Hey, Rusty, I know you’re a bit busy at the moment, what with helping that saintly Victoria Osteen escape from charges of being one of those first class a-holes we all see on every flight. And when you’re done with her, I know that you have to get back to helping Roger Clemens win back the reputation that’s been destroyed by that mean, mean Brian McNamee.

But seeing as how you made your reputation by getting drunk athletes off, I’d like to give you the name of a person who appears to desperately need your assistance. And since he’s currently under a guaranteed contract, I don’t think he’s going to need sell off any cars to Bret Michaels in order to pay your excessive fees (which reminds me, I’ve been wanting to ask, isn’t it the suckers who go to Lakewood Church who are really the ones paying your fees?).

I couldn’t help but notice that the University of Texas is retiring the jersey of Kevin Durant. Now I don’t know about you, but I always thought that somebody had to do something rather exceptional to have a jersey retired. And playing for a team for one year just doesn’t seem to qualify to me, especially if that one year doesn’t even result in a national title.

I understand Vince Young. He still split school early, but he stuck around for a couple of years and he did lead the team to a national title. And I can understand Earl Campbell. He only won the Heisman Trophy and went into the NFL Hall of Fame. You can’t deny Bobby Layne, who went on to be one of the NFL’s greats. But Durant wasn’t even the best player in the country for the one year he played in college.

We here at Ballz are all into lists. And since earlier this year I did the best sports movies, I thought I’d share with you my choices for the 12 best sports books.

12. Everybody’s All-American, by Frank Deford. This is the story of an All-American college running back growing up in the segregated South who never quite lives up to his potential once he hits the pros, then has trouble adjusting to life once his career ends.

11. A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports, by Brad Snyder. This is partly the story of former St. Louis Cardinals outfield Curt Flood, and it’s mostly the story of the baseball reserve clause and the challenges and attempts to bring free agency to baseball. And if you ever want to read the details of one of the stupidest-ever Supreme Court opinions, this is the place.

The Houston Rockets named their replacement for Gene Peterson and Jim Foley on Thursday. And the jobs are going to one person, Craig Ackerman.

Ackerman has worked for the team for 14 years, having started as an intern. For the past five years, he’s done studio work, and he’s filled in for Peterson and Foley when one or the other had to miss a game.

Resident Rockets guy Jason Friedman apparently loved covering T-Mac and Yao so much, he decided to marry them. Okay, not exactly, but he did recently take a job as staff writer for the Houston Rockets, which means he can no longer write for us. We’re definitely gonna miss Jason, but we wish him the best of luck. It’s always nice to see one of our own do well in this world.

It’s hard to be funny when you’re saying goodbye. Farewells just aren’t inherently amusing. I mean, there’s a reason Shakespeare didn’t pen a line like “Parting is such wicked awesome hilarity.”

So this leaves me in a bit of a pickle. I’m saying goodbye to the Ballz blog today. I’d like my last post to be funny or, at the very least, mildly smirk-worthy. But I just don’t think I have it in me. And since there’s nothing worse than forced attempts at humor, I’ll just slip off into the ether with a few thank yous and call it a day.

Well that was disappointing.

After all the hype and hope generated by a Lakers-Celtics Finals, we ended up with a lackluster series culminating in last night’s horror show: a 131-92 Boston massacre which cemented the Celts as world champs for the 17th time, and sent Kobe and the Lakers back to L.A. with their tails between their legs. While the ease with which Boston dispatched Los Angeles may have been surprising, the result wasn’t. Once the series got rolling, it quickly became clear the guys in green were the superior team and it was only a matter of time before they started making plans for a parade.

What seemed to surprise many people, though, were the feet of clay possessed by the seemingly superhuman Kobe Bryant. Outside of a sterling performance in Game 3, Kobe was held in check by a swarming Boston defense. In the grand scheme of things, this shouldn’t seem so shocking. The Celtics were the proud owners this year of a D that ranked among the best the league has ever seen, and showed during the regular season that they had the wherewithal to get Bryant off his game.

I give up.

I’m done trying to figure out this Boston Celtics team. It’s pointless; an exercise in futility. I truly believe I’d have a better chance of divining the meaning of life than piecing together the puzzle that is this Celtics squad.

Heading into the postseason, Boston was clearly the best team in the league. Sixty-six regular season wins and a historically great defense will do that for you. But then the playoffs began, and the would-be champs looked more like chumps. First, Atlanta (Atlanta?!?!) took the Celtics to seven games. Then the Cleveland LeBrons did the same, and it took a performance for the ages from Paul Pierce to save Boston’s bacon. In fact, it wasn’t until the fourth quarter of Game 6 against Detroit that we finally caught a glimpse of the Celtics team we saw throughout most of the regular season.

The NBA Finals are finally interesting.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the Los Angeles Lakers benefitted from a winning combo of home court and healthy desperation to dispatch Boston 87-81 last night; cutting the Celtics’ series lead to 2-1 in the process. And if, while watching, you started having flashbacks of the Heat-Mavs Finals from ’06, well, let’s just say you weren’t the only one.

But that wasn’t the real story from the NBA last night. Disgraced former referee Tim Donaghy’s legal team dropped a bombshell on the league yesterday, via a letter alleging refs altered playoff games and series; including the Houston Rockets’ first-round match-up with Dallas back in 2005. The letter doesn’t come right out and name the Rockets and Mavs per se, but those possessing a memory slightly greater than that of a goldfish should be able to figure out the principals involved:

There’s one thing worse than not making a trade, and that’s making a bad trade. And Houston sports fans have witnessed a lot of bad trades. Here, in my opinion, are the five worst.

