Houston Game 7 thoughts

It should never have come to this, and we'll see if this ultimately costs us a championship.

First quarter:
* On Kobe's second touch, he drives to the hole in the secondary break. Great sign, my worst fear for this game was him trying to be "aggressive."

* 3 steals in the first 2 1/2 minutes. NOt coincidentally, we are off to an 8-0 lead.

* Artest is 0/3 with 2 airballs. More Ron-Ron please!

* Bynum is coming up huge, rebounding and blocking and altering shots and generally turning them to much when they get near the basket (he ended with 2-5-2 in the quarter).

* Trevor hits his second early 3 for a 13-2 lead.

* Houston is 0/12 from the field.

* Fish hits back to back jumpers to make it 17-4. And he's turned Brooks into the Invisible Man.

* Bynum checks out and the D lets up. I'm shocked, shocked.

* 22-12 at the quarter. Considering the transition opportunities, pretty lame offense but the D is tremendous.

Second quarter:
* Hayes posts up, turns toward the middle, and reverse pivots to the baseline for a layup. One of the more shocking moves I've seen all year.

* Bynum continues to dominate the paint as the lead swells to 35-17.

* Bynum gets a phantom technical when he and Brooks bump into each other. Weak.

* Kobe drives twice in a row, one leads to a miss but Drew cleans it up and draws Battier's third foul at the 4:40 mark. Kobe is playing an intelligent game, my fears look to be unfounded.

* Pau with a putback dunk to stretch the lea to 43-24; he has 9 and 10 so far.

* Fish is just destroying Brooks, who is a nonentity on the offensive end.

* Houston ends the half on a 5-0 run to close it to 51-31, hopefully they will not be able to carry over that momentum.

Third quarter:
* Ariza is just playing a brilliant all-around game.

* Broken record, but Bynum continues to close down the paint for their offense.

* A quarter of very disjointed offense, but the defense is still there and we go to the fourth up 69-50.

Fourth quarter:
* ShanWOW's first appearance of the game; he's a victim today of Fish's brilliant defense and his own inability to check Lowry, who is now being matched with Farmar.

* At the 9:30 mark, we are outscoring them 40-20 in the paint. That's championship basketball.

* Sasha only scores on dunks these days!

* No sooner did I say that than he hit a 3 and a couple of other jumpers. Encouraging, but I need to see it for more than a few minutes of garbage time.

* The lead is 82-56 with 6:45 to go and this one is over.

And so we move on to face a rested and rolling Denver team. Game 1 will be huge as we have the 48 hour turnaround while they have been preparing for several days.