Just to bring everyone up to speed, these are the headlines from the past week in the NFL:

• - Cedric Benson was pepper sprayed and arrested for operating a boat under the influence (you know you’re drunk when you’re resisting arrest in the middle of a lake… Where were you going to go Cedric?)
• - Marvin Harrison is being “questioned” about a shooting where the evidence is so stacked against the Colts’ receiver its a miracle he hasn’t been charged yet.
• - And, of course, there is more silliness from the Pacman Jones saga as the gunmen is trying to claim that Jones ordered the whole thing to go down.

But fear not! Emmitt Smith is here to make sense of it all. The master of morality, the king of Kantian ethics, the… guy in gold shoes apparently stopped by Cowboys camp to set things straight. I would try to summarize, but ESPN pretty much nailed it with their headling “Emmitt stops by Cowboys camp, advises Pacman to make [and they quote] ‘better choices’.”

Well, “better choices” is kind of vague guys. Care to clear that up in the first two graphs of your story?

IRVING, Texas — Emmitt Smith has some advice for suspended Dallas Cowboys cornerback Pacman Jones: Stay out of trouble.

“As long as you’re not killing anybody, getting anybody shot at and going to jail, then I don’t have any issues,” said Smith, NFL career rushing leader. The former star running back for Dallas was visiting Cowboys rookie minicamp Saturday.

Ahh, that’s better. So the three commandments of the NFL according to Emmitt:  Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not get thy neighbor shot, thou shalt not go to jail.

However, thine drug trafficking, human trafficking, brothel, and rape…. Thy league shall looketh the other way.

Amen.

About the 16-second mark…KG, getting frustrated that the Celtics are overrated.

Is this no longer a suspension?

Can Amare appeal the Suns’ exit last year?

Oh yea, and Commissioner David Stern was at the game. So I doubt he missed it.

Some day soon, a book will come out entirely centered around the journalistic phenomenon we now call blogging. Specifically sports blogging. It won’t be written by a blogger, but some Ph.D. at a liberal arts school. The book will analyze all the ways in which this new form of media has effected “traditional sports reporting” and how the landscape of event coverage has changed forever. One of the chapters in this book will be an expansion of this article (or at least the beginning of it), published in the New York Times on Monday, April 21. The chapter will center around access, and who deserves what amount. But before all that happens, we wanted to address this issue in a five-part series. We will view the access question from the perspective of all the major parties involved: owners, players, reporters, bloggers, and we’ll end on Monday with the most important perspective of them all — the fan’s.

Part 4 - The Bloggers

Listen, just because I didn’t land an internship with the Backwoods Ledger out of college, doesn’t mean I can’t give the people what they want.

The popularity of sites like Deadspin and The Big Lead has shown that sports fans don’t have to turn to their local paper for day-old box scores. Fans can get stories the big dogs are afraid to print, and they can get them immediately.

The writing is a bit too snarky, you say? Check out Free Darko — a downright insightful NBA blog. Coverage too varied for your particular taste? Storming the Floor will make you crave March Madness seeding. Even if you just want a good laugh, FireJoeMorgan is there for you.

Bloggers have it all.

So with all these great prosers — why shouldn’t bloggers be allowed in professional locker rooms?

We do more investigative reporting than newspaper reporters, anyway. Beat writers get the quotes/stories/interviews they want by coddling their sources for years. Every story they break that has even the slightest negative connotation has 5 anonymous sources.

Bloggy don’t play that.

If someone has dirt, we discuss it. Remember when Harold Reynolds (by far the best talking head on Baseball Tonight) got the boot from the World Wide Leader? Without blogs, you would never have heard anything about it. You just tune in one night, and bam, he’s gone.

Newspaper reporters have cultivated this horrendous image of bloggers to use to their advantage. As long as the uneducated, prim and proper public associates bloggers with stoned slackers, they’ll have a hard time getting respect.

