Welcome to the Finals, Orlando. My name is Kobe Bryant, and I’ll be serving you this evening. Our special is the “40 points on 16-34 shooting.” What’s that? No, I’m afraid neither the hot 3-point shooting nor dominant inside play are available tonight.

OK, I’ll stop the analogy, but you get the point. The Lakers dominated the Magic 100-75 in Game 1 of the NBA Finals last night behind a bona fide MVP performance from one Kobe Bean Bryant. The law office of Kamenetzky and Kamenetzky have the LA perspective, while Brian Schmitz searches for answers on the Magic Basketblog  

Meanwhile, lost in the marshes of cable (thanks, Bettman!), the Pittsburgh Penguins evened their series with the Detroit Red Wings last night at 2 games apiece with their 4-2 win. The highlights are available here. I invite you to gasp at the greatness of each of the last three Pittsburgh goals. Go on, I insist.

The back-to-back losses have left Detroit antsy. Mitch Albom takes a break from writing about GM bankruptcy to give his take, while Michael Rosenberg tracks the improved play of Messrs. Crosby and Malkin, and Helene St. James says that Pavel Datsyuk is “close” to returning to action, and not a moment too soon for wearers of the spoked wheel. For those who want the Steel City perspective, Dave Molinari’s recap is here, while Gene Collier comes in praise of Jordan Staal.

The first-place Texas Rangers are in town for the weekend after dropping 2 of 3 in New York. You can get the recap of yesterday’s 8-6 Yankee win here, while Jeff Wilson of the Dallas Morning News tells you everything you need to know about the Rangers, including tonight’s starter Kevin Millwood.

Other items for your Friday time-wasting include Jayson Stark on Randy Johnson’s 300th win, the boys at Unprofessional Foul break down Wednesday’s U.S. Soccer loss to Costa Rica and look ahead to Honduras on Saturday, and Sports Illustrated has your Belmont preview right here.

Enjoy the weekend, folks.

You know what’s worse than Mondays? Mondays on which no sports are played. Last night, for example, my viewing choices boiled down to the Yankees, College Softball, or AA baseball. Not much of a choice, really.

Thankfully things are somewhat back to normal tonight, with the Red Sox starting a three-game series against the AL Central-leading Tigers tonight in the Motor City (Insert bailout joke here). Tonight, Daisuke Matsuzaka gets the ball against Rick Porcello, who is the subject of an interesting little feature in today’s Detroit Free Press, highlighting the fact that the rookie has won five straight games without throwing more than 95 pitches each outing. Of course, he’s only lasted more than six innings in one of them, but hey, that’s modern baseball for you.

Most of the  Free Press’ sports section is given over to coverage of the Stanley Cup Finals, which resume tonight in Pittsburgh with the Red Wings holding a 2-0 series lead and hoping to pull off back-to-back Cups. Today, Michael Rosenberg wonders if time might be catching up to Kris Draper, Helene St. James thinks that Henrik Zetterburg is in line to become the next Red Wings captain, and Ben Schmitt presents a guide to Pittsburgh lingo, which to me doesn’t sound much different than the Chicago Swerskian dialect. But maybe I’m reading it wrong. You can also play “Smack the Penguin,” which is not nearly as dirty as you probably wish it was.

On the other side of the divide, Ray Fittipaldo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette spotlights Rob Scuderi, while columnist Ron Cook says the Penguins need more from Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby.

If you’ve watched ESPN for any amount the last couple days, you know that the NBA Finals start Thursday, which is a long wait for us hoop junkies looking for an NBA Finals fix. The reason for this is that David Stern likes to watch us suffer. And TV. Always, always TV. While you wait, George Diaz of the Orlando Sentinel has an update on Jameer Nelson, Mike Bresnahan of the LA Times breaks down the Laker game plan, Michael Wilbon and Peter Vecsey share their take on l’affair du Lebron, Chris Bosh has a record deal, Jeff Van Gundy will stay on ABC’s broadcast team despite objectivity questions, and Charles Barkley can get away with anything.

