We’ll get you out of here this week on this: Watch the Cavaliers-Magic game tomorrow night. If you are at a bar, be by a television. If you are at grandma’s house, make sure she has cable. If you are at home sitting on your butt, well, you have no excuse.

It is possible this is the last time you will see this man play basketball till next season. Don’t miss it. If it’s not, and the Cavs force Game 7 on Monday night, you’ll thank yourself, because you might be watching a terrific Eastern Conference Finals comeback.

Either way, it’s a win for your eyeballs and brain. See you Monday.

As previously reported, both Jonny Flynn and Chase Budinger worked out for the Bulls over the weekend. Today, the Tribune has Flynn quoted:

“I couldn’t understand why they would bring me in either,” Flynn said at the NBA predraft camp at Attack Athletics, confirming the Tribune’s report of his Sunday workout. “But they said there are times they wish to move Derrick [Rose] off the ball. When they said that to me, it fell into place.”‘

As Eamonn wrote over at NBC today, are the Bulls really looking to move Derrick Rose off the ball? Really? The guy that is great with the ball in his hands, but only a so-so jump shooter? Seems a bit odd.

As for Budinger, he talked about the Bulls’ psychological tests. One he described sounded like a challenge right out of “Survivor.” But then, there was this, from another team:

One of the strangest was when one team asked if he had a girlfriend. When he said, “No,” the follow-up was whether he had any “friends with benefits.”

“That was kind of a whacky question,” Budinger said.

Asked how he responded, Budinger said, “No comment.”

No girlfriend, but a possible girl/girls on the side. Hmm. Seems Chase Budinger will fit in the NBA quite well.

In keeping with today’s let’s-whine-about-the-NBA-refs-theme, NBC’s Ira Winderman writes:

So if there is a fourth referee in the building, one that rated high enough during the regular season to earn the trip and per diem, why not put him to work? Why not station him in the TV truck, where he can see all the angles that a mere six eyes on the court might miss? Why not provide an instant line of communication to the scorers’ table? Would it mean that games then would become officiated differently than during the regular season? Aren’t they anyway?

Sure! Why not? You could even set up some sort of admittedly arbitrary rule by which certain calls could get TV-ref oversight (say, flagrant fouls) — and certain calls don’t. (For whatever reason, I want the NBA’s refs to continue to struggle with block-charge.) But this is just a superficial, easy fix. The NBA is a difficult game to referee, but that doesn’t mean the quality of referees can’t get better. Here are two ideas how, the first of which belongs to Simmons, the second of which I’m pretty sure I first read about at TrueHoop, back before TrueHoop was ESPN’s TrueHoop:

1. Younger refs! Dick Bavetta is approximately 300 years old. He lost a footrace against CHARLES BARKLEY! What on Earth makes you think he can react fast enough to make split second decisions affecting the play of 250-pound athletes jam packed with fast-twitch muscles? He can’t. Nor can many of the aging refs that stalk the NBA’s sidelines. Younger refs, please.

Keep reading →

Shortly after the Keyboard Cat played Carlos Zambrano’s epic rant off, the ruling came down from MLB: a six-game suspension, and a $3,000 fine. His next start will be pushed back two days to June 4 in Atlanta. Could have been worse, but it looks like the contact Zambrano made with umpire Mark Carlson was from Carlson’s end, so Big Z’s suspension and fine stayed pretty modest.

Yesterday in the Cubs’ clubhouse, a large gathering of reporters, mostly middle-age white men, asked Zambrano about the rant, fine and suspension.

And when George Ofman of ChicagoSportsWebio asked Zambrano about his other “incidents,” this happened (starts at the 1:01 mark):

Every man fights back? Apparently Zambrano never lived in Haight-Ashbury during the 60’s.

Instead of dropping a Lost Time mid-day on Fridays, I’m linking back to some entries you may have missed during the week.

+ The Blackhawks won’t be going to the Stanley Cup Finals, but there is promise with this team for years to come.

+ This Michael Jordan clip from 1984 is still driving me wild.

+ Jake Fox is a Hall of Famer. The evidence is here.

+ Eamonn argues even if soccer gets more stats, that won’t necessarily endear it to the American crowd.

Quotable:

“I do think it’s silly for the NBA to fine Phil Jackson because he called a referee a butthead, or whatever, but the issue of attempted censorship in sports doesn’t bother me much. It’s a circus in a bubble, all the participants enter the bubble willingly, and they know they’re expected to abide by the rules. The reason I bring this up, this 90,000,000th time a sports figure has been fined for saying something, is that I believe we have the definitive answer to the question I asked up top. The sports bubble is very tightly and almost completely quarantined, and since its inner and outer workings are wildly different from those of the real world, some of our real-world ideals don’t quite belong in the sports world.” – The Right To Free Speech Doesn’t Apply To Sports, And It Doesn’t Need To, Either

That all hinges on one dude: LeBron James. And I’m not talking about LeBron taking over and scoring 90 points in each of the next two games, and being the greatest, most amazing player this world has and will ever see. I’m talking about getting back to what made the Cavs so great this year: ball distribution, sharing, caring, taking what’s there, LeBron working as the strongest player within the team and putting the accelerator on when he needs to, instead of working as a strongest player without the team and forcing the accelerator.

The former is what happened early on in the Cavs’ win last night; it’s what happened in the second half, when James had a hand in 32 straight points; this is what happened in that magical fourth quarter, when James started posting up on the free-throw line, and either backed down his defender, or looked to dish out a three to Mo Williams or another teammate.

Top to bottom, the Magic are better than this Cleveland team. The talent of their starting five has an edge. But when you have Mo Williams, Delonte West and Wally Szerbiak (and Daniel Gibson) hitting their outside shots, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas being serviceable inside — all things that have been iffy for the Cavs this series — in congruence with an out-of-this-world talent like LBJ, this team can beat anyone in the league.

I guess I was wrong with my first sentence. It doesn’t just hinge on LeBron. It hinges, too, on the shoulders of his teammates playing within the LeBron James-led system.

We at least get the man’s brilliance for one more night this season. Here’s hoping we get it all the way through the end of the Finals.

Remember when everyone thought the Cubs were going to get sold like a year or two ago? And then Tom Ricketts finally won the bid a few months back? And then the deal has dragged on? And then Bud Selig started grumbling about it? And then Sam Zell said if the deal doesn’t get done, there will be others that want the team?

Not familiar with the last one? Zell said it recently:

“We’ve made it very public that the Cubs don’t fit into the long-term picture of the Tribune,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “So if the Ricketts deal doesn’t get done, I’m sure there will be other ones.”

Now, the entire rest of the article goes on to say Zell expects a deal to get done with Ricketts, and that the struggling economy is to blame for the hardships in coming to an agreement. All thing we’ve heard before … the latter being a completely viable excuse: securing credit in this kind of economic downturn is incredibly difficult. Or so I’ve read. I don’t know anything about money, except If I hand some of it to the Chipotle cashier in an hour, I will get a sweet burrito for lunch.

But, Zell’s blockquoted comment here does seem to point to one thing: like Selig and the MLB brass, like Cubs fans, like the media, like pretty much everyone, he just wants this damn deal to get done. If he can’t with Ricketts, he’ll get it done with another group, one way or another.