Did you love the NHL playoffs, the NBA race to the playoffs, and the beginning of the MLB season? Did you go crazy for March Madness? Of course.

But…wasn’t there something missing? DIdn’t it feel a little empty? Of course it did, there’s no football!

Rest easy (or easier) football fanatics (myself included), the NFL has announced that team schedules will be released tomorrow, Tuesday at 2:00pm.

So, with the draft coming up right around the corner, this quick injection of football fever should keep the football fanatics busy until the first pick of the draft.

*The ADD Show will break down the Eagles schedule later this week after it’s release, along with thoughts of easy/hard SOS’s for divisional opponents and the other 28 teams*

Well Sixer fans, you don’t have to wait any longer to see who our boys will play in the first round of the 2008 NBA playoffs: the 2nd seed Detroit Pistons. But that shouldn’t be the case at all, at least not yet.

Tonight the SIxers played their last home game taking on Lebron James and the Cavaliers. It was an important contest for both teams; the Sixers needing a win to stay even with Toronto and the Cavs needing a win to secure 1st round home court advantage. Coming into tonight the Sixers and Raptors were deadlocked with 40-40 records in the 6 seed, but Toronto held the tiebreaker making the Sixers the 7 seed.

Around 9:30 or shortly after, the Raptors score went final: a 91-75 win over the incredible Miami Heat. So with that win the Sixers needed a win themselves to keep pace at 41-40. Then, on Wednesday if the Bulls could top the Raptors (more likely than the Heat tonight..) and the Sixers top the Bobcats, your Sixers would leapfrog the Raptors for the 6 seed. So, with a win needed against a fired up Cavs team, the game went down to the final seconds, literally.

Down as many as 12 points in the 4th quarter, the Sixers jumped on the backs of Andre Miller and Lou Williams who were absolutely sensational. Philadelphia brought the lead closer, chipping away at the Cavs advantage until it was 89-88 with 15 seconds on the clock. After a timeout, the ball was inbounded and to nobody’s surprise it ended up in the hands of Andre Iguodala. Despite a horrific shooting night of 4 for 17, he was the man as the seconds ticked off the clock. As he drove into the lane the ball was tipped and then ricocheted off a leg right to the hands of Lou Williams. The youngster dribbled around traffic, pulled up and took an impossible 18 foot jump shot from the right wing. Swish. 90-89 Sixers! Now here’s where it get’s sticky…

With 5 seconds left, after a full timeout, the Cavs threw it in to Lebron who was quickly fouled as the Sixers had a foul to give. So, now there was 4.1 left. Another inbounds and again it was Lebron who quickly drove the lane. His left handed shot was up, and blocked by Dalembert! But Devin Brown was in the right place and got the board, put it back up, but it didn’t fall. No whistles, the red light was on, Sixers win! They keep pace with Toronto in a huge momentum building win going towards the playoffs! Take a look, even ESPN says..we won:

The Sixers players were filled with enthusiasm, high fived fans, and went to the locker room as the music played in celebration; what a great come from behind win. But wait one second here. All of a sudden after literally almost a minute of standing around, the refs came together at the scorers table to look at the play. You can only guess what they called: a 2 shot foul on Dalembert with 0.02 seconds left.

There’s 2 things wrong with this call. The first is that there was no whistle. Sure, the crowd was loud during the replay of the final drive, but the only whistle clearly audible was to signify the end of the game. Even if they looked at the video and saw there was a foul, they can’t call it after the fact when the game is now over; it’s going against NBA rule as pointed out by the broadcasters. The second thing wrong is this: if you’re going to make this awful call at least put time on the clock that makes sense. They put 2 tenths of a second left. On the replay you could clearly see bodies colliding around the 0.07 mark. The foul occurred between 0.07 and 0.05. But 0.02? Are you kidding me? With that little time there’s, in the rules, no time allotted for a shot, just a tip-in. But if the Sixers had been given the correct amount of time, a shot from their half court in bounds play might have worked; there would have been time to grab the ball, turn a bit, and then fire.

Should the Sixers be bitter over this? Hell yes. They played their asses off in this game and got cheated out of an important win. Because of this call and this loss, we automatically get the 7th seed and play Detroit in the first round of the playoffs. If they had gotten it right, would it have mattered? Would the Sixers have beaten the Bobcats coupled with a Bulls win over Toronto on Wednesday to move them up to the 6th seed to play Orlando? Who knows; but the Sixers got a raw deal tonight. They’re a 7 seed for sure, their record is 40-41, when it shouldn’t be. But hey, why should I be surprised, this is Philadelphia. We never catch a break.

Few people (in this country) really, truly care about the fate of the NHL. I am one of them. I became a fan over 10 years ago and have continued to hang in there when the popularity of the sport plummeted to the point where ESPN dropped its coverage of the sport in lieu of NASCAR coverage. There was once a hockey show competitive with Baseball Tonight, NBA Countdown, and NFL Live. In fact, NHL 2 Night is where John Buccigross made his ESPN debut.

The NHL is now only mentioned on Around the Horn as a joke that Tim Cowlishaw of the Dallas Morning News, is a hockey fan.  Cowlishaw’s lack of ability to be entertaining instead pushes the joke on him, in that he will once again be beat out by the always exciting Woody Paige, again.

Although improving two years removed from a bitter lockout that not many people noticed, the sport still has its work cut out in order to even regain its mid-90s form as merely being recognized as the fourth major professional sport. These days I hear “experts” talk about athletes and try and compare them to other sports, but they only say “…and it’s the same in baseball, football, or basketball,” but never hockey. Until recently, SportsCenter only mentioned hockey in a negative light, like examining the brutality that causes suspensions.

We have now resorted to making metaphors of the usual characters at a frat party to explain the character of the teams competing in this year’s playoffs.

I wanted to further attack ESPN’s attempt to douse the sport of any integrity but realized that someone did that already. It’s sad really because although ESPN is definitely to blame in part for the initial downfall of the sport, the way to revitalize the coolest sport on ice is to get new fans. NHL fans have widely been awarded the title of “most loyal” (see? even when ESPN covers hockey its still got to be about fighting). But perhaps the “Worldwide Leader in Sports” can redeem itself by bringing the sport back on its airwaves.

Of course, a large portion of the blame must lie with commissioner Gary Bettman who has evidently made it his duty to kill the league with ridiculous expansion and clearly dividing the league from its players during the lockout. And although he really didn’t have much of a choice, Bettman signed the NHL’s life away to a cable deal with Versus. Although the coverage from Versus has been reasonable and not insulted the intelligence of a hockey fan like NBC, the cable network is still unavailable in a lot of places (like my apartment building, which decided in its infinite wisdom to sign a contract with HotWire Communications).

It looks as though my favorite sport will have to continue to struggle for at least a little while longer. We need more new fans (which could be generated if ESPN would decide to put favorable NHL programming on their station), fewer teams in areas that don’t care about hockey (I’m looking at you Florida Panthers), and perhaps a shorter season to build up the excitement of the Stanley Cup playoffs, one of the most exciting playoffs in all of sports. I would move to Canada to suppress all my hockey problems, but even people in Toronto don’t want to be Toronto Maple Leafs fans. So for now, we wait.