Lets start in Miami where, on Saturday night, Carmelo Anthony, Tyson Chandler, and Amare Stoudemire took their talents to South Beach to do battle with the Heat. This game was over from the tip as the Heat ran away with 33-point, 100-67, victory. Both teams were two of the most talked about teams all year in the NBA thanks to expectations, Lin-sanity, losing streaks, and in house drama. It seems as though the Heat have turned it up another notch to start the playoffs, but were they as impressive as New York was disappointing in Game 1? Yes, as bad as New York played throughout the game Miami played ridiculous defense, anchored by LeBron James holding Anthony to 11 points on 3-15 shooting, and was able to hit nearly 50% of their shots. I would look for this dominating trend to continue in this series and predict a sweep by the Heat.

The biggest news of the playoffs thus far has to be Derrick Rose going down with a torn ACL in Game 1 against Philadelphia, and Motomochi and myself talked about this heavily on our show this week. Last year’s league MVP has missed significant time all season and the Bulls have continued to win without him, but this isn’t the regular season anymore. In the playoffs it is my belief that to win a title you need a superstar on your team for those “big moments”. Chicago no longer has that option, unless you consider Rip Hamilton or Luol Deng a superstar, in which case you obviously don’t follow basketball all that closely. In my opinion the Bulls are done. Now they will win this first round series against the weaker 76ers, but that is as far as they make it. They are going to face either Boston or Atlanta in the second round, both of who I believe can beat the Bulls without Rose in a seven game series. It is sad that this happened to Rose who is such a special player, but with that said the Bulls might want to start making vacation plans after the second round.

Day two of the playoffs featured the red-hot Memphis Grizzlies and the Lob City Clippers. Long story short the Grizzlies entire team decided to do it’s best impression of LeBron. They dominated the Clippers in every aspect of the game for the first 40 minutes and at one point had a 27 point lead. The Clippers went on to finish the game on a 28-3 run and squeak out a 99-98 win over the Griz. I have to admit that I didn’t get to see the finish of this game, turning it off with the fourth quarter about to start, but this game has to go down as one of the greatest comebacks in playoff history. 

Finally the first weekend of the playoffs ended with Rajon Rondo being ejected from the Celtics-Hawks game in the fourth quarter for apparently making contact with an official after a foul call went against Boston. The Celts went on to lose the game 83-74, but the story afterwards was Rondo who could face a league suspension as well. Losing Rondo for even just one game would hurt the Celtics, whoa re also without sharp-shooter Ray Allen currently, tremendously. 

All-in-all it was an intense start to the 2012 NBA Playoffs. After the smoke clears I think that one thing will be able to be taken away from this weekend, and that is that fact that the Heat’s chances of getting back to the NBA finals just got a huge boost with Rose going out and the Celtics, the only other team who people believe can beat the Heat in the east, could be without two of their best players for at least one more game.