ESPN, the place where "No Celtics News Is Good News"

[Snoopy the Celtics Beagle <snoopy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's amazing, really.  If a flea farts on LeBron James, it's an ESPN 
sidebar.  Kobe Bryant buys an apology present for cheating on his wife (and 
when said event puts her on the evening news it had BETTER be expensive) 
and rates a headline for doing so.  Even a whisper of talks between the 
Clippers and the Heat merit a clickable headline.

Yet the Celtics have completed at least one signing, possibly two, 
accompanied by showing Travis Best's agent how the Celtics expect the game 
to be played on and off the court; and from ESPN we get.....

Zip.  Not so much as a whisper.

I know, it's me being a hometown fan, some will say.  True, but that 
doesn't matter any to a sports desk.  Others will chime in, insisting that 
signing a second-round pick isn't worth the space.  This is the internet, 
people.  For all intents and purposes, space is limitless, given the amount 
of drivel that somehow finds it's way online.  Besides, a look at today's 
news of front page interest includes the naming of the Rockets' new arena; 
Lue signing with Orlando; and someone named P. Diddy wanting to own the Knicks.

It was two days after the fact that Walter McCarty's signing was mentioned 
on the site.  The Summer League, to hear it from them, was attended by one 
player from Cleveland.  No mention of the fact that LeBron's first shot of 
the league was an airball courtesy of the Boston Celtics.

I know there's some bad blood in the past.  Red was arrogant in 
victory.  No less so, I think, than anyone who has won 16 championships has 
a right to be.  The Celtics had the whole mystique thing going.  Anything 
bad that happened to the Lakers, was cause for celebration in 
Boston.  Anything bad that happened to the Celtics was cause for 
celebration everywhere else.  The owners got to stick it to the C's by 
voting down a request for relief when Reggie Lewis died, which is the main 
reason the owners no longer have this power.

But the networks have perpetuated this sort of idiocy for years, now.  Tom 
Heinsohn was fired as a national NBA announcer because of his bias for 
Boston during the mid 1980's.  As Heinsohn put it, paraphrased, the team 
was winning 60+ games.  Was he supposed to say they stank?  Yet Jeff Van 
Gundy, a former coach of the Knicks, conspicuously said "we" in speaking of 
the Knicks, as if he were still working for them, and not TNT.  Hubie Brown 
never met a negative comment about Boston that he didn't freely repeat on 
the air as often as he could.  We all remember too well the playoffs tv 
schedule, where the Celtics had two playoff games in the same series 
relegated to NBAtv, including what could have been a series-deciding 
game.  Other teams had only one such appearance.  During those games we DID 
see, the announcers would talk about every subject under the sun BUT the 
Celtics, save only to say, "Walker likes taking threes" like it was a state 
secret that nobody had figured out.

The Celtics take more heat than the Heat do.  The Trailblazers team picture 
practically needed to be taken at the city jail.  The Lakers are getting 
progressively crazier.  Police in places ranging from Toronto to Orlando 
are making it clear they don't tolerate NBA players behaving like thugs.

The Celtics have been to the playoffs two years running with a team that 
the previous owners did their best to gut like a cheap fish while taking 
money by the truck full  to their own hands.  They have made a determined 
effort under new ownership to commit to long-term winning, not only this 
season, but in the future.  I think that ESPN, to name one incredibly 
unbalanced bastion of sports journalism, needs to stop bashing Boston and 
start acting like they know what the words "balanced" and "objective" mean.

Snoopy the Celtics Beagle
Please visit the <http://www.celticsbeagle.net/>Celtics Beagle Website