Now a few of us have made the transition smoothly. In one of the few crossovers from blog to mass media, True Hoop, an NBA blog authored by Henry Abbott, was snatched up by espn.com.

And according to Henry, his sport has one of the most forward-thinking (yet most basic) approaches to bloggers in the locker room:

The only place I have ever been treated any differently because of my medium is in Mark Cuban’s Bizarro-land. But I know of no other place in the NBA where a serious blogger, who has been around for a while, would be expected to be treated as a second-class citizen.

I think the NBA did the perfect thing. From what I understand, they didn’t tell the teams they have to credential any set number of bloggers or anything. They said there can be no special ban of bloggers, and they have to go into the mix with everybody else.

That makes perfect sense to me. You look at how much space you have, you look at all the credential requests you have, and you make some hard decisions, based on stuff like who’s professional, who has influence, who has audience, and all the rest.

People who read blogs don’t think it’s hard to figure out which bloggers belong there and which ones don’t.

Henry sums it up perfectly.

All we want is to be treated like every other writer. Take away that giant-ass credential from the Sun-Times and those 30 years slaving away on agate in Richmond, Ind., and who would draw the bigger readership?

I guess I’ll let the Web (and newspaper layoffs) answer that one.

Some day soon, a book will come out entirely centered around the journalistic phenomenon we now call blogging. Specifically sports blogging. It won’t be written by a blogger, but some Ph.D. at a liberal arts school. The book will analyze all the ways in which this new form of media has effected “traditional sports reporting” and how the landscape of event coverage has changed forever. One of the chapters in this book will be an expansion of this article (or at least the beginning of it), published in the New York Times on Monday, April 21. The chapter will center around access, and who deserves what amount. But before all that happens, we wanted to address this issue in a five-part series. We will view the access question from the perspective of all the major parties involved: owners, players, reporters, bloggers, and we’ll end on Monday with the most important perspective of them all — the fan’s.

PART 3 — THE REPORTERS

Alright, let’s get this out front first. Yes, a lot of reporters write blogs for their given outlets, but it’s not necessarily by our own accord. More often than not, an editor calls us into the office, tells us that management wants to establish more of a “Web presence” because that’s what all the kids are doing these days with their Giggles and Tube Yous, then they tell us to cross our arms and “Oh my god, look at the spider on the ceiling!” then *FLASH*-*SNAP*, we have a blog.

What I’m trying to say is, that’s not entirely by choice. As much as I love being forced to write twice as much as I used to, I’m not the biggest fan of sports blogs. Never really have been.

I look back on how I got to this point, and I see college where I spent countless hours in sweaty rooms writing news leads and memorizing the different between lay and lie. I covered field hockey and volleyball and water polo and track and softball… And what did it all get me? My first job covering all the same shit — except at a high school. My big stories were about a basketball player with down syndrome and a football recruit getting arrested (which I co-bylined with a fat man named Bill who had a burly mustache and a car that smelled like sour hot dogs).

Ten years of that landed me right back at the colleges, and another 15 years after that I finally cracked open the doors to a professional press room. That’s how I got the job I have, how about you bloggers that want a seat next to me? You opened an account at Blogspot and started calling me a shmuck.

I’m not saying all that makes me more or less worthy, I know the world doesn’t work like that. What I’m saying is that you can’t replicate the passion and respect that those 30 years have left me with. I approach these games like a surgeon approaches a patient; like a lawyer approaches a courtroom. These are not some free tickets to me. This is work.

When I look around that press room, I see a bunch of tired faces that carry the same battle scars as my own. And I’m just as dependent on those guys as I am on my recorder and notebook. You see, in the eyes of these athletes, we’re all the same. Lumped into one giant bunch. “The Media.” And the fact of the matter is, if one guy pisses of the coach, he walks out on all of us. I have to tell my editor that my story won’t have quotes tonight, just like the other 20 guys in the room. Around here, there isn’t any room for renegades.

