The NBA Finals are set. Dallas and Miami will start their seven game series on Thursday to determine the NBA Champion this season. Assuming the series goes six games, the champion will be determined sometime around 23 June. And the approximate date of that final determination demonstrates yet another reason why college basketball is a more entertaining product than the NBA version of the game. The NBA playoffs started in late April; it takes them two months to determine a champion. The NCAA tournament takes less than three weeks; you could cram three “March Madness tournaments” in their entirety into the typical NBA playoff schedule. Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.

I know that the NBA is not going to shorten its playoff schedule; it would cost them money to do that in any meaningful way so that isn't going to happen. But there is a way for the NBA to shorten its games. Unless the game is an absolute blow-out, the final two or three minutes of a game can take 20 minutes to unfold. The problem simply is that there are too many timeouts allotted to each team and the coaches/players tend to save them to preserve “strategic options” at the end of the game. Add to the surfeit of timeouts the fact that teams foul intentionally to stop the clock and you get these interminable game endings. The NBA would have you believe that this produces more drama for the viewers; if you are a viewer, you know better; this merely produces more commercials on TV. The way to stop this nonsense is to reduce the number of timeouts available to a team. Take whatever the number is now and reduce it by two. And throw in the rule that at the beginning of the fourth quarter, each team will have only one time out left in the game no matter how many they have taken or not taken up to that point.

Actually, that timeout reduction rule change might also cut down on the number of situations where a player calls time out as he is going out of bounds or as he scrambles to gain possession of a loose ball on the floor. If timeouts were a more precious commodity, we'd see less of that nonsense. I, for one, would not feel that the NBA had deprived me of something important if I watched a game and never saw that happen.

The other “timeout situation” I would take off the books is the one where the guy can't inbound the ball and calls timeout to retain possession. Excuse me, the clock isn't even running and the guy calls timeout. Get rid of that; these are professionals making – on average – millions of dollars a year on the basis of their skills. If they can't figure out how to throw the ball inbounds to a player wearing the same color shirt they are wearing within five seconds, give the ball to the other team and maybe they'll figure out how to get the action started again. I call this situation the “Incompetence Timeout”; the league needs to stop allowing players to escape accountability for this incompetence.

I'm not sure what is going on in Charlotte at the moment with the Bobcats. Owner Robert Johnson recently fired Ed Tapscott as the team's CEO but retained Bernie Bickerstaff as the coach. Technically, Tapscott resigned his position, but lots of folks who cover the NBA have referred to this as a firing. The team has a new arena but didn't fill it even with the novelty of the new arena and despite the fact that ammost everyone calls the facility “magnificent” and “resplendent”. So, the team “parted company with” the CEO and retained the coach in a situation where the team finished tied with Atlanta for the third worst record in the league. I could understand firing both men; this team has not improved significantly since its expansion season. But to fire only the CEO is a bit unusual.

In describing the Cubs' trade for Phil Nevin, someone on SportsCenter said that the Cubs were “anxious to get a power hitter in the lineup due to Derek Lee's injury.” I don't want to sound like your eleventh grade English teacher, but “anxious” is not a synonym for “eager”. Anxious means apprehensive or uneasy; put that into the description of the Cubs' motivation to trade for Phil Nevin and you get gibberish. The Cubs should be anxious about their ability to score runs with Derek Lee on the DL, and that should make them eager to seek out a strong power hitter as Lee's replacement.

There's been so much speculation about Roger Clemens intentions with regard to this season that it is almost anti-climactic now that we know he will pitch for the Astros starting later this month. Bernie Lincicome had a sound observation about all of this in the Rocky Mountain News:

“Of all the things Clemens is and has been (no pun intended) what he has become is a pronoun. This is a compliment. Not everyone becomes a pronoun.

“Clemens is the 'He' in 'He's Back,' a standing headline in Houston, just as Michael Jordan was the 'I' in 'I'm back.' “

And while I'm thinking about Bernie Lincicome, here's another of his observations about baseball:

“Baseball is life. Baseball is hope. Baseball is wisdom. Baseball is eternal. Baseball is faith. Baseball is usually an hour too long.”

[I wonder what he thinks of NBA games in the final two minutes…?]

The minor league umpires had been on strike since early April. Now there is a settlement and the terms of the settlement seem on the surface to be pretty meager – until you look at them in terms of percentages. Salaries will increase by $100 per month and per diem rates will increase by $3 a day. However, salaries for minor league umpires at the AAA level were only $15K per year to begin with and only $12K for AA umpires and it goes downhill from there. The per diem rates in AAA were only $25 a day so this increase is a 12% hike and the rates will continue to increase year by year until 2011 when the rates will be $40 a day. No one – and I mean no one – will get rich working as a minor league umpire, so these modest increases are significant for folks making what those guys make.

Finally, this note from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald:

“This just in: The NBA has announced that TNT announcer Marv Albert's toupee has been suspended for violating the league's realistic-hairpiece policy.”

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...

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