Another game against everybody’s best friend, Gilbert Arenas! Fantastic.

I will cut Gilbert some slack. I like his addidas commercial, and I do appreciate that he’s a hard worker and that he didn’t have his career handed to him; he did actually work for it. And he has fun with it! So many guys treat their lives as basketball players like it’s some miserable responsibility that they can barely tolerate, like taking out the garbage or something. Gilbert doesn’t – he seems to genuinely enjoy it. Good for him.

I just wish he didn’t have to be such a jackass, though.

Tonight’s matchup in Washington is huge for both teams. The Raptors are a half-game up on the Wizards for third in the east; the Wizards are a half-game up on Miami for the Southeast Division lead.

The game will also serve as a tie-breaker if the Raptors win – they’ll take the season series 3-1. If the Wizards win, it’ll come down to conference records – still to be determined.

Washington is a tough place to play, as the Raptors well now, having gotten blown out there by 30 a couple weeks ago. The Wizards are a team much like Denver, or Toronto itself – good offensively, poor defensively. And when the shots are dropping, they are capable of blowing anyone out, and when they’re not dropping, they’re capable of getting blown out.

Unfortunately, the Wizards are finally fully healthy – having gotten Caron Butler back from a knee injury – while the Raps continue to miss Andrea Bargnani, who just started working out again yesterday and won’t be back for another week or two.

Add to that the Raptors recent road woes (having lost four of five away from the ACC) and the Wizards’ home success (winning five of six), it doesn’t look good for Toronto.

But as the Raptors have shown in the past week – winning three of four since Bargnani went down, and two of them in convincing fashion – they respond well to adversity, so you can never count them out. And as shown in the Miami game, they can rebound when they put the effort into it. As you may recall, the Wizards dominated the Raptors on the glass the last time they met, with Bosh only pulling in one rebound. I expect the Raptors to at least put in a little better effort this game.

Still, I think Gilbert and the Washington offense will be too much for the Raptors on this night. If the Raptors get the same energy and intensity off the bench that they got last game, it’ll be close, but Arenas is super-clutch, so I’d put my money off him in crunch time.

And if the energy is not there, if the Raptors aren’t focused like they were the other night… Wizards by 14.

On another note… The Star pointed out this morning that six of the last 11 Raptors games are on Raptors NBA TV (including tonight's). I have to ask… whose brilliant f’ing idea was that!? Obviously I have the digital channel so it doesn’t affect me personally, but here we are, in the stretch run, people in the city finally noticing that hey, this team is good, they’re going to the playoffs… and no one will be able to see the games. What complete fucking idiot at MLSE made this decision? Whoever it is needs to be fired. Today. Seriously.

Note to MLSE: You will never, EVER, EVER grow any interest in this team, locally or nationally, unless you make the games available for everyone to watch. Making it so that 99% of the country CANNOT watch, is NOT a good business decision. REPEAT: NOT AIRING GAMES ON STATIONS PEOPLE DON’T HAVE IS BAD. BAD! VERY, VERY, BAD.

Look, I know what they’re doing. They want people to pay for Raptors TV. But you have to understand that your fan base right now is miniscule. You currently have about 600,000 RapsTV subscriptions? Well, guess what: That’s about all of us. You may, in a year or two, get to 800,000. But that’s it.

Casual fans are not going to pay for Raptors TV. And if you air MORE THAN A QUARTER OF THE TEAM’S GAMES, including THE MOST IMPORTANT STRETCH RUN, on the station that no one has… no one will ever turn from a non-fan into a casual fan and from a casual fan to a die-hard… BECAUSE THEY CAN’T SEE WHAT THEY’RE MISSING!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m not a business major, but as a marketing expert, I know a little bit about growing your business. And a no-brainer is making your product available to the most amount of people, for the least amount of money, until you’ve grown your audience to a point that they enjoy your product so much that a majority of them would be willing to pay for it. This makes sense, right?

So tell me if this makes sense: Sportsnet, a station everyone has, would have taken more games (i.e.: paid MLSE for more games) but only wanted to show them regionally. MLSE refused, saying they had to be national games. So they took those games off the table and moved them to a station very few people have, Raptors NBA TV – which they own, so therefore earned no money, except for advertising.

So to sum up: Rather than have a potential audience of 4.5 million in the GTA alone, MLSE decided it was better to have a potential audience of 600,000, AND turn down the money Sportsnet would have paid for the rights. (And do you think anyone is going to pay RaptorsTV a lot of money to advertise to a maximum of only 600,000 people?)

So, if given the choice, what would you do to improve the ratings of your struggling program? Make it available to 4.5 million people for free… or make it available for 600,000 for $3.99 a month? Keeping in mind that even if those 600,000 watch every game, you will not gain one single new viewer in the process, whereas, even if only 60,000 people watched on the other network, the potential existed to gain millions of new viewers?

You might notice I’m a little upset at this. I am. I can’t stress this enough. Putting so many games on Raptors TV is franchise suicide. (Franchicide?) Please, MLSE. Fire the incompetent morons in charge of these decisions and hire someone who can help you improve the ratings. Try and GROW the fanbase, not strangle it. I’m begging you.