Listen, even though I could go on about “ethics,” and “standards,” and how “I can’t do what you do and get away with it,” I don’t think those are the central issues to this matter. I think journalists have proven they are just as capable of acting unethically. What’s bigger is the history, tradition, and honor that surrounds covering a coach who just won a Super Bowl, or a 22-year-old kid that’s sobbing into your microphone because he just lost the last meaningful game he’ll ever play in his life.

Those are the things that are not to be taken for granted. And unless you’ve seen that same elation on the face of a little league coach or that same anguish in the eyes of a high school softball pitcher, I argue that you’ll never truly understand what a privlege it is to cover these games. So for now, let’s just stick to what we each do best. I’ll keep writing game wraps, and you can keep calling me a shmuck.

View the other perspectives: The Owners and The Players

Some day soon, a book will come out entirely centered around the journalistic phenomenon we now call blogging. Specifically sports blogging. It won’t be written by a blogger, but some Ph.D. at a liberal arts school. The book will analyze all the ways in which this new form of media has effected “traditional sports reporting” and how the landscape of event coverage has changed forever. One of the chapters in this book will be an expansion of this article (or at least the beginning of it), published in the New York Times on Monday, April 21. The chapter will center around access, and who deserves what amount. But before all that happens, we want to address this issue in a five-part series starting today. We will view the access question from the perspective of all the major parties involved: owners, players, reporters, bloggers, and we’ll end on Monday with the most important perspective of them all — the fan’s.

PART 2 — THE PLAYERS

Today’s perspective is that of the player. And after much Fynal Cut editorial board discussion, it was decided this particular segment could not be done from the first-person point of view. Here’s why:

As far as being opinionated on the media (whether it be traditional reporters or bloggers), we’ve separated professional athletes into two camps:

One group (in the extreme minority) write their own blogs. These range from the ungodly annoying to the extremely insightful and entertaining. It’s fairly obvious that some athletes (cough, Schilling, cough) do this with the specific intent of avoiding media contact. It’s direct contact with the fan. Cut out the middle man.

On the other hand, some, like Gilbert Arenas, probably just do it for fun — which feels pretty damn good to say.

The player blog has even spun off into a news topic of its own — friend of the Cut Ryan Corazza now writes specifically about athlete’s blogs for ESPN the Mag.

The other 98%, which would be most players in most leagues, could care less who gets credentialed to be in the locker room. As long as they aren’t bothered.

Few athletes actually open up to these individuals anyway, so why would they care for which publication these pests write?

I could see a few potential problems developing out of bloggers being allowed in the locker room.

The first is something like this happening, which would be horrific to bloggers everywhere.

The first time a player complains about a writer — who later turns out to be a blogger (gasp!) — would signal the end of the basement dwellers in the locker room. Ideally, bloggers shouldn’t be subject to different treatment than the regular reporters. But the fact of the matter is, bloggers in the locker room will be a disruption at first.

The reporters will question whether the bloggers should be there. The bloggers will have an air of confidence in thinking they will soon be replacing the beat reporters. And the athlete will be thrown out of his comfort zone and complain to the media relations person.

In the end, the athlete will be fine with bloggers in the stadium, on the team plane, in the shower locker room…until they get annoyed. Which is going to make it extremely difficult for bloggers to do their jobs.

We can only hope players like Gil will try and talk some sense into their fellow players.

Some day soon, a book will come out entirely centered around the journalistic phenomenon we now call blogging. Specifically sports blogging. It won’t be written by a blogger, but some Ph.D. at a liberal arts school. The book will analyze all the ways in which this new form of media has effected “traditional sports reporting” and how the landscape of event coverage has changed forever. One of the chapters in this book will be an expansion of this article (or at least the beginning of it), published in the New York Times on Monday, April 21. The chapter will center around access, and who deserves what amount. But before all that happens, we want to address this issue in a five-part series starting today. We will view the access question from the perspective of all the major parties involved: owners, players, reporters, bloggers, and we’ll end on Monday with the most important perspective of them all — the fan’s.

