The first weekend of the NBA playoffs is more than half over and I still haven't put my virtual money or my mouth on the line as to who will advance past the first round. Thus, without getting into too many details (the round will be over if I start spouting; although I'll try to chime in here a few times later in the week), here is the thumbnail version of the way I see it shaking out, with cavaets included where current events have already overtaken my original "wisdom."

Eastern Conference

Heat over Nets in 4.

The Nets have quite possibly the worst collection low post players in the league. The Heat have Shaq. And I still don't like Vince Carter.

Pistons over Sixers in 5.

Philly gets a game only as a means of respecting AI, the second-most valuable player in the NBA this year behind Shaq. A sweep wouldn't surprise me.

Pacers over Celts in 6.

Until yesterday's blowout, I had Indiana winning this in 5. Guess I'm still living in the past, where 'Toine Walker was a rally killer instead of franchise rescuer, and Paul Pierce always has to take--and miss--the last shot. Seriously, although they enjoy a serious edge at point guard (Payton over Anthony Johnson), and better depth, I don't see the Celts overcoming deficiencies in the paint (even with Jermaine O'Neal's bum shoulder) or on the sidelines (Carlisle may be the league's best coach).

Bulls over Wizards in 7.

 Yes, I do think Chicago will sorely miss Eddy Curry in the middle. But Scott Skiles has had them playing great team D all year--check their opponents field goal percentage--and the Wizards are too predictibly reliant on their big three (Arenas, Hughes, and Jamison) for offense. Key matchups: Hughes vs. Hinrich in the backcourt early, Hughes or Arenas vs. Gordon in the backcourt late. (I think the game one is on as I write this, but I don't know the score.)

Western Conference 

Suns over Grizzlies in 5.

All this talk about whether or not uptempo teams can thrive in the postseason will have to wait until the supreme uptempo team--Phoenix--is tested. The dysfunctional Grizzlies are dangerous only so long as they feel like they have nothing to lose. That should be worth a game, two at the most.

Spurs over Nuggets in 6.

This is the series I most anticipate, and the one I am least confident in calling. Variables abound, from the health status of Duncan and Camby (which is huge), to the fascinating matchup between greased lightning Tony Parker and seam-seeker Andre Miller, to inevitable fireworks between the arrogant 'Melo Anthony and the bruising Bruce Bowen. And don't forget K mart, who can be as chippy as the next guy. The more emotional it gets, the more it favors the Spurs, who have a superstar ice man in Duncan and a maniac disciplinarian in Popovich to keep them in line.

Sonics over the Kings in 5.

I had this series going six until I saw how useless the Kings were on the glass for long stretches of the game last night. Plus I want karma to squash the Kings for the two terrible trades they made this year (even if the C-Webb sacrifice was long-term shrewd, knowing the guy was going to blow out what's left of his bad wheel sooner rather than later). Sac has no matchup for Richard Lewis, Peja is a huge choker, Bobby Jackson and Brad Miller aren't close to full strength, and Ray Allen, the best player on either team, is playing for a max contract and max respect around the league. Only an unconscious series from Mike Bibby (who spit the bit last night) or a team choke from a Sonics squad that still doesn't believe it's very good will extend this series beyond 5.

Mavs over Houston in 7.

I had Dallas winning in six before T-Mac trumped Dirk in Dallas yesterday. There are certainly reasons to pick Houston, beginning with McGrady's magnificence and Jeff Van Gundy's court smarts. And Wolves fans still sympathetic to Kevin McHale might note that Houston went out and got four solid-to-very-good backcourt people to lend ballast to the T-Mac/Yao dynamic: Mike James, David Wesley, Bobby Sura, and Jon Barry. It is hard to pick a team in the post season that contains Keith Van Horn, long one of the league's most overrated players. But the Rockets counter with Yao Ming, who is more overrated than Van Horn. Yeah, I know, if the guy could only rest in the off-season he might live up to the hype. But until that happens, we'll see blunderbuss showings in the spring from the big galoot, and Dikembe Mutumbo isn't going to bail him every game as effectively as he did yesterday. Finally, somebody please take that microphone away from Mark Jackson, who is as banal and slow as an announcer as he was durign his last five years at the point.

The online sports press is gushing about the Vikings top two picks in the first round of yesterday's NFL draft. CBS Sportsline.com's senior football writer Pete Prisco hands out his only A+ grade to Scott Studwell and the other Purple People Drafters. ESPN.com's pigskin guru John Clayton cites the Vikes behind only Dallas in his "winners and losers" column, saving some praise for the team's second-round choice. And over at the website shared by Sports Illustrated and CNN, former Vikings beat writer Don Banks likewise slots Minnesota as the second best winner among all NFL franchises, this time as runner-up to Dallas. Finally,  SI/CNN.com's John Donovan, after first voicing reservations regarding the Purple's pick of Troy Williamson over Mike Williams, quickly comes around to proclaim that, "The Vikings got all they could hope for from their two first-rounders."

