It's All Over

As the Knicks wrapped up their series, losing 4-1 to the Miami Heat, I learned three things about myself this season. 

First, despite what I say, I cannot be impartial with teams that I have liked in my past.  The Knicks are one of those teams and I went through all the highs and lows of the season with them.  I enjoyed the team when they were at the peak of Linsanity and felt terrible when we all knew D'Antoni was on his way out.  It was fun watching a team I used to like do well again, even if they were a quick out from the playoffs.  Now if only the Mets could advance to the World Series, I would probably lift my three year ban.

Second, being an analyst is really hard.  Not that I would ever call myslf a basketball analyst, but putting your picks out there can be a tough proposition.  Unless you are the second coming of Nostradamus, you are most likely going to be wrong a good percentage of the time.  So the real trick is fooling the reader into ignoring your previous incorrect prediction with some kind of statistic or a few witty comments.  Did you know the Knicks set the consecutive playoff losses record at 13 games, dating back to 2001?  Also, Carmelo Anthony now has a career playoff record of 16-36.  That is a .308 win percentage, making him the worst out of any player with at least 50 games played.  I certainly hope that there will be more wins next year, and less marks of futility.

Lastly, it is a good time to be a Knicks fan.  I am actually looking forward to next year.  There are a few things the Knicks need to work on.  Free throws is one area.  They were 22nd in the league this year, which is kind of amazing considering they seem like they should be a good shooting team.  In addition, they need to work on closing out the first half and coming out strong in the 3rd quarter.  For a fan, this was the most agonizing part of watching them this season.  This was usually the time when teams would come back and even the score or pull away if they were already leading, as Miami did in all four games they won in this series.  I think these are motivational and focus issues which can be fixed.  I will discuss the returning players in a later post, but it seems like they will have a decent roster.  Let us hope management can flll some key holes. 

BACK TO THE NBA:

Despite the Knicks being bounced out of the playoffs, I am excited to see the rest of it and see who will come out on top.  However, the first round has not been as exciting as I had anticipated.  Besides the Memphis-Clippers matchup, there has not been that many battles.  One odd thing I noticed is that no series went 2-2.  There were two sweeps from OKC and the Spurs, Miami and Indiana won 4-1, and all the losing teams in had to win the last game to make the series 3-2.  We could potentially not have any game 7s in the first round of the playoffs this year.  I wonder if that has ever happened before.  One thing that always amazes me is the amount of weird stats that you will be shown throughout any game you watch.  I hope that if it does end up that there no game 7s this first round, a statistic comes up to tell me if this is the first time that has happened or the last time it happened.  I supposed it is not that hard to find it if I muster some initiative.  We only started having best of 7 series in the first round in 2003.  Whether or not there is a first round game 7, the rest of the playoffs should be more interesting and I expect it to be more intense.