PART 1: THE OWNERS

I’m a business man and my model is simple: Win. Winning = good press = more fans = dollars. It’s that simple… On the surface.

The only things that fuck up that model are the elements beyond my control: A head case of a closer, my point guard finds out his prozzie is a cop, the backup QB gets caught railin’ lines off a hooker, hell, some punkass fan decides to start a riot… These are the only chinks in my armor. The only ways I loose money. So what I do I do? I control. As much as I can. That’s the name of the game in this business — control. You’re either gaining it, or you’re losing it.

So what are bloggers to me? They’re sharks. I know, we usually reserve that title for prick agents, but let me lay a different analogy on you. See, us in management are like dolphins. We work as a group, everyone with their role, and together we create structure. We organize all the little fish into a perfect, compact space and through this organization and planning, we get what we want. Bonus with sports is, we don’t have to eat the fish, the fish get what they want out of the bargain too.

But bloggers, you see, they exist outside our control. We can’t exude any command over them, we can’t work them into our overarching plan. They’re just out there sniffing for blood in the water, and when they catch a whiff they attack! They come barreling in, caution to the wind, and make a big spectacle out of everything, just trying to gobble up as much (attention) as they can before everything is gone. Then they swim on, back to the darkness, looking for their next meal. And it’s us dolphins that are left with the mess.

I love analogies to nature because it speaks to something bigger than the human mind. It’s nature. It’s the way things are. And believe me, I understand that in the age of the Internet, this is the way things are. It’s the way they’re going to be. These guys writing blogs are no different from what I used to be — just a guy looking to make it on his own, to carve a niche. So, don’t get me wrong here, I don’t have a problem with what they’re trying to do, you’ve just got to understand the differing perspectives.

Granting access to bloggers is just bringing a shark into my family of dolphins. The head case closer, my sex-craved point guard, the QB addict — that’s all blood in the water, my friend. Don’t you see? A blogger’s wet dream is my nightmare. 

What about regular reporters, you ask? All I’ll say is this: Reporters report. I can live with that. Bloggers, they  try to stir the pot even if nothing’s cookin’. Look, this issue is nothing personal, it comes down to a conflict of interests. Where I look for control, they look for chaos. What they see as page views, I see as lost ticket sales.

And at the end of the day, that stadium, those seats on press row… Those are my waters, son.

For a good majority of this week, the focus of my conversations with BabyJ has been the ridiculousness of the NBA MVP coverage. It’s come up a scary number of times.

Today, a major media outlet (that we enjoy greatly) gave its take on the shitstorm.

We battled the depression with Onion clips like this and this.

I would say everyone’s pretty used to critiques on the media. But in one week, it couldn’t get any worse, right?

Holy. Christ.

This is ESPN’s new investigatory journalism?

A sick twist of Candid Camera, 60 Minutes and everything on Telemundo?

At least it involved some serious discussion first (sarcasm included free).

I imagine the “roundtable discussion” they frequently show on the program went something like this:

Main douchy reporter: OK guys, I’ve spent the last 14 years getting the Dominican authorities to release this document. I’ve done some things we must never speak of…Anyway, so we get Miguel Tejada to come into this fake interview. We’ll chat about — oh I don’t know — his background or something to distract him. Then BAM — I bust out this! (pulls out birth certificate)

Subsequent douchy reporters: Excellent!…Super!…Pulitzer, here we come!…

Why is this news? So he lied about his age. He was poor kid coming to a new country, I’m sure no one in a similar situation would ever think of doing such a thing.

Plus, he’s 2 freakin’ years older. 2! It’s not like he’s 50.

It appears your local Channel 5 “gotcha!” brand of journalism has spread to the Leader.

Alright, so we let our gut-wrenching fear admiration of robots go a little overboard here at the Cut, but might I stress a point I made last month that math is really just robot DNA. How does this ridiculous robot/math rant have anything to do with sports? Cuz the soulless bastards just won our pool!

