The roads I take...

They really made it!

Unfortunately I haven't been able to watch any of those games (3am to 6am is quite a bad time), but I've been reading all the recaps, and it's just great how this team managed to win the NBA Finals and get to be a 4-time-champion.

A few days ago, San Antonio fans were mocking young Cleveland star LeBron James as "LeBroom" and chanting "Sweep! Sweep! Sweep!" after only two games of Spurs domination over the Cavs. That sounded overly optimistic, but it held true.

The Spurs clearly have joined the club of the best teams of all times in NBA history, and the Duncan-Parker-Ginobili trio probably earned being called "legendary" in the future - almost like Jordan-Pippen-Rodman - even though it's actually the whole team, including players like Rob Horry, Mike Finley, Bruce Bowen and others, and of course their great coach Gregg Popovich, who achieved this great success.

Being a great team is what it's really all about. I followed the NBA playoffs games of the Spurs closely this year, and found that they always had more players on the field as their opponents, with the last finals game being the exception where both teams used 10 players over those 48 minutes - but Shannon Brows of the Cavs is only credited with one second.

After the Spurs had not played like a to-be-champion in the first half of the season, it was really great to see this turnaround - I guess they were just getting better with every game they played this season.

To quote the NBA.com article:
"It never gets old, it never gets old," Tim Duncan said. "Unbelievable. Such a great run, a great journey, a great bunch of guys."

Congratulations to Tim, Tony, Manu, Gregg and all the other great people of the Spurs!
Oh, how I would like to be in the Alamo city to celebrate this...

Umm, so I know I 1) should be in bed by now and 2) you people probably want to hear Mozilla-related stuff from me - but, then, going to sleep early and restricting myself to Mozilla stuff would just not be myself

So, after "my" Spurs managed to make it a good season still after not performing as well as we're used to in its first half, they made the NBA playoffs - and defeated the Nuggets 4-1 in the first round. Good job, guys. When it was said round two vs. the Suns would be an interesting head-to-head matchup, also between Steve Nash and Tony Parker, I'm sure commenters didn't mean it the way those two players performed it on the field today...



The first of those photos is about a second after Parker's head hit Nash's - the second is Nash with the taped, bleeding nose in the last few minutes of the game. Parker's bump in his forehead looked quite bad as well in the short post-game interviews, but as it wasn't bleeding, photographers didn't give it much attention, it seems. When they crashed into each other, it even seemed that Parker was hurt worse than his opponent, going down immediately - and even both the two players thought that at first, as this ESPN article implies. It turned out that Nash was the one bleeding, though - and with his team trailing one point, he couldn't help them as much as they'd have needed in the last minutes of the game.

Not that they needed him, really. They managed to have all chances they needed to win the game without him - and they failed to use any of them. Being more of a Spurs fan, I don't feel bad about their loss though. It wasn't as they would have dominated the game, the Spurs were playing better most of the game, and Manu "Obi-Wan" Ginobili didn't even show off his talent.
I still wonder why people said the Sun's bench would be so great it would win the series, as even in this series, the Spurs bench is stronger in number of people acting on the field. (see the box score for details)
OK, this was just the first game, and I guess we'll be seeing a few more. And not all of them might be won by the Spurs. In fact, even as a fan, I'm not convinced they'll win it. But chances got higher with that win on the road.

Oh, and while I'm on the topic - isn't it great how those tough Warriors from the Golden State shot the season-leading Mavericks off the playoffs? Astounding, awesome, heroic. Klingon warriors probably couldn't have done better. And the fans play a big part in that - see how Steve Kerr praises the Oracle Area crowd in his blog.

Hmm, enough said, I guess. Let's see what those teams can show in the rest of those playoffs.
Oh, and I promise I'll blog about Mozilla topics again. I guess another round of status updates is due - but first I should really get some sleep.