Being repetitive here, but here's a radical sports concept

First of all: Way to go Celtics! I like James and the Cleveland Cavs (especially West and Szerbiak) but they've recently made the finals and James is still a baby. He'll probably win it soon. Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett aren't going to be around forever.

But, here's a revolutionary concept I'd like to introduce to the press/fans: Just because one team wins, that doesn't mean the other team did poorly.

Logically, you could have 4 options: One team plays poorly and one team plays well (2 out of 4 options), both teams play well, or both teams play poorly. I've already seen sports commentators discussing what went wrong with the Cavs or what their weaknesses are. How about the simple explanation: They played well but the other team played better.

I dislike how at the end of games they march out the losing coach in the press conference like he's a middle schooler who just got sent to the principal's office for after-school detention: "So what did you do wrong today??"

The worst case of this was at the Memphis-Kansas NCAA final last March where the commentators for ESPN or CBS or whichever channel the game was being broadcast on thought that Memphis had it in the bag so they were talking about how Memphis had this great season and was the better team all along and started dissecting why Kansas was the wrong team. But as my track coach used to say, "Balls bounce certain ways" (the whole quote was about how running is less open to upsets than most sports because a 5:00 miler would never be able to beat a 4:30 miler, but a basketball team could score an upset because balls bounce certain ways). Anyway, Kansas had a couple very lucky breaks and scored an upset and all of a sudden the same statistics that revealed upon examination by the experts that Kansas was the inferior team were magically reexamined to reveal that in fact, Kansas was the superior team after all.

The stat sheet had changed in one very minor way: Kansas had one more field goal than it had a moment before when Kansas was the losing team.

Of course that's all Kansas needs to win a game, but my point again is that we try to fit square pegs into round holes in sports commentary.