Welcome! Thank you for stopping by; I will be doing my best to make this site worth your bookmarks and regular visits. The topic is sports; mainly the pros but with a little college talk as well. If you’ve come from my previous blogs, you know more or less where I’m coming from sports-wise, but I’ll quickly recap for those of you who didn’t (but you should – that would be antisocial-network.blogspot.com).

 Being born and raised in Portland (the real one, not that crappy little place on the right coast), I have an undying love, and thus a blatant bias, toward the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team. I love the NBA in general, and follow it closely, but the NFL is King in my book. I don’t even have a team (more on that in future episodes) and I still feel that way. The NFL playoffs provide the most excitement in sports in my opinion. And, I would be dishonest if I didn’t confess to playing a little Fantasy Football now and then. Fanatically.  I like baseball well enough, but don’t think the decision makers at the top of the sport have done enough to keep the game fresh and relevant in people’s minds, and it has lagged behind the other two major pro sports. I really like MMA, which will probably draw boos and hisses from some, but I feel like the UFC has done enough to raise it from being a barbaric bloodfest up to being a legitimate sporting event. Thankfully, there’s still enough of of the barbaric bloodfest element to keep it hedonistically fun to watch. I mean let’s face it, it’s not like anyone is watching boxing or amateur wrestling these days...

So that’s my sports background. I will endeavor in this blog to cover a fairly broad base of topics of interest, so please check this out frequently; new content will be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

 With a title like “Sport Werks”, it seems only natural to begin with German-born Dirk Nowitski and his Dallas Mavericks. The Mavs captured their first NBA championship on Sunday, downing the Miami Heat in six games. It was truly a matchup of “good vs. evil” in these NBA Finals (unless you live in Florida, I suppose), as Dallas had been a class act all through the season and playoffs while Miami came across as arrogant and overconfident. It was a pretty glaring difference in character when comparing the two teams’ stars, Nowitski of Dallas vs. LeBron James and Dwayne Wade of Miami.

 Dirk was all class all the way, giving his teammates and the organization most of the credit for their success while downplaying his own notable contribution. Nowitski hit clutch shot after clutch shot all throughout the playoffs, making almost all the open looks as well as plenty of his signature “fading back, on one foot” leaners. Then, when he finally needed help in Game 6, fellow veteran Jason Terry was there to rain in outside jumpers and fill in for Dirk until he came alive in the fourth quarter. It was pretty gratifying, even as a Trail Blazers fan who saw these same Dallas Mavericks send my team packing for the summer, to see veterans like Dirk, Terry, Jason Kidd, and Shawn Marion get championship rings fairly late in their careers. They all handled it with class. Hell even team owner Mark Cuban, who is easily the most obnoxious thing about the Mavericks, was all class throughout these playoffs. I will admit that his move to bring 78-year-old former Mavs owner Donald Carter up to accept the championship trophy choked me up a little. I would have never thought Mark Cuban would be capable of doing something that caused me to choke up…either I am getting wussier as the years go by, or he’s not such a chump after all. Or both.

Things were not quite so classy over on the Miami Heat side. James and Wade were caught, not once but twice, mocking Nowitski as the cameras rolled. The duo came across as rather sophomoric and smarmy throughout the Finals, and James capped it all off after Game 6, dropping this gem of a quote in the post-game press conference:

“All the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life they had before they woke up today”

Slick, King James, verrrrry slick. You could have simplified that line a little and just said “You haters are just a bunch of losers with crappy lives; I’m better than you and always will be”. Of course the backtracking began immediately, but I think by now it’s clear that James just doesn’t have the maturity to go get clutch wins, to be the leader and the “man” when things get tough. In that respect, he made a wise move when he teamed with established superstars Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami; the pressure to take over big games and be “the man” when it counted was immediately reduced by 66%. The only problem is, James didn’t just not take over the games of these NBA Finals, he almost completely withered during the deciding minutes of the games. His fourth-quarter numbers were pedestrian at best, so much so that he couldn’t even effectively serve as a decoy to get Wade and Bosh the looks they would have needed to win the big games. So now it’s back to the drawing board for the Heat. Who wants to bet me that James and/or Wade (I give Bosh a pass on all the crap for the most part) doesn’t insist on a new coach before the start of the 2012 season, forcing Erik Spoelstra out? Spoelstra did a fine coaching job for this team, but he is a young and fairly inexperienced head coach, and I expect the blame to eventually, unfairly, shift his way. The good news for the Heat is that James, Wade, and Bosh will all be around for a while, free agents like Miami as a destination city, and, as long as the Heat are playing close to a championship level , players (particularly skilled older players who have not yet won championship rings) will be willing to take smaller contracts to go there for a chance at a championship. This year’s team is probably the worst version of the James/Wade/Bosh Miami Heat, because (barring sweeping changes caused by a new collective bargaining agreement that would take place before next season) they will still have several million available to sign players due to every team’s Mid-Level Exception that can be used to add players.

 If the MLE is still around next season, it could be used to grab a couple skilled veterans, a legit center like Samuel Dalembert, or both, depending on how much salary players are willing to sacrifice for a chance at a ring. So celebrate the Heat being shut up and shut down for now, if you are so inclined, but recognize that they will most likely be back, deep in the playoffs, as soon as NBA basketball is played again.