a beast there.

Dwight Howard reminds me of Malone, arky. Watching Howard will give you a good idea of how good Malone was.

Thank you, gentlemen. That gives me an excellent picture of the man, which I'm about to supplement with the google. Uh, who does Dwight Howard play for, kevin?

It's pretty funny that Basketball-reference lists him as being 215 pounds.

Andy, would you say Malone was probably the seventh best center of all-time, behind Russell, Wilt, Kareem, Hakeem, Shaq and Duncan?

Top 10 Playoff Plays: Moses Malone

The man can play.

Uh, who does Dwight Howard play for, kevin?

Um. Orlando?

Can't you find Howard on Youtube as well, ark?

That's about right, Jon T. I thinka the 3 MVPs has to put him up there. He wasn't any good after the age of 30 but he was a horse in his twenties.

I would rate him about equal to Hakeem.

Can't you find Howard on Youtube as well, ark?

Wise guy. Off to the tube it is.

Andy, I'm not sure malone is underrated. After all, he did win 3 MVP awards. So he was recognized as a great player in his time. And he dropped off the table after '83, so his run was relatively short. His problem was that 80% of his game centered on his ability to rebound. He couldn't pass. At all. And he was just a good interior defender. Not great. You could go over the top on him.

Kevin, I'll bow to the fact that you probably saw Malone play more than I did, but it seemed as if every time I saw him he was a dominant force in the game. You're right that he went downhill after he turned 30, but then he also began his career at 19. And FWIW he was quite a bit better on the foul line than any center I can remember other than Dave Cowens, which is a nice skill to have late in a game. They couldn't play hack-a-Moses and get away with it. If the Sixers had had him from the start they would have won at least two more titles (80 and 82) and possibly one or two others beyond those.

Andy, would you say Malone was probably the seventh best center of all-time, behind Russell, Wilt, Kareem, Hakeem, Shaq and Duncan?

For career value, probably about there. For peak value, Walton would go above him because of his all-around skills, but they're all so close that it's hard for me to separate them all that much.* On any given night any of them might be the key man in any given game against any of the others.

*For career value to his team(s), I'd go with Russell, Kareem, Shaq, Duncan, Wilt, Hakeem and Malone; and for peak value to his team(s) (meaning at the top of his injury-free game, even granting how short it was) I'd say Walton, Wilt, Russell, Kareem, Shaq, Hakeem and Malone. (Wilt had a brief period between shooting too much and shooting too little where he was unstoppable while at the same time not crowding out the rest of his teammates. At that point, and only at that point, he was better than Russell. But no center has ever had better all-around skills than Walton. That bad foot of his is the greatest might-have-been in NBA history this side of Maurice Stokes and Connie Hawkins.)

Damn. DH can dunk a little, eh? He plays like he's around 7'-6. Wonder whether he'll be able to adjust once his knees start to go.

"Rich, cut the Pistons some slack. Billups is hurt. Badly hurt."

Fair enough.

However, with great athletes like Prince and Hamilton and to some extent Wallace, they could fast break once in a while. And instead of playing the pass-it-around-the-perimeter offense every time in the half court, why not try some pick and pops or pick and rolls? Rasheed Wallace is capable of doing a lot more than he's asked to do in this offense.

When Larry Brown coached this group -- mostly still the same guys plus Stuckey and minus the other Wallace -- they actually had a plan on offense. Again, I am not an expert. But it does not appear that Saunders actually coaches what could be called an offensive system.... I think Doc Rivers does a better job, but that's not saying much.

"Russell was far more of a thinking man's player than Malone, who was the first non-college NBA star and had blue collar written all over everything except for his paycheck."

Malone was terribly inarticulate. I don't know if he was stupid, but it came across that way. Nonetheless, the guy was a great basketball player. At his peak, he was the best center in the NBA, though usually rated below Kareem in those days.

"Dwight Howard reminds me of Malone, arky. Watching Howard will give you a good idea of how good Malone was."

In my memory, Malone was much meaner and grittier than Dwight Howard. Moses was a superior athlete for a big man, like Howard. But he was tougher: more like a thinner Rick Mahorn in that regard.

He used to give Kareem fits. Kareem couldn't keep him off the glass. He'd just bury kareem in the paint. Riley got so frustrated in the '83 Finals, in desperation he tried playing Rambis on him.

Of course, that worked even worse.

Well, the Spurs are back in it, with a convincing performance. Kobe was strangely passive, until it got too late to make a difference.

Game 4 should be a doozy.

Are you going to reply?

Reply to what?

email

I already replied.

I already replied.

You replied to the email I sent you at 11:34? Hmm... I don't see the reply.

I replied to the one you sent at 8:53.

IOW: You choose to have that stand as your reply to the subsequent one? Ok; your choice.

That's the only one I've gotten. What else do you want me to reply to? To my own reply?

Interesting: I've sent three after 11:20.

Yes, that's very interesting. Apparently, my blackberry has already picked up on the fact you can't be trusted either.

Sure.

I think we've finally found the way to kill this thread.....

I would like to reiterate my request that a video camera be brought to this meetup.

I think we've finally found the way to kill this thread.....

I agree.