matt weighs in

Okay, I’m back at it. You can stop holding your breath in anticipation now. I hope you have noticed some additions in the sidebar of the main page – Twitter (or tweets), which we love and force ourselves not to update every hour and our Flickr pictures, which we have to do better to update more often. We can even send our tweets by text message, which we did Friday night from Chino Latino in Uptown. You’ve been warned. I’m working on a few other things that may or may not screw up the sight if I mess them up, but I’ll try to keep that to a minimum, or at least contact my friend Dave, who’s recently been experiencing some updating pains. That’s the joy of the interweb.

A few thoughts on a Sunday night to catch up:

1. We could get some closure to the Democratic race on Tuesday. Most polls show Hillary with only a slight edge in Pennsylvania (down from earlier in the month), but nowhere near significant enough to make up much ground in delegates. I didn’t see the most recent debate last week, but most accounts were fairly disgusted with ABC’s lines of questioning. Two different recaps are here and here. I have thoughts on what Obama said at the private fundraiser in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, but he looks to have weathered the ridiculous reactions to it (hint as to how I feel about those reactions).

2. The NCAA basketball tournament was exciting as advertised. I have to admit that I fully jumped on the Davidson bandwagon after they disposed of Georgetown, who, most unfortunately, was my pick to win the whole damn thing. I had G’town in my pool with Laura’s family, who mostly live on the West Coast and had a predictably strong UCLA bias. Congrats to those in Missouri who were biased to Kansas, and, therefore, came out on top in the pool.

3. The NBA playoffs have started, and they are living up to their billing, as expected. I watched about 52 of the 58 minutes in Game 1 between San Antonio and Phoenix. The Suns were ahead most of the game and should have won, but were in foul trouble when it mattered – I’m not a big fan of refs and usually tell whoever will listen that I know I could do better in stripes.

The game was almost unwatchable for two reasons: every ref call was followed by players whining about it (this grows tiresome) and THE PA ANNOUNCER AND THE MUSIC WERE SO LOUD THROUGHOUT THE GAME THAT I ALMOST TURNED DOWN THE SOUND ON THE TV (bet you want to stop reading after I just screamed at you for five seconds). They do this at MN Timberwolves games, too. Music plays while the game is going on, and the game announcer thinks it’s his job to get the crowd going. The game should be exciting enough to keep the fans in it. This was evident during last year’s playoff games between Golden State and Dallas. GS’s crowd was so amped that they drowned out the music. I can’t imagine the next time that might happen at Target Center.

4. Elliot is walking. I can’t tell you the non-stop joy this is to watch him keep his balance on grass, dirt and sand. It’s great comedy, and I may start taking bets with people as to whether or not he can stay on his feet for more than five seconds on different terrain. I would take the over every time.

5. I miss Johan.

6. I watched three of the six MN Wild games and listened to two others on the radio. They only led for about four minutes in the six games played (about 380 minutes total), but with my limited hockey knowledge, they controlled play for most of the series. They ran into a Colorado Avalanche team whose goalie won the series for them (you can’t overlook their overall defense, though). I think the Wild were done in by a team that played their game better than they did in the series. The Wild are coached to be defensive minded first and take advantage of opportunities to score when the opponents give it to them. This series they lost, they were the aggressive team the majority of the time, and Colorado scored when they had the chance. Only one goalie was MVP in this series.

Thanks to ticket-hookups from friends, I was able to check out the Minnesota Wild and the Minnesota Timberwolves in person over the last week. We had really good seats for the Wild (club level), even though there isn’t a bad seat in the place, and decent seats for the Wolves (center court, 1st row of upper level). As much as I love basketball, catching a hockey game at the X is a great sporting experience.

Growing up in small-town southern Minnesota, I followed in my dad’s and brothers’ footsteps and loved basketball – played it in our driveway, even in the snow, played it by myself in the high school gym at 10pm and played it in Ween’s hayloft when it was snowing at 10pm. I prefer to watch college and pro b-ball, rather than hockey, on TV, but it’s the exact opposite in person, and really, it’s not even close.

The Wild had a rematch from their playoff loss in 2007 against Anaheim, so I knew it would be a good game. I don’t follow hockey closely, but I hate Anaheim after the playoff series last year (yes, I think it’s ok to hate sports teams, players and their fans, but it’s not personal, just fun). The playoffs were physical, borderline dirty, throughout, but Anaheim crossed the line for many fans in game 4, when a third guy entered a 2-man fight and helped take the Wild player down to the ice face-first and by throwing knockout punches to a Wild player who avoids fights, for the most part, due to his size.

Sadly, in the game I saw this week, the Wild only mustered about 14 seconds worth of offense and lost 2-4. There was still bad-blood, as Boogie-man had more than his share of stare downs and shoving matches.

Watching from the Club level was great. Easy to follow the puck, see who is who and possibly the best part, only had a very short distance to walk for more beer, nachos, brats and bathrooms. And, the Wild still have an actual organ player for much of the background music. I loved the experience, even if it was a loss.

The Wolves, on the other hand, played the Suns, which I was really excited about, because I’m a big Steve Nash fan. I’ll admit that I was more into it than I thought I would be – the Wolves are horrible, Target Center is ok as an arena, but not great, and it was the Suns, who should have ran up and down the court against the young Wolves.

However, as it was earlier in the season, the Wolves pulled out a win by feeding the ball to “Big Al” Jefferson all game, and he couldn’t be stopped. Amazingly, too, is that the Wolves actually made some outside shots, which has been a huge plague this year for the whole team. As I said, I was excited about our seats, because usually we’re in the rafters (why pay a lot of money to see half-*ss basketball?). I believe the closer you are to the court for a pro-game, the better the experience and more into it you can get. Pro players just don’t bring out that much excitement in the game, unless your team has a superstar (we miss you KG!) or they go on a huge run to take a big lead or they win a game they really have no business winning.

Maybe the Wolves have made a turn for the better in the last week – wins at Golden State and against the Suns and a narrow loss in Boston to KG’s Celtics Friday night, in a game they should have won. We could not have said this about the Wolves at the turn of the New Year. The young guys appear to be mixing together well, finally, and even though they’ll still end up with a top-5 pick in the 2008 NBA draft, maybe they’ll give us something fun to watch the last couple months of the year, even if we have to watch from the nosebleed seats.