Quick Sports Hits...

-Ok, that's more like it. I thought the series against the Bulls was going to be 5 or 6 games, but the way that the Bulls have played the last two games it's definitely going 6, if not 7. I still feel like the Celtics have the advantage of experience, especially should it come to a 7th game. In addition to that they definitely have the coaching edge (and this is coming from a guy who's not the biggest Doc Rivers fan). Del Negro really should have saved a timeout in last night's game. You can see now see how much this team misses Garnett on the defensive side of the ball.

Also, the Celtics still need to get Pierce more involved. Watching the game last night he almost seemed an afterthought and it felt like they weren't running enough plays through him. There was no doubt in my mind that Allen was going to be the one taking the last shot. I have to assume that Tony Allen is still too banged up to be effective, otherwise he should have been out there last night on Ben Gordon and allowed Ray Allen to save some energy on the defensive side of the ball.

Now, in every Celtics series I tend to latch on to two players on the other team: one I would love to see wearing green and one I begin to loathe irrationally. I was always a big Brad Miller guy, but he's getting up there in age, so I'm going with Kirk Hinrich. He'd be a great backup guard to Rondo, though he's under contract for a couple more years. I wasn't sure who was going to be the guy that I started to dislike for no real reason, but it was nice of Joakim Noah to step up to the role by trying to stare down Kendrick Perkins. Good luck with that one, Joakim. Perk would wreck you in a fight.

-I forgot how bad coverage of a marathon is to watch on TV. They basically have a guy riding backwards on a motorcycle, driving in front of the lead pack. Only the bike is barely going 20 miles an hour and that's a hard speed hard for a rider to keep a bike controlled and balanced. Add the extra weight of a second rider and all that camera equipment and it's a shaky ride. On TV it ends up looking like the worst home movies your parents ever shot. I got a migraine after about 10 minutes of watching.

Also, I know that other than the New York marathon this is about the only time running takes the center stage of American sports, but do running analysts need to try and cram everything they know about running into one 4 hour telecast? Yesterday everyone was trying to talk over each other talking about pacing, running strategy, wind speed, hills, subtle hills, turning, drafting and kicking. Yeah, we get it: there's a lot more than putting one foot in front of the other for hours at a time. Next year, one at a time, please.

-Full disclosure: I was never a good trash talker. Whenever I was playing sports and some one tried talking shit to me I would just not respond for like 4 plays and then come back with something witty like, "Yeah, whatever" (clever, I know). It was one aspect of sports I just never worked on. So, imagine my surprise to find out that the Vancouver Canucks apparently are taking the time to do research into their opponents lives. That's the dedication that makes you a professional, boys.