Jim Rome is a Dumbass

Errrrrrrr, allegedly. I accidentally caught the first couple of minutes of "Jim Rome is Burning" last night while flipping around the channels. Under the lame headline, "Texas Toast," Rome suggests that since the San Antonio Spurs have lost the first two games in New Orleans, they now have no chance to win the series. His reasoning? "The Spurs have NEVER come back from an 0-2 deficit to win a playoff series."

Never? Wow, that makes it sound like there are a lot of examples of this happening, right? Wrong. Over the past 10 seasons (not counting this season) since Tim Duncan was drafted in the summer of 1997, the Spurs have been to the playoffs every single year, and have played a total of 28 playoff series. And how many times have the Spurs lost the first 2 games? Twice. Twice out of twenty-eight series over the course of ten years, including exactly zero in the past six seasons. The first occurrence happened in the 1998 playoffs when rookie Tim Duncan was facing Karl Malone in his prime (and by prime, I mean that he had just won the MVP the previous year, and he would go on to win it again the next season). The other instance? Against Kobe and Shaq's Lakers in the 2001 Western Conference finals.

Now, I think Chris Paul is a great young player with tons of talent and potential, but unless Jim's going to tell us that Chris Paul & David West are equivalent to Stockton/Malone, or that Chris Paul & Tyson Chandler should be mentioned in the same breath as Kobe and Shaq, then he shouldn't be making asinine comments about how if the Spurs (before Manu Ginobli or Tony Parker showed up, by the way) couldn't come back from 0-2 in those two particular situations many years ago with different players, against historically great competition, then they can't possibly come back in this series against the upstart Hornets. Ridiculous. The gambling lesson here: don't take these so-called trends at face value - do a little digging to find out if past occurrences have any reasonable relationship to the current situation you're considering, or if they just sound impressive when you hear them from some pompous jackass on television. Rack it!