Give me the Green Light

Watching the Mavs/Thunder game yesterday, I clearly saw that the Mavs can go the distance and maybe win this series. Dirk fumbled the ball and that led with a bad shot and Terry missed two 3-pointers to tie the game. The Thunder again escaped with a close victory of 102-99 - with Kevin Durant struggling with his shot and committing 7 TO's - thanks to Russell Westbrook's 29 points and James Harden's 4 crucial FT's to give the Thunder a three-point lead. For yesterday's game, I think that the best pick might have been Amare Stoudemire and his 25 PRA. The reason why is that immediately after the game, he let his emotions get the best of him and punched the glass case of the fire extinguisher (why the hell would you punch the glass case?) causing the medical staff of both the Heat and the Knicks to rush over to the locker room to treat his wound. As I am writing this blog, Stoudemire is considered questionable for Game 3 leaving Carmelo to be "The Man" for this Knicks team that already lost Shumpert.

As for today's pick, Rondo(Bos)and Rose(Chi)will not play for their teams (I think you guys already know why) leading me to the conclusion that I should pick a Celtic player this time around. I still would not pick a player on the Nuggets/Lakers series unless it would be on an elimination match; as for the Sixers/Bulls series, I really want to pick Jrue Holiday for this one but I have read this interesting article and Holiday was quoted that he MIGHT be guarding Rip Hamilton for defensive purposes. Guarding Hamilton has proven to be one of the reasons why a player might not be involved more in the stats sheet, Hamilton loves to go around screens and once he sees a mismatch on height, he will post up and shoot. He already burned Meeks for 19 points in Game 1 so I think that Holiday - known as a good one on one defender - will definitely guard Hamilton especially now that someone has to pick up the slack on scoring.

I really do not want to pick a Celtic this early but playing Game 2 without Rondo and Allen will be a nightmare for the Celtics. Losing their best facilitator on the court will make it hard for the team to create open shots; Bradley might play the point and Pavlovic/Pietrus will play two to have more scoring options on the court. Pierce will act as the point guard for this one and will play a two-man game with Kevin Garnett. With that in mind, I am picking Kevin Garnett for today's game since the Celtics might try to play it more in the post as well as pick and rolls to free Paul Pierce up.

Given that Pierce admits that "he was the main culprit" why they lost (5-19 on the field), I still think that he will save his best performance on Game 4 or 5. Garnett would also be motivated to play better on Game 2 after he was manhandled by Jason Collins on the first half of Game 1. Garnett will play better and will give me about 25+ PRA. My projected stats for him will be 16pts, 10rebs, 5asts. He WILL have the green light to shoot and attack the basket of the Hawks.