2008 NBA Finals: Lakers vs. Celtics

[Ripper 0]

I really hate when people judge others pain and how they should have reacted to it. Thats just kinda dumb to me.

 

Zo did his whole (I am walking off on my own) because there was a chance that was his last time on the court. Seeing as he had been wheeled off before, lets not pretend thats the norm.

 

We are also pretended we werent' all watching the game when the sideline reporter was telling them about how he wanted to try and walk and the trainers said no. this isn't your rec team. Its a highly paid athlete whose health is the difference between a NBA championship and getting swept.

 

The Celtics were having trouble scoring at the end of the first half. Paul Pierce comes out hot. So since he is hot Paul decides to fake a injury? That is just dumb.

 

Most times when guys feel that "pop" in their knee its not only a sprain but a slight dislocation that goes back into place soon. Once again, that shit fucking hurts.

[Brett Favre 0]

I'm not saying he faked it. But you know that guy that twisted his ankle and he's like "OH SHIT..okay, hold on, aahh crap.." and he just twisted his ankle? That's Paul Pierce. Here's what he said:

 

"I think God sent an angel down and said, 'Hey you're going to be all right. You need to get back out there'," Pierce said.

[Ripper 0]

And I am saying there are different degrees of a twisted ankle. You can twist it and it goes right back into place and all you have is some soreness. You could slightly dislocate it which feels like you are being stabbed everytime you put the slightest weight on it, then it slides back in place and you can walk again. It could be a violent twist, like you were going for a rebound and your entire body weight lands on it causing some small tears in some ligiments there.

 

Its just plain silly to say how someone should react to something when you have no idea what you are feeling. Yeah, that quote is fucking lame and overdramatic, but go over your history of watching Paul Pierce play. When does he ever go down? like...ever? he got up fine when Marvin williams and Josh Smith landed on him, he was hurt but he got up and walked it off. The reason he didn't walk this off is because the shit hurt like a bitch when he tried to walk.

[Damaramu 0]

I'm just wondering how it's going to affect him in game 2.

 

Last night he was pumped full of adrenaline and they wrapped it and he went out on an emotional high.

I'm just wondering if it's going to start swelling or get sore and affect him in game 2 when he doesn't have all that stuff going for him.

 

Any word on Perkins? I don't think he ever came back into the game.

[Ripper 0]

Depending on the sprain, there is a chance he might not be in too good of a shape in game two. Thanks to this wonderful extra day 2 days of layoff for no reason whatso fucking ever, he has some time to get it back in shape.

 

I HATE this fucking finals schedule.

[naiwf 0]

All I'm saying is that he acted like his knee got Carson Palmer'd and 5 minutes later he's hopping up and down while making his heroic Willis Reed inspired entrance. Either he's "soft" when it comes to pain the moment it happens or he really wasn't that hurt in the first place and oversold how much he was hurting. If guys on the local sports stations are calling attention to it when we have no horse in the race I think it's safe to say that a lot of people share the sentiment that it was a whole lot of commotion for what amounted to something he could easily play through.

[Ripper 0]

You don't see the insanity in YOU saying HE could have played through it when he tried to stand up and couldn't? So if you can't pop right back up from a injury or it takes a few minutes before you can walk on it, you are being a pussy? Jesus.

 

Why in gods name would he milk a injury when he was hot and the team needed scoring? What kinda sense does that even slightly make. I would even see if this was a guy we haven't seen get hurt and get back up plenty of times, but shit man.

 

 

 

I know I am not going to convince anyone otherwise of what they think, but I just find the whole thing silly. Paul Pierce is being called a pussy because he came back from a knee injury and/or didn't pop right back up after it happened because that is OBVIOUSLY what he could have done.

 

[naiwf 0]

The crying and wheelchair ride made it look like he was a pussy when he came back less than 5 minutes later. It was very soccerish when the guy dives and clutches his knee like he's holding the ligaments together himself, does a stretcher job and is up and running 2 minutes later. If your knee "pops" you're done for the night. When David Ortiz felt a pop in his wrist the other day he's out for at least a month and possibly half a season. When Paul Pierce feels a pop in his knee of all things, he's out for 3 or 4 minutes. I'm almost willing to bet he won't even have a limp by Sunday's tip. I know that you won't see it otherwise but a LOT of people are wondering what the deal was there and I'm sure God and his angels had nothing to do with his miraculous and/or instantaneous recovery from what appeared to be a season ending injury.

 

 

[nl5xsk1 0]

While I agree that it's a bit over the top to start talking about Divine Intervention or angels or anything, it's insane to say "he ended up not being hurt, so he's a pussy for erring on the side of caution". At the time of the injury, he thought that he was more injured than he was in reality. Happens all the time. Players lie on the floor, writhing in pain, and end up not even leaving the court or needing any real assistance.

