NBA: Conference Finals // All Sports & The Dynamics of Change
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“SPORTS NOTEBOOK” posts its columns Tuesday and Friday of every week---Ed. & Publ., Marvin Leibstone.
NBA: IT’s still anyone’s guess as to whether it’ll be the Eastern Conference’s Boston Celtics or Miami Heat playing the Western Conference’s Oklahoma City Thunder or San Antonio Spurs during the NBA’s 2011/12 championship series. Right now,
We’ve been saying that the competition among the four teams is also about the values of star power opposed to less or more teamwork, which certainly characterizes the Thunder and the Spurs competition; and within the Eastern Conference, it’s a battle between two triumvirates, as if three royals and two plain but high-numbered cards make the full hand needed for glory in professional basketball (this has defined the Celtics and the Heat long before the conference finals began; think: Boston’s Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce facing Miami’s LeBron James, Dywane Wade and Chris Bosh).
The above-cited arrangement of the chess-pieces hasn’t altered significantly for the East or Western conference post-season teams, and dramatic changes are unlikely even if both sides go to a seventh game, when a surprise tactic can be the one winning factor. Here’s the remaining schedule for the conference finals that are bleeding uncertainty profusely with regard to a projected finish, more so than during previous years:
EAST: Tonight, 8:30 ET; Thursday, June 7; Saturday, June 9
WEST: Wednesday, June 6; Friday, June 8
ALL SPORTS --- You can get to thinking, “Same ol’ business,” from an individual athlete being MVP time and again, or from a team listed in the top three in its division month after month, year after year. Then something happens, a new face champions a particular sport, the expected loser revs it up and becomes a winner---a team that’s been marginal for years climbs the ladder rapidly, setting records. Example: a horse called “I’ll Have Another” wins the Kentucky Derby and then the Preakness and this Saturday, June 9, could win the Belmont Stakes and be the 34th winner of horse racing’s coveted Triple Crown, when odds have favored many other horses, “I’ll Have Another” having been entered by an owner classified as a dropback, as horse racing’s version of the irrelevant participant, allegedly dirty re. drugs, getting in his own way, seeing the bottom more than the top.
Year after year, Formula One racing driver, Mark Weber, finished in the bottom half among the many F1-qualified drivers. Mid-decade, this veteran of F1 went to a new car team, soon winning races and commanding up front positions along the grid, taking first place at Monaco. Weber is now a leading driver of a sport that for years seemed to be the same race repeated every two weeks, with, after crossing a finish line, the same win, place and show drivers going to the podium. For the six races held this year since the F1 Grand Prix season began in March, there have been six different winners. Not very long ago, German-born F1 driver, Michael Schumacher, was the sport’s annual champion six years in a row, usually with the same second and third place finishers alongside him at the podium. Since Schumacher’s first retirement, there have been more than six annual F-1 win combinations, enough to bring F1 back to the U.S. Austin , Texas
Within the NBA, the Oklahoma City Thunder, a small market team built from remnants of the former and declining Seattle Sonics, reached the post-season two years in a row and could be the 2011/12 NBA national championship team. Unexpectedly, the Washington Nationals are a leading MLB team this year. No-one thought that the Detroit Lions would recover as quickly from being one of the worst teams in the NFL, or that the Boston Red Sox would ever win a World Series, and until a short while ago whoever heard of tennis player, Novak Djokovic, or, for that matter, track star, Usain Bolt?
As to what causes these sudden and surprising shifts in sports, the reasons could surpass a family of nine’s monthly grocery list: on the dark side for the individual athlete breaking records, it could be from performance enhancers or from another form of cheating, and on the bright side it could be out of clean leaps in physical and/or psychological maturity, or from a new coach taking the athlete in new directions. . . For a team suddenly at the cusp of winning, it could be from a pair of outstanding draft picks and/or trades, or from changes in leadership and game-day rostering, maybe from differences in scheduling, or from better training in the off-season, or possibly off of a revised playbook.
More than likely, the quick burst from the bottom to the top includes multiple reasons why, some of which the athlete or a team’s leadership will remain unaware of, and this is what helps to make any sport an amazing story, a narrative of ups and downs that viewers can identify with, in that all persons experience streams of ups and downs, and, yes, always gratifying is when someone, a small group or a large organization that’s been down for a long while is suddenly rising to the top, like the Colorado Rockies having won seven of the team's last eight games, which included a four game series sweep versus the Houston Astros, followed by a three-game series win vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers (this after suffering multiple losing streaks).
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