NBA Playoff and Father's Day Thoughts

Three comments on the NBA playoffs:

1) The NBA playoffs are a random walk, but the ESPN analysts are chartists - they look at the last day trend and extrapolate forever. Dallas handles the Heat easily in Games 1 and 2, and all you hear from Legler and Anthony are how Dallas is the greatest team ever, and that the Heat have nothing. Three games later it is nearly the opposite story. Same thing happened Pistons-Cavaliers. You should watch these guys with Ludlow & Kramer in the picture in picture - the analysis is as equally irrelevant.

2) The Game 5 call was ridiculous. But in the course of any one game, there are bound to be a lot of questionable calls, so while it is natural to focus and the last pivotal one, it is not necessarily fair. That being said, I think the NBA playoff championships should change its format - they should institute a sudden death overtime that extends until one team goes up by at least 10 points, with overtime triggered anytime the regulation spread is not at least 10 points. Right now, you have three games that the Heat won, which I would argue do not provide statistically significant evidence of superior play. All noise, no signal. This is why, of the four major sports, basketball is ultimately the least satisfying (while at the same time being the most entertaining).

3) Love Dwayne Wade, love Shaq. Not a big Pat Riley fan. Love Avery Johnson. Not a big Mark Cuban fan. So I really didn't care who won. Wade wins a championship with Shaq clearly on the downside of his career - so how does Kobe feel about that? Another reason to love Flash.

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Jake gave me a card for Father's Day with sentences that he had to fill in, like "My dad's favorite food is ___." He filled in broccoli. Other fill-ins were similarly off point. The last one: "I wouldn't trade my dad for __." He filled in "food." Great, I rank marginally above string cheese in the eyes of my kids. Sometimes I feel like they don't understand me at all. They just don't know who I am.

I read a book recently called Stumbling on Happiness (I highly recommend), which billed itself not as a how to book for achieving happiness, but rather as a guide to understanding, years down the road, why achieving all of those things you thought would make you happy ended up not working. Anyway, the author comments that happiness in marriage declines while kids are in the mix; it is higher before they come along, and higher after they leave, but generally doing things with your own kids rates low on the satisfaction meter for most people.

I think there is some truth to this, but I view these years as an investment for down the road. You don't appreciate boredom until you have kids, and when my life is boring again, I suppose I'll savor it. Of course, achieving happiness is not the same as feeling like your life has meaning, and so while one might have more fun without kids (though I don't think I would), you don't get the same sense of generativity out of the freedom to go to the movies on any given night.