A Comic Gives Me A Chance To Blather About Sports

In last month's Power Man and Iron Fist, Luke Cage showed up in a nice aircraft to fish Victor and Danny out of the ocean. Luke's price for not telling the rest of the Avengers is Danny's courtside seats at the next Knicks' game, a playoff game between the Knicks and the Heat.

I'm not sure why it's a huge issue if the Avengers found out about this. So Danny didn't quite handle things smoothly. Big whoop. A couple of his teammates are Spider-Man and Hawkeye, both of whom have multiple screw-ups to there name. Not to mention Wolverine, who gets mind-controlled into slaughtering 500 people every other Tuesday, but I digress.

My initial reaction was to laugh because by the time the comic came out, the Knicks had already been eliminated. By the Celtics. Well, you figure van Lente wrote this months ago, before the Celtics stumbled post-trade with Oklahoma City, and it would have looked like Knicks/Heat in the first round. That's a boring explanation.

Perhaps the Marvel U Celtics never made the Perkins for Jeff Green trade, the rest of the team didn't fall into a depression, and they held onto the #2 seed, leaving the Heat to battle the Knicks. Or maybe the Knicks fell to the #7 seed. Which raises the question of whether it happened because they made the trade for Carmelo Anthony and it did worse in the short-term than it did here, or because they didn't and attempted to rely Amare Stoudamire even as his back troubles increased and left the team without a premier scorer.

There's always more radical possibilities. van Lente anticipated the way playoff seeding broke out, and in Luke and Danny's world, the Knicks were able to triumph over a worn down, disinterested, or just outmatched Boston team. So the Knicks and Heat are playing in the second round. It could be the Conference Finals, but I'm not going crazy enough to think the Knicks can make it that far.

The way Luke mentions Jessica having a thing for LeBron suggests he isn't in New York often where she can check him, but maybe it's just a rare occasion where they have the time to go watch him. Perhaps in the Marvel Universe LeBron took his talents to Long Island, or wherever. He and Amare have made the Knicks a powerhouse, while Wade struggles with Bosh as his sidekick.