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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
The NBA's twofer Tuesday: Labor peace and a Pistons win that guarantees the first Finals Game 7 in 11 years.
Jun 22, 2005 | It was a good news, bad news kind of Tuesday for the NBA.
The good news: They'll be playing basketball in the fall. The league and the players association have agreed on a new six-year collective bargaining agreement. There won't be a lockout July 1, as had been feared.
The bad news: They'll be playing basketball Thursday night.
The Flyover Finals aren't over yet. The series that's made America stand up and say, "What else is on?" is going to a seventh game. The Detroit Pistons won in San Antonio for the first time in eight years Tuesday, beating the Spurs 95-86, tying the series at 3-3.
OK, that's a joke. The Pistons' victory wasn't bad news for the NBA. In fact, Rasheed Wallace will tell you that the NBA wants seventh games so badly it's willing to put the fix in to get them.
Wallace's expensive conspiracy theory aside -- he was fined $20,000 for his comments before Game 6 of the Heat series -- it really is always great to have a Game 7. There hasn't been one in the Finals since 1994. And while you were watching "Family Guy" and "Law & Order: SVU," the Pistons and Spurs were turning in a pair of close games won by the visiting team.
All of a sudden, this series of blowouts upon blowouts has turned into what most of us expected it to be: a close, hard-fought, intense, grinding battle in which every possession is crucial.
It isn't Michael Jordan soaring through the lane or Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant putting aside their soap opera for 48 minutes to make some Eastern Conference team look like the Washington Generals. But it's turned into every bit the intriguing series it should have been from the start.
There's no way to look at those first six games and predict with any confidence what might happen in Game 7. The Spurs have the home floor, where they rarely lose and where they blew the Pistons away twice last week -- but also where they got beat Tuesday. The Pistons have the momentum -- which they also had Sunday, right before they lost.
The Pistons earned a seventh game and a chance to repeat as champs by doing something not many teams can do. They shut down Tim Duncan, which they also did in their two previous wins, and in one of their losses too.
Duncan had 21 points and 15 rebounds Tuesday, which is actually an improvement on his averages for both the regular season (20.3 points, 11.1 rebounds) and the playoffs (19.8 points, 14.7 rebounds). Which just goes to show you how averages sometimes don't tell you much.