And for reading all that, here’s a bonus parody video at the expense of the TNT “Inside the NBA” crew. Try getting that song out of your head now.

Alright, everyone, behave yourselves. Only a few hours left till the weekend, so bear with me while I, Samuel Chamberlain, serve up the mystery meat that is the collection of the best sports blogs around the Internet. Though I warn you, the content might be a little light, as our office is abuzz over the pending David Ortiz-Manny Ramirez road trip.

Let’s begin with the NBA, where Cleveland staved off elimination, winning Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals 112-102 behind a triple-double from LeBron James. Brian Windhorst has the Cleveland perspective in his Cavs Beat blog, while Brian Schmitz and the Orlando Sentinel crew add their own talking points.

Frightening news for fans of giant mascot heads. ESPN analyst Lee Corso apparently suffered a mild stroke sometime in the recent past, but expects to be back for the 2009 season. And since you’re behaving so well today, I’ll even throw in a bonus Onion story.

Speaking of commentators, if you’re looking for a blog (other than this one) for your morning reading, I can’t recommend Awful Announcing enough. Today’s main page is a particularly scrumptious assortment of errors, including a TNT graphics snafu at last night’s Cavs-Magic game, and a misspelled ESPN graphic at the (wait for it) Spelling Bee. And if you look really hard, you’ll find the video of Al Michaels’ “Hawaii Five-O” appearance.

Who’s up for some American football, Austrian-style? For the last few weeks, Deadspin has been running the diary of Robert Lunn, a former UConn defensive tackle currently toiling in the pro football hotbed of Portchach, Austria (you know, schnitzel, Alps, the Von Trapp family, the whole schmear). The latest installment of his “American in Austria” diary ran yesterday. Click on any of the tags at the bottom of the post to get the whole, absorbing story.

Enjoy the weekend, folks, and don’t forget to check the “It Is What It Is” Patriots blog later today for highlights of Dennis and Callahan’s interview with Tom Brady.

Tom Brady has told Peter King he wants to keep playing for another 10 years, at which point he would be 41 years old. It’s an ambitious declaration for someone coming off  major knee surgery, and might not be a given even if fate, and Bernard Pollard’s helmet hadn’t intervened.

After all, Marino, Tarkenton, Elway, and Montana all packed it in at age 38. All of them suffered various degrees of injury over their careers, but never experienced any thing close to the trauma that Brady experienced last September. Warren Moon managed a Pro Bowl season in 1997 at age 41, but it was a far cry from his early ’90s heyday in Houston. Len Dawson went 1-4 as a starter at age 40 in 1975.  Sonny Jurgensen had an effective 40-year-old season, throwing for over 1,000 yards and 11 touchdowns in1975, but he made it his last.

Even a sterling example of longevity like George Blanda only started one game as a quarterback after the age of 39, when he started a single game in November of 1968. Granted, he did quite well  for himself, but one game is hardly grounds to build a case for Brady’s own longevity.

But we are, at bottom, optimists here at WEEI.com, and so let’s permit ourselves to dream and imagine where Brady would rank on the all-time stat pile assuming he does match his stated goal of playing another 10 years.

Brady currently ranks 51st on the all-time passing yard list with 26,446 yards. Throw out the 76 yards he threw for in Week 1 last season, before “the incident,” and Brady’s averaged 3,767 yards in his first seven years as a full-time starter. Keeping in mind the fact that Carson Palmer threw for 200 more yards AFTER his comeback from a similiar injury, as well as the fact that Brady is more likely to throw for 4,110 yards (as he did in 2005) than for 2,843 yards (as he did in 2001), we can reasonably project that Brady could throw for around 35,000-40,000 yards over the next ten years. 35,000 passing yards would put him third all-time at just a shade under 63,500 yards, behind only Brett Favre and (presumably), Peyton Manning.

