NBA Playoff Thoughts - The East

Thought I'd jot down my thoughts on the NBA playoffs - we'll start with the East...

If you're not a fan of a specific Eastern Conference team, the conference is almost unwatchable, and frankly has been for like 7 or 8 years. An Eastern team may very well win a championship, but they play an unpleasant brand of basketball for a neutral fan. It's like a conference full of Baltimore Ravens.

You have the Pistons, whose devotion to fighting through picks and seamless switching on defense is impressive, but ugly. There's the Heat, who are fun to watch if you enjoy Shaq and Wade shooting forty free throws a game. Toronto is fun, but never on television. Cleveland is a disgrace to offensive play-calling - watching LeBron shoot 35-foot three pointers is pretty low on my priority list. New Jersey, once the most exciting Eastern team to watch, doesn't fastbreak too much anymore, and focuses more on Vince Carter in the halfcourt, which is exciting the one out of every five games Vince gives a shit. Then you have the Bulls, who despite being young and athletic, play Scott Skiles' ultra-disciplined system. At least this year we don't have to watch Rick Carlisle's Pacers - you know, I bet Skiles and Carlisle have both had the same thing for breakfast every day for the last 25 years. You could probably make a good buddy movie with them, call it "Carly and Sky". Two antagonistic buttoned-up, by-the-book accountants/free-throw contest champions have a bizarre day of wild accidental criminal hijinks. I'd watch it. If Jessica Alba is in it.

When Gilbert Arenas and Caron Butler went down, the East lost its most genuinely fun team, leaving only Toronto to carry that mantle. So I've been pretty disappointed that Toronto has delivered a general stinkbomb in these playoffs. Even the games they won didn't have the same energy and spirit that's marked the second half of their season.

Cleveland basically got a bye, Detroit-Orlando had zero interesting moments, and Chicago swept an injured Miami team easily. Sometimes I don't know why I bother to watch Eastern Conference games - as a neutral fan, I never come away satisfied.

Anyway, nothing's happened yet to displace Detroit as the odds-on favorite to win the conference. The Bulls might be able to, if Luol Deng has his coming-out party, but realistically I think Tayshaun Prince reduces Deng to merely a good player and Billups and Hamilton should frustrate Gordon and Hinrich. I could be wrong though. That's happened in the past.