As you may or may not recall, we started a pool this year to find out who can truly claim to be king when it comes to predicting the NCAA Tournament. Are there truly “experts?” Do bloggers know more than there bad grammer let’s on? Or is it all a fruitless quest to try and predict the totally random?

Well, I’m not licensed bracketologist, but based on our results that answer to that last question is a resounding, “Hell no!”Quite the opposite. If this year has proven anything it’s that the tournament is far more predictable than we make it out to be — at least this year it was.

As evidence, we present Exhibit A: Ken Pomeroy. The man’s revolutionary new approach to ranking basketball teams (judging them on efficiency per 100 possessions as opposed to anything based on their final score results) was able to clean up in our pool and earn the man computer program first prize. And for its prize: 0110010 1110010 0011100. Yup, out of the kindness of our hearts. Congrats!

From there, however, we get to the goods. In other words, the pwning of the pros. Second place went to yours truly — coming in only 11 points shy of the Pomeroy rankings, and guessing 46 games correct (the computer got 48). Third place went to Ft. Wayne Mad Ants Head Coach and former NBA-er Jarren Jackson — the only participant who gave Memphis any respect. Fourth place was fellow blogger Eamonn Brennan aka Postman E, who you may know from AOL Fanhouse, We are the postmen, and I’m pretty sure there are another two or 20 he contributes to out there. Rounding out the top five was the RPI rankings.

What do we learn here? Well, obviously that bloggers are smarter that “real reporters.” Or at least the ones that have unhealthy infatuations with Bob Dylan and the Wu Tang movie masterpiece “Iron Fist Pillage.” But on the whole, it also revealed that taking a serious approach to the bracket does pay off. Sure, inevitably Sue from accounting will catch a break and take the pot, but our friend Brittany was the only “casual fan” in our experiement to finish in the top 20. And she even faltered down the stretch.

The bigger thing to take away is the rising significance of stats in sports. These number crunchers are for real folks.They are able to sift through all of Dick Vitale’s rants and Billy Packer’s insensitive comments to find some real objective measuring sticks by which to judge these teams. And in closing: 0110010 0110010 0011101 1100101 1100010!

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT! SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT! I was actually able to interview Ken Pomeroy a couple of times for an article I wrote for popularmechanics.com. Rather than bore you with details here, I’ll just let you know that if you are interested in his pool-winning formula for ranking teams there is a much more thorough breakdown of his method riiiggggghhht HERE!

Oh also, just to let it me known, Bill Simmons finished second to last in between a small child and the “Places I’ve Been” bracket. The small child was the one ahead of him.

Here at the Cut, we always like to bring you fresh content.

At least when it doesn’t get in the way of our real jobs. Or playing Wii. Or drinking.

But other than that, we always want to give you as many perspectives from as many people as possible. That being said, I’m proud to introduce a new FynalCut feature - The Fynal Say.

And boy, have we started off with a bang for our inaugural piece.

Josh Levin, an associate editor at Slate, was kind enough to be our first. If you don’t read Slate, you’re probably leading an aimless life, destined to die young. If you do, join us we discuss insanely tall basketball players, John Kruk’s hair and Coach K on the scoreboard at a Wizards game…

—Let’s start off insanely broad. What’s the biggest flaw in the way we cover sports right now? Or, in what facet is sports media most in need of improvement?

I’m not sure this quite answers your question, but one problem the sports media has to face these days is that athletes really don’t have any need to talk to the press these days. Back in the day, a newspaper story or a Sports Illustrated profile was a big deal. People got to know their heroes through the papers and magazines, so star athletes had a strong incentive to talk to the press. Now, everyone gets their news from TV and the Web. LeBron James can get famous and rich by doing commercials and hosting the ESPYs without ever talking to a newspaper reporter. Also, guys like Barry Bonds and Curt Schilling use the Web to bypass the media and take their messages straight to the fans. There will always be great stories in sports, and there will always be plenty of fascinating people to write about, but it’s probably never been harder for writers to get an unguarded look at a superstar at the top of his game — maybe I’m forgetting something, but I can’t remember reading any great profiles of Tiger Woods or LeBron or Kobe Bryant recently.* Of course, it’s possible to write a great, insightful piece about an athlete without getting any access — see Pat Jordan’s hilarious incisive takedown of Jose Canseco on Deadspin — but it’s a lot harder.

