Worst of the Weekend: Boston Celtics

Winner: On Sunday night, the Boston Celtics lost a 109-107 decision to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Former Celtic Ricky Davis, who had a team-high 28 points, hit the game-winning shot with 0.2 seconds left. On any other night, the "returning player beats his old team" shtick would have been The Storyline, but Davis' performance was merely a sad footnote in a larger, sadder story: the fact that the once-proud Celtics lost their 18th straight game.

This is getting so bad I'm starting to think that the losing streak retroactively killed Red Auerbach. And forget rolling over in the grave; I'm surprised Walter Brown hasn't burst forth from his icy tomb and gone on an unstoppable, brain-eating rampage. We haven't seen this much rancid feces get squeezed out of Beantown since the 15-win "Let's get Tim Duncan!" campaign of 1996-97 (and we all know how that one turned out). Greg Oden may be good and all, but he's not worth all this...is he? And the way the Celtics luck has gone since Len Bias blew the team's future out his nose, I seriously doubt they'll get the number one pick.

History in the making: The longest losing streak in NBA history is 23 games, a record held by the 1995-96 Vancouver Grizzlies and the 1997-98 Denver Nuggets. Can these Celtics match, or even surpass, the all-time record for sucktastic futility? Absolutely! As long as they don't accidentally beat Milwaukee at home on Wednesday, they get to go on a 7-game road trip during which they'll face the Suns, Lakers, Jazz, and Rockets. If they didn't finish the trip with games against the Knicks and Nets, I'd say they had a good chance to lose 30 or so games in a row. But Isiah Thomas won't let that happen...not on his watch. Look for the Celtics to "break out" in New York on February 28. That'll end the streak at 24 games, worst in NBA history.

Public Relations Clusterf**k: NBA.com is the marketing/public relations face of the NBA, which is why you get sunshine and delicious candy crammed up your ass every time you visit one of the official team pages. So it came as no surprise to me that the headline for last night's game was "Pierce and C's Drop a Thriller." Way to put a positive spin on it, guys. What would you say if your grandpa pooped in his adult diaper... "Elder Statesman uses space-age product to its fullest potential"? There's also a story about Dee Brown winning the 1991 Slam Dunk Contest. In it, Dee reveals that his famous "no-look dunk" was inspired by a future vision of the 2006-07 Celtics. "I saw my team just losing and losing, and becoming the laughingstock of the league. I just couldn't watch." We're right there with you, Dee.

We can't bear to watch either, Dee.
Runner Up: The state of The Motion Picture in this country is about as bleak as the Celtics prospects of winning 20 games this year. That's the only way you can explain how a movie about a giant fat woman tormenting a hapless nerd raked in $33 million this weekend. Alternately described as "offensive on all levels" and "a strange, toneless collection of fat jokes, fart jokes and foul sex gags," the movie stars Eddie Murphy as a sloshing pork monster and the retarded geek she wants to have sex with. Has anyone else noticed that Eddie has dressed up like a woman (sometimes fat, sometimes old, sometimes fat and old) and hit on himself in his last three or four movies? I'm fairly certain Freud would something to say about this, and it would involve words like "penis" and "vagina" and "batshit crazy." I just hope Eddie can work through his issues and get back to making us laugh some day.

Eddie Murphy in his, ahem, biggest role ever.