Be a basketball columnist! It's easy!

There are many reasons to root for the Celtics over the Lakers in the NBA finals, which head to Boston on Tuesday for a critical Game 6. But there is one above all.

A Celts victory will force LA Times basketball columnist Bill Plaschke to shut up.

It will force him to shut up.

It will force him to stop using columnist cliches like the endless repetition of a key phrase.

It will force him to stop leaning on wheezy old devices like single-sentence paragraphs.

Or paragraphs that combine the two, like:

This one, which starts a thought here, inserts a contrived pause for fake suspense, and concludes just below with the reappearance of the key phrase.

It will force him to stop.

It may also give him time to consider that he wrote an entire column around the idea that you dare not count out the Lakers, when the single most prominent voice to urge counting the Lakers out of the finals was his.

It was his.

It was right here.

Some balmy night this summer, when Pau and Kobe and Lamar are shooting hoops around a playground basket not for glory but simply for fun, the way they did when they were kids, before the bright lights and the pressure and the artificially stately rhythms of a paragraph that's meant to suggest "Here comes the wind-up," they will suddenly realize they are listening to an unfamiliar sound.

The sound of Bill Plaschke shutting up.

And they will relax and breathe easy.

Until November.

Cross-posted at billbarol.tumblr.com.

Follow Bill Barol on Twitter: www.twitter.com/billbarol

Comments

[RobinSeattle]

Bill Plaschke, the guy who spent three full columns once deriding Hideo Nomo because the Japanese righthander wouldn't speak to him in english. He's a lisping idiot. How he got a job working for one of the country's two premier newspapers just amazes me. Most of the commenters here at Huffington Post have more writing talent.