Round 1 Coming Attractions: Cleveland-Chicago

We here at No Regard love our stories. And the playoffs are where each narrative strand that was teased in the regular season is shredded or affirmed. So, here are the first round series as we see them. Thank you.

If you believe, like I do, that MJ was and is a supervillain, it is easy to paint the Bulls of the 90s as the Galactic Empire. If you are appalled by that statement, rest assured that when I say "supervillain", I refer to the kind of being that any of us with good sense roots for, the kind who is too cool to be truly good and whole inside. He is Mr. Glass. He is MF Doom. He is, in many ways, Darth Vader.

But as we all know, the Death Star has been idling for a minute now, and the man in black has found property elsewhere in the galaxy, down south somewhere, I hear. Meanwhile, the Rebel Alliance has come to new prominence under the leadership of a fearless young man driven by what? Love? Pride? Glory? All of it, most likely. LeBron walks on the sky like none other, and he wants some more hardware for his heroics. Sure, LeBron already got his medal, as did Luke at the end of A New Hope. The Olympics were some sort of benchmark for LeBron, ending one chapter and starting another. But he and his crew--his Han, his C3PO, his R2, his Chewbacca, his Obi-Wan--are dreaming of bigger things, you know.

The Bulls, though. The team with a name that, to many in our generation, is still synonymous with basketball. The once great Empire. You can bet they haven't forgotten the way their franchise used to run this show. And the end of the regular season has been an impressive showing of muscle, the kind of muscle that can handle almost any work when there is retribution involved. Chicago is a cold city, y'all. These dudes know what Hoth looks like, and they are sending their peoples.

Let it be mentioned that this Bulls team, this weakened yet tall shadow of a monolith of the past, has a lot more on the line than just reclaiming faded glory. They are led by a man who will obviously go to great lengths to get this franchise back on top. They have a dangerous crew of droids, an ugly-ass Wompa, and a new breed of man in black who is eager to show that his name must be mentioned when we are mentioning names. And, hell, with the way they've been playing lately, they may even get LBJ on the rocks and try to convince him to join their forces and rule the world.

Sure, the Bulls may have fathered this whole modern operation, but in the end, they will have to accept that a new force is in control. Big L will find a way to escape in (mostly) one piece and make it back to the Falcon. It is home, after all.

Defining Quote:
"A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was."-Yoda

Cavs in 6.