*There was a pretty stellar profile of Kobe in Esquire awhile back, but the pouty image Bryant portrayed just furthers Levin’s assessment.

—”Freshness” is a big key in journalism these days, what with the invention of and complete/utter dominance by the Internet. It seems as though maybe this hinders creative, well thought-out stories because they aren’t “first on the scene.” How do you balance Web freshness, with also being the first to have a particular story.

Well, I’m at an advantage because I’m the sports editor for a site where sports isn’t the top priority. Since we don’t have to cover every game, I can pick my spots and write or assign whatever I think is interesting. If I do have a writer with a great idea, I don’t want some other magazine or Web site to beat us to the punch. But it is liberating not to have to post an instant take five minutes after Jason Kidd gets traded.

As far as your larger question, you’re right that there’s more pressure on everyone in the media (and especially on the Web) to write and opine at a faster pace, and that sometimes writing faster can mean writing less conherently. I’m not sure how exactly to achieve the proper balance, but I do know that Slate depends on a stable of staffers and freelancers who can both write fast and write well.

—More specifically, what’s Slate’s approach to covering sports? It’s not your main priority, yet you seem to take such a unique approach as compared to other newspapers or magazines that aren’t sport-centric publications or Web sites.

Some folks around the Web and on Slate’s message boards have made fun of our sports coverage by saying that the formula of a typical Sports Nut piece is: “Why the team/player that you love actually sucks. Also: You’re a moron for liking them.” In my defense, I’d say that we also run the occasional piece like “Will Michael Vick be able to play prison football?” and “Notre Dame’s Charlie Weis, the worst football coach in the universe.” Well, maybe that Charlie Weis one isn’t the best counter-example. But in the past year, we’ve run stories on why Eastern European tennis players are so good-looking, the internal politics of a fantasy baseball league, the wonders of online sports wagering and Bob Knight’s love of bass fishing. So, maybe the link there is that I try to run stuff that’s interesting to sports fans that you might not read elsewhere. That mission has gotten a lot harder in the last few years, by the way. While I think we still publish stuff that you wouldn’t ever find in a conventional sports page or in SI, the explosion of the sports blogosphere has meant there are tons more people doing smart, creative, snarky sports coverage than even two or three years ago (we assume he’s talking about us here…). That’s a great thing for me as a huge consumer of sports media, but it also means it’s harder to be unique.

—Would you ever consider working for a sports-specific outlet like ESPN or Sports Illustrated?

Sure, though I do like to write about things over than sports. And it depends on the circumstances. I wouldn’t want to have to argue with Skip Bayless or style John Kruk’s hair.

—In one of your stories this year, you detail watching the almost-upset of Duke by Belmont — one of the closer first-round games. All-in-all, was it the most exciting live even you’ve ever covered? Does anything beat the March Madness atmosphere?

March Madness is kind of a strange case, especially in the first round. The games are on neutral courts, so you’ve got a bunch of locals who don’t really care who wins and fans of other teams who are waiting for their game to start. The Duke-Belmont game was so great because it was a rare occasion where you had the tension of a down-to-the-wire tournament game along with the buzz of a jacked-up home-court crowd. That’s the power of Duke — that’s the only team in the country that could turn a game in D.C. into a de facto home game for a tiny school from Nashville.

I went to a Wizards game the other night, and despite the fact that Gilbert Arenas made a surprise return to the lineup, the crowd was comatose for pretty much the whole night. When the Bucks shot free throws, the Verizon Center crew put up a collage of Duke images — Paulus, Coack K, etc. — on the scoreboard to get the crowd to boo, and it worked like magic. I’m not kidding. That really happened.

