Oh Yes, Their Will Be Boos.

It's a beautiful piece symmetry, the Raptors first playoff appearance in forever is. The basketball gods have given Toronto a final chance to once and for all expunge Vince Carter from its sports concsiousness, in the form of a first round match up against VC's New Jersey Nets. Chris Bosh and the one-for-all Raptors get to play the last man to call the Raptors his franchise, get to finally show that Vince Carter was the problem with Toronto, and not the other way around.

Sure, maybe a date with the collapsing Washington Wizards might have be easier, but a play-off with New Jersey is custom ordered drama.The first round doesn't really matter, but here are two teams who will go at it like it was a championship series. They spilt their season series 2-2, both teams winning their home games, which gives the higher seeded Raps maybe an advantage in that category.

Game one is Saturday at the ACC. Oh yes, their will be boos.

Jason

Melo Out, Young Anthony

People are going to make a big deal over the b-ball brawl between the Knicks and Nuggets that took place at the Gardens, and more specifically, Carmelo Anthony's cheap shot on Mardy Collins. They should of course, Melo is one of the NBA's Golden Trio (just wait Bosh, they'll regret leaving you out), a rising superstar who did something very, very stupid.

Ok, that's out of the way. Let's take a look at what Carmelo actually did (if you haven't seen it, you can probably find it on the net somewhere. Come on, you computer savvy savant you, get cracking). He didn't "punch" Collins, and he certainly didn't "sock" him.

He slapped him.

Carmelo Anthony slapped Mardy Collins in the face, and then even worse, jumped back and started running. Serious. Is that what they teach on the streets these days? Sorry Melo, but that was pretty pathetic, not helped by the fact that your girly outburst was basically unprovoked, in fact, the refs had the sitch more or less under control until you decided to employ your five fingered diplomacy. (Though to be fair, it was equally pathetic that your face wipe actually managed to knock Collins down. There, you should both be embarrassed)

Leave the fighting to the hockey players, please and thanks. It's pretty obvious you don't know what you're doing.



While we're at it, we might as well mention that the Raptors smoked the Nets the other night, holding Toronto's favourite son to just 12 points all night, a season low for him. Suck it Vince Carter. New Jersey is probably going to win this sad excuse for a division, but any time the Raptors can stick it to the team that traded us a sack of potatoes for our homegrown superstar, we'll take it. The Raps are 9-14, good for second in the Atlantic.

Jason

Change for the Sake of Change: Not Always a Good Thing?

Paul Lukas' always excellent "Uni Watch" column over at ESPN.com had a great article today on the real effects of the NBA's little basketball switcheroo. Forget Shaq and his whining, the real problem lies not in a of bunch of disgruntled glorified ballerinas, but in the terrible ramifications this will have on the logo's of of most basketball teams. Now this is the hard hitting investigative journalism 64 Years and Counting can only aspire to.

Twenty-one of the NBA's thirty teams use a basketball in their logo, making them overnight anachronisms of a bygone era. The Toronto Raptors aren't spared by this either. Though they ditched their (oh-so-unfortunate) dinosaur logo, it's replacement, despite being an improvement in every sense of the word, still suffers from old basketball syndrome.

Did nobody even bother to put any thought into the b-ball change? Any at all? Did they consider the millions of dollars that would go into updating 21 logos? Obviously not. David Stern was too busy trying to run his poorly covered despotism that he likes to call the National Basketball Association.

Jason

PS. Speaking of new jerseys, the Raps open up the season tomorrow against the Nets (now that was a segue). Take comfort in the knowledge that it would be physically impossible for them to start the season worse than last year.