Heat Shine, Lakers in Doubt for Playoffs

At the beginning of this year's edition of the National Basketball Association season, I was fully prepared to sit back and relax, enjoying while two teams I had formerly disliked, the Miami Heat and the Los Angeles Lakers, made easy runs through the regular season and then breezed through the playoffs, with the expected culmination being an unforgettable championship series against each other.  Uh, well, something else instead happened.

The Miami Heat, a "super" team composed of great players like Lebron James, Dwyane Wade, Ray Allen, and Chris Bosh, did indeed fly through their regular season and will finish with the league's best record.  They also enjoyed a phenomenal 27-game winning streak at one point.  Being the NBA's defending champion, other franchises sought out ways to compose their own unstoppable "super teams", chief among them the Lakers.  During the off-season they signed my favorite player, Steve Nash, from the Phoenix Suns as well as Dwight Howard, who left the Orlando Magic.  With standouts like Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, winning the Western Conference seemed like a sure bet.  But a combination of injuries that kept circulating through the team and poor coordination between the superstars (especially with Howard) caused them to falter badly in the first half of the season.  To their credit, they rebounded and are actually at this writing in a position to inch into the playoffs as a conference eighth (and last) seed.  But Nash is still out with another injury, another starter Metta World Peace is out for the season injured, and, dammit, now it looks as if Bryant is out.  Unbelievable.  Well, if after all this they still make the playoffs, that will be a minor miracle in itself.  But I don't expect them to go very far.

If the Los Angeles Lakers don't make it, there are still plenty of teams for me to root for.  The "sleeper" team that could win the conference title (but would still most likely to lose to Miami) is the very, very fast Denver Nuggets.  We'll just have to see, should be exciting to watch these playoffs...