Bulls vs Heat Game 4 Recap: MIke Miller and The Heat Get The Monkey Off Their Back and Heat Fans are Retarded

Day before yesterday, I wrote how the Heat were turning the basketball world upside down and were going to stage their own 3-man revolution. Well, I guess Mike Miller took offense to that and decided he would show the world that there are actually other players on the Heat team who do occasionally throw the ball in the hoop. Miller was lights out in the 4th quarter, hitting all 4 of his shots, on a night when Dwyane Wade looked as bad as I'd ever seen him (despite his midnight shooting session the night before). While Udonis Haslem was a surprise contributor in game 2 due to his injuries, Miller has basically been non-existent all season and had pretty much been written off the key contributor list. If they can continue to get scoring from him, (which I doubt) Miami would be unstoppable. Still, the Heat were able to get something out of a guy they thought would be their biggest off-season addition outside of the big 3.

Before I say anything else about last night's contest, a word about Heat fans. They are stupid. And I mean that in every sense of the word. I'm sure there's a couple of real, knowledgable basketball fans (M@d $cientist included) who have been there since the Steve Smith and Brian Shaw days and behave themselves in a sensible manner, but for the most part, Heat fans are very stupid. They only show up when the team is winning (and even then they don't do so until late into the first quarter). The empty red and yellow seats in the AAA are so unsightly, that the team has begun putting white shirts ON THE SEATS. It's like the old joke about the sell out crowd in disguise as empty seats; Heat brass have resorted to literally dressing up seats as fans. I'd venture a guess that most of the hot girls and other tanned douche-bags in attendance couldn't pick Glen Rice out of a line-up let alone be able to claim being there since the beginning. I still remember the crowds in Miami being practically split down the middle between transplanted Knicks fans and Heat fans during the 90s so the fans in Miami have always been about as fair weather as..well, the weather.

Their basketball I.Q. is not the greatest either, as evidenced by the cheers of delight after LeBron did the Kevin Garnett block of a shot 5 seconds after a foul (even Steve Kerr got a chuckle out of that). Also, how about chanting about an actual player for the opposing team, instead of about a loudmouth TNT broadcaster like Barkley that no one pays attention to anyway? Maybe a clever chant like "Noah's a Fag"? If Joakim called a New York fan that on live tv, he'd be ducking D batteries on his way off the court. And while you're at it, ditch the t-shirt throwing thing. I understand most Heat pseudo-fans haven't been to many sporting events outside of wet t-shirt contests, but those towels and t-shirts are meant to be waved, twirled or worn, not tossed in the air like it's new year's eve after every win.

Now that I got my Hater J on, as for the game: The Bulls continued to struggle for long stretches on offense, partly due to great Heat D, and partly due to plain old missing shots. Rose was particularly awful for most of the game, and LeBron's defense on him at the end of the 4th and O.T. played a big part in that. Chicago has a slightly better chance than OKC being that they play 2 out of the next 3 at home (win game 5 and as they say, the pressure switches back to the Heat) but like the Western Conference Finals, Game 4 may have been the back breaker for the losing team. Both teams were a minute away from evening the series and now they're both a game away from vacations. The idiots will be celebrating soon.

Bulls vs Heat Game 3 Recap: Chris Bosh, LeBron and The Heat Revolutionize Basketball

Sometime in the very near future (like mid-June) we might be talking about "remember when we all thought the Heat weren't going to be able to beat the Celtics?" or "remember when we all thought the Bulls would dominate the Heat like they did in the regular season?" and maybe most surprisingly "remember when everyone thought Chris Bosh was a big pussy who didn't belong on the same court as the other two guys, and will get eaten alive by Carlos Boozer and Joakim Noah?". Oh, how naive we all were. Chris Bosh (up there literally taking a back seat to LeBron) continued to be the best player on the court in this series (his one off game, the team won anyway), barely missing a shot after the first quarter and the Bulls continued to look awful offensively.

A lot of credit for Bosh's sudden manliness has gone to Boozer's pre-series dismissal of him, and you have to think there's some truth to that, since he's playing as aggressive as I've ever seen him play. Whatever the reason for his awakening, the Bulls better figure some way quick to stop him. Then again, once they figure Bosh out, there's those other 2 guys. If the Heat big 3 experiment has taught us anything this season, it's that you really can win with 3 guys. You don't need a superstar coach like Phil Jackson to manage the personalities, or a top-notch point guard to run the show, or even a Steve Kerr or Robert Horry clutch bomber. You get 2 of the greatest players of all time and a very good player and you might just win the whole damn thing. Take that, haters.

