6 Thoughts
1) Beat down in Miami. You could see it coming after an atrocious performance and late escape against New Jersey on Saturday night. Oklahoma City looked long, athletic, quick, and energetic. Miami looked lethargic. Besides Dwyane Wade, who struggled through a 6-19, 22 point effort, Miami doesn't exactly overwhelm anyone physically. Tonight they looked outclassed athletically. They are 7-3 after 10 games, but it's a bit of a mirage - the schedule has been soft, and heavy on home games. With Wade healthy, they a .500 team, maybe slightly better - so they are bound to come back to earth some.
2) Second year Thunder point guard Russell Westbrook absolutely annihilated second year Heat point guard Mario Chalmers. Westbrook, bigger and stronger and as quick as Chalmers, harassed him all over the court, making it hard for Emcee to get Miami into their offense. On the other end, Westbrook bullied Chalmers with 24 points on 9-13 shooting. Westbrook has an especially abrasive personality - taunting, smirking, and swaggering; Chalmers is as mild-mannered a player as there is in the league. It felt like a night where Mario had to stand up for himself physically and emotionally - instead, he got punked.
3) I'm not even going to elaborate on it, except to say that the whole situation is about to get ugly, organizationally-speaking, but Mike Beasley somehow managed zero (0) rebounds in 23 minutes.
4) If there was any bright spot for the Heat tonight - and, really, there was only one - it was Daequan Cook finally starting to show some rhythm coming back from a mild shoulder injury. 17 second half points for Cook, 14 in the fourth quarter, with 4 threes. They desperately need shooting and scoring right now - Cook provided that throughout the first half last year before injuring the same shoulder, and it would be a huge boost if he consistently gives them same kind of shooting off the bench now that he is back.
5) Well, every year you know you are going to see something that you have never seen before. Early in this one, Thunder forward Jeff Green (one of Dos Minutos' Top Ten Least Favorite NBA Players) started a drive approximately 35 feet from the basket, careened slightly out of control, ran over a stunned and stationary Jermaine O'Neal - back from taking a day off against the lowly Nets - and earned an easy charging foul from official Ed Malloy, in perfect position under the basket. Except, young official Brian Forte came running in from nearly midcourt, forty feet from the collision, to call a block on Jermaino, claiming that he was inside the "no charge" line near the basket. Replays showed Jermaino was roughly a foot and a half outside the line - whatever, that happens - NBA officials make bizarrely incorrect calls all the time. Except in this case, there were two calls. The referees huddled, discussed the play, and then decided to assess fouls to both O'Neal and Green and have a jump ball at midcourt. I'm no referee - much like a po-lice, the job description is to make peoples' lives worse, and I'm not with it - but it seems like, out of any decision they could have arrived at, that was the one thing it couldn't be. One guy ran over another guy. Either the second guy was in position, or he wasn't - it's one play - it has to be either a block or a charge, it can't be both. If you want to say, "hey, we don't know - no fouls on anybody, and let's jump it up," fine. Everybody would be fine with that. But to give both guys a foul - that's the only thing it couldn't be, it's the only call you can't make there. On the other hand, it was the call that made the greatest amount of peoples' lives worse at that given moment. Also, the least competent. So I guess we should have expected it.
6) A sobering moment: RIP for Ken Ober, host of MTV’s classic cult 80s game show Remote Control, and a native of West Hartford, Connecticut, my hometown. Also had a starring role on the short-lived television series version of the movie Parenthood. Ken died far too young this week, at the age of 52, of unknown causes. I arrived in my office to a deluge of emails – okay, one, from my brother – informing me of his death. Ken spent more time behind the camera than in front of it as his career progressed, notably on fellow Remote Control alumnus Colin Quinn’s show Tough Crowd on Comedy Central. Most recently, Ken had been a writer and producer on Carlos Mencia’s show The Mind of Mencia, so suicide can’t be ruled out...
Next game: 2morrow, on the road in the Atl, against the hottest team in basketball, and last year's playoff opponent, the Atlanta Hawks. Trouble brewing...
-------------------
