Pat Summitt continues to set the standard

With her announcement of stepping down as Tennessee's head women's basketball coach, Pat Summitt has shown once again just how much better she is than everybody else doing this coaching thing.

You know most of the story. 16 SEC regular season and tournament championships. 18 Final Fours. 1,098 wins. Tennessee never missed an NCAA Tournament during her 38 years at the helm, a feat that absolutely boggles the mind. But by stepping down due to her battle with early-onset Alzheimer, Summitt showed she knew when her time had come, a characteristic not displayed by many athletes or coaches these days.

There was Michael Jordan coming back to play for the Washington Wizards when he shouldn't have been, and Brett Favre ruining his relationship with Green Bay before heading to the New York Jets and Minnesota Vikings. Even then, Favre stuck around until scandals surrounding his penis did more to force him out of football. In college football, both Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno hung on to their jobs at the helm for way too long, the latter ending in disastrous circumstances. Bobby Petrino hadn't been at Arkansas for long, but he was revered by the Razorback faithful. Now, he's out of a job because he too let his ego and perceived importance get the best of him.

Not Summitt, though. Somehow (sarcasm), she managed to avoid the inflated sense of self that has ruined so many other sports personalities. She knew earlier this season that this would have to be her last, but where she differed from so many others was that she followed through on that. Sure, Summitt will still be the "Coach Emeritus" (whatever that means) at Tennessee, but she's done with the profession. She'll still be there so Tennessee can recruit competitively, but Summitt knows it's time to hang up the proverbial whistle.

Always good to know that there are still some decent, smart people in the sporting world.

Why I'm not worried about the Heat, even a little bit

I couldn't find much to write about in the past week and change. But with the NBA playoffs coming up soon, there has been an interesting development in the league that is quickly becoming the biggest headline: the Heat are losing games, they can't keep pace with Chicago. Can they pull it together and win a championship? Wait...that's been the headline of the NBA for the past two seasons.

In this most recent addition of "The Heat can't cut it", the Heat have gone 3-4 while trying to make a push for the Eastern Conference's top seed. Of greater note is the fact that three of those four losses came to the Boston Celtics (twice) and the Chicago Bulls. The fact that as the season winds down, and the Heat are unable to beat other playoff teams from the East gives some people concern (or fills them with glee). Bill Simmons even took the time to write a column about how his beloved Celtics are back, and that they could mess with the Heat in a playoff series if they stay healthy. Sorry, not gonna happen. Because while I'm no expert on the NBA, I watch enough to know that the regular season is mostly meaningless.

In the NBA's regular season, getting into decent position in the playoffs is the only concern. It is a rarity to have a game in which both teams really play hard on a given night in the NBA. Take this BS Report podcast with Steve Nash, who talks about in a normal NBA season, having "scheduling losses", losses that a team basically just surrenders due to the grind of its schedule at that time. Yeah, sometimes in the NBA teams don't really show up. When they do, it's fantastic. That is why the playoffs are so entertaining. Because teams and players are giving it everything they've got in the playoffs. That's also why the regular season can't really be used to evaluate a playoff bracket.

Take Lebron James' first team for example. In the two years before James left for Miami, the Cleveland Cavaliers had the best record in the NBA and lost in the playoffs. In 2009, the Cavs were an unbelievable 66-16 in the regular season, but were dispatched pretty easily by the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference Finals. If not for a buzzer-beater by James in game 2, that would have been five game series. A 66-16 team was manhandled. Orlando, despite its inferior regular season record, was the better team. In the next year, everyone knows what happened. Cleveland went down to the Boston Celtics in six games, and Lebron "quit" in game 5. (This is an argument for another time, but I watched the game, and just don't agree that he had already quit on the Cavs. Look at his game 6 stats for at least some evidence). Whether or not James had given up, what always seems to be lost in that story is that clearly, the Celtics were a much better team than they were given credit for during the regular season. Everyone thought the C's beating the Cavs was an incredible upset, but then the Celtics beat the Magic easily, and almost won the Championship over the Lakers. It seems obvious to me that the Celtics flipped a switch in the playoffs and started playing real basketball. They just wanted to get into position, and when that happened, with all their veterans, become the team they knew they were capable of being.

