Morning Walk-thru - Did you take your LAX today?

LAX is coming!...I noticed this happening near the end of the college hoops season, but college lacrosse is infiltrating the airwaves. Used to be, if you were a lacrosse fan, you could count on seeing three games on television each year: the two NCAA semi-finals and the championship on Memorial Day morning.

Now it's part of the Bottom Line on ESPN. The women's selection show was covered somewhere. The mythical ESPNU has been LAX-central all spring. What gives? Is lacrosse truly growing as a major spectator sport or are we just being force fed?

As much as I enjoy watching lacrosse, I'm leaning towards the latter. A couple of years ago, when hockey was mercifully absent, the "new" sport on ESPN was college baseball. Now that air time is going to lacrosse, but the sport has some major hurdles to clear before it even gets to College World Series status. Reasons like these:

• I know that the NLL is doing pretty well right now. The league has expanded to meet the growing western demand with teams in Colorado and Arizona, but finding MLS games is easier. Without a major pro league that people can actually see, the popularity of the college game is severely restricted.
• There are still large swaths of the country where nobody plays the sport. You want kids to watch? Let them play the game.
• Finally, lacrosse still has the Abercrombie & Fitch stigma of being a rich, suburban white kids sport. Not quite sure what you do about that.

Of course, if the sport still looked like it did originally (see above photo) there's no way I'd miss it.

The Oakland Myth shattered...After last Friday's game I wasn't sure it could happen, but Golden State finally lost a home game in the playoffs last night. (Embarrassing their mothers in the process.) The Jazz now lead the series 3-1 heading back to Salt Lake.

Like clockwork, the Warriors playoff hopes are being extinguished. Almost always happens after a huge upset. It's hard to shock the world twice in two weeks, and I'm not sure there's anything Nelly, on or off the postgame wagon, could do about it.

Sure, the Warriors might say that they believed they could beat Dallas, but nobody else did. When they actually started doing just that, it became a story. Golden State's victory became every non-Mavs fan's victory and that's a lot of hope and interest to have to carry.

Utah doesn't have that because a) people would be more surprised, with T-Mac's playoff record, to see Houston here, and b) nobody realizes that Utah is only one game away from the Western Conference finals because they look like North Carolina now.

SportsCenter goes to the bench...If you happened to catch last night's SportsCenter, you probably noticed that they paired Stuart Scott with Kenny Mayne. Actually, I don't know how you couldn't have noticed. Hasn't been such a large chasm in talent (and humor) between two people since the early-90s Bulls would pair Michael Jordan with Rodney McCray in the backcourt.

Mayne's "runnin' moonshine, cockfighting in the infield" quip with his vintage NASCAR clip was probably the best SportsCenter witticism of the year thus far.