 

And the tears, in my biased Boston eyes, were more "I can't believe I finally got to the NBA Championship and I might be too hurt to even finish one game" ... not tears of pain.

 

And not for nothing, the NBA is the league that had a player carried off the court with a broken nose a few years ago. And Dwayne Wade leaving the court in a wheelchair because of a shoulder injury. To have a player be treated with extra care isn't really new or shocking.

[The Niggardly King 0]

Even though I joke about the injury... I'm gonna cringe whenever I see the players pick him up like that. It's like, "REALLY??!! YOUR GONNA JUST CARELESSLY PICK UP THE LEADER OF THIS TEAM LIKE THAT... REALLY??!!"

[naiwf 0]

While I agree that it's a bit over the top to start talking about Divine Intervention or angels or anything, it's insane to say "he ended up not being hurt, so he's a pussy for erring on the side of caution". At the time of the injury, he thought that he was more injured than he was in reality. Happens all the time. Players lie on the floor, writhing in pain, and end up not even leaving the court or needing any real assistance.

 

And the tears, in my biased Boston eyes, were more "I can't believe I finally got to the NBA Championship and I might be too hurt to even finish one game" ... not tears of pain.

 

And not for nothing, the NBA is the league that had a player carried off the court with a broken nose a few years ago. And Dwayne Wade leaving the court in a wheelchair because of a shoulder injury. To have a player be treated with extra care isn't really new or shocking.

 

Who was the nose guy? I also remember that a lot of people thought D-Wade was a pussy when that happpened. I remember him getting ripped on all of the ESPN shows and vaguely recall some guy saying his wife going into labor had less histrionics involved than Wade's shoulder injury.

[Ripper 0]

People called him a pussy but at the same time, how the fuck were they supposed to get him off the court without moving the shoulder at all. Once again, most sports writers are a bunch of fucking pussies that have never felt a injury in their life. He had a dislocated shoulder and tore his labrum. Every single inch that thing moved probably was more pain than any of those fucks have felt. So they took him out on a wheelchair to stop it from moving.

 

I have broken a rib and it didn't hurt as bad as the dislocated wrist. I got shot and it didn't feel as bad as the sprained knee and partially tore my achilles and it didn't feel as bad as a sever sprain on the other ankle.

 

Injuries are not the fucking same. EVER. To even try to judge how much pain is involved and how it should be handled is once again, beyond silly.

 

Whining about Pierce crying like there was no reason for it when he tried to stand up and he couldn't put his weight on his knee, after all these years in the NBA in his first finals game is also silly. Its shit like this that makes me want to hit sports writers in the knee with a crowbar.

 

It will always conjure up memories of Woody Paige saying that Barry Bonds wasn't really hurt because when he hurt his knee he was back riding his bike in X number of months and Barry was still trying to hurt longer. Just fucking ridiculous.

[OldSchoolWrestling 0]

I see it the same as when a football player is down after a play and the trainers come out and eventually he walks off the field. A play or two later or even a series later he is able to come back. When you are initially hurt it may hurt like hell but then you can shake it off and come back.

[Precious Roy 0]

Anyone making a big deal over this Pierce thing just comes off to me like they never actually played sports at anything beyond a pee wee level and/or never had a sports related injury. He was acting? Come the fuck on.

 

Plus there's just the simple common sense of the trainer not letting him immediately put weight on it after Pierce has told him, "I felt a pop, and it really fucking hurts." Once they get him back in the locker room on a table and the trainers can actually examine the injury and determine that there's no major structural damage, that's when they give the ok for him to try and go with it. That's just standard procedure in a professional sport.

 

I worry about Pierce for the rest of the series though, a sprained knee won't go away in a couple days, especially if every other day he's playing basketball on it. He says he'll play Sunday, but I bet he's going to be very limited and in a lot of pain after a couple minutes up and down the court. Also, he's apparently refusing to take an MRI till after the series, so while the trainers will have an idea of the injury, they won't know for sure if there's any small tears in any of the ligaments.

 

Just as an aside because it relates to this, I've experienced a severely sprained knee in combination with a partial (around a 1/4 of an inch) tear of the MCL (the ligament on the front of your leg that connects the knee cap to the tibia), during a basketball practice. When it happened I was down on the ground for at least 2-3 minutes and even the slightest movement of my leg was just total, mind-searing pain. After the initial pain subsided I was helped to my feet, stood on it, stretched it out, kind of tested it with weight and walking for a bit, and after about 5 minutes of that I re-entered the practice. The next day when I woke up my knee was swollen to shit, I could barely even move the thing, just getting out of bed hurt, and I decided I had to go see a doctor. It took a good week and a half to two weeks for me to be even close to doing anything more than just walking, and the partial MCL tear bothered me off and on for about a year.

