Results tagged “NBA Finals” from The Sports Desk

Today's column was fun to write, a good exercise because it made me think about what makes one sports event bigger than another. How much bigger are the NBA Finals and the Final Four when the Lakers and UCLA are involved? How much less big is the Super Bowl because an L.A. team is never involved and the game is never played here? I could keep tinkering with my rankings for a week and never feel they're completely right. Tell me what you think of my list after reading the column, which follows.

My Wednesday column was written from the Lakers-Celtics game. Steve Dilbeck and I huddled quickly at the end of the game, making sure we weren't writing the same angle, and it turned out we had ideas that complemented each other in a good-cop bad-cop kind of way. I wrote that the Lakers displayed the toughness to win despite not playing their best, while Steve wrote that they're still in trouble unless they play better than this.

My column follows ...

In our effort to cover sports in a lot of different ways, we've added a 14th sports blog at dailynews.com.

The difference in this one will be obvious right away: It's written in Spanish.

Take a shortcut to the new blog, Deportes Daily News, by clicking here.

Marc Berman, who covers the Knicks for the New York Post, observes in his Knicks blog that sportswriters in Boston's two major newspapers were unanimous in picking the Celtics to beat the Lakers. This is unremarkable, since writers do tend to hear more from the hometown team and often are swayed by its optimism.

But this should make us all appreciate our own columnist Steve Dilbeck and the steely objectivity he displayed in his NBA Finals prediction column. Dilbeck picked the Celtics to win, even though that's not what most readers here wanted to hear.

Read on for Berman's complete blog item.

I didn't hear it myself, but the Daily News' Vinny Bonsignore says ESPN radio talk-show host Colin Cowherd complained today that NBA Finals games start too late. Yet another example of ESPN's eastern-time-zone bias.

Now, if you're really feeling creative, pretend you were a sportswriter covering the game, and tell everybody what your lead would have been. Just a paragraph or two. Use the Comments section.

We're as ready as the Lakers and Celtics are for the Lakers and Celtics to tip off tonight. Here in the sports department, we've been gameplanning for the NBA Finals for a couple of weeks now.

You'll begin to see the results in eight pages of series preview material wrapping around the sports section in today's paper, followed by four pages of coverage wrapping around the sports section in the paper following each game. We've scheduled more in between, including news- and features-section stories to appeal to non-basketball fans, keepsakes and surprises.

Look for more Lakers posters in the next two Sundays' papers: this week, a poster honoring Lakers all-time greats, and next week, a celebration of this year's Lakers team.

A couple of thoughts ...