So what was it about those Cavs that made them so good in the regular season but unable to get over the hump in the playoffs? The answer is simple: they played hard every night in the regular season. Players like Anderson Varejao hustled like crazy every night and were awarded as All-Stars in the regular season. But the playoffs started, and the Varejaos of the world start going against guys who are more athletically gifted, more talented and now playing just as hard, and things got ugly. (Varejao's career stats: 7.3 points, 7.2 rebounds. His career playoff numbers: 6.0 points, 5.6 rebounds (according to databasebasketball.com). In 2009-10, Varejao averaged 8.6 points and 7.6 rebounds. In the playoffs that year, he went for 5.7 points and 6.5 rebounds. In both cases, he played less minutes per game than during the regular season, but that is just as telling as the decrease in numbers: Varejao couldn't get the job done quite as well anymore).

Now look at last season, in which the Heat were the second seed in the East behind the Bulls. Miami went 0-3 against Chicago in the regular season, and it looked like Chicago had a serious mental edge. But then after losing game one, Miami reeled off four straight wins in relatively easy fashion, burying the Bulls in the fourth quarter each time. The Heat proved it was a better team than Chicago was.

Given the way this NBA season has gone, there's no reason to expect a different result in the playoffs. The Bulls almost exactly the same team as last year: a hard-playing group of most good players that operate around one unbelievable superstar. They have managed to win without Derrick Rose this year, which might be better for the Bulls come playoff time, but it's unlikely. When everybody is playing as hard as Taj Gibson and Joakim Noah are, Chicago looks a whole lot more pedestrian. And when everybody in Miami is playing that hard, the Heat will become a whole new animal, similar to last year.

Hopefully it will still result in a team on a mission from the West dispatching them in the NBA Finals, so the Heat narrative can continue.

We found baseball in a hopeless place

One hundred sixty-two games. It can be easy to forget in the early season excitement of Major League Baseball (which begins tonight, at least in the U.S.), that we've got to last through five and a half months and 162 games just to get to the playoffs. And that means if your team is not very good, after a month-long (maybe) grace period of just being happy to watch baseball, the sport can get pretty old and pretty depressing pretty fast. That's not a good thing, because a few tennis Grand Slams aside, baseball's the only thing going on during the summer months.

This is precisely why I'm concerned about the 2012 MLB season. According to Grantland.com baseball writer Jonah Keri, it would be a surprise if the New York Mets (my favorite team) were to finish anything better than last in the NL East. In ESPN.com writer Jayson Stark's annual preseason prediction of the World Series winner, the Mets qualified as one of the ten teams that have "no shot to be cooking in October." And in a division that possesses expected contenders in the Phillies, Braves and Marlins, let alone the popular sleeper-pick Washington Nationals. It could be a very long season for the Metropolitans. The Amazin's are looking like anything but in 2012.

So how to enjoy a season of baseball in which the team I like will probably be 10 games off the lead within the first 40 games of the season? Fantasy baseball will certainly help. But the key to continuing to enjoy baseball lies in following individual pursuits. Will David Wright, one of the great Mets of my lifetime, finally enjoy a healthy season and return to his original form? Will any of the young players (Ike Davis, Lucas Duda, Ruben Tejada) have a breakout year and be a pleasant surprise in an otherwise dark year? How impressive will Johan Santana be after sitting out last year due to surgery? Outside of the Mets, how about Jose Reyes? Will he continue to be the dominate game-changer he was in 2011, or will he go back to good-but-not-great form after securing himself that massive contract?

With so many players, so many games and so, so, so many numbers, there is always something that can be enjoyed about baseball. Really, where else can we so easily access a hitter's batting average against a certain pitcher when he is facing a 2-1 count? Nowhere else in sports that I'm aware of. Love it. So tune in tonight, tomorrow and over the weekend.