Hot hot heat

It was 90 degrees in Boston all day today (For Hursty and the rest of the world, that's over 32 degrees celsius). On April 7 in New England, that's unheard of. And tomorrow, the high is 58. I've heard about global warming, I saw An Inconvenient Truth, and if this isn't climate change then I don't know what is. A forty-degree change between two days is ridiculous.

There has been some "climate change" in the NBA lately. Two examples: the Boston Celtics and the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The Celtics have flat-out sucked lately. They've lost four out of the last five games, and the win was to the Cavs, who own the best record in the league and have clinched homecourt advantage throughout the playoffs. So that was a good win, but they still blew a 20 point lead in the fourth, so it left a bad taste in Celtics fans' mouths. The losses came to the Spurs (understandable), Thunder (understandable), the Rockets without Kevin Martin, Shane Battier and Trevor Ariza (shouldn't have happened) and the Knicks (inexcusable).

The Celtics' painful inconsistency has been embarrassing lately for a Celtics fan. I'm not embarrassed about losing--the wins and losses will come, especially when your team is aging quickly, it can all be expected. But the reason that it's been embarrassing lately is some of their apparent arrogance. Garnett is still jawing, and he can't back it up. So is the rest of the team. THAT is the embarrassing part. I can't apologize for the club that I root for, but if I could, I would. I wish the Celts could just shut up and play as hard as they can.

Which is something they haven't been doing lately, apparently. In the paper I've read countless quotes about how "their hearts aren't in it". It's a pretty quick turnaround that the Celtics have had lately. I'm not saying they're out of it, I'm not--but their ball lately has been painfully inconsistent for sure. Especially from the point of view of a MA resident and Celtics fan. It just bugs me that they're complaining about the calls WHILE the other team is putting up a layup on the other side.

The OKC Thunder sucked last year. AND the year before. But a lot of us knew that they would come around and be a playoff team in the future (I see you, BET), and right now, I see them as a formidable foe in the playoffs in the West this year. Yeah, their average age is 23. Which only means that they're ready to take the league by storm in years to come. Durantula going off for 40 seemingly every night. People haven't caught on yet, but Russell Westbrook is a nightly triple-double threat. Jeff Green is insanely versatile. The one thing that this Thunder team is missing is a decent center. After that....the league's theirs.

I feel like I (maybe all of us) can relate to this team more than any other because of their youth, style of play and tight-knit-ness off the court, because that's the sort of cameraderie that I feel with my friends/teammates, and they do things that we all do, based on articles I read and quotes that I hear. This team is so intriguing and fun to watch, when I was watching them own the Celtics in the fourth the other night, I found it hard to know who I was rooting for. And that NEVER happens, it was just impulse.

So, the NBA waters have been churning lately, and new things have been coming out for these seasons. I'm not saying that these huge turnarounds are unpredictable, but who knew that Garnett was gonna fall off THIS much, and that OKC would be near the top of the West NOW?

Then again, did anyone predict that the hottest day of the year in Beantown could end up coming at the beginning of April?

--Moose