I agree with the silvery tongued D. Stern that this has in fact been a pretty good season in the NBA, given that a few playoff spots in the East are still to be determined, and seeding in the West changes by the day.

But with all due respect to Stern -- whom we should nickname Rumpelstiltskin because he spins so much gold -- there actually have been some disappointments in the 2001-2002 campaign.

	Michael Jordan's aching knees brought the Wizards' playoff run to a screeching halt.

The most obvious, of course, is that Michael Jordan did not complete his season with the Washington Wizards. Actually, the more baffling question about Jordan is what ever happened to his divorce? Now that is a disappointment.

Imagine all the grit and gristle that would have come out of that thing. One day, you hear that Juanita is going to take the children and hole up in their 150,000 square-foot mansion like the family in Land of the Lost, and I get interested. The next, Juanita says everything is hunky dory, and she holes up in her 150,000 square-foot mansion like the family in Land of the Lost, and Michael continues to drive the kiddies to college. I wanted details. I wanted smut. I wanted fresh material for The Enquirer and, well, ESPN.com. That is my biggest disappointment.

Barring that, though, I'd have to list MJ's season-ending knee injury. I'll be honest, if the Wizards made the playoffs, I was going to vote Jordan as the league's MVP. I nearly gave him the award just for getting that team close to .500. I mean, have you see that group of players. Christian Laettner? Jahidi White? The fact that Jordan had them believing in themselves is something of a miracle in itself, and I would have liked to see what he did on the national stage of the playoffs. Now, we'll have to wait, hopefully, for next season, and by then maybe Michael and Juanita will be fighting again and we can double-dip.

The second-biggest disappointment also is Michael-related, in that it involves one of his teammates and his former team.

Now I realize that we, as media members, tend to blow things up for effect occassionally. But the fact that we made Kwame Brown, Tyson Chandler and Eddy Curry the second coming of Jimmy Naismith -- I wonder if the dude that invented the game could actually ball -- is ridiculous.

Have you ever seen three more misplaced chaps? It was kind of like when Charlton Heston landed on the Planet of the Apes and wondered, "Where the hell are we?" It certainly didn't help that Chandler and Curry were baffled by the idiotic decision-making of Timmy Floyd, who turned out to be the worst experiment in the Midwest since Cornahol, or whatever the hell that organic gasoline back in the early 80s was called. But the season, for those three, seemed like a complete waste of time.

Though I did get amusement out of another divorce story, this one involving Curry. Apparently, he was married to a girl he knew in high school with whom he had a child, then got divorced, but since he didn't want anybody to know that he had been married, he kept introducing her as his "ex-girlfriend." Ouch.

Disappointments? I'd like to say Calvin and Hobble Booth, he of the $34 million and 13 blocked shots. But he's young, so he still gets a chance. What about Mitch Richmond? I mean, this guy used to be an All-Star.

I remember when the All-Star Game was in Cleveland, and the NBA used to have this Saturday morning affair at the Convention Center that was a shooting contest. Guys used to take 3-pointers and stuff, but they would also take 40-footers and halfcourt shots and 30-foot bank shots and every other crazy thing. And I remember the finals came down to Richmond and Tim Hardaway, and when you see something like that, you realize just how good an NBA player is. Both guys knocked in like four out of 10 from 40 feet. Richmond was money. Now, he is a rupee. No, not a groupee, a rupee. I mean, Richmond used to be a part of Run TMC. Now, he's like MC Hammer. He has a career 21-point average. Now? He averages 4.0 points on 40 percent shooting. Four points a game. That's one point a quarter. Put it this way: Both Tyson Chandler and Eddy Curry are averaging more. Hell, Juanita Jordan could average more.

Other disappointments?