With every win, Miami is revolutionizing professional basketball. While that "We Did It" bullshit up there originally looked as appropriate as Bush's "Mission Accomplished" sign, it's beginning to look more and more like this team is going to win it all. Easily. Even if LeBron or Wade aren't Jordan (who's unparalleled greatness alongside Pippen gets most of the credit for those thinly talented Bulls team's success), and the supporting cast is still terrible, it doesn't mean a thing. If you stop LeBron, you have Wade, and if you stop him, you have Bosh. The odds of all 3 having off games is minuscule. All those experts who declared the Heat's struggles as justification for real team basketball are going to be proved wrong by the 3 player team that's too good for all of the old school "play the right way" teams or even any team that's ever picked up a basketball anywhere in the world. You're always taught that a team is only as good as the sum of it's parts, a team that plays together as a team with reasonable talent will beat the superstar laden team, etc, etc. The Heat are going to prove all of that mumbo jumbo to be loser talk; stuff coaches of weakling, ordinary teams tell their pedestrian, non-superstar players to get them to believe that the big bullies don't always win. After LeBron and Wade shove the Bulls' faces in the toilets, they'll move on to stuffing Nowitzki in a locker. Basketball will never be the same.

Bulls vs Heat Game 2 Recap: Pardon The Udonis

Pardon the who?!? You read correct, Udonis Haslem. The forgotten man in Miami who missed the majority of the Heat season and had played all of 9 minutes of the 2011 playoffs going into tonight. But there was Mr. Florida basketball carrying the Heat through the latter part of the third quarter and first couple minutes of the 4th when the Big 3 was silent. Haslem's been around for a while now. He's the only other hold over from the 06 championship team besides Wade, and he holds the distinction of being the only player in history to win championships at the high school, college and pro level in Florida as well as the last person on Earth still rocking corn rows. Bottle kept telling me how important he was to the team, but nobody listens to Bottle (even if he's right more often than that squid). And right Bottle was again this time; Haslem scored 11 in the third alone, including two Taj Gibson like dunks from out of nowhere.

It probably speaks more to the sad state of Miami big men than anything else that a guy scoring 15 points is national news, but Haslem gave Miami the spark that they needed as they sleep walked through the first 2 quarters. Besides his unexpected play, though, the other storyline of last night's game was the defense. As Hater J pointed out, it was almost like watching Riley's Miami teams of the '90s out there for some stretches. I half expected Dan Majerle to hit a 3 at some point. LeBron himself had warned people not to expect high scoring this series, and this game definitely lived up to that hype. With the extra days in between games in this series, (game 3 is being played some time before the 4th of July) both coaching staffs will be able to tweak their defenses, (something they specialize in) and last night it showed. The Heat were excellent at cutting off Rose's paths to the basket and the Bulls defense was it's usual suffocating self for most of the game. This isn't to say that Chicago didn't have their chances. All the threes that they were hitting in game 1 weren't going down this time. Kyle Korver, in particular, continued his recent struggles, and he appears to be totally distracted since the announcement that he'll be Charlie Sheen's replacement on Two and a Half Men. Being the slow white guy that he is, he's virtually useless if he's not connecting on at least a couple shots from outside. Reggie Miller suggested during the broadcast that Thibs might have to sit him if this keeps up, and I might have to agree with that.

The final storyline of this unsightly game was the continuation of the sudden transformation to Mr. Clutch by LeBron James. The guy who was branded a choke artist by everyone from Hater J to his own fellow players (he didn't receive one vote on S.I.'s player poll of who should take the last shot) has miraculously transformed himself into the closer. Of course, the perception of Bron as not a big time player was a little overblown anyway. He's hit big shots before in his career (game winners vs. Washington, the buzzer beater vs. Orlando, his domination in Detroit) but last year's meltdown is still fresh in most people's minds (game 5 at least, he still had a great game 6), and some people are just haters. He's changed his late game strategy a bit, though, taking long 3s with confidence and relatively simple pull up jumpers going to his left or right, rather than the ugly lay-up flings that weren't working earlier in the season in crunch time. Even superstar athletic freaks of nature need some confidence some times and he seems to be shooting with supreme confidence late in games now. I don't like the Heat but it has more to do with Riley and the "big 3"'s attitudes as well as residual hate from the 90's (although if you told the 14 year old Bagels that I would be rooting for the Bulls one day, I'd probably smack you with my Jansport). I never doubted any of their skills or abilities.

Now, the series heads to South Beach. In keeping with the league's Green initiative, the players will walk from Chicago to save jet fuel, hence the long lay-off. We'll see how the supporting cast plays away from home (my man Taj seems to feed off the energy of the crowd and vice versa), if Udonis keeps up his Lazarus like comeback and if the Bulls can snap out of their offensive funk. Should be fun.

The Most Hated Person In Sports: The Front Runner

George Carlin had his famous 7 dirty words you can't say on television routine back in the '70s, and while most of those have changed with the shifting morals of acceptability on tv, there are still a handful of words that could start a fight in most locker rooms and sports bars: Choker, flopper, Mets fan and maybe the worst label, frontrunner. Those other names usually reference a flaw in your game or mentality that could be fixed or reversed with the right image-changing moments (just ask Dirk). But a front-runner is the worst kind of sports person, be it a fan or player, coach, whatever. An emotionally weak person who latches on to the successes of others (at least that's how it's perceived).