What about the touchdown count? Brady sits in a tie for 28th on the list with 197 touchdowns, tied with Ken Anderson. Throwing out the career high (50, 2007) and low (18, 2001), Brady has averaged 26 touchdowns per year. Again, we’ll round the average up, on the assumption that Brady will have similar years to 2007 than 2001 for the forseeable future. At 30 TDs a year for the next ten years, Brady is at 497 TDs in our hypothetical list ten years from now. Again, such a showing would put him behind Manning, who currently has 333 TDs, is only a year older than Brady, and has none of Brady’s injury history.

Let the conversation begin.

When you think of Boston College baseball, your first response is probably something like, “Oh, yeah, they play the Sox every year in spring training.”

Well, I’m here to tell you they do a lot more than than. They play in the Atlantic Coast Conference and they’re pretty darn good. And led by head coach Mik Aoki, the Eagles are going to the 64-team NCAA tournament for the first time since 1967.

As is often the case when a school hasn’t made the tournament in 42 years, not a lot of people picked BC to advance this far. This Rivals ACC preview is a pretty good indicator of where people thought BC would be. But the Eagles served notice during their season-opening swing through Florida, first by hanging tough with the Red Sox, then by taking two games of a three-game series from traditional powers Florida State. The Eagles capped their season in style at the ACC tournament this weekend in Durham, North Carolina, defeating Georgia Tech and Miami in their last two games by the combined score of 17-4.

If Aoki needs some inspiration before BC’s first game in the double-elimination Austin Regional (it’s at 2 p.m. Friday against Texas State), he could do worse than look to the 1967 Eagles, who made it all the way to the College World Series in Omaha (perhaps getting there on gas at $0.33/gallon) and actually won their first game, defeating Rider 3-1 on June 12, when “Groovin’” by the Young Rascals was the No. 1 Song in America. Sadly, the good times couldn’t last, as BC lost their next game, to eventual champions Arizona State, and was eliminated from the CWS after a thirteen-inning loss to Houston.

Congratulations to the Eagles, and good luck. It’s always nice to have two good baseball teams in Boston.

Welcome to the Tuesday morning edition of the LEEInks, everybody, in which I, Samuel Chamberlain, entertain you as you work your way out of your Memorial Day meat coma.

Let’s begin with the NBA, where the Nuggets evened up their series with the Lakers at two games apiece with a 120-101 victory in Game 4 last night. Over at the LA Times Laker Blog, the brothers Kamenetzky break down the loss from the purple-and-gold perspective, while over at the Denver Post, Benjamin Hochman inevitably invokes the WWE, which played the Staples Center last night instead of the Pepsi Center as previously scheduled.

Over in the East, Mo Williams caused a stir yesterday, with his comments that Cleveland could still win the series. Actually, he went a good deal beyond that. To refresh your memory, the Cavs need to win tonight to avoid going 3-1 down in the Eastern Conference Finals. Rather than offering up the usual boilerplate stuff, here’s what Williams said, “We’ll get this game.” The excellent Brian Windhorst has the full quotes in his CavsBlog

Closer to home, the Red Sox continue their series against the Minnesota Twins. In the Star-Tribune, Jim Souhan writes in praise of Carlos Gomez, who made two sensational catches in yesterday’s 6-5 Red Sox win. However, this has not spared him the wrath of certain Internet commentators, one of whom derisively refers to him as “Gogo the Clown.” I suppose Midwestern politeness only goes so far.

Even closer to home, the long road back for John Smoltz continues tonight at venerable MerchantsAuto.com Stadium in Manchester, New Hampshire, as he starts for the Portland Sea Dogs against the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. First pitch is at 7:05, and according to the Fisher Cats website, seats are still available.

Finally, you may have noticed the good work done in this space by my colleague Jennifer McCaffrey at this weekend’s NCAA Division I Men’s Lacrosse Championships, won in overtime by Syracuse over Cornell. If, by some chance you haven’t seen the highlights of Syracuse’s frantic rally in the final 3:37, you can watch them here. If you’re a Cornell fan looking for a palatte-cleanser, well, this is the best I can do.

Enjoy your Tuesday, everyone.