Friday, April 10, 2009

Return Of The Mack; Denver - Meet: Competition

Return Of The Mack

The much-awaited return of the Playboy-mansion-mack finally happened. For what it's worth, Bynum's return was somewhere between good and great. He was a step slow on some rotations, a step slow in some rebounding situations, and the timing was off on at least one potential alley-oop in the 2nd quarter. All of that, however, is completely expected after over 2 months away from game action. The good? He repeatedly got excellent position deep in the post, pulled down 7 decent boards, and scored 16 surprising points in 22 effective minutes. He looked better and better as the minutes wore on, putting up a bunch (13) of his points in the 3rd quarter. He was passing the ball fairly decently out of the post and working within the triangle offense, and moved pretty well out there. All in all, the LA contingent have to be happy with what they saw, and should be looking forward to improvements in the remaining the 3 games of the season.

As for all those people criticizing Andrew's rehab at the Hugh Hefner Workout Center: get a life you jealous morons. If any guy days away from playing an NBA game can't hoist 110-pounds-when-wet of skin and silicon, then it's better you find out before he laces up his Nike's.

By the way, there were two other guys, Pau and Kobe, that were pretty good last night too.


Allow Me To Introduce: Real Competition

Denver's 8-game win streak fell hard tonight, and they also dropped to 1-3 against the Western Conference leaders. As chronicled in this space a day ago, I can only hope that too many people weren't making too much of their recent win streak, given the sorry level of competition they schedule makers had granted to them. In the pack of teams all vying recognition as 2nd-best in the West, I'm not too convinced that Denver has done anything to separate themselves, regardless of their lock on the 2nd seed and Northwest Division crown. The 2-thru-8 fight should continue to be riveting over these remaining 6 days of the regular season.

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