Bringin' down the House

Bringin’ down the House



The play offs are now upon us, we have the first round in the books and nobody loves play off basketball more then me, but I have to say outside of Chicago-Boston this first round was a snoozer. ESPN has saturated you with all of the Boston-Chicago news and if you follow basketball you watch all the game so this is all I’m going to be saying about that series. I was great, but not the best ever. Let’s get real it was a first round series. I loved it, I watched every game but the stakes weren’t high enough to make it the all time greatest. This garbage that was the Atlanta-Miami series was miserable to watch. The average margin of victory was 20+ points. The home team won every game and if you want to win a championship or just beat the Cavs at least one time you have to win one game on the road and the Hawks couldn’t beat the one trick pony Miami Heat one time on the road.
The Denver Nuggets are playing some amazing basketball right now. They have done the most remarkable job of morphing from an offensive team to a hard nosed defensive club. I can’t state the fact that the trade for Chauncey Billups was one of the best trades ever that I have seen. Billups has taken command of a team that had very little discipline and turned it into one of the most disciplined teams in the NBA. When Denver gets a lead of ten points or more the game is over. Billups can control the flow of the game so that if the opposing team tries to make a run he will nip it in the bud. They can turn a ten point lead into a twenty point lead in no time.
The match up in the second round isn’t going to go well for the Dallas Mavericks. The Mavs are a finesse team and the Nuggets are a big physical team. The Mavs are a jump shooting team. They have no big man that can be fed the ball and score with his back to the basket. Dirk is a jump shooter but he doesn’t drive the ball enough to create shots for the rest of his teammates. The 109-95 win today was telling. Denver shot shot 36 free throws compared to the 13 of Dallas. That shows that they are just sitting back shooting jumpers.
The Los Angeles Lakers-Houston Rockets series is going to be the best series of the second round. Yao Ming is going to give the Lakers fits. Yao Ming is dominant in the post and LA doesn’t like to play behind big men they like to play in front of the opposing big man. This is going to cause trouble for Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol. I’m really looking forward to this series; my call is LA wins the series in six.
Thank you,
Jared House