Holt:

Let’s not kid ourselves. Sure, the Heat are going to be expected to win by 70 every night. But one loss to begin the season is not the end of the world.
One loss to end the season, though? That’s another story entirely.
There should be no excuse for a lineup with Chase Utley and Ryan Howard to not score enough runs to support Roy Halladay. Or even me, for that matter. And I stopped playing baseball in second grade. The Halladay-Roy Oswalt-Cole Hamels trifecta should have torn through the feeble hitters the Giants threw at them.
Instead of a third-consecutive World Series appearance, though, the Phillies are golfing, or swimming in pools filled with gold leaf, or whatever else rich people do.
And as if that isn’t disappointing enough, the Yankees fell to a team that went bankrupt. A-Rod, Jeter and Cheeseburger Combo Sabathia couldn’t beat a Rangers team that hadn’t even won a playoff series. Yankees World Series wins: 27, Rangers playoff series wins: 2.
Two of baseball’s biggest payrolls floundered more than Brett Favre trying to cover up his mobile phone habits.
The Heat can and will be excused for working out chemistry issues in the team’s first season together. There’s no such excuse for the Phils or Yanks, who are veteran squads who know what they’re doing, especially in the postseason. It’s like Bear Grylls and the guy from Survivorman teaming up together and failing to start a fire; it shouldn’t happen, ever.
And as a note, I know Bear Grylls would never allow that to happen. I’m pretty sure he can conjure fire from pure willpower. He’s like a human flamethrower that can drink pee and build rafts out of trees and pure grit.
As much as I don’t mind the fact the Phillies or Yankees aren’t giving us a rerun of the 2009 World Series, there’s still no logical excuse for what happened. When you’re expected to win and don’t, it’s not only disappointing, it’s kind of sad.

Fiammetta:

For starters, any argument that recognizes Bear Grylls’ status as man of all men is near impossible to refute, let alone top. But, as a Yankee fan – go ahead and laugh – the failure that was the 2010 ALCS still has me a reeling a bit, so I’m not exactly at the top of my game.
There’s my built in excuse, ready and rarin’ to go in the event that my part of this PCP totally sucks. Just like Favre (leaving the texts alone for this one) and the ankle injury that always seems to pop up again when he fails.
But this isn’t about me. It’s about the Heat, and the fact that despite the eyes of the entire basketball world glaring down at the TD Garden court for the NBA season opener, they underwhelmed. Significantly, in my opinion.
Four for 16 shooting and six turnovers for Dwyane Wade? Eight turnovers for LeBron? Yikes. And the Third Amigo, Chris Bosh – eight points on 3-11 shooting! Yes, he pulled down eight boards, but this was supposed to be a guy that was a 25-12 guy, at the very least. Yeah, Miami drew a tough assignment for revealing the Big Three by playing Boston in Boston, but still. This is LeBron James. And Dwyane Wade. And Chris Bosh. Between the three of them, there have been two Nike commercials in the past week alone!
Yeah, you can tell me that the absence of three-point maven Mike Miller severely hinders the Heat’s offensive attack, and that’s why they only scored 30 points in the first half (nine in the first quarter! Nine!). But I won’t buy it. I was definitely one of those guys hyping Miller all summer as being in position to take extreme advantage of the talent around him, but thirty points in the first half – even in the season opener – with LBJ, Agent D3 and…Chris Bosh (I think he looks like Snoop Dogg, but I couldn’t really formulate a nickname from that)? With just one of those guys, you should never struggle to drop 30 in one half. With three? The halftime scoreboard should be reading “MAX” like it did that time I nearly blew up my N64 slaying Bryant Reeves and the Vancouver Grizzlies in NBA Hangtime. Ahh, childhood memories.