It is now official, the NBA finals are already set in place with Game 1 taking place next Thursday. Celtics-Lakers, rivarly II

This is the finals the NBA needed. Two top-dollar market teams, two storied franchises, and a rivarly that brought out some of the greatest NBA highlights ever in the 1980’s and brought out the best in Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Dennis Johnson, Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Byron Scott, Kurt Rambis, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The rivarly is renewed, but the names have changed to Kobe Bryant, Lamar Odom, Derek Fisher, Pau Gasol, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen. Not only have the names changed, but the shorts are longer and the players are more cockier and physical.

Instead of Pat Riley and K.C. Jones, we now have Phil Jackson and Glenn “Doc” Rivers.

Instead of Dick Stockton and Tommy Heinsohn, we will have some combination of Jeff Van Gundy, Mike Tirico, Mike Breen, Hubie Brown, Mark Jackson, Michelle Tafoya, Lisa Salters, Stuart Scott, Michael Wilbon, and the overrated and awful Bill Walton.

I hope that the Celtics-Lakers, rivarly II will be equally as captivating as Celtics-Lakers, rivarly I was. Those games brought back fond memories of when the NBA finals were seen at 11:30 PM on CBS. When ESPN Classic Sports replayed those games, I sat and re-watched those games for hours on end remembering how I would wake up in the middle of the night and cut the TV on with low volume watching those games until either my mom or dad caught me and forced me to go back to sleep.

Now, I can’t watch the old games because my cable company removed ESPN Classic Sports from the base cable package and packaged it within a sports-tier package packaged in their digital cable package that make cable tv way too expensive.

But there’s always YouTube to watch clips of those old times.