LMNOP

Last night as the clock ran out on the NBA finals series of Mavericks vs. Heat, the nation's news editors breathed a Shaq-sized sigh of relief and immediately commenced pulling lame "heat" puns out of their respective asses.  "Heat," after all, is far richer fodder for lame wordplay than "Mavericks" could ever be.

So the nation's headline-writers owe the Miami Heat an immense debt of gratitude, because thanks to them they were able to really phone it in today.  A quick glance at some of the nation's online newspapers confirmed that no actual brain cells were used in the sports journalism world today:

"Heat Wave!"  How creative and, I daresay, daring for the headline writers to use this one.  After all, the operative term here is one commonly used to describe a weather phenomenon that destroys crops and kills old people in their hot apartments.  But whatever.

Now, not every single editor used the "heat wave" line.  Some of them thought for about a nanosecond longer and came up with this gem:

Also extremely catchy, and good for publications that are tight on space!

While 'heat wave' and 'heat rises' were extremely prevalent, there were some papers that stepped it up and didn't use either of those phrases.  Instead, they opted to take any common phrase with the word 'hot' and use it to describe the Miami team:

. . . And so on.

I guess my point is that if Britney Spears can take a stance on something totally insignificant like photographers, then I can take a stance on something like the use of heat puns.  And for the record, I'm very anti.