Bullet the blue sky

Here they come:

• As the NBA season winds down, we are once again enjoying the spectacle of teams tanking their seasons. It's been pretty clear that the Boston Celtics, who desperately want Greg Oden to save them, have not been trying to win for a few months now. Meanwhile, the two teams that I follow most closely, the Bucks and the Timberwolves, are in the process of phoning it in for the rest of the season, having shut down Michael Redd and Kevin Garnett, respectively. While I don't doubt that adding an Oden or a Kevin Durant would do wonders for these teams, I really question whether they should be rewarded for these sorts of tactics. The only thing I'll wager is that the Memphis Grizzlies, the team with the worst overall record, will not land either Oden or Durant.
• Speaking of bullets, the Twins are starting to run short of them already. We are only two weeks into the season and they have seen Rondell White and Jeff Cirillo go on the DL, and now Nick Punto may be headed there too. While it is early, the signs are not good over on Kirby Puckett Drive.
• Meanwhile, our beloved Minnesota Wild are getting their heads handed to them by the Anaheim Ducks. Prior to the series there was a lot of optimism here about the chances of the Wild, but the steady diet of Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver that had been the last third of the Wild's season didn't really give us a sense of where the team stacks up with the rest of the league. I have always questioned the NHL's scheduling, which so overloads divisional rivalries that it becomes difficult to gauge things. Of course, this sort of thing has been endemic to the NHL for years, going all the way back to the 1967 season, when the league doubled by adding six expansion teams, putting them all in the same conference, then deeming that the champion of the East (read: Original Six) would play the champion of the West (read: best of six expansion squads) for the championship. Typically the result would be that Montreal would beat St. Louis, and easily. No suspense, no drama. Winning the East was all that mattered. While things have changed a lot since then, it's pretty evident that the Ducks, who had not played the Wild since December, were a whole lot better, even though their record was not significantly better than the Wild's, mainly because the Ducks were fighting off an equally good San Jose Sharks squad. I guess when an organization can't learn much after 40 years, it's not surprising that their games are almost impossible to find on cable. I have always loved hockey, but it's getting increasingly invisible and irrelevant. Except here.
• On a much more local level, my son's Little League team met for the first time yesterday evening over at the coach's house. My Twins-loving son Ben will reluctantly wear the colors of the Arden Hills Brewers, an SAYB Little League American League powerhouse if I ever saw one. This north suburban True Blue Brew Crew is a good looking group of kids, including a number who were teammates of Ben on earlier squads. Although my current health situation precludes my taking an active coaching role, I get to be the bench coach for this team, which means I'll help the coach manage the lineup, keep the book, and scowl like Don Zimmer. Sounds like a pretty good gig, I think. Meanwhile, watch this space for news on Maria's Instructional League team, which is still TBD.