Monday, April 23, 2007

Tonight's Schedule

Orlando @ Detroit

The darko revenge series returns....

The tale of the tape for game 1 is pretty cut and dry. Despite shooting a mind-blowing 58.1% from the field (including a combined 13 of 19 from the Turkoglu/Darko contingent) the Magic managed to screw themselves by shooting all their free throws blindfolded. Actually, that's a lie but it sure seemed like it.

Now, it's easy to look back and say that if only the Magic had been "kinda" bad from the line instead of "completely shit the bed" bad, they would've won. But frankly, I'm just not buying it. Detroit seems content to play this series just well enough to win. And that's basically how they've approached the whole season at home. Despite having the best record in the east they were ranked 5th in home wins (only 1 more than 8th seeded Orlando). And not only that, 'Sheed and the boys were a dismal 16-26 against the spread at the Palace. Not really sure if there's a precedent for this, but this team made their mark on the road. BIG TIME.

So look for this game to be close, but never actually in question.

Utah @ Houston

Utah continues their quest to take AK47 from 1st Team NBA All-UNDERrated to the MVP of the all overpaid team. The guy's on the hook for $17.8 million in the 2010-2011 season. Somebody might want to give the guy a pep talk. Or maybe just put him in the right position. Wrong position or not, this situation still baffles me to no end. One minute he's putting up insane stat lines of 12 blocks and 7 steals. Now his box score is nothing but 1's and 0's.

The bigger problem for Utah in game 1 was the play of Mehmet Okur and Carlos Boozer. A comined 17 points on 6 of 31 shooting is definitely not gonna get it done. Say what you want about Van Gundy teams and their defense, but it certainly isn't THAT good.

Since 1996, Jerry Sloan teams are 5-17 when trailing a playoff series. Those numbers don't lie.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

you dont think orlando has a shot to beat detroit?