5. Houston Astros closer Billy Wagner questioned owner Drayton McLane’s commitment to winning. On November 5, 2003, owner McLane answered by having Wagner traded to the Philadelphia Phillies for pitchers Brandon Duckworth, Taylor Buchholz and Ezequiel Astacio. Wagner is still pitching at an All-Star level for the New York Mets. Buchholz is a reliever for the Colorado Rockies. Duckworth is currently in the Kansas City Royals minor league system. Astacio is out of baseball.

Since the NBA playoffs ended about a week ago, I guess it’s long past time for me to deliver my 2007-2008 awards column. Wait, what’s that you say? The playoffs aren’t over yet, the league simply decided to stick an interminably long, momentum-draining week of inaction between the end of the Conference Finals and the beginning of the championship round? Hmmm, interesting. Hey, Commissioner Stern, just because the NFL likes to drag things out as long as possible before the Super Bowl, it doesn’t mean you have to do the same thing with the NBA Finals. It sucks for football, and it sucks for your sport, too.

So since we’ve all been subjected to a week’s worth of hype, puff pieces and previews, I won’t bore you with another one. Instead, I’ll just deliver one final flip-flop in a season that’s been full of them. That’s right, I’m abandoning my pre-playoffs prediction of Celtics in 7, and taking the Lakers in 6 instead. You’ve been warned.

And speaking of flip-flops, I hope everyone’s enjoying the Kobe Bryant love-fest these days. Full disclosure: I was a big Bryant fan during his early years, back when most everyone seemed to resent him for some reason. Then this happened and I’ve never been able to see him the same. Fortunately for Kobe, it seems as if the majority of the sporting public has no such qualms, which is fine, just don’t be surprised if the tide suddenly shifts once more. That’s all I’m saying. - Jason Friedman

Sports fans always talk about the trade that should be made, or the trade that was made. It’s just part of being a sports fan. So today I thought I would give you what I felt to be the five best trades in Houston sports history.

5. On April 6, 1975, the Houston Astros sent $35,000 to the Atlanta Braves for mediocre pitcher by the name of Joe Niekro. By the time 1980 rolled around, Niekro was the ace of an Astro pitching staff that also featured a guy named Nolan Ryan.

Good news, bad news for the Comets. Good news is that they have sold-out tonight’s game against Minnesota. They’re in their new (and smaller) digs at Reliant Arena and this is the first home game of the season.

Bad news is that they are still the Comets. They lost the first two regular season games on the road (85-66 against Detroit, and a closer 69-66 against Washington). Add to that the preseason losses and the Comets have a four-game losing streak going.

Tina Thompson is the only player with double-digit scoring average with 17 ppg (she averaged 23.7 points against Minnesota last season). Matee Ajavon, who just joined the team, is scoring a respectable 9.5 ppg.

Tonight’s tip-off is at 7:30 p.m. – Olivia Flores Alvarez

I made a bit of a mistake yesterday: I turned on sports talk radio for about ten minutes. The station was 790, the time was about nine a.m. And in those ten minutes, I heard Brad Davies tell me that once you move from a city, even if that city is where you grow up, you can no longer pull for that team to win. So if you were born in Chicago and moved to Houston for a job, you can no longer pull for the Cubs or White Sox. Or if you moved here from Boston, or St. Louis, or Cleveland, or New York, or anywhere, it doesn’t matter. You can only pull for the Astros.

Following this, Davies told me that he was pulling for the Lakers to beat the Spurs because he is bored by the Spurs. Not bored by the Spurs’ style of play. Or by any of their players. He’s just bored of seeing San Antonio win the thing all of the time. Now, I’ll let Jason handle the whole Spurs basketball thing, but I just want to ask: What kind of stupid decision is it to pull for a team because you’re bored by another team? The Rockets are out of the playoffs, and I really don’t watch the NBA much anymore, but the Spurs are a fun team who are well-coached, can play fast or slow, are good at the fundamentals, and are basically everything a basketball fan should want from a championship team once the hometown team is out of the running.

Being a longtime observer of Houston sports means that I’ve seen an awful lot of uniforms. Some good. Many bad. So I thought I would give you what I consider to be the five worst uniforms in Houston sports history.

5. Houston Astros, Home Uniforms, 2000-Present.

I hate these uniforms. I can’t stress enough how much I hate these things.

I hate the colors. I hate the pinstripes. I hate the hat. I hate what they’ve done to the logo.

The colors are dull and boring. And they kind of look like pajamas to me.

Damn Drayton, if you wanted to go retro, you should have gone retro with the unis and gone to the late-60s/early-70s look.

Last week I revealed my strange love affair with the San Antonio Spurs —a team hated by most people outside of the Alamo City for reasons I can’t quite comprehend. So today I’m going to focus on the team I inexplicably despise. Yeah, you might be surprised by this one. It’s none other than the anti-road warriors themselves, the Boston Celtics.

Perhaps my hatred stems from something ingrained deep within my Houston sports DNA: As a kid, I loathed the Celtics for ruining the Rockets’ title hopes in ’81 and ’86. Or maybe I’m just naturally opposed to mega-market teams which get crammed down my throat by the national media hype machine. Whatever the case may be, my hate for Boston’s beloved basketball team has returned.

The strange thing is, on the surface, there’s nothing all that despicable about this Celtics squad. They’re a group of seemingly unselfish guys who play tough, fundamentally sound basketball. In fact, I’ve always liked Kevin Garnett and never really had a problem with Paul Pierce or Ray Allen. So if I don’t mind the Big Three, what’s my problem?