While I love what the Vikes have done with their defense--especially the signings of Smoot and Sharper in the secondary--all these huzzahs about Williamson must be tempered by the fact that he arrives at the cost of losing Randy Moss. And as good as Williamson might be (thus far all we really know about him is that he's very very fast) I think it is fairly safe to say that there will still be an extreme drop-off at the wide receiver position this season.

Meanwhile, what does it say about the increasing senility of South Carolina coach Lou Holtz that he had a blazing stud lined up on the wing for three years and rarely got him the ball? (Um, I guess is says that Holtz is increasingly senile. ) 

The Associated Press is reporting former NFL cornerback Michael Brim, 39, died in a shootout with another man Tuesday night. Brim was drafted by the Cardinals in 1988 and played for seven years with various teams including Detroit, the New York Jets, Cincinnati, and the Minnesota Vikings from 1989-1990.

Read the full account of the shooting here.

Heckling During the Malik Sealy Memorial Is a Good Start

To: David Stern
From: Paul Kaiser, Jim Walsh, Pat Widell
Re: Is it easier to throw a man out of an arena or throw a ball through a hoop?

Dear Mr. Stern

We just got kicked out of the Timberwolves-Spurs game. We're not that surprised it happened, just at how quickly it happened. We told people we were going to inspire Kevin McHale to suit up--at least then we might have had two players on the floor who cared.

Read the rest of Jim Walsh's letter to the NBA Commissioner here

Heckling During the Malik Sealy Memorial Is a Good Start

To: David Stern
From: Paul Kaiser, Jim Walsh, Pat Widell
Re: Is it easier to throw a man out of an arena or throw a ball through a hoop?

Dear Mr. Stern

We just got kicked out of the Timberwolves-Spurs game. We're not that surprised it happened, just at how quickly it happened. We told people we were going to inspire Kevin McHale to suit up--at least then we might have had two players on the floor who cared.

The way Malik Sealy cared. We tried to pay tribute to the late guard by yelling during the Malik tribute before the game, "He was a player," and "he cared," and "we loved him." People sitting nearby came up to us and told us to shut up and threatened us with fisticuffs.

If I need to explain why that is so disturbing, then your league is part of a bigger problem. You must sense it, deep down. We told people as we went into the game, including the woman at the box office, about our Draft McHale plan and everyone thought it was a good idea. Everyone laughed.

Once we started loudly voicing our opinion, people told us to relax. People told us to shut the &^&**%%%$#&# up. We just wanted to see McHale play, because he was tough and competitive back when the league was worth talking about. Heard a great quote the other day from 20th-century Protestant theologian Richard Niebuhr: "Most people are right about what they affirm and wrong about what they deny."

We started getting grief from fans, ushers, security, and, finally, Minneapolis's finest. We left without incident. We asked the officers, Why? They talked about rules and really had no good answer. We weren't belligerent. We were just preaching the truth. Anyway, we got the tickets for free, because one of us freelances for the Wolves fan publication Wolf Tracks, the staff of which and the dishwashing crew we saw at Champps before the game would have made a better team than the mutts in uniform.

As they were booting us and we were calmly expressing our bewilderment, it seemed like the cops actually wanted to listen, because we were making so much sense about everything. It was like their eyes were registering a pilot light, but the furnace wouldn't fire. One of our sons asked, "Are people going to think this is funny, or obnoxious?" Hard to tell, Bud.

Anyway, when we told them we were inaugural season ticket holders, they threatened to revoke our season tickets, which was funny because we cut our losses three years ago. We don't care like we used to, because they don't care. Nobody does. Nobody cares that the police kicked us out of an event in which we pay huge amounts of money to watch other people make even huger amounts of money play a game in the United States of America, land that we love, land where you apparently cannot express a profanity-free, semi-drunk opinion (like, "You've got no heart," and "Howard Dean cared")--opinions that our seating section used to thank us for a decade ago, when we were passionate regulars.

We're done. We hate even talking about how screwed up everything is, so we get together and go to a game, like we did when Bill Musselman was alive, and minimum wage lunch-bucketeers fought and clawed their way to a more respectable record than the legendary 2004-5 Minnesota Timberwolves, a team with exactly one heart.

So ban us. Hell, you'd be lucky to have the three of us behind your bench all next season. If you weren't playing hard, we'd let you know about it. If you played hard, we'd love you 'til the end of time. Minnesotans are funny like that.

