Bramlet's Belated Broodings About the Mavericks' Meltdown

Early in Bramlet's youth, The Muppet Show inspired him with visions of how great old age could be.

Statler: That was terrible!
Waldorf: Being holed up in this balcony with your farts is more pleasant than watching the Mavericks whine and choke their way to another championship for Shaquille O'Neal!
Statler: Hahaha! What a bunch of overpaid pussies! I'd rather listen to your wife talk about her incontinence than listen to Mark Cuban bitch one more time!
Waldorf: Hahaha! I had a colonoscopy this morning that I enjoyed more than that series!
Statler: You have a colonoscopy every morning! I'm starting to think you do enjoy them!
Waldorf and Statler: Hahahaha!

That's the kind of stuff I imagine I would say if I'd actually bothered to watch the Heat beat the Mavericks. But I didn't watch much of the series. I just plain wasn't interested. In fact, I've developed a mathematical formula to express the level of my disdain and indifference:

time spent watching 2006 NBA Finals

________________________________________________

time spent watching World Cup matches + time spent watching reruns of Full House

In a normal World Cup year, this ratio would come out pretty close to 1. But this year, even though I refuse to subject myself to Full House as a matter of principle*, the above ratio still turned out to be a very small number - something on the order of 0.15. Although I have actually enjoyed the World Cup quite a bit, if I spend that much more time watching football ("soccer") than watching NBA playoff basketball, you can bet that something is seriously wrong (i.e. the Spurs were eliminated early on). Hell, for the one Finals game I watched with the guys, I spent more time shoving crappy generic cookies into my face while complaining earnestly about American wastefulness and consumerism than actually watching the game. (Being trashed makes irony and hypocrisy a lot harder to detect.)

When fueled by alcohol and good times, Bramlet makes the Cookie Monster

look like Kate Moss on appetite suppressants.

In retrospect, I should have just rooted for the Heat and hoped for sweet revenge on the Mavericks in the form of a karmic beatdown (thanks for the catchphrase, Funktiger). The pleasure of watching a 7-foot German get bitchslapped probably would have motivated me more than rooting for the Mavericks did. Bruce Bowen and Robert Horry had the right idea.

Bruce:

"I'm thrilled that Dallas didn't win it. Oh, poor them. Being as they went through so much, you know, as far as adversity (insert Bruce rolling eyes and sarcastic tone here). Um, I'm saying too much now."

Rob:

"That's the first time I ever rooted for the East," Horry said. "You usually never root for the East, you root for the West. But the way (the Mavericks) acted, it just put a bad taste in my mouth.

"All the whining Dallas did, the way (owner Mark) Cuban acted, the way (assistant coach) Del Harris acted on the sideline a couple of times, I was happy to see Dallas lose.

"I know the one game we won in Dallas, Avery was crying about the refs," Horry said. "I was like, 'You're crying about the refs?' We're the only ones who should be crying about the refs. We're the ones who are down in the series.

"There were just a lot of things that they did that I didn't think were characteristic of a team that's supposed to be in the (top) class."

Cuban whines so much that by the end of the series even Nowitzki wanted him to shut up.

Fortunately for Bruce and Big Shot, the Mavericks' spectacular choke will be immortalized in DVD form for posterity:

* The principle being that it sucks ass. If I ever resort to watching crap like that in my old age, please just put me out of my misery - unless I'm only watching it so that I can make Statlerian or Waldorfian comments about how badly it sucks (in which case I'll want it to be brought back). But then, that's a little unfair of me. Complaining that Full House is trite and sentimental is like complaining that a bag of Cheetos that makes proclamations like "Dangerously cheesy!" and "They're the cheesiest!" should go a little lighter on the cheese. It is what it is.

While doing research for these comments, I found out a couple of very disturbing things. One is that there is a ridiculous number of Cheetos products on the market. Americans must be consuming an awful lot of these fucking things to support that many variations on the "corn meal and processed cheese" theme, especially given all of the generic imitation products that are out there as well. The other disturbing thing is that judging by the number of results for this Google search, Americans (I'm assuming, quite reasonably, that they're all Americans) don't know the difference between "Cheez Doodles" and "Chez Doodles." The second one reminds me of either a bad French-Canadian children's TV show with a lot of mimes and general silliness or a gay porn movie.

In late 2006, in a desperate effort to save his house, Screech agrees to star in Chez Doodles.

So, yeah, those are my thoughts on the Mavericks.