Yup. That's Mark Cuban on Dancing with the Stars. He's still dancing.
Dear playoffs, we can’t win for losing, can we? I mean, Dallas won the NBA championship but struggled to buy a headline for all of the attention cornered by Miami losing the NBA championship. It’s a good thing Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has deep, deep pockets. Now, the Vancouver Canucks couldn’t find their way to any kind of winner’s circle. Boston won the Stanley Cup and the city of Vancouver seems to be on a bit of a losing streak altogether.
Anyway playoffs, we’ve seen a lot of each other lately, what with 13 games in 16 nights. It’s been good. Too many riots, not enough hugs though. Let’s take stock of some of the losing we’ve done along the way; that’s been part of what’s made it all so much fun. Let’s check in quickly with baseball, too.
1. Mark Cuban lost his voice. He didn’t talk to the media almost at all during these playoffs (drastically unlike his behavior in previous trips to the playoffs). But he found it again, claiming he was just superstitious, and the less he said the more games his team won. Dirk Nowitzki found his nerve, playing gritty, championship calibre basketball even when his shot wasn’t falling in the last game. And then he lost his nerve at the exact moment when he could afford to do exactly that, leaving the court before the clock even struck zero. Because he was overcome by the moment.
2. Roberto Luongo lost his bike mechanic. That’s about all I can really make of this tire-pumping talk. If, during the pre-game warm-up, the opposing goalie takes a shot on you when you’re in net, you have not endeared yourself. Don Cherry pointed this out. At the end of the game Luongo and Thomas seemed to acknowledge some kind of shared experience, but I was hoping to see them hug.
3. Some of us lost some of our shine. Well, we did. Let’s consider Lebron James as the new mayor of Vancouver. Who knows more about having a great thing going on, only to then turn everyone against you? Lebron will take the reigns of the city and tell everyone that, riot or not, you all still have to wake up tomorrow with the same personal problems in your life. So he doesn’t care. But he’ll retract that.
4. Teams taking the field against the Jays lost their main gambit. You can’t just walk Bautista anymore without facing real consequences for having him on base. Because Adam Lind, up in the order right after Bautista, is killing it too. He’s got 6 home runs in 11 games now. In other baseball news, Wednesday night saw a group of spectators (which swelled in numbers over the course of the Giants-Diamondbacks game) win a game of ‘distract everyone from baseball.’ It’s a low-stakes game, but the winning move was to simulate tectonic plates, moving around the outer row of the stadium one seat at a time, every time a pitch was thrown. Also, break up the Nationals.
5. Birdman lost 2 million dollars. The rapper and CEO of Cash Money Records had placed a $2 million bet on his beloved Miami Heat. The two million gone, he’s sitting courtside when Dirk blows by him as he makes his hasty exit after vanquishing the Heat. Not to be out done, I should have bet two million that Dirk and Dwayne Wade wouldn’t share a hug when it all wrapped up. Birdman has also been known to give friends, such as Lil Wayne, a million dollars in cash as a birthday present.