And for the record: We'd like to think that McHale, Garnett--players who care--wouldn't have objected to us calling out the team's performance and blowing off a little steam about the mess this world is in, including the NBA, which issued us with three WARNING cards that read:

You are being issued a warning card that the comments, gestures, and/or behaviors that you have directed at players, coaches, game officials, and/or other spectators constitute excessive verbal abuse and are in violation of the NBA Fair Code of Conduct. This is the first and only warning that you will receive. If, after receiving this warning, you verbally abuse any player, coach, game official, or spectator, you will be immediately ejected from the arena without refund.

Oh, well. The night was fun. We had a couple of beers, went to the ball game, got a taste of what the Clash sang about in "Police on My Back," and Public Enemy rapped about on "Fight the Power," all within 20 minutes. We got home to our wives and kids early, and wrote a letter about the world our kids are growing up in, and the elephant-in-the-arena-fact that (to quote Leonard Cohen) "everybody knows."

Sorry we said anything.

Fantastically,

Paul Kaiser
Jim Walsh
Pat Widell

Minneapolis, Minnesota
United States of America

The NFL's "Monday Night Football" is leaving ABC after 35 years for ESPN starting with the 2006 season. The deal will cost ESPN $1.1 billion over eight years. No word if Al Michaels and John Madden will be moving to ABC's sister station. No doubt there's a few ESPN staffers would like to take a crack at calling some games.

This leaves ABC the only network station without football, as NBC will take over ESPN's Sunday night game for $600 million over six years and host the Super Bowl in 2009 and 2012. NBC is hoping to lure men to, say, the Cardinals versus the Bills and away from Desperate Housewives. Hopefully ESPN's Sunday night crew, including Joe Theismann and that grouchy Paul guy who resembles a walrus in a necktie, will get their walking papers because of this.

La Velle E. Neal III's Twins recap is utterly befuddling. The third-grade sentence construction is painful enough, but then he loses all grasp of the English language.

The runs can be scored on 450-foot homers, seeing-eye singles or (gasp!), even because of a walk.

However they are scored, it seems to happen to Twins righthander Brad Radke in the first inning of games.

"It happens to me a lot," he said, "but I swear I don't do it on purpose."

The trend did not change Thursday night, but it didn't matter as the Twins smacked the Tigers 10-4 to sweep the three-game series and headed Cleveland with a four-game winning streak.

Radke (1-2) settled in for the flight able to avoid his first 0-3 start to a season. And he tied Jim Perry for third on the Twins career list with his 128th victory.

On Wednesday, the Twins were able to score in the first inning for first time all season. On Thursday, Radke gave up two runs in the first inning, following a trend in recent seasons in which he's most vulnerable in the first inning. The stats back it: Radke has a 5.58 first-inning ERA since 1999. Through three starts this season, it's 15.00.

The 2005 NFL schedule was released today and the Minnesota Vikings could be in for a very long season. The NFC North has been making some notable off-season improvements, and a Moss-less offense against Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore may need a lot of help from the recent acquisitions on the defensive side of the ball.

Sept 11 Tampa Bay
Sep 18  at Cincinnati
Sep 25  New Orleans
Oct 2     at Atlanta
Week 5 BYE
Oct 16   at Chicago
Oct 23   Green Bay
Oct 30   at Carolina
Nov 6    Detroit
Nov 13   at N.Y. Giants
Nov 21   at Green Bay
Nov 27   Cleveland
Dec 4     at Detroit
Dec 11   St. Louis
Dec 18   Pittsburgh
Dec 25   at Baltimore
Jan 1     Chicago

Silva's one thing; how's Morneau going to hold up after his beaning?

It's a little too early to fire up warning flares, but the Twins in week one didn't exactly look like the world-beaters that pre-season surveys made them out to be. The obvious item of concern is Carlos Silva's knee injury. Silva was a solid starter for the team last season, and the Twins don't have starting pitching to burn. But he's not likely to be a big difference maker either way--as the 2005 Baseball Prospectus item on Silva points out, he racks up very few K's and depends on his defense for 90 percent of the outs made while he's pitching. Silva's been lucky on the balls-in-play batting average of his opponents, but guys like him are always a simple turn of luck removed from looking like very different pitchers.

The Justin Morneau beaning looks more worrisome to me. Incidents like this have been known to dampen or even ruin whole careers. That's rare, but it's not at all uncommon for players to take a very long time to find their poise and their reflexes at the plate again. Sammy Sosa got beaned in early 2003 and took over a third of a season to get back on track, and he was a lot more comfortable in a major league batter's box at the time of his beaning than Morneau. 

And Morneau's bat, unlike Carlos Silva's pitching, would be a very tough thing to replace. How he does at the plate in his first weeks back will be one sort of clue as to whether the Twins will be just a good team again, or the elite team many think they are this year.

UPDATE: Around the time this was posted, the Twins placed Morneau on the Disabled List, retroactive to last week.