This is why basketball isn’t hockey. Because the No. 1 seed really is better than the No. 8 seed. Because while major upsets are possible, they are not expected. Because the game doesn’t hinge on one suddenly hot goalie, but on a team that puts it together as a team – and puts the lesser team away.
First of all, no more 1 o’clock games on Sunday, OK? Both teams looked half asleep when it started. There’s a reason they call it “Hockey Night” in Canada, not “Hockey Brunch.” You don’t play the game with a bagel and a Sunday paper.
Secondly, no more talk about the “new” NHL. So far in this Red Wings-Oilers series, it’s the NHL playoffs as it always has been the NHL playoffs: funny-looking goals, trap defenses and a goalie you barely heard of suddenly becoming the story.
They say the first stage of grief is denial. And at the funeral of the rapper Proof, some folks were apparently in severe denial – about what he contributed, the world he celebrated or their own part in the culture of violence that killed him.
He gets the best parking spot. That’s one perk. Over the years, he jokes, his space has moved “closer and closer” to the Joe Louis Arena door and now “I only get bumped for two people.”
“Mr. Ilitch being one?” I say.
“And his wife being the other,” he laughs.
Don’t try this at home. Ben Wallace takes his left wrist in his right hand and squeezes. The wrist shifts, making a soft cracking noise that sends a shiver down an observer’s spine.
And that’s his good hand.
“That’s what happens when I’m shooting free throws,” he says, flopping the right hand now – the one that has been injured for years. “I can shoot 10 straight good ones. On the 11th, it just slips out. I don’t know when it’s gonna happen.”
“And you have to fix it,” I ask, “right there on the free-throw line?”
“Yeah.”
“You just pop it back in?”
Joey Harrington sounded like a kid who had just gotten his acceptance letter to college.
“I’m going to Miami,” he crowed.
He was speaking on a cell phone from Washington, a city he had never visited. He was doing the tourist thing, he said, standing in front of the Jefferson Memorial. It’s a place kids go on their class trips. But for Harrington, the longest tour of his life finally had concluded. He’d found a new team. He’d settled on a new city. All that remained was the legal separation from Detroit.
They met in a soda shop over a milkshake – he ordered it, she served it – and six weeks later, he asked her to marry him. This was 1947 and she was still in high school. So they waited until she graduated. During that time there were dates and laughs and flowers – flowers, because his work was landscaping – and there was baseball, too, always baseball.
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