Elvis Andrus yanked from game for lack of effort

Rangers manager Ron Washington pulled shortstop Elvis Andrus from Sunday’s loss to the Twins after the youngster made what looked like a lazy throw on a grounder in the bottom of the eighth.

“I didn’t like his attitude,” Washington told the Dallas Morning News. “The inning before there were a couple of plays he didn’t make, but he gave the effort. There are going to be plays that you can’t make. On that play, there wasn’t energy. Elvis is better than that. I didn’t chew him out, but I let him know that.”

The errant throw resulted in Andrus’ second error of the game.  The previous error in the seventh contributed to five unearned runs, and Andrus had a second ball that he failed to get to as part of that big inning for the Twins.

“I was still a little upset, I think about the inning before,” Andrus said. “I got upset with myself and I think that was still bothering me because I didn’t help the pitcher out. But things happen. There is no excuse. There’s nothing really that I can say about it.”(dallas cowboys, dallas mavericks, dallas, nba, mavericks )

It doesn’t sound like the incident will put Andrus back on the bench Tuesday against the Yankees.  He has been awfully error prone this season, with 13 miscues already, but he’s also made a lot of great plays and the Rangers are pretty happy with how he’s contributing offensively. Hopefully this will end up being just a one-time thing.

Mike Wise: Dallas’s former phenoms went through the pain LeBron now knows

We were witnesses, all right — witness to a flat-out schooling by men who once took their own lumps on the NBA’s grandest stage, who didn’t turn their free agent signings into a WWE Raw event before they had won bupkus, who knew the pain of losing here hurt too much to treat getting out of the second round like Carnival in Rio.

And now that Dirk and Dallas’s locker room of redemption has sent the Heat and The Forsaken One into a shell-shocked summer of frustration — one only Dan Gilbert and northeastern Ohio could understand last July when LeBron left without a note (karma’s a killer, young fella) — now comes the lesson to take with him:

Of all the things LeBron James could learn from the past 11 months, and especially the past two weeks, none is more important than the message Jason Kidd and DeShawn Stevenson communicated on Sunday night, the night an old point guard, one 7-foot all-star, a hell of a bench and their teammates dropped the game’s most talented trio to capture the NBA championship:

“Worst to first! Worst to first!” Stevenson, Haywood and an injured Caron Butler chanted as they hugged one another after Dallas had closed Miami out, 105-95, referring to leaving the 19- and 26-win Wizards more than a year ago to join an NBA champion in 2011.

“My thing was, even after I couldn’t jump like I used to and people thought I was done, I just did what I could to hang around and stay in the league,” Stevenson added.(nba, lebron james, miami heat, mavericks, heat )

Kidd, once the phenom LeBron was, though not as hyped, is 38 years and 81 days old. In his third Finals try, he dusted off his three-point shot, let the ball do the work, used his large, strong mitts to compensate for his inability to stay with LeBron or Dwyane Wade laterally and, best of all, let Dirk be Dirk for a championship coveted for more than 20 years.

Kragthorpe: Even minus Jazz, NBA playoffs have been fun

The 2011 NBA playoffs simply cannot last long enough for me.

From start to finish, the league is staging the most entertaining, compelling postseason in history. The big upsets, epic performances, great comebacks (or collapses) and dramatic finishes have been so much fun to follow from a distance that I would suggest the Jazz strongly consider participating in the playoffs next season.

If there is a next season.

The only trouble with these playoffs is they have to end Sunday or Tuesday, and then who knows when the NBA will conduct business again? A lockout is looming, just when the game is better than ever.

Anyone around here who tuned out the NBA when EnergySolutions Arena went dark in mid-April is missing some awfully good stuff. The NBA Finals between Miami and Dallas, tied 2-2 entering Thursday’s game, could be not be any more fascinating.

Even beyond having three consecutive games decided only with the ball in the air at the buzzer, the stories got better Tuesday. While the Heat’s LeBron James was shrinking from view in an eight-point showing, Dallas’ Dirk Nowitzki was evoking memories of Michael Jordan against the Jazz in 1997 by fighting off illness and coming through in the end.

So what happens now? Can the Mavs summon another big effort in Game 5 and then win once in Miami? Or will the Heat regroup and ride their home-court advantage to the title? I know this: If LeBron and the Heat manage to overcome Dallas and win the championship, they will have earned it, and that’s all we can ask.(nba playoffs 2011, nba, nba finals, nba final, nba finals game 4)

A feature of NBA.com enables fans to create their own playoff highlight reel, but where to begin? If the standard complaint about the NBA postseason is that it drags on and on, the 2011 playoffs have provided reasons to watch all the way along.