We all know a few front-runners in our lives. That kid from your office who all of a sudden is a die-hard Heat fan and probably doesn't even know who Bimbo Coles is. The guy at the deli in the Cowboys Jacket who's never left Brooklyn but lives and dies for the 'Boys, or the Jordan fanatic turned Kobe lover turned LeBron supporter (I'm partly guilty of this one). These types are everywhere. In New York, we get a ton of these characters; just take a look around you on the subway when the Jets were making their recent runs. I never knew there were that many Green and white supporters during the Rich Kotite years, because there weren't. Or the bandwagon jumping Knicks fans who ran out to get their Carmelo #7 t-shirts, and then quickly remembered why they jumped ship in the first place. Those types of fans, though, are preferable to the die-hards for teams that aren't even in their city. The guy who grew up being a Braves and Cowboys fan because of their dominance in the '90s are way worse than the fan who wakes up to root for his home-town team whenever they start winning. You can witness this phenomenon any Winter Sunday at your local bar. There's no way that many people moved here from Pittsburgh (I don't even think that many people live in Pittsburgh, I've never met one person actually from there).

Why do we hate these guys so much? Because they like to take the easy way out, rooting for whatever team is on the winning side at any given time. Die-hard sports fans who stick with their team through the good, the basd and the Isiah, can't stand the preening idiot in the Stoudemire jersey who swears he's been down since day one, while the true fans bear the scars of Shandon Anderson and Jerome James starting lineups. This is also the reason so many people hate LeBron and Bosh (and to a lesser extent Wade). As many people have pointed out since last July, these two carpetbaggers couldn't handle things on their own and had to team up and form some kind of a half-assed super team. Fans can't just trade in their team allegiances (they could but deep down they still care about whatever team they ditched). We all wish we could call our agents and say, I'm done with these asshole Mets, I want to be a part of a winner, but it's not that easy and we don't want to be perceived as douche-bag frontrunners, a gene that Cowboys, Yankees and Notre Dame fan LeBron lacks.

So, next time a Heat fan asks you why you're one of the millions of people rooting for the Bulls and (if they fail) whoever makes it out of the West, tell them you just can't stand a front-runner and then get ready to fight.

Bulls vs Heat Game 1 Recap: First Blood

I'm going to try to recap what I think will be the best series of the 2011 playoffs (although every thing I've predicted thus far has been wrong) since there's about 2 weeks in between each game. Nice of David Stern to give me time to get my thoughts together. So, let's get it started.

Last night saw the Bulls draw first blood. Like most game 1s, it can go any of many different ways. The team that just won a grueling or emotional series (in this case the Heat) can either carry that momentum into this next series, or can experience the hangover from exerting all that energy. The Heat started off the game looking like they would fall into the former category. LeBron had a steal, 50 foot assist to Wade for a dunk, another steal, dunk and block shot in about 90 seconds. I immediately texted Bottle that LeBron was poised to dominate, however before I could even press send on a "Bron is dominating" (or something witty like that) text to Hater J. all hell broke loose. Brooklyn's own Taj Gibson absolutely posterized Chicago homeboy D-Wade. It's the type of dunk that will be shown over and over again until M@d $cientist contemplates giving up on sports forever. The type of dunk that Scoop Jackson could write an entire article about. The type of dunk that gets blown way out of proportion by everyone who writes about it. So maybe it's not the turning point in the series or a sign that "these Bulls are for real" or something silly like that, but it was a hell of a play.

And on the game went, back and forth, the Bulls bench outplaying the Miami subs (no surprise there) MVP D. Rose calming down after the early turnovers to hit a bunch of 3s and Chris Bosh of all people dominating down low. Eric Spoelstra made the curious decision to keep Big Zydrunas in a suit, even though you would think that his ability to hit the stand-still jumper would work vs. Noah, who likes to roam the paint. No matter, Bosh seemed out to dominate Boozer after the blatant disrespect that Carlos showed him during the ATL series, refusing to even call him by name and only referring to the Big 2 (even if he's right). The TNT guys said that Boozer was mostly irked that he didn't get an invite to the Heat this off-season and there was a little jealousy happening there. Imagine if Boozer had gone to the Heat, they would have the two most hated players in Cleveland history in their starting lineup. The only thing that could make Cleveland angrier would be to suit Art Modell up in a pair of Heat shorts and let him play power forward. Whatever drove him, Bosh dominated.

Unfortunately for the Heat, he was the only one who showed up. Wade struggled most of the game, and LeBron (whether it was due to Luol Deng's D or not) never got it going after the 1st minute that got me so excited. A close game in the third quarter (Miami actually had a 1 point lead) turned into a Chicago explosion punctuated by another Taj NBA Jam like dunk. I expect the Heat to play much better next game, but the Bulls defense may prove to be too much for them to keep from coming back to Miami down 2-0. So expect the Heat to win by 20.
TAJ!!!!