 

I only share this as an example of how there are different stages of an injury, how you can go from initially being in a ton of pain, to feeling ok almost immediately afterwards, to being in much worse shape once activity stops and swelling sets in. Like Ripper has been saying, every injury is different and everyone reacts differently. I have no doubt that Pierce was in a lot of pain when it happened, and I don't doubt that it will be bothering him for the rest of the series.

 

Also, Pierce got stabbed 11 times, had a pierced lung, and was back on the court in less than a month. Nobody should question that man's toughness.

[Kurt Angle Mark 0]

Game 1 got an 8.7 rating, a big disappointment for ABC I'm guessing

 

 

Everyone is quick to blame the Spurs, but I have been saying it for awhile the reason NBA Finals ratings have gone way down is because the play-offs are stuck on cable with the new TV deal. When the play-offs were on NBC you got a ton of games on the network and thus they could build an audience for the Finals. Now you get 1 or 2 games on ABC a week with a couple of hand picked teams being shown.

 

 

[Guest Epic Narcissism]

It's a lot of factors: the relegation of so many games to TNT and ESPN is a big part, along with the fact that the NBA coverage that ABC does have is very poorly marketed (I've been saying this for years) with no established announcing team, no heavy promotion, and since Super Bowl XL, producing the games as ESPN programming which happens to be shown on ABC. I've hated that move from day one. You can talk all you want about ESPN being a global sports/lifestyle brand and all that, but in the minds of many, ESPN is still a notch below network sports departments. There's still a certain cachet that comes with being CBS Sports or NBC Sports, and even ABC Sports to a lesser extent, that you can't replicate with "ESPN on ABC." It just sounds and feels like a downgrade, because there's no distinction being made between cable and network programming. Even TNT does a better job producing meaningful basketball programming.

 

But really, we're never going to have the ratings we had in the Jordan years ever again. Those days are gone forever. The NBA isn't a phenomenon that transcends mere sports programming. For a league currently reviled for its flopping Europeans and mob-tied referees, an 8.7 is probably the best you're going to get.

[Guest Tzar Lysergic]

On the subject of injuries, one of the most painful ones I ever had was an injured finger while sparring. I peed a little. I laid a hook right into a buddy's elbow, and my ring finger said

 

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!"

 

Thing swelled up like a bratwurst that night.

 

I ended up just splinting it and taping it for a couple of days with some ice and it was fine. A little tender.

[Guest Tzar Lysergic]

The roundabout point I'm making is that I've also been hit by a car, and the finger hurt more. Give the guy a break for having a five minute agonizing injury with no lasting effects.

[Ripper 0]

They should just make a "there can only be one" commercials with two refs. Because apparently that is what everyone is tuning in to see. Refs blow the whistle.

 

 

this game should get really interesting once the refs decide to stop fucking the Lakers over and let them play.

[Brett Favre 0]

I hope Paul Pierce can make it through this game.

[alfdogg 0]

Good to see Pierce's injury hasn't affected his flopping ability.

[CanadianChris 0]

I'm amazed the Celtics aren't up by 20 or more, what with them having three extra guys on the court at all times.

[Guest Vitamin X]

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one thinking this is getting to be Finals 2006 levels of whistle happiness.

[Ripper 0]

Doc Rivers is charismatic as fuck. I see why he will always have a job in the NBA.

[alfdogg 0]

The advantage of guys like Kobe and Garnett getting technicals is that they can now yell and cuss out and fingerpoint the referees all they want knowing that they wouldn't actually throw them out in the NBA Finals.

[Ripper 0]

I wonder if a superstar has ever been ejected from a finals....hell...playoff game with techs when it really mattered(not getting kicked out with 2 minutes left in a blowout. Like...kicked out in the 2nd quarter or something).

 

I remember this one time Utah was playing Seattle in the first round, and Gary Payton had gotten a T earlier. Then he and Karl Malone got into it later and it was a double T. Gary looked at the ref and said "you just kicked me out the game". The ref changed the call to just a T on Malone. I thought it was so hilarious that they were so obvious with the bias.

[Ripper 0]

I know I asked it before, but I have to ask again....how did Luke Walton go from important cog in the Laker offense to worse player in their rotation? In one freaking offseason?

[The Niggardly King 0]

did he get a new contract?

[Guest]

Yes. I'd sure love to blame the referees, but when role players fuck up possession after possession, it's kinda hard. We were in perfect position to make a big push before Radmanovic shoved a finger up his ass and took a terrible shot, followed up by a whatever the fuck he was trying to do with his left hand.

 

The Celtics get away with murder though, yeah sure.

[Brett Favre 0]

Odom needs to take those jumpshots that he keeps passing up. It ruins the possession.