Look what I found in the article on New Jersey going to the Finals... "They beat the Celtics on the parquet 96-88 to clinch the Eastern Conference finals, 4-2, and advance to the NBA title round starting Wednesday night in Los Angeles." http://www.nypost.com/sports/nets/16933.htm Someone forgot to pass me that memo...
If I read another article from any paper from the city of New York regarding sports I think Im going to puke.
Maybe it's a misprint but they should fix that SH*** right away. They meant to say California, because they talked about that on NBC. California and all, nothing to do with LA.
From Mark Heisler in the L.A. Times: In Game 5, the Laker defense let a lot of drivers get O'Neal in foul trouble. In Game 6, they didn't allow the penetration and Shaq kept himself out of trouble at the other end, turning and shooting rather than backing his man in. A conspiracy, however, would be something else. Not that the refs couldn't affect the outcome or some NBA exec under pressure couldn't get demented enough to tell them to. The problem would be keeping it secret afterward. This isn't the Mafia, but a highly visible and media-penetrated sub-culture. If a league exec ever made an improper hint to a referee, it would leak. One day, in a bar, or a labor dispute, or a lawsuit, someone would talk and there would be a scandal they'd remember the rest of the century. Here's how you know it isn't happening. The Lakers are two-point underdogs today. In other words, the books offshore and in Las Vegas are still taking action. If this thing didn't look kosher, it would be whisked off the board. If you think you're suspicious, you're an innocent, compared to a gambler. "If anything fishy was going on, like the college basketball scandals, the lines in Las Vegas would move dramatically," Gary Oldshan of the Gold Sheet says. "There's been nothing like that." Many coaches and players go beyond suspicion into paranoia, but they're the ones who can acknowledge only two outcomes: "We won," or "We were cheated." Hmmmm, does that last line describe anyone on this BBS?
The right-wing, Murdoch-owned NY Post is the dumbest paper in that city. It serves up a continuous buffet of red meat for the urban rednecks that read it ("Houston is a hell hole" was courtesy of a Post sports columnist during the 94 series).<p> That they would prematurely give the Western Conference to the Lakers only points to their contempt for fact-checking, not anything more nefarious.