In NBA, Drama Reigns

You think Danny Ainge is watching this? He can't be, not 10 days after suffering a heart attack. Certainly, he couldn't be watching his Celtics play the Bulls. Three games out of four down to the wire. Two decided in overtime. Series 2-2 going back to Boston. No way the doctors signed off on that.

Actually, there's just not a lot Ainge can watch right now. The Rockets are on the verge of the second round for the first time since Hakeem Olajuwon, which is causing palpitations all across Texas. Orlando and Philly are tied at two apiece, three games already having been decided in the final seconds. The four-time champion Spurs are on the brink of elimination. If calm and peaceful is what the doctors ordered, then March Madness is what he needed, not the first round of the NBA playoffs.

Okay, Ainge would be safe taking a peek at Cavaliers-Pistons because nothing in those four double-digit blowouts would even keep him awake, much less cause overexcitement. But we're talking about a limited menu.

May turn out that Miami-Atlanta and Denver-New Orleans will be long and tense struggles, too. Even the champ-to-be Lakers dropped a game to Utah, on Deron Williams's buzzer-beater, of course.

The end results may still be all too predictable, but getting there has been something of a thrill ride so far for the NBA. And nothing we've seen this year, at any level of basketball, has been as dramatic as Celtics-Bulls, which has had more incredible shot-making through four games than most great series have through seven. The men at the center of all this theater are guards, Rajon Rondo for Boston and rookie Derrick Rose for Chicago. They're point guards, scoring point guards, players who are impossible to keep away from the basket with the NBA enforcing rules (and creating new ones) that keep defenders from using a forearm or hand check to slow them down.

Forget the 10-assist playmaker. Welcome in a new era of the scoring point guard. Joining Chris Paul and the aforementioned Williams will be Rose, who is 20 and probably the strongest and most athletic of this new breed, and Rondo, the quickest and craftiest. Only three men have averaged a triple-double over a playoff series: Magic Johnson (who had 30 triple-doubles in his playoff career), Jason Kidd and the all-too-forgotten Fat Lever. And now there's Rondo, who has a pair of triple-doubles in a series that might go three more games.

Even without Kevin Garnett, whose knee injury will keep him out of the playoffs, the Celtics still have a Big Three. Ray Allen and Paul Pierce are still the team's best players, but Rondo's youth and energetic persistence are what will get the champs through the first round, probably in seven games, and through either Orlando or Philly in the second round. (Imagine if the Phoenix Suns had kept him after drafting him, to first back up Steve Nash, then to succeed him in that system?)

This postseason, too, belongs to guards. As good as Yao Ming and Dwight Howard have been, the five best players in the playoffs so far have been Rondo, LeBron James, Chauncey Billups, Dwyane Wade and Ben Gordon (I would add Tony Parker, who is averaging 29 points a game, except the Spurs are down 3-1).

It's a less rosy time for recent former champions, especially the Spurs and Pistons, one of which has already been put to bed. Detroit's remarkable run has come to an end, officially. Certainly it was worthy: one championship, two trips to the Finals, six straight trips to the conference championship, eight straight trips to the playoffs. Allen Iverson might as well be wearing a Charlotte Bobcats uniform already and Rasheed Wallace, in this economic climate, might as well be in retirement. Still, it was wonderfully consistent, and the Pistons might not be gone from the scene all that long, what with plenty of cap space to sign a couple of free agents (Carlos Boozer?) and several talented young guards (Rodney Stuckey, Will Bynum, Aaron Afflalo) already under contract.

So we lose one perennial playoff giant and gain one usually miserable bridesmaid, the Houston Rockets. Nearly as important to the NBA as a Kobe Bryant-LeBron James matchup in the Finals, is having a second-round matchup between Kobe Bryant and Yao Ming.

You think "American Idol" gets big ratings? Thirty million is nothing compared to 200 million, which is what some believe will be the average audience for games involving both Yao Ming, the most important non-American star the game has ever had, and Bryant, whose popularity in China is at least equal to Yao's. Nothing in the history of American television has attracted the number of viewers a Kobe-Yao hookup in the playoffs would get.

The surprise, of course, is that the Lakers won't be stood up. Okay, nothing's official yet. Portland, down 3-1 in its series with Houston, still has two home games potentially, 5 and 7. And it's not like the Rockets are exactly reliable when it comes to advancing past the first round. But if they do . . . poor Tracy McGrady. All these years playing with Yao Ming and they couldn't win a series; now with McGrady in a suit on the bench, the Rockets look like the better team. Now, without McGrady, the Rockets will draw the Lakers. Ron Artest and Shane Battier will try to guard Kobe. Yao will lead a rather faceless cast of characters into battle against Kobe, and all of China will be riveted.

We'll be fairly interested, too. By the time that series gets cranked up, Ainge hopefully will be well on the way to a full recovery, the Celtics will likely have extricated themselves from this tangle with the Bulls and we will have been reminded that the NBA can have both its preferred order and yet plenty of dramatic and unexpected performances along the way.