Maybe Your Standards Should Be Higher

There is an old joke about two men walking in the woods when they come across a grizzly bear. Seeing that the bear is about to charge, one of the men reaches down to tie his sneakers. His buddy turns to him and says "Are you nuts? You can't outrun a grizzly." The other guy looks back at his buddy and says, "I don't need to run faster than that bear, I just need to run faster than you." It's a funny enough joke and I think of it every time I see this new commercial that is on all the time. It's an ad for Verizon Fios and every time I see it, something about it bothers me. During the spot they show a chart of "very satisfied customers" as compared to Comcast. The Comcast bar is very low, at only 19%, while the Fios bar is much taller. The thing is, the Fios bar still only represents a very satisfied customer rating of 49%. Sure, that's a lot more than 19%, but it still means over half of your customers don't like something about your level of service. Now, I'm a Fios subscriber and I'm happy enough with them, but there are things I would like to changed before I would consider myself "very satisfied". Maybe, instead of simply being content to not be dead last and the worst option, Fios should work on being better for their own sake.

-It was nice to see that all it took to get the Celtics to give a crap during the playoffs was a marginal player on the other team calling two of the best players on the Celtics "actresses." I guess if the Celtics go on a prolonged playoff run we will have Quentin Richardson to thank for it. For the first time I can also see why Dwayne Wade was in no hurry to sign a contract extension with the Heat, despite it being an ideal situation with weather and the fact that Florida has no state income tax (always a big deal to athletes). That team has a lot of quit in it. I think if the Celtics win Game 3, that series is over. Guys like Jermaine O'Neal and Michael Beasley not only act like they don't gave a crap at all, but actually seemed inconvenienced that they made the playoffs and pushed back their inevitable offseason. Add in Jamaal Magloire you have 3/5 of the starting lineup for the "I don't care if we win or lose as long as the check clears" All-Star Team. Not that I root for the Heat one way or the other, but I can totally see why Wade may want to play somewhere else next year.

-While I'm very pleased that the Celtics blew the doors off the Heat last night, I'm still not getting too hyped about their playoff chances beyond this round. The bottom half of the Eastern Conference playoff teams were crap this year. Honestly, if the NBA had decided simply to skip the first round of the playoffs and just had Orlando/Atlanta and Cleveland/Boston I don't think it would have mattered much. None of the first round series should go more than 5 games (yet another reason to put the first round of the playoffs back to a best-of-five format). But, on the other hand, I don't think any fan base should get too happy about first round sweeps because none of us will really know how good these Eastern Conference teams are until the next round when they start facing tougher competition.