—On the topic of annoying personalities, who’s the most insightful person you’ve interviewed in the sports world? The most entertaining? Who was the least insightful/entertaining?

I still have the tourney on the brain, so I’d have to say Belmont coach Rick Byrd was very thoughtful and generous with his time after his team’s loss. The most fun I’ve had working on a story was probably when I got a basketball lesson from Gheorghe Muresan. Gheorghe is an incredibly genial, funny guy, just a lot of fun to be around. Least insightful? Hmmm. Maybe Sun Ming Ming, another extremely tall basketball player. Well, it’s not that he wasn’t insightful. He just didn’t want to talk to me.

—Speaking of Madness, who do you think has the goods to win it all?

This is going to be a great Final Four because every team has the goods to win it all, right? My only prediction is that UCLA’s going to make Memphis look bad. Ben Howland’s teams have always been good at imposing their pace on other teams, and the Memphis teams of recent vintage have tended to bog down when forced to operate in the half court. Recall that UCLA beat a talented, athletic Memphis team 50-45 in the 2006 Elite Eight.

—Lastly, after reading that insane Lenny Dykstra story in the New Yorker, would you be interested in co-writing a movie about this “Players Club” magazine? I’m thinking a mix of “Boiler Room,” “Major League” and “Blow.”

Sure thing, though I’m already in negotiations to write The Mitchell Report: The Movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman has signed on to play both Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee. What an amazing actor.

Josh Levin is an associate editor at Slate, where he edits the sports and technology sections. Before coming to Slate, he wrote for the Washington City Paper. He’s a native of New Orleans and has lived in Washington, D.C., for the last five years.

Yesterday, on April Fool’s Day, Tooch graced you with his impeccable memory and wove a tale of Crystal Pepsi and inappropriate facial hair.

Today, he’s back. And with a real NBA playoff preview.

Let’s begin with the tricycle race that is the Eastern Conference playoff competition.

Led by the stud-heavy Celtics, the East boasts just a few teams (Boston, Detroit and Orlando) that have any remote chance of winning a championship.

Cleveland, Washington, Toronto and Philadelphia have all locked up their spots, but none boast enough star power to compete with those power players – or a single Western Conference playoff team for that matter.

One E.C. team to keep an eye out for – besides the Celtics – will be the Wizards. Gilbert Arenas has been medically cleared to play and could return to the team any day now. Let’s just hope he doesn’t commit suicide the minute he’s sent to the bench. The Wizards, when they are completely healthy, are a dangerous team and maybe, just maybe, could slip past the Celtics. (Just don’t count on it though.)

In the end, I – like the rest of the NBA-watching world – will be absolutely shocked if the Celtics don’t cruise to an NBA Finals appearance. Kevin Garnett is at the top of his game right now, Ray Allen is relatively healthy, and even “Big Baby” Glenn Davis is contributing. One of the only things working against Boston is the incredible amount of pressure on the team to return the city to the glory it enjoyed in the 80s. I’m going to go out on a limb here though, and predict that that pressure will send the Celtics the way of their Boston brethren Patriots this year.

You read that right. In what I’m sure will be a shocking pick to all of you, I’m going with the San Antonio Spurs to reign as champions yet again this season. The Spurs have won eight straight games now and, as usual, are getting huge contributions from their role players (Jacque Vaughn, anyone?).

New Orleans is having a fantastic season as well and boasts this year’s regular season MVP in Chris Paul, but nobody – and I mean nobody – can compete with the postseason experience of the Spurs. Give credit to the rest of the Western Conference though, which has played an absolutely incredible season. Look no further than the Golden State Warriors, who – with a 45-29 record – have NOT even locked up a playoff spot. That’s just how damn good the West is.

Snoop Dogg, rejoice – the West Coast is undoubtedly on top this year, and it looks like they mean business.