Predictions, con't.

Earlier, I predicted the Lakers in seven, with home court advantage proving the difference. The funny thing is, though, is that I didn't really think that they would win all of their home games--intuitively I thought they would split the first two. However, also in the back of my mind was the belief that the Lakers wouldn't be able to win in Denver.

So what I'm trying to say is, I didn't really have a consistent scenario played out in my head. It can't be the case that they split the first two, Denver wins all its home games, and the Lakers win in 7. And yet: that's what my gut's telling me.

My gut's kind of dumb.

Addendum:

To make this post not complete gibberish, I would like to quote Andrew Bynum, who shares my thoughts about the Lakers' defense:

"Honestly, I think we need to rethink how we are doing the defense. … They are just attacking it and swinging [the ball] to the other side. It is an easy three-on-two every time that they swing it to the other side."

In engineering, a design principle you try to follow is to make failures as graceful as possible. This is an outlook that recognizes that system failures are inevitable and that it's infeasible to try to eliminate them completely--but that you can take steps to minimize their effects when they happen. So for example, it might be inevitable that a computer program will crash from time to time--but it is much better for that program to display an error notice and close itself than, say, abruptly exit or freeze up. You want the program to crash gracefully.

The same applies to basketball defenses. A defense that completely collapses whenever someone is slow on the rotation is a poorly designed defense. Failures and missteps on the defensive end will occur, and they will result in an advantage for the offense. But you want that advantage to take the form of an open jump shot--not an uncontested dunk.