Day Three of One Twenty Four

[Q_FBE]

Besides our game:

1) Atlanta 107, NJ Thirty-Seven or so it seemed. Atlanta is one team that flies under the radar but they have the third best regular season record combined over the last four seasons behind Boston and Orlando. They maintain enough talent have a deep bench. I recommend paying attention to this team. New Jersey did not bother to compete after Atlanta put a 13-2 run on them in the last 4 minutes of the 1st qtr to lead 28-11 and were predictibly booed off the floor by their fans. They won their game in Washington in day 2.

2) Minnesota - Milwaukee  The big north central shootout. This was the other great game of the night and it went to Milwaukee. I still think that Minnesota will do better this year. I expect Milwaukee to barely make the EC playoffs unless Bogut gets hurt again.

3) Sacremento at Portland - Portland takes advantage of a soft opening week sked to start 2-0. Sacremento hung in there for a half before depth, talent, and experience wore them down after beating LA at home the night before. I expect Sacremento will not be in the playoffs (too much depth in their division) and Portland to be a bubble team a la Milwaukee in the east.

4) Utah @ LAL I guess playing Utah at home on the third night of a back to back to back is the best pairing a struggling Laker team can hope for. Al Jefferson was miserable last night on both ends of the floor. This was a horrible game to watch after the Celtics frankly got jobbed again on the road. 

[Q_FBE]

The NBA is going through it's early week of surprises.

Good Surprises (not necessarily beneficial to the Celtics)

The Hornets are 2 and 0 beating two good teams to prove the Patrick Ewing theory espoused by Bill Simmons, a professional blogger for ESPN. They lose their two best players and teamwork emerges. We will see how long that lasts.

Mark Jackson's Warriors seem to buying into the concept that defense wins games and the result is they beat a good Knicks team and scored less than 100 doing it. Good to East Coast basketball migrating to the West.

Philadelphia was in town last night and whomped on the Pheonix Suns, too bad I was at another Phoenix sporting event and they lost 2-1 in OT  . All of the Bruins fans were happy until they saw me react in horror to the ESPN bottom line of NBA scores. Then they tried to get me to focus on the Bruins and Patriots.

The Lakers look as human as their rivals to the east.

Bad Surprises:

1) Well the obvious one is the local team we pontificate about ad nauseum is 0 and 3

2) The Heat barely beat the Bobcats.

3) The Mavericks who saved the NBA last year temporarily are a weak O-2.

Otherwise, expect the unexpected and wait three to six weeks before it is safe to bet on NBA games.